The Paris Affair Part 14

CHAPTER 10.

"Laclos was set up." Malcolm turned up the Argand lamp in the privacy of the bedchamber he and Suzanne shared. His fingers shook. "d.a.m.nation."

Suzanne touched his arm. "Darling-"

"Don't, Suzette." He jerked away from her touch. The lamp hissed. He turned it up again. "Don't tell me it's not my fault or I couldn't have known. I b.l.o.o.d.y well should have seen it."

He felt her gaze on him. "Are you sure?" she asked.

"Talleyrand says Bertrand wasn't working for the French." His fingers curled inwards. "As inclined as I am to take everything Talleyrand says with numerous grains of salt, I don't know why he'd lie about this." Bertrand Laclos's face shot into his memory, bent over books at Oxford, on the sidelines in a Mayfair ballroom. Dark, serious eyes, an unexpectedly infectious grin. "I fell for some b.a.s.t.a.r.d's deception. I fell right into the trap they laid for me, and the cost of my idiocy was the life of a man who was running incalculable risks for my own side."

"People die," Suzanne said, her voice quiet and steady. "Because of things we do. Because of things we don't do. People on our side, people on the opposing side. Sides. A death is a death. And we have no choice but to live with them on our conscience. Or we'd go mad."

He swung his gaze to her face. Her sea green eyes were haunted and yet unusually hard, like Perths.h.i.+re agate. "It has to matter. If it ever stops mattering I won't be able to live with myself."

"I know, dearest. That's what makes you you."

He strode across the room. The watered-silk walls seemed d.a.m.nably close. "If I'd thought to question-"

"I know. It's rather an insult to one's intelligence."

"What?"

"Falling for a deception."

"That's not-" He spun towards her and gave a rueful grin. "Oh, all right. That's part of it. I like to think I'm above being deceived."

"We none of us are, darling. In the right circ.u.mstances."

Malcolm struggled out of his coat and tossed it over a gilded chairback. "Whoever was behind the deception knew Bertrand Laclos was a British agent. Knew his methods of communication. Knew the codes to use."

"Rupert Caruthers would have known all that." Suzanne struck a flint to the tapers on her dressing table. "Are you sure he and Laclos remained the greatest of friends?"

Malcolm frowned, seeing the anger on Rupert's face when he talked about Bertrand Laclos's death. "There's no reason to think otherwise."

"Rupert married Bertrand's cousin after Laclos's death. Could they have been rivals? Or could Bertrand have opposed the match?"

"The way you described your conversation with Gabrielle, it sounds more as though Rupert married Gabrielle because he took pity on her."

Suzanne undid the clasp on her necklace and stared at the pearls and diamonds as they glowed and sparkled in the candlelight. "Or because he felt guilty?"

"Possibly." Malcolm unwound the folds of his cravat. "So you're suggesting Rupert and Bertrand had some sort of falling-out and Rupert chose this method to get rid of him?"

"I'm only suggesting that it's possible." Suzanne set the necklace in its velvet box. "Lord Caruthers would have been ideally positioned to put the plan into place."

Malcolm dropped his cravat on top of the coat. "Whoever was behind it planned to use me."

"Because they knew your intelligence would be believed without question."

He stared at the starched white linen folds of the cravat, pristine when Addison had handed it to him, now creased and stained. "Quite."

"And they did their job well."

Malcolm grimaced. "Gabrielle's brother Gui became heir to the t.i.tle with Bertrand Laclos's death, as etienne had already died in the failed Royalist plot."

"I met Gui Laclos tonight. He came up to Cordy and me. It seems he and Cordy were once rather close."

Malcolm stared at his wife. He was very fond of Cordelia and he wasn't a prude-or so he kept telling himself-but the reality of Cordelia's past still brought him up short. "Poor Davenport."

"I don't think it was very serious. But Cordelia seems to have been fond of him. And he of her. Cordy said he was an outsider, like her, because he came to England so late in his growing up and had been separated from his family for so long. He seems to have felt a great deal of guilt at having survived when both his cousins had lost their lives."

Malcolm tugged at his waistcoat b.u.t.tons. "Understandable."

"But apparently it was more than that." Suzanne unfastened one of the diamond earrings he had given her for her birthday last year and held it swinging from her fingertips. "Cordelia said Gui Laclos had a nightmare one night and called out, 'Fremont.' Does that mean anything to you?"

"No." Malcolm shrugged out of the waistcoat. "Cordelia didn't know what it meant?"

"No. Only that when Gui woke he seemed afraid he'd betrayed himself somehow in his sleep."

"Interesting." Malcolm perched on the chair arm and started on his s.h.i.+rt cuffs. "I've never known Gui well. We ran in different crowds."

Suzanne removed the second earring. "Gabrielle said her brother has a weakness for gambling."

"So rumor has it. I've never been one to haunt gaming h.e.l.ls."

"Except in the line of duty." Suzanne's mouth curved in a smile.

"Quite."

Suzanne began to pull the pins from her hair. "Perhaps he was indulging himself and making up for lost time all those years living in Provence." She twisted a hairpin between her fingers. "Or perhaps he was trying to distract himself from whatever he felt guilty about."

"Perhaps." Malcolm frowned at his s.h.i.+rt cuff. He'd got a spot of red wine on it at some point in the evening. "Rupert dismissed the idea that Gui might have tried to get rid of Bertrand. But then Gui is Rupert's brother-in-law, and Rupert's the sort who wants to think the best about everyone." He pulled the s.h.i.+rt over his head. There was more he had to say, though he was oddly unsure how to put it into words. "Talleyrand revealed more than that Bertrand Laclos was framed. Apparently Rivere was telling the truth, at least in part. It looks as though Tania did have a child."

"Oh, Malcolm." His wife's voice was warm with a sympathy that threatened to undo him.

He moved to the bed and wrapped himself in his dressing gown while he told her, as matter-of-factly as possible, about his conversations with Annina and Talleyrand.

"So it sounds as though Tatiana became pregnant in late 1806 or early 1807," Suzanne said.

"Yes." He tightened the belt on the dressing gown. His fingers were shaking. d.a.m.nable not to be in more control. "I just can't understand-"

"Why she didn't tell you?"

"Why she didn't at least leave a message for me." The burgundy silk slipped through his fingers. He tugged at it and heard a st.i.tch give way.

"She wouldn't have been expecting to die, Malcolm." Suzanne hesitated, and he knew she was thinking of the letters he'd written to her and Colin in case he didn't survive their various adventures. The letters that were still in his dispatch box. He never knew when they might be necessary. "Not everyone plans for contingencies as carefully as you do, darling. And she wasn't going into a battle as you were at Waterloo."

"She was-"

"Your sister. I know." Suzanne crossed the room, her half-unpinned hair falling over one shoulder, and dropped down on the bed. "It sounds as though she was concerned for her child's safety. G.o.d knows I can understand that."

Malcolm sat beside his wife. He saw Colin, curled in his bed when he and Suzanne had looked in on him a quarter hour before. Relaxed in sleep, one arm curled round his stuffed bear, the other flung up beside his head. So content. So vulnerable. "That's just the point. I would have-"

"Protected Tatiana's child? She may have been trying to protect you as well." Suzanne touched his back, her fingers warm through the silk of his dressing gown.

"She made Talleyrand swear to keep his knowledge of the child from me in particular." That revelation still hammered him, a blow from which he'd never recover.

"I don't think it means she didn't love you or trust you, darling. I think it means quite the opposite."

Myriad fears sliced into his brain. "If she thought the child represented a danger-"

Suzanne hesitated a moment. "If her affair with Napoleon began earlier than we thought-"

"Quite. But Talleyrand's right. Even that wouldn't have seemingly needed to be so secret at the time. But if the father was someone less exalted-" He shook his head.

"Do you know who else she was involved with about that time?"

"No. I didn't see her when she was in Russia or when she first came to Paris. I went to Paris secretly in early 1807 to tell her of our mother's death. She must have been with child then. But she gave no hint of it. If I'd been able to guess-" Malcolm stared at his hands and saw Tatiana's fingers moving over the keyboard of the pianoforte in her rooms in Paris. With her cropped hair and plucked brows and carefully applied cosmetics, she'd seemed so much more elegant and self-a.s.sured than the girl he'd last seen at her school in France. Until her eyes had lit in a familiar way over a favorite pa.s.sage in the Beethoven sonata and he'd known she'd always be his sister.

"It was early in the pregnancy, darling. You couldn't have known." Suzanne hesitated, her fingers spread on the crimson silk embroidery on the counterpane. "I didn't want to mention this until I knew if anything would come of it. I talked to Doro about Edmond's friends.h.i.+p with Bertrand Laclos. Doro said she could hardly account for Edmond's friends. But Cordelia offered to have a word with Edmond."

"Why should Cordelia be able to-"

"Apparently she was acquainted with Edmond Talleyrand in Paris last year." Suzanne looked steadily at him. "Rather well acquainted."

"Oh." Sometimes, he thought he was a great deal too simple. "Edmond Talleyrand and Gui Laclos. Poor Harry."

"Cordelia was a bit concerned. But she said she and Harry had to learn to live with the past."

Malcolm grimaced, seeing the guarded cynicism on Harry Davenport's face in Brussels last June. Both the Davenports had changed amazingly in the past two months, but everyone had their limits. "I hate to see them face this so soon. Though I doubt Harry would thank me for my sympathies."

"Cordelia spoke to Edmond at the ball tonight. He said his uncle had asked him to keep an eye on Bertrand Laclos when Laclos first came to Paris. He also said he and Laclos didn't have a great deal in common, which is hardly a surprise. But he did reveal that Laclos was the lover of Louise Carnot. Louise Sevigny now."

"The painter's wife?" Malcolm recalled meeting her at an exhibition of Emile Sevigny's work a fortnight or so ago. Sevigny was a talented artist. As a favorite of Bonaparte and Josephine, he was on thin ice in Restoration Paris, like so many others.

"Apparently her first husband, Carnot, was an aristocrat and a soldier and not one to take kindly to his wife's infidelity. Edmond wasn't sure if Carnot had ever learned of Louise's affair with Bertrand Laclos. But if he had-"

"It would have been harder for Carnot to set up Bertrand than someone British, but it's possible."

"I'll talk to Louise Sevigny. Simon's friends with Emile Sevigny-he can help me." Suzanne smoothed the crumpled gauze of her overdress. "Cordelia said her talk with Edmond stirred some uncomfortable gossip. We should be on the lookout to deflect it."

Malcolm recalled the self-hatred he'd glimpsed in Cordelia's eyes so often in Brussels and still caught flashes of. He might not understand the life Cordelia had lived, but he knew the bite of self-hatred all too well. "How was Cordelia afterwards?"

"A bit unhappy to be reminded of her past. Having Gui Laclos come up to us just after didn't help. But Harry seemed to have things well in hand. They'll cope."

"I hope so."

She cast a quick look at him. "Darling, you don't think-"

He kept his gaze steady on her face. "I think marriage is difficult. I think love is difficult. I think Harry and Cordelia are two complicated people with complicated pasts. I don't think being married comes easily to either of them. That doesn't mean they won't succeed. But it does worry me when they go through something like this."

She shook her head, her hair falling over her face. "I can't help but think-"

"I know." He reached out and slid his fingers down her arm. "That's because you're much more of a romantic than I am."

She gave a rough laugh. "I lost my capacity for romance years ago, Malcolm."

Rage at the French soldiers who had raped her and killed her family and at the very English Colonel Frederick Radley who had seduced and abandoned her blurred his vision for a moment. "Not lost, I think. Just buried it beneath some very hard-earned realism."

She looked up at him. The candlelight slid over her face. "I don't know that I was ever a romantic even . . . before. I just-"

"Believe people can be happy."

Her fingers curled into the coverlet. "I believe happiness is possible, in fits and s.n.a.t.c.hes if nothing else. Perhaps it's precisely because it's rare that I believe in grabbing hold of it."

When he was growing up, watching his parents, happiness had never seemed like much of a possibility. He lifted his hand and pushed the loose strands behind her ear.

She smiled but then went still, her hand on his back. "Darling-" She broke off. He could feel the question in the tension of her fingers through the silk of his dressing gown.

"Don't tell me there's something you're afraid to ask me."

"No." Her gaze moved over his face. "Not afraid. But I'm not sure it's my place-"

"For G.o.d's sake, Suzette, since when do you worry about what it's your place to do or not do?"

"I don't think marriage should entirely strip one of privacy. But-" Her gaze flickered over his face. "Have you thought about telling Willie and Doro about Tatiana's child?"

He checked the instinctive denial. His fingers dug into the coverlet. His mother had trained him to secrecy when it came to his sister. But she was Wilhelmine's sister as well, and he knew Dorothee felt a responsibility towards her. Tania and Dorothee did not share a biological father, but the man Dorothee had grown up calling father had fathered Tania. Questions of parentage and sibling relations.h.i.+ps were complicated among the aristocracy. "You think they'd want to know?" he asked, his voice harsh to his own ears.

"I think so. I think I would in their place. And I think they could help."

"We don't-"

"Help can always come in useful, dearest. I think one's wise if one learns to accept it when it's offered. I know I'm trying to do so. There've been a lot of secrets where Tatiana's concerned. Perhaps it's time-"

"For honesty? That's what I was just saying to Wellington and Castlereagh."

Suzanne drew back against the bedpost as though to give him s.p.a.ce to make his choice. "It's your decision, darling. There's no right answer. But for what it's worth, I think you can trust Willie and Doro. I think we learned that in Vienna. After all-"

"I owe Wilhelmine my liberty and quite possibly my life." Malcolm saw the heavy door of his Vienna prison cell swing open to let in his wife and the d.u.c.h.ess of Sagan. And Prince Metternich. "And without Wilhelmine and Dorothee we might not have been able to save the tsarina. You're right. One should be grateful for help where one finds it."

"I know I'll be forever grateful to them."