The Paris Affair (23 page)

A pounding sounded, like a fist beating against polished door panels. A low-voiced murmur that must be the footman, another cry of “Manon,” then a crash and the wrench of tearing hinges. Dear God. He’d pushed the door open. Suzanne ran to the bedchamber door, Manon’s half-unlaced gown slipping from her shoulders, and shot the bolt home.

Feet pounded on the stairs. “Manon!” the voice yelled again. The brass door handle rattled. “For God’s sake, Manon, let me in.”

She crossed to the connecting door to the dressing room and bolted it as well. To speak or not to speak? She was good at imitating voices, but this was a lover. But then she’d survived this far by trusting her instincts, not doubting them.
“Chéri,”
she said, in Manon’s tones, back by the bed where her voice would carry less clearly. “I told you tonight would not work.” A risk, but surely Manon would have given him some excuse about tonight.

“You can’t still be cross about Yvette.” His voice shook with desperation. “You know that ended months ago. I haven’t had eyes for anyone else since I met you.”

“That isn’t how it looked.” Suzanne stripped off the gown and pulled the pins from her wig.

“She’s a friend. She was in trouble. I couldn’t turn my back on a friend in trouble.”

Suzanne gave an imitation of Manon’s snort as she stuffed the wig into the wardrobe and grabbed the plain black gown Manon had left for her.

“I settled her debts. That doesn’t mean I took her to bed. I don’t want to be in anyone’s bed but yours. Can you doubt that after all that’s passed between us?”

“Fine words.” She pulled on the black gown, which mercifully fastened up the front.

The handle rattled again. The door shook in its frame. “Have you got a man in there? Damn it, who is he—”

“Don’t be silly,
chéri
.” She stowed Manon’s silk-rosetted slippers in the wardrobe and pulled on a pair of plain black ones.

“You witch! They warned me you wouldn’t be faithful, but I was mad enough to trust you.”

“Because of course I love you,
mon amour
.” She softened her voice as she moved to the dressing table and grabbed some pins to tidy her hair.

“Then why—”

“Because tonight I am tired and the performance was difficult and Clarisse was ill and you hurt me with your silly attentions to Yvette.”

“Mon ange!”
His voice had softened as well and turned husky. “Let me in. I won’t tease you, I swear it. I only want to hold you in my arms.”

Oh, poison.
“Not tonight,
mon cher
. I look wretched.” Suzanne tucked the last strand of hair into place. “You know I can’t bear for you to see me when I’m not at my best.”

“As if I care. We’re beyond that.”

“Oh,
chéri
. A woman is never beyond that.”

“
Mon Dieu
. You do have a man in there.” The door shook. “By God, Manon, I’ll call the fellow to account.”

“If I did have a man in here—which I don’t, I’m in no mood to see any man—that would hardly be the action to win me over. Do go home and go to sleep,
chéri
.”

“As if I could sleep tonight. As if I could leave.” A thud sounded against the door. “If you won’t let me in now, I’ll wait here until you will.” Another thud as his body slid to the floor.

Damnation.
Suzanne cast a glance round the room. Manon’s gown and cloak could stay tossed across the bed. That looked very like Manon. So did the hairpins strewn on the dressing table and the scattered jewels. No other signs of her own presence remained.

“Oh, have it your own way,” she called.

She crossed the room, pushed back one of the curtains on a side window, and eased up the sash. Thank God it was well oiled. Outside was the dark stillness of a side garden, and the shadowy mass of another house beyond, mercifully unlit. She climbed onto the sill and reached out an arm, feeling round for the grout between the stones. She found a purchase with her toe, drew a breath, slid her other foot from the ledge.
Inch by inch, focus, don’t think about the drop down.
Carriage wheels rattled and horse hooves clopped in the street, but surely no one could see into the shadows of the side garden.

Fingers stinging, she felt the molding of the dressing room window frame. Her hand closed round the molding, and then she was standing on the sill, breathing hard, her face pressed to the glass. She crouched down, pulled a pin from her hair, and worked at the window latch. Not as quick as her picklocks, and her smarting fingers made it more difficult, but at last she got the latch open. She pushed up the sash, slid through, and dropped onto the dressing room floor.

Another breath of relief, the window closed. She found and lit a candle, looked in the dressing table looking glass long enough to smooth her gown and once again tidy her hair. Then she took an embroidered cushion and a cashmere blanket from the striped satin chaise-longue, blew out the candle, and slipped into the passage.

He was slumped on the floorboards against Manon’s bedroom door, dark hair disordered, cravat askew, coat rumpled. He had pale skin and finely molded features. A handsome man, though he looked to weigh a stone or so more than might be ideal. Suzanne walked briskly down the passage and held out the blanket and cushion. “Madame says if you insist on staying here, you might as well have these.”

He blinked at her out of burning dark eyes. “Who the devil are you?”

“Odette, monsieur.” Suzanne made her voice slightly husky and roughened it with the accents of Gascony. “The new housemaid. Madame hired me last week.”

His brows, dark and dramatic and standing on end, drew together. He pushed himself to his feet. “Didn’t say anything to me.”

“No, monsieur.” Suzanne lowered her gaze to the blanket and pillow in her hands. “I don’t expect madame is in the habit of discussing her domestic arrangements with you.”

He gave a short laugh. She could feel his gaze moving over her face. “See here, Odette. Is your mistress—Is she alone in there?”

Suzanne lifted her gaze to his face. “Of course, monsieur.”

“You’d say that in any case.” He scraped a hand through his hair, cut in a Byronic crop. “Damnation.”

His eyes held genuine torment. Whatever their history, whatever had happened with this woman Yvette, it was clear he loved Manon. And Manon? Did she return his feelings? Suzanne suppressed a shiver. There was a time when she had believed she could walk away from Malcolm. She had gone into their marriage thinking as much. Thinking she could not only leave but also take her—their—child with her. Now it was unthinkable. Or rather, she could imagine it, but only in the nightmare sense she could imagine cutting out a part of herself and going on living.

“Monsieur—” Suzanne stretched out a hand but did not quite risk touching him. She made her eyes very wide, in that way that signaled openness and invited trust. “There is no man in madame’s bedchamber. I swear it.”

He met her gaze for a long moment, then drew a harsh breath and gave a shaky nod. Suzanne pressed the blanket and pillow into his arms. His fingers closed round them, as though he were clutching on to his beloved, and he slid down against the door panels again. Some of the tension had left his face. He leaned against the doorjamb, the pillow behind his head, the blanket spread over his knees, his cheek pressed to Manon’s door. God help him in the morning.

But she could not afford to think about that now. Suzanne walked briskly to the green baize–covered door at the end of the passage that led to the service stairs. Down three flights to the kitchen, where the smell of bread lingered in the air and coals glowed in the range, but no one stirred. She listened at the area door while carriage wheels rattled past, then opened the door and went up the area steps. The street was dark and still, save for the glow of street lamps and lights in one or two houses. A cabriolet clattered by, but the shades were drawn and it did not slow. She didn’t think it held unseen watchers.

The man was still in his position across the street, but he didn’t stir. Suzanne paused beneath a street lamp, long enough to let her dark hair and plain dark gown show. A maid slipping out for a rendezvous with her lover. Sometimes it was safer to be in plain sight. She walked down the street, making no attempt to hide herself, and turned at the first corner. She doubled back twice and paused once in a doorway, but she could detect no sign of pursuit. Soon she was lost in the throng of Parisian nightlife.

She turned down a narrow side street, cut through an alley to another, and opened a side door to a glover’s. The door was unlatched. She was in a storeroom. Her evening gown, cloak, stockings, shoes, and reticule were where Raoul had said they’d be, on the third shelf down on the left, behind a box of evening gloves. She dressed in the dark by instinct, a trick Raoul had made sure she mastered years ago when he trained her. Her strand of pearls, her diamond earrings, and her pearl bracelet were tucked into the reticule. And her wedding ring. She slid it onto her finger and gripped the solid metal for a moment. Then she pulled her side curls loose from their pins and wound them round her fingers. An approximation of the coiffure she’d left the house with, but she hoped the night breeze would be enough to account for the change.

The maid’s clothes tucked behind the box, her gloves pulled on, her silk-lined velvet cloak round her shoulders, her reticule in her hand, she stepped back into the side street, raised the hood of her cloak so she wouldn’t be too obvious, and made her way towards the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. She avoided the impulse to linger too far in the shadows.

She didn’t know the exact time, but thanks to Manon’s lover she must be close to an hour later than she’d meant to be. Malcolm might well be home before she was. Well, she would deal with that. She’d dealt with countless unforeseen turns of events since their marriage, including one memorable night when he’d caught her climbing through their bedroom window with a stolen British dispatch tucked into her corset. She might no longer be actively spying for the French, but she couldn’t afford to grow rusty. Her pulse quickened, partly at the risk, but partly at the thrill of the challenge.

She moved past cafés bright with candlelight. Talk and laughter and flirtatious giggles came from open doors and from tables set out on the pavement in the warm evening air. The smells of wine and tobacco drifted in the breeze. In another life she could have slipped into one of those cafés, ordered a glass of wine, and lost herself in the crowd. But not as Mrs. Malcolm Rannoch. Playing one role limited the other roles she could take on.

The door of a café swung open when she was only a few paces away. The pop of a champagne cork and a medley of voices spilled out. Two young men in silk hats and evening cloaks staggered from the café, drew up short to avoid colliding with her, swept elaborate bows, and then stared. “Good lord. Mrs. Rannoch?”

The round face, pale blue eyes, and straight flaxen hair showing beneath the hat belonged to Freddy Lyttleton, a junior attaché whom she’d danced with last night at the British embassy. Suzanne extended her hand. “Good evening, Freddy. It was so wretchedly hot at the Russian embassy, and I didn’t want to wait to call for my carriage. It’s such a pleasant evening, I thought I’d walk.”

Freddy stared at her as though she’d taken leave of her senses. His companion flung back his head and laughed. Bobby Gordon, Suzanne realized, another junior attaché, dark haired, shorter than his friend Freddy, and with rather more wit. “You’re a regular out-and-outer, Mrs. Rannoch,” he said. “But you can’t walk alone in the streets of Paris, you know. It simply isn’t done. Not by an Englishwoman in any case.”

“But I’m not an Englishwoman, Mr. Gordon. Everyone knows about Continental eccentricities.”

“But your husband’s an Englishman,” Freddy said, as though he could still not quite make sense of her presence in the street.

“Scots.”

Freddy waved a hand as though centuries of contentious history and border warfare might never have occurred. “British. We’ll see you home, Mrs. Rannoch.”

“That’s very kind of you, Freddy, but I assure you—”

“No, we insist.” Bobby’s voice was firm and less slurred than Freddy’s. “Malcolm would never forgive us if we let you go on alone.”

There was no help for it. Suzanne smiled and said it was too kind of them. The two men walked, rather unsteadily, one on either side of her, to the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

And of course they would not simply leave her at the door. Suzanne rang the bell. Valentin, the footman who had come with them from Brussels, opened the door. They stepped into the entrance hall. There, just beyond Valentin, was Suzanne’s husband.

CHAPTER 18

“Darling.” Suzanne walked forwards. “Mr. Lyttleton and Mr. Gordon were kind enough to escort me home. Wasn’t that splendid of them?”

“My thanks,” Malcolm said with an easy smile. “Although my wife is quite capable of looking after herself, you know.”

“Walking in the street alone. Wouldn’t do. Dangerous. Besides, people might talk.” Freddy coughed, as Bobby nudged him in the ribs. “Not that Mrs. Rannoch could know that, of course.”

“Quite,” Malcolm said. “May we offer you some refreshment?”

Freddy opened his mouth as though to agree, but Bobby grabbed his arm. “No. Thank you, but we won’t impose. Rannoch. Mrs. Rannoch.”

The young men withdrew. Valentin, who had been pretending to be deaf, closed the door behind them. Malcolm and Suzanne climbed the stairs to their bedchamber. Suzanne could feel her husband’s amused gaze on her. He was waiting for her explanation. But he had no doubt there would be a simple, logical one.

“Cordy left the Russian embassy early,” Suzanne said, tugging at the ties on her cloak. “I stayed. I was hoping to talk to the Lacloses or learn more about them. But I was singularly unsuccessful. Though I did hear an interesting piece of gossip. Apparently Tatiana may have been the lover of Paul St. Gilles around the time the child would have been conceived.”

Malcolm’s brows rose, though he did not appear as surprised as she’d have expected. “Tania and a Radical painter. I’ve heard stranger things. Though it’s hard to see why his being the father would occasion such secrecy.”

“No. But we should talk to him. He may know more about her life at that time.” She dropped the cloak on the dressing table bench. “After I left the embassy, I thought with my cloak on I could stop in at a café and perhaps learn something more.” She glanced at her husband. “Yes, I know it was a risk, but I thought—”

“That I was off in the thick of things and you didn’t want to be behindhand?”

“No. Well, yes, perhaps. A bit. But again, no success. So I thought I’d walk home. I’m sorry.”

“Why should you be sorry?”

“I try not to cause unnecessary talk for you.”

“Having a wife who is the toast of the junior attachés is more likely to make me envied than talked about.” He was smiling. Malcolm was a master at deception, but it had never occurred to him that his own wife would deceive him. A sign of his love and trust in her. Which made the champagne and cold salmon from the embassy rise up in her throat.

She pushed aside the folds of the cloak and perched on the bench. “I trust you had a more productive evening.”

“You could say that.” Malcolm’s smile faded, and Suzanne noticed the strain in the set of his mouth.

“You found Christine Leroux?”

“Oh yes. Rivère is to be congratulated. A woman of spirit and intelligence. And quite capable of lying to us, though I don’t think she was. At least not the whole time. She admitted Rivère engaged in blackmail.” He dropped down on the edge of the bed across from her. “Apparently Rivère had come into possession of an indiscreet letter Wellington wrote to Lady Frances Webster.”

Suzanne pictured the duke sitting beside the lovely blond Lady Frances at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels. “It’s hardly secret there’s something between them. Though I’d have thought—”

“That the man who defeated Napoleon Bonaparte would have had the wit not to put it in writing? So would I. Whatever the devil was between them, Lady Frances was already seven months pregnant at the time of Waterloo—”

“That isn’t a bar to all sorts of activities. As we well know.”

Malcolm flushed. Her husband could be delightfully prudish. Of course during her own pregnancy she’d had to persuade Malcolm that it was no imposition on her to engage in those activities. “I’ll speak to Wellington in the morning,” he said. “As I told Harry, this explains his quarrel with Rivère but not what he did about it.”

“I’m sorry,” Suzanne said. “I know this can’t be easy. You’re fond of him.”

Malcolm gave a wry smile. “It seems almost presumptuous to be ‘fond’ where Wellington’s concerned. God knows I disagree with him about enough political matters. But I suppose—” He stared at his hands for a moment. “Intelligence is a messy game, with its double crosses and betrayals. I long since accepted I’m not sure I know the limits of what Carfax is capable of. I suppose I liked thinking Wellington was above that.”

Her heart twisted. “You’re much too decent for the intelligence game, Malcolm.”

“Carfax often says the same. It’s not meant as a compliment.”

“I meant it as a compliment.” In truth, Malcolm’s empathy often allowed him to see things other agents would miss. It just burdened him with an intolerable load of guilt.

“But then you possess far more tact than Carfax. Not to mention a kinder heart.” Malcolm shifted his position on the bed. “There’s more,” he said. “Apparently Rivère also quarreled with Gui Laclos last week.”

Suzanne drew in her breath, Cordelia’s confidences sharp in her mind.

“I know,” Malcolm said. “About Gui and Cordelia. Harry told me.”

“So Cordy told him. I’m glad of that at least.”

“Yes,” Malcolm said, but she heard the slight hesitancy in his voice.

“Darling? What is it?”

He hesitated a moment. “Merely that confronting his wife’s past is a bit harder for Harry than he’d admit to anyone. Particularly Cordelia.”

She swallowed. “Yes, I imagine it would be. But he must realize—”

“I think at times he still finds it difficult to believe Cordelia loves him.”

“Rubbish. He has to know—”

“Not because he doesn’t trust her. Because he has difficulty believing a woman like her could love him. I can understand that.”

Suzanne fixed her husband with a firm stare, her throat torn by conflicting impulses. “Men,” she said, “sometimes can’t see what’s directly in front of them.”

“Oh, that’s undoubtedly true.” He grinned, though his eyes were vulnerable as spun glass. “For what it’s worth, I am glad Cordelia told Harry about Gui. And about Edmond Talleyrand. However painful the truth may be, it’s infinitely preferable to have it in the open rather than keeping it concealed.”

Her fingers dug into the padded satin of the bench. “Just so.” She drew a breath. “So now you know what Wellington quarreled with Rivère about.”

“Quite. Which doesn’t mean Wellington didn’t—”

Questions he couldn’t quite put into words lurked in his eyes. She was fond of Wellington, but she had no such loyalty to the British commander. “You think Wellington would have killed to keep this letter secret?”

Malcolm’s brows drew together. “Wellington can be ruthless, but I’d like to think not for personal reasons. He’s not the sort to put much stock in what others say about him. But he also has a temper. We don’t know what was in the letter. It mattered enough to him for him to withhold information from me.”

The concern behind his eyes belied his even tone of voice. Suzanne got to her feet and crossed to the bed. “Whatever he’s done, darling, it’s not on your conscience.”

He looked up at her with a quick smile. “That’s my Suzette. No false reassurances.”

“You wouldn’t believe them if I tried.” She rested her hand on his shoulder. “If anyone can get Wellington to talk it’s you.”

A bleaker smile pulled at his mouth. “I’m not sure that’s reassuring.”

“But it’s true.” She bent down and put her mouth to his.

His arms came up to circle her shoulders. She sank down onto his lap and tangled her fingers in his hair.

She could not have said which of them she was trying to comfort.

 

Harry eased open the door of the bedchamber he shared with his wife, trying not to wake her. Sharing a bedchamber was still new territory for them. There were times when he entered the room shocked to find her there or to smell the whiff of her perfume. And others when he woke stunned to feel the warmth of her beside him. Or the weight of her arm flung over his chest.

Candlelight spilled over the floorboards. Cordelia was sitting up in bed, her knees drawn up beneath the coverlet, a book in her hands.

“Harry.” She smiled at him. Her hair tumbled loose over her shoulders. Her eyes had that open look they got when she removed her eye blacking, though she still wore her sapphire earrings. “Did everything go all right?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d be awake.” He pushed the door to. “Is Livia all right?” Their daughter had been sickly as a baby, and though she seemed perfectly sturdy now, the worry still haunted him, despite the fact that he hadn’t seen Livia in those early years. Or because of it.

“Livia’s fine. Sound asleep when I got home with her face squished up against Portia.” Portia was Livia’s stuffed cat. “But I find it difficult to sleep when you’re on a mission.”

“A visit to a casino is a hardly a mission.”

“You’re investigating a murder.” She put a hand on the embroidered silk coverlet, a sort of invitation.

He dropped down on the edge of the bed. A ridiculously domestic action. If anyone had suggested three months ago that he’d be in such a position with his wife—“Rivère’s mistress might be called a dangerous woman, but hardly in that sense.”

Cordelia’s gaze shot over his face, her eyes lit with amusement. “She intrigues you.”

“Of course she intrigues me. She has information.”

“And she’s an intriguing woman.”

“Well, I’m hardly blind.”

“Thank goodness for that. Did she tell you anything? No, it’s all right if you shouldn’t talk about it. I won’t tease you.”

Harry looked into his wife’s blue eyes, open and trusting in a way he’d never thought to see them. The temptation to say nothing, to lean over and kiss her, to sink back into the pillows and blot out past knowledge and present questions, was almost overmastering. But for all his sins and fears, he’d known from the first that the only chance they had lay with honesty.

“We saw—” He almost said “a friend of yours,” but that would sound too arch. “We saw someone you know—” He was as tongue-tied as he’d been when he first met her at the Devonshire House ball, a callow young scholar dazzled by her glittering beauty.

“Edmond or Gui?” Cordelia asked in a level voice.

He met her gaze. She looked back at him, her own steady. He wasn’t the only one who understood about uncompromising honesty. “Gui,” he said. “Apparently he’s a regular at the Salon des Etrangers.”

Cordelia settled back against the pillows. She’d have looked relaxed to anyone who didn’t know her as well as her husband. Or perhaps one of her lovers. “Hardly a surprise. He once told me perhaps it was as well the family fortune had been left in France or ten to one he’d have gambled it away.”

“You liked him.” He could hear the memories in her voice.

“He was kind. It’s amazing how many of the men I—how many of my lovers weren’t.”

“You shouldn’t sell yourself short, Cordy.”

She gave a brief laugh, brittle as old paper. “I didn’t like myself very well. Perhaps it felt more convivial to be with someone I didn’t like very well, either.”

“But not Gui Laclos.”

Cordelia pleated a fold of the coverlet between her fingers. Her wedding band flashed in the candlelight against the apricot silk. “Not Gui. Though I rather think one of the things that drew me to Gui was that he suffered from as much self-disgust as I did.”

“Over what?” Harry kept his voice even, though he couldn’t quite manage a conversational tone.

Cordelia’s gaze skimmed over his face. “Did you just happen to encounter Gui tonight or does he have something to do with the investigation? You don’t have to answer that. But if you want me to help you—”

“Quite. Apparently Gui quarreled with Antoine Rivère a week ago.”

He saw the surprise that ran through Cordelia’s eyes. Surprise and a jolt of concern. “Do you know what the quarrel was about?” she asked, her voice taut as a bowstring.

“Gui says he’d lost money to Rivère at the gaming table.”

“But you think it’s more than that.”

“So does Malcolm. Who’s a more unbiased judge.” Harry hesitated a moment. “Rivère dealt in blackmail.”

“And you wonder if Gui—” She was silent for a moment. He thought she might refuse to say more. “I can’t say the source of his self-disgust. Perhaps in part that he was safe in England while both his cousins had died fighting for France one way or another. And yet—”

“You think there was something more?”

“I think there was a great deal about Gui I didn’t know. But—”

“You’re sure he couldn’t be a killer?”

She swallowed. “I learned in Brussels I couldn’t be sure of that about anyone.”

He caught her hand. “I’m sorry, Cordy. That was unpardonable. I didn’t—”

“You were doing your job.” Cordelia put her other hand against his face, her eyes dark and fragile as stained glass. “What I meant to say is there are things about Gui I’m quite sure I didn’t know. I can’t say they have anything to do with Antoine Rivère. But if Rivère was blackmailing him—”

“Just so.”

She swallowed. Without eye blacking and rouge, her face framed by wispy bits of hair, she looked unexpectedly like a schoolgirl. “Do you want me to see what I can learn?”

He kept his gaze steady on her face. “It’s not a pretty thing, looking into people’s pasts. Especially people one cares for. I wouldn’t ask that of you, Cordy.”

“I know. But I’m offering.”

“You don’t need to do this to prove something.” His voice turned rougher than he intended.

“I’m not. I’d be a fool to think I could prove certain things to you. Those things can only be accepted with time, if at all. But you know I can’t bear to hang back once questions have been raised. I need to know.”

“You may not like the answers,” he said, in the tone he’d used with young intelligence operatives he was training.

“I daresay I may not. But avoiding the answers won’t make the questions go away.”