Where Shadows Dance (7 page)

Sebastian waited while the gray-bearded man placed the coffee on the table before them, then withdrew. “How long have you been in London?”

“Nearly ten years. I went first to Italy, then Majorca.” She leaned back in her chair, her fingers playing with her cup, an enigmatic smile touching her lips. “I was acquainted with your mother, you know. You are quite like her in many ways ... although not in all.”

Sebastian held himself very still. Some eighteen years before, on a hot, joyless summer day after the death of Sebastian’s two older brothers, the Countess of Hendon had staged her own death and disappeared to the Continent with her latest lover. He had mourned his mother for half his life before discovering that she was, in fact, alive.

It had been but the first of several unpleasant truths he had learned.

He’d tried in the months since that discovery to trace her fate. His agents had followed her to Venice and then to France, where they hit a wall built by war and an inexplicable, fearful silence.

Now he asked, his voice calm and casual and everything he was not, “You knew her in Venice?”

“Yes. She lived in a crumbling old palace on the Grand Canal with ...” Her voice trailed off.

“Her lover?” he supplied.

A sad, sympathetic smile touched her lips. “Yes. She used to give wonderful musical evenings—it’s how I came to know her. Her lover was a talented composer as well as a poet, you see. They were quite happy. But then, he died.”

Sebastian nodded. According to the last report he’d received, Lady Hendon had eventually taken up with one of Napoléon’s generals, but he had no way of knowing if that was still true.

Angelina Champagne reached out to touch her fingertips briefly, unexpectedly, to the back of his hand. “You need have no fear that I will speak of these things to others. The past is dead, and we who are left alive must go on, yes?”

She paused to take a slow sip of her coffee. There was a fragile, ethereal beauty to her features, a tautness that hinted at sadness and tragedy borne with a quiet stoicism and something else—something mysterious and well hidden. She said, “You know Ross was with the Foreign Office?”

“Are you saying you think his work at the Foreign Office had something to do with his death?”

“You doubt it? All of Europe has been at war for—what? More than two decades. Over the years, alliances have shifted and recombined, again and again. But it’s my belief that one day, historians will look back on this summer and see it as a pivotal moment in time.”

“You mean, because of Napoléon’s invasion of Russia?”

“Even without the successes of Wellington in Spain, it was most unwise. But as the situation currently stands?” She pursed her lips with contempt. “It goes beyond folly to madness. Tens of thousands will die. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. We have lost too many already—so many dead, so much of what once made France great, destroyed. And now this.”

He wondered how many relatives she still had in France, perhaps even serving in the legions that were marching on Moscow as they spoke. He said, “Napoléon claims the Czar left him no alternative.”

She let out her breath in an elegant sound of disgust. “There are always alternatives. The Swedes and Russians have ended their war with the Treaty of St. Petersburg, while the Treaty of Bucharest has ended the Russo-Turkish War. With their northern and southern flanks thus protected, the Russians will be able to throw all of their forces against the French.”

“Except they’re not facing just the French,” Sebastian reminded her. “Napoléon has succeeded in cementing a new alliance to bring the Prussians and Austrians with him against Russia.”

“Only because Prussia’s King Frederick William knew his choice was between a military alliance with Napoléon and the loss of his crown.”

“And Austria?”

“Austria has little to lose and much to gain from a war between France and Russia. Metternich knows this.”

She was an unusual woman, shrewd and well versed in current events and not the least hesitant to state her opinions. Sebastian studied the stark line of the tie for her eye patch, the sun-kissed skin of her cheek. In an age when most gentlewomen took excruciating pains to protect their delicate complexions from the sun, Madame Champagne obviously deliberately sought it out, and he found himself wondering why.

He said, “You take an interest in diplomatic affairs.”

“War tends to make us all students of diplomacy, does it not? There is a story that Napoléon once told the widow of the Marquis de Condorcet that he detested women who meddled in politics. Do you know her reply?”

Sebastian shook his head.

“She said, ‘You are right, of course, General. But in a country where one cuts off women’s heads, it is natural that they should wish to know the reason why.’”

Madame Condorcet had been a widow because the Revolution sent her husband, the famous
philosophe
the Marquis de Condorcet, to the guillotine. Sebastian’s gaze dropped to Madame Champagne’s left hand. She still wore a simple gold band on her finger, but the dusky lilac silk of her gown told its own story, for lilac was the color of sadness and mourning.

As if aware of the train of his thoughts, she said, “My husband was Baron Jean-Baptiste Champagne. He was killed in the September Massacres, in 1792.”

Sebastian had heard of Jean-Baptiste Champagne. Like the Comte de Virieu and Lally-Tollendal, Champagne had been an early supporter of the Revolutionary movement—before it turned violent and cruel and began devouring its own.

He said, “That’s when you fled France?”

“As soon as I was able, yes.”

Her voice quavered ever so faintly, and she turned her head, showing him only her flawless profile as she studied the flow of elegant carriages in the street, the endless parade of gentlemen on the strut. He found himself wondering about the life she’d once lived—and lost—in Paris, about the horrors she must have witnessed before she finally escaped it all and fled to Venice, and about all the lonely years she’d lived since then, bereft, with her memories.

They sat in silence for a moment, watching as a plumpcheeked dandy with exaggerated shirt points and a painfully nipped-in waist approached the adjoining door that led to the apartments above and disappeared inside. A moment later, the shuffle of his footsteps on the stairs could be faintly heard above the murmurs in the coffee shop.

Sebastian said, “These ‘dangerous men’ you say Ross associated with ... Do you know who they were?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know they were dangerous?”

Again, that faintly amused curving of the lips. “In my experience, men who turn up the collars of their coats and pull their hats low enough to hide their faces are generally to be avoided.”

“Did such men visit Ross often?”

“Often enough.”

“And the night he died?”

“You mean, last Saturday?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you think I would remember such a thing now, a week later?”

“Because on Sunday morning, when you heard Ross had died, you were suspicious. I think you gave some thought as to what you might have observed the night before.”

She raised her cup to her lips and took a sip. “You are very astute, are you not?”

Sebastian said, “Who visited Alexander Ross that night?”

She set her cup down with careful attention. “Well ... Let’s see. First there was a young woman. Or at least, I assume she was young, although it is difficult to be certain since she wore a cloak and had the hood pulled up.”

“A well-dressed young woman?”

“Her cloak was plain, but well cut. I couldn’t see more than that, since she also wore a veil. She was no woman of the streets, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Did Ross entertain women of the street?”

“Not in his rooms. I’ve no notion how he conducted himself elsewhere.”

“How long did this woman stay?”

“Twenty minutes? Perhaps half an hour. No more. She left very quickly.”

“She came by carriage?”

Madame Champagne shook her head. “Hackney, of course.”

Sebastian nodded. St. James’s Street was the gentlemen’s preserve. For a gentlewoman simply to walk down St. James’s Street was considered a social solecism. But for a woman of quality to be seen entering a gentleman’s lodgings, alone, would mean swift and certain ruin. No wonder the woman—whoever she was—had taken care to hide her face. “And then?”

“An hour or two after the woman’s departure, a gentleman in evening clothes went up.”

“And he arrived—how?”

“Walking. But there’s no use asking me anything more about him because I really couldn’t tell you. He wore a hat pulled low and an opera cape with the collar turned up, and he took care to keep his head down.”

Sebastian smiled. “One of Ross’s ‘dangerous men’?”

“Exactly.”

“He stayed how long?”

“Longer than the woman. An hour. Perhaps longer. I’d say it was close to nine or ten when he left.”

“There’s nothing you can tell me about him?”

“Not really. He was neither remarkably tall nor short, corpulent nor excessively thin. His clothes were very much those of a gentleman—silk stockings and knee breeches. Oh—and he carried a walking stick.”

Sebastian himself possessed an elegant ebony walking stick. The silver handle was artfully contrived to conceal a stiletto. He said, “Mr. Ross himself never stepped out that evening?”

“If he did, I didn’t see him.”

“Is there another way out?”

“There is a door to the court, but it doesn’t lead anywhere.” Madame Champagne sipped her coffee for a moment, then said, “Ross had one more visitor that night.”

“Oh?”

She nodded. “Shortly before I retired for the evening, another gentleman went up. But he came back down almost immediately.”

“You mean, as if he had found Mr. Ross not at home?”

“Yes. Or as if Mr. Ross were already dead.”

S
ebastian studied the Frenchwoman’s fine-boned face, the single, half-hooded eye. “And how was this second gentleman dressed?”

“Much the same as the first. Evening cape and knee breeches.”

“Could they have been the same man?”

She frowned, as if considering this. Then she shook her head. “I do not believe so. They moved differently. Or at least, it must have seemed so to me at the time, for it never occurred to me that they might be the same man.”

Sebastian said, “Had you seen these men visit Mr. Ross before?”

“Them, or men like them.”

“But you’ve no idea who they might be?”

She started to say something, then hesitated.

“What?” he prompted.

She leaned forward. “Men may hide their faces but forget that their accents can tell their own story ... to those who know how to listen.”

“What kind of accents are we talking about?”

“Mainly Russian. But also Swedish and Turkish. And the occasional Frenchman, of course.” She kept her gaze on his face. “You’re wondering how I could know, yes?”

He gave a wry smile. “I doubt I would be able to identify a Swedish or a Russian accent. Or distinguish a Turk from, say, a Greek.”

“My father was an official at Versailles when I was a child. I grew up surrounded by accents from all over Europe—and beyond. It was a game my brother and I played, imitating them.”

Sebastian watched her nostrils flare on a quickly indrawn breath and he knew without being told that her brother, like her husband, was dead. He said, “You knew none of these men?”

“I recognized one of the Russians—a colonel attached to the embassy, by the name of Colonel Dimitri Chernishav. I understand he and Ross were friends from Ross’s time in Russia.”

The name meant nothing to Sebastian. “Anyone else?”

She made a face. “Well, there’s Antoine de La Rocque.”

“Who is he?”

“Once, he was a priest. He fled France in the first wave, more than twenty years ago now. He has something of a reputation as a collector of rare, old books. He has opened part of his collection to the public—to the paying public, of course, although he claims that is only to keep out the riffraff.”

“Where is this?”

“Great Russell Street, near the museum. Although he can frequently be found prowling the bookstalls in Westminster Hall.”

“Could de La Rocque have been one of the men you saw that night?”

“He visited Alexander Ross regularly. But was he one of the men I saw that night?” Again, that enigmatic smile. “Who knows?”

Sebastian was beginning to suspect she knew considerably more than she was willing to reveal. But all he said was, “The second man—the one you say went upstairs and came back down again so quickly—at what time was this?”

“Somewhere around half past midnight. It was shortly before I retired for the night. I keep rooms in another house I own near here,” she explained, “on Ryder Street. So it is always possible someone could have arrived to see Monsieur Ross after I left here. Or Monsieur Ross himself may have stepped out. I would not know.”

Sebastian pushed to his feet. “You’ve been most helpful, Madame; thank you.”

She gazed up at him thoughtfully. “Yet you wonder why, when I know your reason for asking these questions, I have given you the name of one of my countrymen—a fellow émigré. Hmm?”

He had, in fact, been wondering exactly that.

The skin beside her remaining eye crinkled with her smile. “For some time now, those of us in the émigré community have suspected that there is a traitor in our midst. One who claims to despise Napoléon and all the while secretly passing information back to Paris.”

Sebastian had heard such rumors. He said, “You think de La Rocque could be the traitor?”

She pressed her lips together and shrugged. “He claims he fled France to avoid being put to death as a nonjuring priest.” Tens of thousands of priests had fled Revolutionary France rather than take the antipapal oath of religion; those who stayed faced either death or deportation to a penal colony. “Yet he will also laugh and tell you he lost his faith in God at the age of ten. Both cannot be true.”