The Mayfair Affair (5 page)

"It's not far," Malcolm said. "And we can look after ourselves."

"An understatement if I ever heard one." Roth gave a faint smile and tipped his hat to Suzanne. "I'll send word once we move Miss Dudley to Newgate." He took two steps down the street, then hesitated and turned back. The lamplight fell across his face, catching the conflict in his gaze. "I know this can't help but be awkward. But for all that, I'm glad to be working with you."

Malcolm found himself smiling, on a night when smiles seemed an impossible stretch. "The feeling is mutual."

"And though I hate to be the sort of wife who says my husband speaks for me, I quite agree," Suzanne said.

Roth returned their smiles and set off towards Pall Mall.

Malcolm tucked Suzanne's hand more securely through his arm as they turned in the opposite direction. "What haven't you told me?" she asked.

"Am I that transparent?"

"No, it took me years to learn to read you."

Malcolm saw the realization of what she had just said flash in his wife's eyes in almost the same instant it dawned on him. So much between them was unchanged and so much would never be the same. She swallowed but didn't look away. Suzanne was tougher than that. "If you prefer not to tell me, I quite understand."

"Good of you. Though of course that never stopped you from uncovering things in the past."

"Darling—"

"Sorry." He squeezed her arm with his free hand. "No sense in dwelling. In truth I could use your opinion. David revealed rather a lot about Trenchard." He recounted David's story about his belief that Trenchard had struck Mary.

Suzanne's eyes darkened. "Men who strike their wives rarely do so only once."

He drew her arm closer against his side, aware of the warmth of her skin through the layers of coat and pelisse. "Quite. David knew he was giving a motive for himself and for his father. I don't think he realized the same about Mary. Perhaps because it's beyond his comprehension that she could have committed murder."

"It is beyond his comprehension about his father?"

"No, David made a token protest, but I'd say he's all too aware of what his father's capable of. As am I. And as a father myself, I can well understand Carfax feeling the impulse to murder. It's damnably difficult for a woman to get out of a bad marriage. Money and family help, but even with a legal separation, she'd be likely to lose custody of her children. I find the thought intolerable in general. I can only imagine how I'd feel if it were Jessica and our grandchildren in the equation."

"Your conscience would stop you. Carfax isn't given to moral quibbles."

"No. The chief factor in Carfax's defense is that he asked me to investigate. It was actually David who pointed out Carfax might have known I'd investigate anyway, and he wanted me in the open as well as to keep a check on Roth. And that he then brought David in to keep a check on me. David knows his father well."

He could feel Suzanne considering this as they covered the damp cobblestones between the yellow glow of two street lamps. "It's possible."

"I was holding my breath lest Carfax say that Trenchard was a French spy." He looked sideways at her familiar profile. "He wasn't, was he?"

"Not that I know of." She looked up at him, her eyes as hard and fragile as crystal. "I would tell you, Malcolm. Do you believe me?"

He gave the question honest consideration. "I think so."

"Impressive." Suzanne was silent as they turned into Jermyn Street. "Darling— We haven't talked about this part of it, but these are your friends."

"It's hardly the first time we've been involved in an investigation involving friends."

"But these are the people you grew up with. In a way they're family."

Family. Always a tangled word for him. "Difficult to think of Carfax that way. What concerns me is that I don't want him anywhere near you."

Suzanne's fingers tightened round his arm. "I don't think that's an option, dearest. Unless we go to a remote desert island."

"Don't imagine I haven't thought of it."

"I've told you before it isn't wise to try to protect me, Malcolm. The recent revelations don't change that."

Malcolm looked down into her bright eyes. There had always been a hardness beneath the glow. He was just more aware of it now. "I'm not just protecting my wife. I'm protecting the mother of my children."

"Darling—"

"You've always run risks with your safety, Suzette. Knowing the truth of your past, I understand just how far you've gone. But it's different now. Colin and Jessica make it different. There's no room for extravagant gestures. Whether they come from indulging a craving for adventure or trying to expiate guilt."

Her chin jerked up. "I'll own to a taste for adventure, but I'm not in the least given over to guilt. In fact, one could say I've been all too able to commit all sorts of betrayals without showing any proper guilt at all."

"My dear girl. Don't show off. I may have been criminally blind to a number of things where you were concerned, but in other ways I can read you rather well. I know you. I know what you've been doing to yourself. And it's folly—it won't improve matters for any of the four of us."

She glanced away. "Damn you, Malcolm—"

"Because I think we agreed. Before anything else, we're parents."

"I never forget that." Her voice was low and rough.

"I know. But sometimes you're so busy looking after everyone else, your forget to look after yourself."

"All right. I won't give in to any extravagant guilt-driven impulses—not that I'm admitting to having them in the first place—if you won't give in to any extravagant protective impulses."

"Fair enough. If—"

From the sudden tension that ran through her, he felt her sense what he had in the same instant. Nothing as defined as footfalls or movement in the shadows or a rustle of clothing, but someone was following them.

"Diversion," she murmured.

The uncomfortable moment was gone. They were a team again. Of one accord, they moved into the doorway of a shuttered shop. Malcolm pulled her close and pressed a quick, hard kiss against her lips. Suzanne drew back with a silent laugh. "Hotspur," she whispered against his cheek. Then she slipped from the doorway and moved down the street. A few seconds, perhaps half a minute later a figure went past in the darkness. Malcolm hurled himself from the doorway and tackled the shadowy form.

They thudded to the cobblestones in a tangle of greatcoats and boots. The man Malcolm had tackled drew a winded breath that was half a laugh. "Malcolm, for God's sake, I was trying to catch up with you without yelling in the street."

Malcolm sat back on his heels and stared down at the man he was sitting on. Even in the darkness, the eyes burned bright and the mouth gleamed with mockery. Malcolm got to his feet and extended a hand to the other man. "Damn it, O'Roarke, what are you doing here?"

Raoul O'Roarke sprang to his feet with his usual catlike grace. Suzanne's former spymaster and lover. Malcolm's childhood mentor and friend. Who also happened to have been his mother's lover and Malcolm's own biological father. The revelations of three months ago had at once smashed the ties between them and created stronger ones.

O'Roarke looked from Malcolm to Suzanne, who had come running back to the two men. "I imagine I'm doing the same thing you are. Looking into the Duke of Trenchard's death."

The unease that had coiled within Malcolm from the moment he saw O'Roarke tightened into dread. "How do you even know Trenchard is dead?"

"Janet sent word. The underhousemaid at Trenchard House. She's been in my employ for some time."

It was all Malcolm could do not to reach for Suzanne and pull her tight against him. O'Roarke's words, O'Roarke's involvement, O'Roarke's very presence threatened their fragile marriage on any number of levels. "Why do you have a source in Trenchard House?"

"Because Trenchard was a member of the Elsinore League."

Malcolm bit back a curse. The Elsinore League, the mysterious club begun by a group of powerful, ambitious young men with the aim of manipulating the world to their own advantage. Their membership remained mysterious, but it was without question that Alistair Rannoch, Malcolm's putative father, had been one of the founding members. That Malcolm's mother, Arabella, had been involved in trying to unearth the club's secrets and put an end to their actions; that she had very likely even married Alistair for that reason. And that she had involved her lover Raoul O'Roarke in that quest.

"Damnation," Malcolm said.

Something softened in the hooded depths of O'Roarke's gaze. "I'm sorry."

"I knew this seemed too disconnected from everything else," Suzanne said in a voice of worn silver plate polished to show the brass beneath. She cast a glance at Malcolm. "We can't stand here discussing this in the street."

"Quite." Malcolm jerked his head at O'Roarke. "You'd better follow us to Berkeley Square, O'Roarke. At a bit less of a distance than you were."

And so the three of them proceeded down Berkeley Street and across Berkeley Square to the house Malcolm had inherited from Alistair Rannoch. Valentin, the footman who had come with Malcolm and Suzanne from Brussels to Paris and then to London, opened the door without surprise. O'Roarke was a relatively frequent visitor, often at odd hours, despite the revelations of three months ago. Or perhaps because of them.

The fire was still banked in the library. Malcolm poked it up, while Suzanne lit a lamp and a brace of candles. O'Roarke remained quiet. To do him credit, he still displayed a certain amount of caution in their house. Malcolm crossed to the drinks trolley, splashed whisky into three glasses, gave one to Suzanne, and put the other in O'Roarke's hand. "Talk."

O'Roarke took a sip of whisky. "Trenchard and I go back some time. To Paris in the eighties."

Suzanne dropped down on the sofa. "Why does everything seem to go back to Paris in the eighties?"

O'Roarke flashed a faint smile at her. "So many people in our world are still reacting to events of the Revolution one way and another."

"Was that what connected you and Trenchard?" Malcolm seated himself beside Suzanne. "The events of the Revolution?"

"Not at first. We quarreled over a woman, as it happens. Not one I was involved with. It was shortly after your birth. I was—"

"Loyal to my mother?" Malcolm was surprised at the lack of irony in his own voice.

"In a manner of speaking. This woman was a young actress, Louise Doret. She'd become entangled with Trenchard and was having difficulties freeing herself."

"Was he violent?" Malcolm asked.

O'Roarke's brows lifted. "Yes, as it happens. How did you know?"

"He appears to have not caviled at hitting his wife."

O'Roarke's mouth tightened. "That type is dangerous. I helped Louise and the young actor who was her lover escape to Italy. Oddly enough I had assistance from Robert Jenkinson. Lord Liverpool now."

"The prime minister?" Suzanne asked in disbelief.

Raoul smiled. "He was just a young man of nineteen acquiring some Continental polish. Even then we were hardly political allies, but he was a great admirer of Louise. He came to me to offer help arranging travel papers for her through connections of his father's. Perhaps the only time we've ever seen eye to eye. Though I've always thought part of the reason I was eventually able to return to British society after the uprising in ninety-eight was owed his influence. Trenchard wasn't best pleased with either of us, to say the least. He tried to challenge me. I told him I saw no reason to risk my life and violate my principles to satisfy his antiquated notions of honor."

Malcolm found himself smiling. "I don't imagine that went over well."

"No. A series of unpleasant altercations followed whenever we encountered each other. Like many young men in his set, Trenchard continued to come over to Paris after the Revolution. I was looking into the Elsinore League with your mother."

"You knew Trenchard was one of its members?"

"Yes, that was what had first thrown me in his orbit. He doesn't seem to have been at the heart of the intrigues that so absorbed your fath—Alistair and Dewhurst in those days, but he was part of their circle."

"Did he know you were investigating them?"

"I'm not sure. I like to pride myself that he didn't. And I tend to think that if the League had been on to me I'd have known it. Trenchard took various petty revenges on me, none more than a nuisance. I confess I underestimated him. Woefully."

"What did he do?" Suzanne asked. Her throat sounded tight.

"He denounced me to the Committee of Public Safety as a dangerous subversive."

Malcolm heard the sharp slice of his wife's indrawn breath while his memory flashed back to his mother's white face when she slit the seal on a letter from Paris a quarter-century ago. He looked across the library at the man he now knew was his father. "That was how you ended up in Les Carmes?"

Raoul nodded. "It probably would have happened eventually, without Trenchard's intervention. I was far from an enemy of the Revolution, but I wasn't happy with where it had gone, and I wasn't the sort to keep silent. But Trenchard certainly hurried things along."

"And almost sent you to the guillotine."

"If Robespierre hadn't fallen first. I've often wondered if Trenchard regretted that Robespierre didn't hold on to power just a bit longer."

Malcolm released his breath. He had always known, of course, but this was the first time he had relived those months since he'd learned O'Roarke was his father. As often as he told himself it shouldn't change anything, in some ways it changed everything.

"Did Trenchard take further action?" he asked.

"Yes, but nothing so drastic. Oh, there was the time in the Peninsula he thought he betrayed me to the French, but since I was in fact working for the French it came to nothing."

"Have you had an agent in his house all this time?" Suzanne asked.

"No." O'Roarke took a sip of whisky and crossed his legs. "It was Archie Davenport who put me on to Trenchard recently." Archibald Davenport, the uncle of Malcolm's friend Harry, was an Elsinore League member who had been feeding information to Arabella Rannoch and O'Roarke for years. "Archie isn't part of their inner circle," O'Roarke continued, "but a couple of months ago a stray comment made him think Trenchard was seeking political backing from other Elsinore League members. Precisely what for was unclear. But they resisted. It was enough to make both Davenport and me want to learn more. Establishing a source in Trenchard House seemed prudent."

Malcolm dropped down on the sofa beside Suzanne. "You said nothing of it to us."

O'Roarke's gaze flickered between Malcolm and Suzanne. "I've been doing my damnedest not to intrude on either of you. You've had enough to contend with in recent months. And this isn't your fight."

"You and my mother made it our fight."

"Fair enough. I didn't have enough information to come to you as yet. All we were doing was gathering intelligence."

"What was Trenchard's connection with Laura Dudley?" Suzanne asked.

"I didn't know of one until tonight. I still don't know the nature of it." O'Roarke crossed his legs. "An interesting woman, Miss Dudley. I always thought there was more to her behind the governess facade than she let on, though I had no notion it was this."

"Not that we know what 'this' is," Malcolm said.

"Quite. But from what I observed this evening, I'd lay even money that she didn't kill Trenchard."

"What you—" Malcolm stared at his father. Beside him, he felt Suzanne's absolute stillness. "You were at Trenchard House tonight?"

O'Roarke took a sip of whisky. "I didn't mention that?"

"You know damn well you didn't."

"Stop playing games, Raoul," Suzanne said.

"Sorry." O'Roarke set his glass on the table beside his chair. "I didn't think it was best to have this conversation in the street."

Malcolm eyed his father, a host of possibilities racing through his head. "When precisely did you get to Trenchard House?"

"When I heard Trenchard was dead, I thought it best to have a look at the scene."

"No one saw you?"

O'Roarke reached for his whisky. "Does that surprise you? I knew about the secret passage from my investigations. I waited in the passage until the study was empty. I believe I got a look at the study before you did."

Malcolm stared at O'Roarke. "What makes you sure of the timing?"

"Because if you'd found what I did, I'm quite certain you'd have removed it."

Dread coiled within Malcolm's chest. "What was it?"

O'Roarke's fingers whitened round the etched crystal of his glass. "A letter from Trenchard to Suzanne, threatening to reveal her past."