Teresa Grant - [Charles & Melanie Fraser 01]

by Vienna Waltz

  Talleyrand opened his heavy-lidded eyes and smiled at her. “My dear child, are you accusing me of perpetrating a fraud upon society all these years?”

  “Of course not,” Dorothée said, though she knew her husband’s uncle was capable of doing just that if he thought it necessary to achieve his objectives. “But I can quite see you wouldn’t have wanted to expose someone you thought of as a friend.”

  “Princess Tatiana is hardly the only one in society to lie about her origins.” Wilhelmine, who was sharing their carriage on the drive back to Vienna, looked up from contemplation of the mask lying on the seat beside her. “Though I must say, to adopt the identity of the daughter of a real noble family was quite brazen.”

  “Safer in a way than making up an identity out of whole cloth,” Talleyrand said. “She had a real family history to back her up. There were no close Sarasov connections in St. Petersburg or Moscow. And once she’d married Prince Kirsanov, few would have thought to question her. It probably helped that she didn’t live much in Russia.”

  Wilhelmine adjusted the gold silk folds of her domino. “Very enterprising of Catherine Bagration to have learned the truth. Though it smacks a bit of desperation. I always thought Catherine was afraid Tatiana outranked her in the tsar’s affections.”

  Dorothée’s gaze flew to her sister’s face. “You don’t think—”

  “That Catherine Bagration murdered Tatiana Kirsanova in a fit of jealousy? I can imagine less likely scenarios.”

  Talleyrand crossed his clubfoot over his good leg. “Catherine Bagration is certainly cold-blooded enough to commit murder. But I think she’d need a stronger motive. Jealousy over the tsar’s attentions might pique her vanity enough she’d look for reason to discredit her rival. But I don’t think she takes any man so seriously as to kill for him. Much like you, my dear Wilhelmine.”

  Wilhelmine returned Talleyrand’s smile with one every bit as dangerous. For a moment Dorothée felt as though she were watching a play without knowing quite what had happened in the first act. “Thank you, Prince,” Wilhelmine said. “But I think you forget that for women such as Catherine Bagration and Princess Tatiana and me, the way to power lies through men. Surely you of all people understand the seduction of power.”

  “I do indeed.” Years of events that had occurred before Dorothée was born drifted through Talleyrand’s shrewd blue eyes. “Though I wouldn’t think a woman as addicted to power as you claim to be would have given up Prince Metternich.”

  Wilhelmine shrugged her shoulders. There was something so elegant about her every movement. Dorothée always felt hopelessly gawky beside her. “It may not be in your makeup to realize this, Prince Talleyrand, but as seductive as power can be, some things are even more so. I didn’t mean to fall back in love with Alfred von Windischgrätz, but—well, that’s just it, isn’t it? Love isn’t something you plan. Besides, Metternich’s adoration was growing smothering.”

  Talleyrand twitched a frilled cuff smooth. “Prince Metternich has yet to learn that love should never be allowed to interfere with politics. Though even after my long and varied career, I confess that that is often more easily said than done.”

  “Metternich didn’t seem to pester you too badly this evening, Willie,” Dorothée said.

  “No. He’s stopped the mad, desperate pleas. But he still follows me round the room with that intense gaze.” Wilhelmine threw up her gloved hands, her sapphire bracelet flashing in the light of the interior lamps. “Oh, the devil. I sound heartless. I am sorry for him. But you’d think by his age he’d have learned to let a love affair die a graceful death.”

  “Anyone would think you didn’t believe in love, Willie,” Dorothée said, and then wondered at her own words, because she wasn’t at all sure she believed in it herself.

  Wilhelmine gripped the carriage strap as they rounded a corner. “Oh, chérie, of course I believe in it. I just don’t expect it to last.”

  In an odd way, Dorothée found this idea even more disturbing. Silly. She wasn’t as far removed as she’d like to think from the idealistic schoolgirl she’d been a few years ago. She wound the strings of her mask through her gloved fingers, and returned to the most dramatic events of the evening. “Tsar Alexander was furious at Catherine Bagration when she told the story about Princess Tatiana’s origins. I almost thought he was going to storm across the room and strike her.”

  “He can’t abide being made a fool of.” Wilhelmine adjusted the links of her bracelet.

  “He has the temper of a man used to supreme power,” Talleyrand said. “You’d be wise to remember that, Wilhelmine.”

  “I can look after myself. Though Tsar Alexander’s temper is hardly any concern of mine.”

  “Is it not?” Talleyrand asked in a soft, polite voice.

  The lamplight bounced off Talleyrand’s hard gaze and Wilhelmine’s defiant one as they jolted over a rut in the road. Dorothée studied her sister. She knew the tsar had called on Willie several times recently, often at the hour of eleven o’clock in the morning, which Willie had once reserved exclusively for Metternich. She had heard the rumors that her sister’s relationship with the tsar had gone further. Some even whispered that the tsar had pressured Wilhelmine to end her affair with Metternich.

  “Willie—” Dorothée said.

  Wilhelmine let out a peal of laughter. “Oh, Doro, I always thought the good thing about your bookish side was that you were above listening to silly gossip. Tsar Alexander has a bevy of mistresses in Vienna, including Catherine Bagration and poor Princess Tatiana. But I’m not among their number.”

  Dorothée gripped the carriage strap. “That isn’t why—”

  “Why I quarreled with Princess Tatiana two days ago?” Wilhelmine flicked a glance at Talleyrand. “Doro walked in on Princess Tatiana and me being less than civil. No, that was about something else entirely, ma chère.”

  “Did it have to do with Tatiana’s trade in art treasures?” Talleyrand inquired.

  Wilhelmine’s brows lifted, then she gave a faint smile. “Your store of knowledge still surprises me. I suppose there’s no need to keep it secret, now that the Prince de Ligne blurted it out. I’d learned Princess Tatiana had come into possession of a casket that had belonged to our family for generations.”

  Dorothée’s fingers froze on the carriage strap. “Princess Tatiana had the Courland casket?”

  “Apparently.” Wilhelmine’s gaze flickered back to Talleyrand. “It was fashioned by Cellini. Legend has it that he created it for an Italian noblewoman called Maddalena Verano who helped him when he was imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo.”

  “Supposedly for embezzling jewels from the pope’s tiara,” Dorothée put in, picking up the story long familiar from childhood. “Cellini claimed the charges were false.”

  “And when he eventually was freed, he gave the casket to Contessa Verano in gratitude,” Wilhelmine said. “She later became the mistress of Gotthard von Kettler, the first Duke of Courland, and gave him the casket. It’s been in our family ever since. Until it was lost in the wars.”

  “How on earth did Princess Tatiana end up with it?” Dorothée asked.

  “I don’t know.” Wilhelmine smoothed the folds of her domino. “I made her what I thought a very handsome offer for it by any standards. She refused me. Needless to say, I was annoyed because the casket belongs back in the family. But I was hardly so annoyed I’d have killed the princess.”

  Dorothée sighed, relieved, and yet also troubled because Willie could have told her all this earlier. Why hadn’t she? “And Tsar Alexander—?” Dorothée asked.

  “I find him useful at the moment.” Wilhelmine whipped the domino closed over her Carinthian costume. “For my own reasons.”

  Dorothée met her sister’s armored gaze for a moment, then looked away to find that Talleyrand was watching Willie as well, his eyes narrowed. Dorothée knew the calculations that went on behind that gaze of her uncle’s. Wilhelmine was hiding something. And Talleyrand knew
it.

  There was something unusually brittle in Wilhelmine’s manner tonight. The tension of being Metternich’s guest might account for some of it, but Willie had been in company with Prince Metternich a score of times since their love affair had ended. Was Wilhelmine’s quarrel with Princess Tatiana as simple as an argument over purchasing back the Courland Cellini casket? And why on earth did Willie, who was fabulously wealthy and had her pick of men, need Tsar Alexander?

  Dorothée rubbed her elbows. Even in her earliest memories, Wilhelmine had seemed thoroughly grown up, though thinking back, Willie would only have been a young teenager. They had never been close, but they had spent more time together these past weeks in Vienna. For the first time, Dorothée could almost think of her eldest sister as a friend. And yet in many ways she didn’t know Wilhelmine at all.

  Dorothée looked up to find Talleyrand’s gaze had shifted to her. The appraising expression was gone from his eyes. They rested on her with a look that was carefully veiled. Yet behind that veil lay—She couldn’t say what, precisely, save that it was something very different from the usual chess master’s calculation in his eyes.

  Confused, for reasons she didn’t entirely understand, she smiled back, a little uncertain, and turned her gaze to the dark glass of the window.

  This time it was Malcolm who opened the dressing room door to look in on their sleeping son. He stepped into the room, moving with the quiet that was second nature to him in his intelligence work, twitched the blanket smooth, touched his fingers lightly to Colin’s forehead.

  Suzanne watched from the doorway, her throat gone tight. Whatever uncertainties she had about Malcolm’s feelings for her, his love for Colin was absolute. She moved to the dressing table and began to remove her gloves. As she peeled down the finely knitted silk, she recalled the pressure of Frederick Radley’s hand on her own. Her gaze went back to the dressing room, her husband bending over their son. Despite the coals glowing in the porcelain stove, a chill shot through her at the cold reality of everything she had to lose.

  Malcolm returned to their bedchamber and gave a crooked smile. “There’s something about danger. I always need to reassure myself that he’s all right.”

  “So do I.” She moved Malcolm’s shaving kit to the chest of drawers to make room on the dressing table. “Given the life we lead, that means we need to reassure ourselves pretty much every night.”

  She pulled out the comb that anchored her mantilla and folded the lace into careful squares. Malcolm went to the chest of drawers, picked up the bottle atop it that held the whisky he’d brought from Britain, and poured them each a glass.

  She took a sip when he put the glass in her hand. The smoky bite took her back to her first visit to Scotland the previous summer. Granite cliffs, salt-tinged air, Malcolm at home in a way she had never seen before.

  While he helped her undress, he told her about his talk with Fitz. Suzanne was grateful to be busy with tapes and laces and hairpins. Much easier not to meet her husband’s gaze as they discussed the infidelity in the marriage of two of their closest friends.

  “In the end, all I can really say is that Fitz doesn’t have an alibi for the time of Tatiana’s murder,” Malcolm finished.

  Suzanne wrapped her dressing gown over her nightdress and took a sip of whisky. “Princess Tatiana could have destroyed his marriage and his political prospects by revealing the affair. But why would she have done so?”

  “Quite. But with Tatiana one can never be certain. Or they could have had a lover’s quarrel.”

  “Malcolm, do you really think Fitz—”

  “I don’t. But I didn’t suspect he was Tatiana’s lover, either.”

  Suzanne perched on the edge of the bed, one arm curled round the bedpost, while Malcolm finished removing his grandee costume. “What do you think is in the papers Princess Tatiana had that Adam Czartoryski is desperate to recover? Love letters he wrote to Tsarina Elisabeth?”

  “I suspect it’s more than that.” Malcolm tossed his coat over a chairback. “I’ve heard stories from Michael Langley, who was stationed in Russia in those days. Czartoryski’s love affair with the tsarina was a fairly open secret twenty years ago. In essence, Czartoryski had been sent to the Russian court as a hostage. He was the main voice calling for Polish independence, and the Russian government feared he’d inspire an uprising if he returned home.”

  “This was before Alexander became tsar?”

  “His grandmother, Catherine the Great, was still on the throne.” Malcolm tossed his frilled shirt after the coat. “She died a year later, and Alexander’s father, Paul, became tsar. Paul was a temperamental man with a violent streak. Alexander was a rebellious heir apparent. Czartoryski’s idealism appealed to the side of Alexander that sees himself as a liberal reformer. The two became close friends.”

  “Until Czartoryski’s affair with Elisabeth?”

  “No, that’s the interesting thing. Alexander was seeking consolation elsewhere and by all accounts didn’t object to his young wife doing likewise.”

  Suzanne found herself remembering Frederick Radley’s mocking gaze in the Metternichs’ salon this evening. “Surprisingly broad-minded of him.”

  Malcolm stepped out of his breeches and reached for his nightshirt. “The affair went on for three years. Then Elisabeth gave birth to a baby girl. Her first child. At the christening, Tsar Paul commented on the wonder of two light-haired people producing a child with such dark hair and eyes.”

  Suzanne’s fingers closed on the silk folds of her dressing gown. “And that ended Prince Czartoryski’s residence at the Russian court?”

  “He was packed off as ambassador to Sardinia.” Malcolm shrugged his dressing gown on over his nightshirt. “As Michael Langley describes it, Alexander appeared to miss Czartoryski as much as Elisabeth did. Czartoryski returned to Russia two years later, when Alexander ascended to the throne. Before long he became chief minister. Langley worked closely with him, as Czartoryski’s policies were anti-French and favored an alliance with Britain.”

  “And the affair with Elisabeth?”

  “The tsarina is said to have been seeking consolation elsewhere by then. Czartoryski and the tsar did fall out, but over the Prussian policy, not the tsarina. And Czartoryski still advises Alexander.”

  Suzanne curled her feet up under her. She had seen a wide variety of marital relationships, but this triangle of the tsar, his best friend, and the tsarina was difficult to grasp. “What happened to the dark-haired child?”

  “She died young, as did Alexander and Elisabeth’s only other child.”

  Suzanne cast an involuntary glance at the closed dressing room door behind which Colin slept. “Tsarina Elisabeth has had a difficult life.”

  Malcolm’s gaze flickered after her own. “Yes.”

  “And her relationship with Prince Czartoryski now?”

  Malcolm picked up his whisky glass and looked thoughtfully into it for a moment. “I know no more than what is revealed by his gaze when he looks at her. Whatever the state of their relationship, his feelings are deeply engaged.”

  “But whatever secret these papers contain may have nothing to do with Czartoryski.”

  “Perhaps not.” Malcolm moved to the bed and dropped down beside her, draping his arm round her shoulders.

  She leaned into him, warmed by more than just the heat of his body. “I like Adam Czartoryski, Malcolm. He’s always struck me as a decent man. But if he killed Princess Tatiana—Working with us would be a clever feint.”

  “I thought about that.” His fingers moved against her shoulder. “But I can’t see him killing Tatiana when she was the only one who could tell him where the tsarina’s papers were.”

  “No, you’re right, it doesn’t make sense.” Suzanne slid her own arm round him, the silk of his dressing gown soft beneath her fingers. “Count Otronsky asked me to waltz and posed some not too subtle questions about our arrival at Princess Tatiana’s last night. I suspect the tsar sent him.”


  Malcolm’s fingers stilled against her arm. “I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute. The tsar seems to rely on Otronsky more than any of his other advisers these days.”

  “Malcolm.” Her husband’s heartbeat reassuringly steady beneath her ear, Suzanne sought for the best way to frame her next question. “Did you know Princess Tatiana wasn’t really the daughter of Prince and Princess Sarasov?”

  She felt his sharp intake of breath and the tension that ran across his shoulder blades. “No. Perhaps the one thing I never questioned about Tatiana’s life was her origins.”

  Suzanne lifted her head from her husband’s shoulder and studied him beneath the shadows of the canopy. Whatever Princess Tatiana had been to him, he made no secret of having cared for her. Surely to learn she hadn’t been what he had thought could not but cause him distress. Yet his face was even more carefully armored than usual. A sign, perhaps, of just how deep his feelings ran. “Do you think Talleyrand arranged Princess Tatiana’s new identity?” she asked. “Could she have been his agent even then?”

  “It’s possible.” His voice was cool and appraising, but he kept his arm round her, which was oddly reassuring. “Tatiana would certainly have needed the help of someone as powerful—and wily—as he is.”

  “It seems a bit odd for him to arrange all that to get her into the Russian court, only to have her end up spending most of her time in Paris. But perhaps his objectives changed.”

  “And it would have been easier for her to infiltrate French society as a foreigner than with a counterfeit French identity.”

  Suzanne took a sip of whisky. “Do you think Princess Tatiana was really French?”

  “Difficult to say. She was damnably skilled at accents. She could sound convincingly as though she came from a host of countries.”

  “Like you.”

  “And you.” He lifted his hand from her shoulder and brushed his fingers against her cheek. Odd how his slightest touch could stir her. He leaned forward. She felt the warmth of his breath and caught the scent of whisky. For a moment she was sure he was going to kiss her. Instead, he drew back and asked, “What else did you learn tonight?”