The Berkeley Square Affair (Malcolm & Suzanne Rannoch) (30 page)

“I’m learning the St. Crispin’s Day speech,” Pierre said. “Tell Tante Suzanne. She helped me choose it. She said she’d coach me before speech day at school.”

“I’m sure she will.” He saw Suzanne sitting in the Berkeley Square library with Pierre, bent over a book. Had that only been last week? In the St. Gilles family’s escape from Paris two years ago, she’d saved Pierre’s life. That hadn’t been part of her mission.

“Tante Suzanne taught me how to pick a lock.” Marguerite looked up from petting Daisy. “I’ve been practicing on the garden shed. She’s going to show me how to do a more complicated one next time, like the front door. I want to be like her when I grow up. And like you, Maman.”

“Diplomatically spoken. I think you’ve been taking lessons from Oncle Malcolm.” Juliette smiled and bent down to scoop up Rose.

“Tante Suzanne doesn’t let people tell her she can’t do things because she’s a girl,” Marguerite said. “She doesn’t need to be afraid because she can take care of herself. And other people—she was splendid with those armed men who wanted to take Pierre. That’s the sort of person I want to be.”

“Someone who picks locks?” Pierre asked.

“Someone who has adventures and doesn’t let people tell her what to do and has children and still gets to wear pretty clothes and jewels and curl her hair.”

“You don’t ask for much, do you,
chérie?
” Juliette said.

Marguerite scratched Daisy between her ears. “I don’t see why I can’t have all those things.”

“Nor do I,
ma chère,
nor do I. Perhaps you should write my next book.”

“What if your husband doesn’t want you having adventures?” Pierre asked his sister.

“Pierre!” Marguerite sprang to her feet and stared at him in outrage. “Are you saying you’d try to stop your wife—”

“No, of course not. But some men would. That’s what Maman writes about.”

“I’ll marry a man like Oncle Malcolm or Papa.”

“Men like Oncle Malcolm and your father are rare and precious,
ma belle,
” Juliette said.

“I’ll find one. They have to be on the lookout for the right women.” Marguerite looked at Malcolm. “You wouldn’t want a boring wife who didn’t want to have adventures, would you, Oncle Malcolm?”

“Perish the thought,” Malcolm said. And it was true. He couldn’t imagine being married to a woman who didn’t share his work.
But you thought you had the best of both worlds.
He could hear the words Tania might have spoken again.
An agent wife who became an agent to assist you. Not an agent in her own right, with her own loyalties and priorities and moral compromises. A phantom she created to take you in. The real woman is probably a great deal more interesting.

Perhaps. But then the real Suzanne was someone he didn’t know.

Rose wriggled in Juliette’s arms. “Story,” she said.

“That,” Malcolm said, “is one request I can comply with.”

 

The coffeehouse was the same. The dark, scarred woodwork. The faded hunting prints in chipped frames on the walls. The smell of strong coffee and sharp red wine and newsprint that hung in the air. Just as it had been on a score of occasions in the past two years when she had met Raoul at the Crystal Heart. The setting was the same, but everything else was different.

This time Raoul had got there first. The urgency of her communication must have come through. She dropped into the chair across from him, gloved hands gripped tight on the tabletop to hold on to some semblance of sanity. “He knows.”

Raoul’s gaze flickered over her face. “You told him?”

“He put it together himself.”

A dozen thoughts and emotions raced through Raoul’s gray gaze, but he merely said, “Impressive.” He picked up the bottle of wine on the table and poured a glass.

“Apparently Frederick Radley saw us together in León five years ago.”

“Damn it.” The wine sloshed as Raoul set down the bottle. “I knew Radley was a danger. Why the man couldn’t have had the decency to fall at Waterloo—”

“Decency’s never been much in Radley’s line. He told Malcolm you’d been my lover. Malcolm put the pieces together.”

“A hellish coincidence.” Raoul put the glass of wine in her hand.

She pushed the glass aside. “We probably should have guessed that he’d put it together eventually.”

“Hardly.” Raoul’s voice was taut but level. Faced with the unthinkable, they’d both fallen back on their training. “For all Malcolm’s talents. I doubt he would have done without the current investigation. Drink some wine. You’re two shades paler than usual.”

She pulled her gloves from her numb fingers and managed a sip of wine. Malcolm’s bleak gaze in the shadows of the theatre reverberated in her memory. “I think Malcolm is cursing himself for a fool for not guessing sooner.”

“
Querida—
I’m sorry.” He reached across the table and gripped her free hand. “Sorrier than I can possibly say.”

For a moment, the desire to spring up from the table and run to him and bury her face in his cravat in a way that had nothing to do with the passion that had once been between them was almost overmastering. She forced a smile to her lips and another sip of wine down her throat. “I went into my marriage knowing it wouldn’t last forever after all. One could say I got far more out of it than I deserved. We none of us had any illusions our goal in life was personal happiness.”

“I’d have given anything to spare you this,” he said in a low voice.

Something in his tone shook her. Why now, of all times, should she be sure he spoke the unvarnished truth? “I’m still better off than those in France who face execution.” She drew a breath. She felt chilled and numb at the same time. “He knows about you as well. And about Colin. I’m sorry.”

Raoul’s mouth tightened. “From what you said about Radley I assumed so. It makes it worse for all of you.”

“No. I mean I’m sorry for what you’ve lost.”

She saw his defenses flash into place in his eyes, just as Malcolm’s did. “My dear girl, when it comes to Malcolm I could hardly be said to have had anything to lose.”

“You had the memories of his childhood. And what you’d recently shared.”

Raoul’s gaze shifted to the side. “Malcolm learning about his biological parentage hardly made me a father.”

“No.” She kept her own gaze trained on his face. “But I think perhaps his recasting the past did, on his side. On yours, I think you may have been his father all along.”

“Sentimental twaddle,
querida
.” His voice was still level but rougher than usual. “Whatever I’ve lost, one could say it’s no more than I richly deserve.”

“Aren’t you always saying it would be a sad world if we all got what we deserved?”

His mouth twisted. “One could make a fair case that I deserve more than most.”

“Then one could certainly say the same of me. I’m still safer than many of our friends.” She pulled her hand from his own, because she couldn’t give way to the need for comfort, and took another sip of wine. “I’m not sure where Malcolm has gone. I’m not sure what he’s going to do. You should consider leaving England while you can.”

Raoul poured a second glass of wine and took a sip. “He can’t betray me without betraying you.”

“What makes you so sure he won’t betray me?”

“What I’ve seen of the two of you over the past five years.”

“What you saw was an illusion that ended this afternoon. Malcolm now knows the woman he thought he loved never existed.”

“Malcolm is too sensible a man to think that.”

“He’d be right. I’m not sure who I am anymore.”

“I don’t think you have cause for alarm on this score, but if you do—Do you want me to help you leave?”

She curled her hands round her glass and shook her head. “I can’t take the children away from him. And obviously I can’t leave the children.” Her fingers tightened round the glass. “Make no mistake, if Malcolm goes to Carfax or tries to throw me from the house, I’ll fight to protect myself. I’ll fight to keep the children. I actually found myself thinking of what leverage I have to use against him. That’s the depths I’ve sunk to. Or perhaps the depths at which I’ve always existed. But I won’t be the one who breaks up the family.” She took a drink of wine and set the glass down, willing her fingers to be steady. “I’ve let myself go soft these past years. I need to remind myself I’m good at coping with the unexpected.”

“Suzanne.” Raoul reached out and closed his hand over her own again. “I can do little enough for you. God knows I’ve done little enough in the past save complicate your life. But I can be someone to whom you can openly admit your feelings. You have few enough people who can offer you that. I know because it’s the same for me.” He met her gaze across the table. “If it helps, I’ll admit that losing the brief flicker of what I almost had with Malcolm is cutting me in two.”

She swallowed again, but this time the torrent of feelings came welling up. “Damn you, must you always be right? Of course it hurts like hell. Of course I feel as though my soul’s been ripped out and shredded in pieces, and I’ll never be whole again. And I know I haven’t any right to feel that way, to mourn the loss of something that was only mine through false coin, but that doesn’t make the feelings go away. I never thought I was supposed to be happy, I never thought it was possible, but I was, and there’s no way to capture it again. He’ll never look at me in the same way because I’m not the person he thought I was. And I don’t even know who I am anymore.” She drew a breath, throat raw with unshed tears.

“Feel better for having said it?”

She tugged at the brim of her bonnet. “I’m wondering how I can even be thinking about myself when I’ve smashed Malcolm’s life to bits.”

“And your own.”

“But I knew what I was doing. And now I’m wallowing. I hate wallowers.”

“You don’t have to worry about how you look with me. You never did.”

She jabbed her side curls back beneath the brim of the bonnet. “I underestimated the human element. I was blind to the pain I was causing—or at least I didn’t give it enough weight.”

“That rather sums up my own feelings.”

“But it doesn’t make the other elements go away.” She stared into her wineglass, forcing herself to confront the ugly, gnawing truth. “For all my wallowing, I can’t say I’d act differently.”

“Nor can I.”

“Which makes us hypocrites.”

“Which makes us aware of conflicting loyalties. The question is what we do about them.”

“Damn it, Raoul. I’ve seen you weigh the odds and sacrifice an agent as though he or she was a pawn.”

“My dear girl. You know how badly I sleep. I assure you it hasn’t got any better.”

“But you knew where your loyalties lay. You’d accepted the necessity of betrayal in the game we were playing.”

Raoul picked up the bottle and refilled her glass. “Loyalties conflict every day. Causes, countries, friends, comrades, lovers. It’s often impossible to be loyal to all. One has to make choices.”

“And that’s it? There’s no right and wrong?”

He set down the bottle and wiped a trace of wine from its neck. “You know nothing in our world can be neatly classified as right and wrong.”

“No. But one can’t use that as an excuse to say anything is justified. I’ve seen people like that, people like Fouché. Perhaps it’s self-delusion, but I can’t believe we’ve sunk to that level.”

“One’s still bound by one’s own conscience and what one can live with.” Raoul’s gaze rested on her face like the brush of fingertips. “You have to learn to forgive yourself,
querida
. If you don’t owe it to yourself, you owe it to your children. And your husband.”

Malcolm’s gaze in the shadows of the theatre cut into her. “Even if he can’t forgive me?”

“How can you expect him to if you can’t forgive yourself?”

“I accepted long since that we have to make compromises. That our work isn’t easy or pretty. But with that surely we have to give up the hope of a happy ending.”

“Oh, my darling girl, surely you know better than to believe in endings.” Raoul twisted the stem of his glass between his fingers. “The board shifts, the game changes, and one moves on. And makes the best of where one was left standing. And if one has a scrap of sense one snatches happiness where one can.”

“Are you saying that’s what you do?”

He looked into the glass as though seeing into the past. “I snatched some with you, I snatched some with Malcolm when he was a boy. I snatched some in Paris two years ago when we all worked together. Or yesterday seeing Colin and Jessica in the square.” He took a quick drink of wine. “Arabella was one of the most unhappy people I’ve ever known. Whether it was flirting or shopping or breaking codes, she constantly had to be doing something. If she stopped for a moment one could see the desolation in her eyes. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Or on anyone’s children.”

“I’m not—”

“No, you aren’t, thank God. Your belief in the world is too strong.”

She gave a short laugh. “Dear God, Raoul, after all these years do you know me so little?”

His gaze moved over her face with that look that never failed to warm her. “I know the spark inside you that the most appalling events couldn’t quench. You may not think you can be happy, but at least you acknowledge happiness is possible.”

“Malcolm said something similar once. But of course he was talking to a woman he didn’t really know.” She snatched up her gloves and closed her fingers tight round them. “I may have sunk into a dream these past years where I was deluded enough to believe happiness was possible. That I could get by with nothing worse than living with the fear of discovery. That I could make it up to Malcolm by actually being the woman he thought he’d married.” She tugged the gloves onto her cold fingers. “But that dream ended today. It’s folly to think about happiness. I need to focus on survival.”