The Paris Affair Part 2

Sir Charles Stuart, who saw Lord Stewart as a potential rival for the amba.s.sadors.h.i.+p, kept his gaze fixed on his shoe buckles.

"The evidence seemed conclusive," Malcolm said. He looked from Castlereagh to Wellington to Stuart. "Sir," he said, in a voice taut with strain, the word addressed to all three of them. "Could we have been wrong?"

"Nonsense," Castlereagh said. "There's nothing to suggest-"

"Rivere said what he knew about the Laclos affair could shake the British delegation to its core."

"That doesn't-"

"And he implied it could bring about renewed hostilities between us and France."

"A preposterous suggestion-"

"Laclos's father is a crony of the Comte d'Artois," Malcolm persisted. "If he learned the foreign secretary's brother gave the order for the death of his son, who was in fact working for us-"

"It's a theory, Malcolm." Wellington advanced into the center of the room, as though laying claim to the Aubusson carpet. "But Rivere was a desperate man. Desperate men will say anything."

"But this desperate man was murdered just after he said it."

Wellington's gaze flickered to Castlereagh again.

"The intelligence was good," Castlereagh said. "We had no reason to doubt it."

"But that doesn't mean we haven't wondered," Stuart said.

Wellington grimaced. He was not a man to s.h.i.+rk harsh truths. "We didn't misread the intelligence. It would have to have been faked. Which would mean Laclos was set up."

Silence hung over the room for a moment, as the implications reverberated off the gilded moldings and damask wall hangings.

"If the French had learned Laclos was our agent-," Malcolm said.

"Why not simply kill him themselves?" Castlereagh said. "Or feed us false information through him."

Stuart moved away from the wall. "If it wasn't the French it would have to have been one of our people."

Castlereagh drew a sharp breath.

"Only stating the obvious," Stuart said.

Wellington gave a curt nod. "One way or another we have to know. What happened to Laclos. What Rivere knew. And who killed him." He looked from Malcolm to Suzanne. "It looks as though you needn't fear being bored in Paris."

"Malcolm," Suzanne said to her husband when at last they were in the privacy of the robin's egg blue walls and white moldings of the bedchamber in their lodgings in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore. "Even if you were wrong about Laclos, it's not your fault. All you did was pa.s.s along information."

"If the information was wrong, I should have seen it." Malcolm cut off a length of linen with a sharp snip of the scissors.

Suzanne looked up at him from her perch on the dressing table bench. She knew that set mouth and those hooded eyes. She knew the weight of guilt it meant he was trying to hold at bay. "I hate to break it to you, darling, but you aren't superhuman."

"I should be able to recognize faulty intelligence." Malcolm placed a pad of lint over the wound in her arm, then secured the dressing with a strip of linen. "A man's dead, Suzette."

"Which is tragic. But not your fault."

He knotted off the ends of the bandage. "You're stubborn, sweetheart."

"I'm practical." She pulled her dressing gown up about her shoulders. "Tell me what else you know about Bertrand Laclos."

Malcolm snapped closed the lid on her medical supply box, which seemed to get as much use in peacetime as it had during the Peninsular War and the Waterloo campaign. "He was a couple of years older than me. He went to Eton, so as a Harrovian I didn't see a great deal of him until we both got to Oxford. He tended to keep himself to himself. He was serious, but he had a quick wit. He was a decent man. I liked him." He put the medical supply box on the chest of drawers.

Suzanne drew her legs up on the rose-flowered white silk of the dressing table bench and hooked her arms round her knees. "And after he went to work for the French? And supposedly really for the British?"

"I didn't have any contact with him in the Peninsula. He must have reported to someone in military intelligence. I'll see what Davenport knows." Malcolm pushed aside the silk bed-curtains and leaned against the white-painted bedpost. "Bertrand Laclos made a rather interesting friend in the French cavalry before he was sent to the Peninsula. Edmond Talleyrand."

Suzanne frowned. "You said he had a quick wit. Edmond Talleyrand can't talk about anything but horses and gambling. And women."

"Yes, well, Laclos was playing a part."

Suzanne rested her chin on her updrawn knees. "Did Edmond's uncle have anything to do with the two of them becoming friends?"

Edmond's uncle, Prince Talleyrand, who had survived Napoleon's downfall to now head the government under the restored Louis XVIII, was a master manipulator. He was also an old friend of Malcolm's family. "You mean did Talleyrand put Edmond up to it because he guessed Bertrand Laclos was a British agent? Or because he knew Laclos was in fact working for the French?" Malcolm shook his head. "I wouldn't put it past him. But I've no proof."

"I'll talk to Doro. Though she's not exactly on terms of intimacy with Edmond even if she is his wife." Dorothee de Talleyrand-Perigord had served as hostess for her husband's uncle, Prince Talleyrand, at the Congress of Vienna. When she returned to Paris, she had taken up residence with Talleyrand, rather than with Edmond himself.

Malcolm nodded. "I'll talk to Talleyrand, though as usual I have precious little hope of getting much out of him. But I also need to ask him about-"

"Tatiana."

Malcolm's mouth tightened. "Yes."

Malcolm rarely mentioned Tatiana, but Suzanne knew he carried the guilt of his sister's death like a talisman. Sometimes she would catch him staring off into the distance and know he was replaying some moment of his time with Tatiana, especially those last weeks, wondering what might have been different. "In Vienna Tatiana supposedly said becoming pregnant was one mistake she'd never made."

"So she did. But then Tania wasn't above lying. Especially about something like that. Quite the reverse in fact."

"And even a clever woman can make a mistake," Suzanne said. Her chest tightened as she framed the word, but Malcolm, so quick to see so much, didn't seem to notice anything amiss.

"As I've said before, I'd like to think she'd have told me if she'd had a child," Malcolm said. "But I can imagine any number of reasons she'd have kept it secret."

"Including to protect you. If the father was someone powerful enough."

Malcolm shot her a surprised look.

"I understand Tatiana rather better now than I did at the start of things in Vienna," Suzanne said. "She had her own sort of honor. And she cared about you. A great deal more, perhaps, than even you realized."

Malcolm swallowed. "Sometimes I argue with myself until it seems blindingly obvious that there was a right course of action I could have taken. That would have ensured she was here now. Much good it does. Except to cause sleepless nights and endless questions."

Suzanne stared at him, startled not by what he had admitted but by the fact that he had admitted it at all. A year, even six months, ago, he would not have spoken so to her, nor would have he let her see his face as raw and cut with torment as it was now. She too knew what it was to carry guilt, too keenly to try to argue his away. She got to her feet, went to his side, and took his face between her hands. "All we can do is do the best we can within the moment, dearest. You do that better than anyone I know."

He gave a bleak smile. " 'Render me worthy of this n.o.ble wife.' "

She returned the smile, her own deliberately playful. "You promised not to turn into Brutus."

"Brutus appreciated his wife's strength. I can at least do that. While not making the mistake of not confiding in her."

She slid her hands behind his neck and kissed him, the tang of guilt on her lips. Because when it came to confiding in one's spouse, she had her own sins on her conscience.

CHAPTER 3.

"How should I have the least idea what Edmond may or may not know?" Dorothee de Talleyrand-Perigord flung herself down on the rose and gold silk chaise-longue in a stir of blue-sprigged muslin. "I'm the last person in Paris he'd confide in. You should have seen the way he was looking at Karl and me at the opera the night before last."

"I did see. It argues something other than lack of interest." Suzanne took a sip from the gilt-rimmed coffee cup Dorothee had given her.

Dorothee grabbed a cus.h.i.+on from the chaise-longue and plucked at the fringe. "Edmond isn't any more interested in me than he ever was. His pride is piqued. Stupid honor."

"I couldn't agree with you more there."

Dorothee flung the pillow aside. "I'm sorry, Suzanne, I'm not usually so pettish. It's being back in Paris. Having Edmond here even if I see next to nothing of him. Facing down the gossip. Worrying about Karl."

"And then there's the strain Monsieur Talleyrand is under," Suzanne said.

"That too." Dorothee reached for her own cup of coffee and took a careful sip. In Vienna, she had fallen in love with the handsome Austrian Count Karl Clam-Martinitz, who was still her lover. But her relations.h.i.+p with her husband's uncle, Prince Talleyrand, had also deepened in ways she would not admit even to a close friend like Suzanne. Perhaps not even to herself. "Who is this man who was a friend of Edmond's?"

"Bertrand Laclos. He came to France in 1807 and died in the Peninsula in 1811."

Dorothee frowned a moment, then shook her head, her glossy brown ringlets stirring about her fine-boned face. "I didn't marry Edmond until 1809. Paris bewildered me, and I tended to want to sink into the shadows. His friends were all a blur."

"What are you looking so serious about?" Dorothee's eldest sister, Wilhelmine, d.u.c.h.ess of Sagan, swept into the room with a rustle of Pomona green sarcenet and a waft of custom-blended scent. She dropped down in a chair and began to strip off her gloves. "Do pour me out a cup of coffee. I drank too much champagne at the Russian emba.s.sy last night."

"Do you remember a Bertrand Laclos?" Dorothee asked, reaching for the silver coffeepot. "A friend of Edmond's."

"I make it a point to avoid Edmond's friends." Wilhelmine accepted a cup from her sister and took a grateful sip of coffee. She lowered the cup and looked at Suzanne over the gilt rim. "Is this to do with the Comte de Rivere being killed last night?"

"That's quick even for you," Suzanne said. "How did you guess?"

Wilhelmine tugged at the ribbons on her cottage bonnet and lifted the straw and satin from her burnished gold curls. "Someone dies under mysterious circ.u.mstances, and you and Malcolm start asking questions. I've learned to put two and two together."

Dorothee regarded her sister. "Besides, I suspect Lord Stewart told you."

"Possibly." Wilhelmine took another sip of coffee, then shrugged her shoulders, fluttering her gauze scarf. "Oh, very well. I was there when he got the message from Castlereagh this morning."

"I don't know what you see in him, Willie." Dorothee made a moue of distaste. "When I remember how he pinched me at the Metternichs' masquerade-"

"I admit Stewart isn't always subtle-"

"That's an understatement if I ever heard one. I think Talleyrand would have struck him at the masquerade if I hadn't intervened."

Wilhelmine took another sip of coffee. "Yes, well, we know how protective Talleyrand is when it comes to you."

Dorothee flushed. "Don't make this about me, Willie. I liked Alfred-"

"Alfred, if you'll recall, left me." Wilhelmine rubbed at the lip rouge smeared on her cup.

Dorothee bit her lip. "I'm sorry, Willie-"

"Don't be. Every love affair has to end with someone leaving." Wilhelmine's mouth curved with customary cynicism. Yet in Vienna last autumn, Suzanne had seen how deep Wilhelmine's feelings for Alfred von Windischgratz ran.

"Then there was Fred Lamb," Dorothee said. "I liked him as well."

Wilhelmine leaned forwards to pour more coffee into her cup. "Agreeable. But not serious."

"And now Alfred's in Paris and seems very-"

Wilhelmine clunked the coffeepot down on the silver tray. "Are you saying you think I should come running the moment he crooks his finger?"

"No, course not. But if you love him-"

"I don't believe in love. Or at least I don't trust it." Wilhelmine tugged out her handkerchief and wiped at the coffee that had spattered on the tray and the porcelain tiles of the table. "Whatever Alfred may think he feels, within a few years he'll be married to a nice, respectable girl. It was never going to last-"

"And you think-" Dorothee stared at her sister. "Willie, are you considering marrying Stewart?"

Wilhelmine lifted her cup, full to the brim, and took a careful sip. "You say that as if marriage was some new form of sin."

"You've sworn you're never going to marry again."

Wilhelmine, twice divorced, gave her sister a careless smile. "You've known me all your life, Doro. Surely you realize I'm changeable."

Dorothee shook her head. "I can't believe you love him."

"My dear child. You're almost two-and-twenty. You can't still think love has anything to do with marriage."

"It does for some people." Dorothee flicked a glance at Suzanne.

"There are always exceptions." Wilhelmine's face relaxed into a smile. Then she studied Suzanne. "Though I don't know that even Suzanne would claim her marriage began with love."

"It began with necessity," Suzanne said. Which was the truth. Though, as with so much else to do with her marriage, a twisted truth.

Wilhelmine's gaze held perhaps more understanding than Suzanne would have liked. "There are all sorts of reasons one marries. Necessity. Security. Position."

Dorothee stared at her sister, as though she were a puzzle with unexpected angles. "And you think Stewart will give you-"

"His brother is the foreign secretary of England. It might be amusing."

"It sounds beastly." Dorothee reached for her lace shawl and pulled it tight round her shoulders. "Take it from me, there's nothing worse than being tied to a man one can't respect."

"But then I'm not a romantic, Doro. That makes it easier." Wilhelmine turned her gaze back to Suzanne. "I don't know anything about this Bertrand Laclos, but if you want to learn about Rivere, you should talk to Lady Caruthers."