The Mayfair Affair (24 page)

"The life of a spy keeps one focused on the present," Malcolm said. "It's the only way one can stay alive. Focusing on the present can save one's sanity when one's life is falling apart."

"To own the truth, I didn't care much about staying alive at first. But I must have an instinct for self-preservation. Deception came all too easily to me."

"Think of it as acting," Suzanne said.

Laura's mouth twisted. "My first assignment was with an expatriate family with Bonapartist sympathies. In the months before Waterloo, that seemed straightforwards enough. Not that anything in this business is straightforwards, but at least I could still believe Trenchard was a British spymaster. I had no illusions that spying was anything other than a dirty business, but at least I could believe in our overall goals. Of course, there were times self-disgust welled up. But I confess there were also times I enjoyed the challenge."

"Of course." Suzanne reached for her tea for the first time in minutes. "The game becomes addicting."

"Yes. It does." Laura shivered. "I saw sides of myself I'd never recognized."

"You must have missed your family," Malcolm said.

"Yes." Layers of loss echoed beneath the contained word. "But my father had a new family with my stepmother. I scarcely knew my half-brother and sisters. For a time, I asked Trenchard for information about them. Then I decided it was perhaps better for everyone if I stopped."

Suzanne swallowed a sip of lukewarm tea. "And Emily?"

Laura's mouth tightened. "He doled out the information to keep me in line. A lock of her baby hair—surprisingly blond. She'd only have been about nine months when he gave it to me—she must have had her hair grow in earlier than Jessica. A pastel drawing. Really just scribbles on a piece of notepaper."

"I saw it." Suzanne's mind shot back to their search of Laura's room. "Pressed between the pages of
Pride and Prejudice
in your room. I should have realized then."

"I'm a governess. There could have been dozens of reasons for me to have it."

"There could. I still can't help but feel I should have seen it."

"You expect too much of yourself, Mrs. Rannoch."

"At the very least, don't you think you should be calling me Suzanne now?"

"We're hardly friends."

"But we share the camaraderie of fellow agents." Suzanne set down her tea.

"When did you begin to realize about the Elsinore League?" Malcolm asked.

"In bits and pieces. I could read enough from Trenchard's questions to begin to suspect he wasn't simply a spymaster serving Britain. I still believed he was working for Britain when he planted me in your household. I knew you were an agent, Mr. Rannoch. I thought at first that Trenchard suspected you of dealing with the French, though as time went on it was harder and harder for me to believe that. He began to ask me more and more questions about both of you. And to imply things that made no sense."

"I suspect those things were far closer to the truth than you realized," Suzanne said. "As you now know."

Laura spread her hands in her lap. "I'd managed to remain quite detached from my first family."

"Understandable, given that you'd lost nearly everyone you'd been close to in your life."

"Perhaps. They treated me as a servant, which made it easier to keep my distance. But I wasn't so successful in your household. Colin and Jessica are hard to resist."

Suzanne stared at Laura, seeing her tying Jessica's bonnet strings, buttoning Jessica's pelisse, holding Jessica on her hip. "Dear God. It must have been hell for you to be near Jessica."

"I wouldn't call it hell. She does serve as a constant reminder of what Emily might have been like as a baby, but that's not entirely bad. In my best moments, I feel like she gives me a chance to catch up on some of the things I've missed."

"You're more generous than I could be."

"You're a good mother, Mrs. Rann—Suzanne. It was part of what made it hard for me to credit everything Trenchard said."

"Good parents can't be traitors?"

"I suppose that's folly. But I couldn't keep my distance or see either of you as the enemy. As time went by, I couldn't even see you with detachment. When those barriers broke down, others began to break down, as well."

"Is that why you went to see Trenchard the night of the murder?" Malcolm asked.

Laura leaned forwards, in a confiding posture that Suzanne would have sworn was impossible at the start of the interview. "I went there to force him to tell me where Emily was and to let me see her. I took your pistol to use as persuasion. I know it sounds mad. Imprudent, dangerous, impractical. For me and for Emily. I could try to rationalize it a dozen ways. But the truth is, I looked at Colin and Jessica by the fire earlier that evening and realized that I couldn't bear to go another four-and-twenty hours without knowing what had become of my daughter."

Suzanne thought back to that night, Laura sitting on the sofa with Colin and Jessica curled up on either side of her. "I can understand that."

"Can you? You're a good agent, Mrs.— Suzanne. And in this I wasn't thinking like a good agent."

"No, you were thinking like a mother. Which, God knows, I can understand. The story of my life the past four and a half years has been balancing the two."

Laura drew a breath. "When I stepped into the study and saw Trenchard— I tried to save him. I couldn't think beyond the shock for a good quarter hour."

"Did he say anything to you?" Malcolm asked.

"He was beyond it. But as I tried to stop the bleeding, I asked him where Emily was."

"He didn't reply?"

"He met my gaze, and I think he understood, but he couldn't seem to form the words. Not that I have any faith he'd have told me if he could have spoken."

Malcolm nodded. "And yet the footman says the duke's last word was 'Emily.'"

"I know. Ever since I heard that, I've been asking myself what it meant. If it was some sort of confession. If he was trying to tell me something." Laura pressed her fingers to her temples. "When I realized he was gone, my first thought was that now I'd never learn where she was."

Suzanne reached across the table to touch the other woman's hand. "You don't know that."

"I wouldn't know where to begin to start looking."

"With the Elsinore League." Suzanne looked at her husband. "Malcolm and I are good at tracing people."

"Suzanne." Laura slid her hand from Suzanne's grip. "This isn't your fight."

"Oh, yes, it is. You help us raise our children. That makes us responsible for helping you with your child. Laura, knowing me, knowing Malcolm, you can't seriously imagine we'd stay out of this."

A reluctant smile curved Laura's mouth. "That's why it took me so long to tell you."

"Trenchard rewrote his will, leaving a sizable bequest to Emily," Malcolm said. "James is trying to find her as well."

"James is a decent man, from everything Jack told me." Laura sat back in her chair. "He and Henrietta would probably want to raise Emily. I imagine they're good parents."

"I think they'd respect your wishes."

Laura scraped her chair back from the table and sprang to her feet. "I don't know if she's with a family. In a school. If Trenchard sent money for her regularly. What will happen now that that stops."

Malcolm pushed his chair back and got to his feet himself. "In that case, whoever has her would try to contact him."

"He'll have made sure there are layers of protection between Emily's keepers and him."

"But he'd have kept a link to her. He needed it as insurance."

Laura gave a bleak smile. "Yes. There is that."

"Trenchard had his solicitor sending money to a bank in Maidstone to pay for Emily," Malcolm said. "I've sent Addison to make inquiries."

Hope leaped in Laura's eyes, and then was banked. "Trenchard will have muddied the trail."

"Undoubtedly. But we'll find her."

"And then?" Laura turned to face them, the cloud-filtered light from the single high window at her back.

"We'll restore your daughter to you," Malcolm said.

"In prison?"

"We'll get you out of prison first."

"For a modest man, you have a high opinion of yourself, Mr. Rannoch."

"Oh, no. I'm well aware of my shortcomings. But I'm also well aware of my wife's talents
."

Malcolm paused in the shadow of Newgate to draw on his gloves. "The wonder is that someone didn't murder Trenchard sooner. You know my opinions on killing, and yet if he appeared before me now I'd be hard pressed not to throttle the man myself."

"I still don't think Laura killed him," Suzanne said.

"Nor do I." Malcolm tugged the second glove into place. "He was her one link to her child."

Suzanne adjusted the ribbons on her bonnet. "She became a spy because it was her only link to her child. I dragged my child into the world of espionage with me."

"No time for wallowing." Malcolm took her hand in a firm grip. "I'll send word to Addison to let him know Emily is a child. We're going to find Emily. So help me, I can't bear to think of anyone doing that to a child. Or her mother."

She tightened her fingers round his own. "I could have been her, Malcolm."

He was silent for a moment, gaze on the thickening shadows that filled the street. "O'Roarke has many sins, but he wouldn't have abandoned you. Or taken Colin away from you."

She shot a look at him.

"I may not be clear-eyed when it comes to O'Roarke, but I've known him for a long time. If I forgot what that meant when I learned about the two of you, I've begun to remember. "

Her throat hurt. It must be the soot in the air. "What she went through—I've been through a lot, Malcolm, but I can scarcely imagine. And yet, I understand the choices she made."

"So do I." He met her gaze. "Among other things, I know what it is to fall into a life of espionage in the search for some anchor in the wasteland life has become."

In the gray light of oncoming twilight, the bones of his face were sharpened, his eyes even more deep-set than usual. In battling her own ghosts, she sometimes forgot he had them as well. "I hadn't thought—"

"You aren't the only one to see parallels."

"Parallels and differences. It made me realize— Fortune protects one a great deal." She laced her fingers through her husband's own. "Your fortune."

"Your life has hardly been easy, Suzette."

At the corner, three boys sat huddled round a fire on the pavement. A flower seller hurried down the cross street, a tattered shawl clutched round her shoulders. Suzanne was suddenly and acutely conscious of the softness of her gloves, the expert fit of her boots, the snug warmth of her merino pelisse. "No. But it's difficult to justify the luxury I live in. Oh, don't get me wrong, I know better than to wallow. But every so often, I'm struck by my hypocrisy."

Malcolm drew her hand through the crook of his arm. "You don't talk this way very often."

"No, I try to keep it from you."

He squeezed her fingers. "Do you think we can trust her?"

"Yes."

"That's a remarkably unequivocal answer, coming from you."

"You've seen what she's been through."

He steered her round a pile of refuse on the pavement. "I've seen that her spirit is undimmed. And that she's a survivor. You've taught me that one can never tell where choices will take a person."

"An appalling lesson."

"A useful one." He pulled her to the side as a carriage clattered by, sending up a spray of mud. "She could ruin us."

"What are you saying? That we should turn our backs on her?"

"Of course not. But I can't be blind to the risk she represents." He pulled her closer. "I'm rather keenly aware of what we have to lose."

Suzanne looked up at her husband. She'd been trying all day not to dwell on her meeting with the blackmailer that night, but it hovered on the edge of her consciousness. "We can't make the risks go away, Malcolm."

"No. But I'm trying to minimize them."

Colin looked up at his parents from the nursery hearthrug. "Where are you going tonight?"

"The opera." Suzanne dropped down beside her son in a stir of champagne satin and silver tulle. She was aware of Malcolm standing behind her. He'd argued for staying home until their rendezvous with her unknown blackmailer at five in the morning. But Suzanne had pointed out that all sorts of people connected to the Trenchards would be at the opera. Which, she told herself, had everything to do with the investigation and nothing at all with avoiding private conversation with her husband.

"I hope you can help Laura."

"I do too, darling." Suzanne hugged her son.

"La-ra." Jessica tugged at one of the silk roses on Suzanne's bodice.

"She sends you her love, sweetheart." Suzanne scooped her daughter into her arms and buried her face in the crook of Jessica's neck, wondering where Emily had been when she was this age. In the course of the Peninsular War and the Waterloo campaign, she had seen monstrous acts of brutality. Arguably, she had known many men—and some women—who could rival Trenchard for villainy. And yet the image of him arranging his own son's death, and then calmly hiding another child of his away from her mother, chilled her with the desolation of a Spanish winter, and at the same time made her burn with anger.

Suzanne kissed Jessica's hair as though she could protect her with the force of her love.

"I wish I could go to the opera," Colin said.

"Not tonight, old chap," Malcolm said. "But we'll take you soon. Tonight isn't the best choice for children."

The grand salon at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, was always crowded during the interval. The image of the masked trio entering Don Giovanni's palace fresh in his memory, Malcolm slipped through the crowd. A trick he'd mastered in his years in the diplomatic corps. A touch on a shoulder or arm, a nod, a smile, a murmured greeting. He'd made a half-circuit of the room before he spotted James. At a table alone, a glass of champagne tilting in his fingers, as though he'd forgot he was holding it.

Malcolm was prepared for defenses, but James looked up at him with what seemed like relief. "I didn't want to come. But I needed to speak with Sidmouth."

Malcolm dropped into the empty chair at the table. "I like Mozart, but
Don Giovanni
isn't one of my favorites. Difficult to like any of the characters. Suzette tells me I'm being sentimental."

"I confess I can't see the opera without seeing echoes of my brother." James pushed his glass aside.

"You never met his wife?" Malcolm asked. It wasn't time to bring up Laura. Not yet.

"No. They married in India. But from what I've heard, the marriage didn't settle Jack much. If at all. Why in God's name do women—"

"Find it appealing? I've often wondered."

James gave a twisted smile. "You're fortunate. Your wife adores you."

"You and Hetty seem happy."

"I'm fortunate to have her," James said, neatly sidestepping the question of happiness.

Malcolm studied the man he had come, in the last two days, to think of as a friend. "You were seen in Half Moon Street two nights ago, James."

James went still, though it seemed to be a moment before the words fully registered. He released a breath. "I should have known I'd be seen. And that you'd learn of it."

"In the general run of things it wouldn't be any of my business. But—"

"It was the night my father was murdered." James snatched up his champagne and tossed down a swallow. "It's not what you think."

"I don't think anything yet."

James set the glass down as though by force of will. "I was visiting a lady."

Malcolm said nothing, Hetty's drawn face sharp in his memory.

James twisted his glass on the starched linen tablecloth. "That's also not what you think."

"It's none of my business."

"Damn it—" James drew a breath and cast a quick glance round the crowded salon. He leaned forwards in his chair, shoulders hunched. "I don't know that I've made Hetty happy. Often I think I didn't do her any favors dragging her into this family. But I wouldn't betray her."

"And the lady you were visiting—"

"Her name is Lily Duval. She used to be an opera dancer. And my brother's mistress. If a word that implies something so long-term can be applied to any of Jack's liaisons. My brother had a varied career before he left Britain. I wonder sometimes how many women he got with child. How many nieces and nephews I may have. But I know of one for a certainty. Lily has a seven-year-old son. Jack is—was—the father."

"Mary mentioned something about your father paying her off."

Jack raised his brows. "I'm surprised Father let Mary hear of it. Yes, Father made a settlement on Lily. I supplement it with a quarterly allowance. And I visit from time to time. Johnny doesn't have a father. I want him to at least know something of his family."

"Are you generally in the habit of spending the night?" Malcolm kept his voice as neutral as he could.

"No, of course not." James reached for his glass but, instead of drinking, pushed it from hand to hand. "Lily sent word to me at Richmond. She said it was urgent and asked me to come at once."

"And was it urgent?"

James took a sip of champagne. "Father had written her an intemperate letter. He said he was going to stop paying for her house. He made further comments that led her to believe he was going to try to have Johnny removed from her care."

"Did she know why?"

"She said she hadn't seen Father in months. She was distraught when I arrived, and Lily's one of the most sensible and strongest women I know. She showed me Father's letter. With typical highhandedness, all Father said was that he was making some changes to his arrangements and felt he had already done more than enough for her, and that now Johnny was getting older he would benefit from an environment more representative of his father than his mother. Lily was convinced Father meant to try to take Johnny from her. I wouldn't put it past him to remove a child from his mother."

Malcolm saw Laura's tight face as she talked about Trenchard keeping Emily from her, and then recalled Suzanne's account of Mary describing how her husband had insisted she give up the child she was pregnant with or he would keep her other children from her. "I don't doubt it. What did you tell her?"

"That I wouldn't let it happen." James downed another gulp of champagne. "Though truth to tell, I'm not sure how I'd have prevented it."

"And then?"

"I left. A bit after one. I drove straight back to Richmond. I was there before Hetty woke."

"You drove alone?"

"Christ, Malcolm, you can't think I'd have taken a groom with me." He slumped back in his chair. "There's no one to account for my whereabouts when Father was murdered ."

"And Miss Duval? She was alone when you left? She lives alone?"

"Except for Johnny and a maid." James set down his glass. "Malcolm, you can't think Lily—"

If James was to be believed, Lily, like Laura and Mary, had one of the strongest motives imaginable for committing murder. Protecting a child. But Malcolm merely said, "I should talk to her."

"You won't—"

"I'll be discreet. But now that your father's gone, she has nothing to fear."

Which was rather the point.