The Berkeley Square Affair (Malcolm & Suzanne Rannoch)

by Grant, Teresa

  Raoul leaned back in his chair, wineglass tilting between his fingers. “The past months can’t have been easy.”

  She nodded, surprised at what a relief it was to talk about it. Perhaps that was why she was prevaricating about the real reason she had asked to see him. She was indulging herself, basking in a few moments of understanding. There were so few people with whom she could really be herself. “Losing his father was hard on Malcolm for all they were never close. Perhaps particularly because they weren’t close. There’s so much unsettled business between them that now will never be resolved.” Including the question of who had actually fathered Malcolm. “He doesn’t talk to me much about it.”

  “I suspect he talks about it more to you than to anyone.”

  Suzanne studied Raoul across the table. He had been friends with Malcolm’s mother and grandfather and had known Malcolm since boyhood. In some ways, she thought, Raoul knew her husband better than she did herself. “He doesn’t share easily. But then I’ve always known that. I thought—” She bit back what she’d been about to say and snatched up her wineglass. It wasn’t for Raoul to know that she’d thought she and Malcolm had grown closer only to realize, here in the world in which he had grown up, the layers still between them.

  Raoul regarded her with a shrewd gaze. “One holds the hurts of childhood close. It’s different from the things he’s been through with you. I suspect he’s afraid to burden you with those childhood hurts.”

  “What else does he think I’m here for?” She slumped back against the hard slats of her chair. “Damn you. I suspect you’re right. As usual.”

  “My apologies.”

  She wadded up her handkerchief and threw it at him.

  Raoul caught it one-handed. “How are the children?”

  Their gazes locked across the table. How quickly one could step onto quicksand. “Adjusting to England better than their parents, I think. Jessica crawls all over the new house and pulls herself up and babbles as though she’s telling us something very important—which I suspect she is, we just can’t decipher it yet. She says ‘mama’ all the time, and I think she might actually have been referring to me yesterday. Colin is learning to read and loves the Berkeley Square garden. That convinces me we were right to take the house. And most of the time he’s quite fond of his little sister.”

  “I’m glad.” Raoul smoothed out the handkerchief and handed it back to her. “It’s good for Colin to have a sibling. I suspect it’s good for Malcolm as well.”

  She was silent for a moment. Of all the decisions she’d taken, having a second child with Malcolm was the one that tied her irrevocably to him. “Malcolm was happy when I said I wanted another child.” She could see his face across the breakfast dishes in their lodgings in Paris, a mix of surprise and wonder. Her fingers clenched on the handkerchief. Her initials were embroidered in the corner. S.S.V. Suzanne de Saint-Vallier. The alias she’d been using when she met and married Malcolm that had now become a permanent part of her fictitious past. “I can’t imagine my life without Jessica now. But I can’t help but wonder if it was selfish. One more person to be hurt if anything goes wrong.”

  “All the more reason to be sure nothing goes wrong.” He watched her for the length of a measure of music. “Why did you want to see me, querida?”

  Suzanne took a sip of wine, curling her fingers round the stem of the glass. “Did you know Lord Harleton was a French spy?”

  Surprise shot through Raoul’s gaze. “Talk about old ghosts.”

  She set the glass on the table, sloshing the wine. “So you did know?”

  “Oh yes. I recruited him.”

  The world spun, as it often did with Raoul. “You—”

  “It was in the midnineties, after the Terror.” During the Reign of Terror Raoul had been imprisoned in Les Carmes. He’d been days away from the guillotine when Robespierre fell. It was something of a miracle Raoul had survived this long, all things considered. Raoul reached for his glass. “It seemed important to protect the gains of the Revolution.”

  “So that was when you first offered your services to French intelligence?” Suzanne had never been sure of the chronology for all she knew of Raoul.

  He nodded. “And what more natural than to have me spend time at the Salon des Etrangers and other haunts of British expatriates. I might be anathema to the British Crown, but I still had connections. There were a lot of heedless young aristos like Harleton sampling the joys of Parisian life. He had expensive tastes.”

  “Gambling debts?’

  “And a woman. A very expensive courtesan named Lilliane Moncoeur to whom he’d written indiscreet letters.”

  “You extricated him from his difficulties in exchange for his services.”

  “Always dangerous to have a hold on an asset that can breed resentment. On the other hand, burning idealism can have its own drawbacks. One needn’t fear disillusion when there’ve been no illusions to begin with.”

  “But Harleton continued to work for the French for over a decade. Did he still need the money?”

  Raoul took a sip of wine. “Not particularly after he came into the title and estates.”

  “Do you think it was fear of his secret being exposed that kept him working for the French?” she asked.

  Raoul twirled his glass between his fingers. “Actually, I think Harleton enjoyed the thrill of the chase. Which is also not the best quality in an agent. Though to a degree it can give one an edge.”

  “He didn’t mind betraying his country?” Funny how the word “betraying” stuck in her throat these days.

  “I don’t think Harleton had much loyalty—to his country, to any cause. Perhaps a bit to his friends. He liked the challenge of the game. It amused him to appear to have less of an understanding than he did. I wouldn’t say he was brilliant, but he was less of a bumbler than he let on.”

  “He went on reporting to you?” she asked, piecing this together with what Malcolm had learned from Carfax.

  “Off and on through Waterloo. After the United Irish Uprising, I was in Paris more than ever.”

  In fact, Raoul had escaped Ireland by the skin of his teeth, Suzanne knew, narrowly avoiding the fate of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and others who had died in the wake of the failed rebellion. “Did you realize—”

  “That Carfax was on to him? Yes, after a few years. I funneled information through him that I wanted to get back to Carfax.”

  “And then?”

  “Unlike most of my assets, Harleton didn’t need protecting after Waterloo, so he ceased to be a concern to me. I didn’t hear from him for almost two years. And then a few weeks before he died, he contacted me saying Carfax was going to bring him in.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I was hardly in a position to protect him.”

  “You must have wondered when he died so soon after.”

  “Of course. To own the truth, I wondered if he’d killed himself, though I’d have thought Harleton’s sense of self-preservation was too strong for that.”

  “His son found a letter Harleton was drafting to you that he hadn’t yet put into code.”

  Raoul grimaced. “I’m sorry for the son. Apparently Harleton at least had the wit not to use my name?”

  He could face exposure so coolly. But then the ever-present threat of exposure was something they had both learned to live with. “Crispin Harleton would have said if his father had used your name. But could Harleton have letters from you?”

  “He was supposed to have destroyed any communications from me. But even if he didn’t, I doubt Malcolm could recognize my handwriting on a coded letter written in capitals.”

  Suzanne swallowed, aware of the ground she was stepping onto with her next question. “What about Alistair Rannoch?”

  Raoul’s brows lifted. “What about him?”

  She kept her gaze steady on Raoul’s face, the hooded eyes, the sharp nose, the ironic mouth. Trying to read the man who was so often unreadable, even to the age
nt he had trained. “Crispin Harleton found a letter from Alistair Rannoch to his father in his things. It implies Alistair was a French agent as well.”

  Raoul released his breath, his enigmatic gray gaze gone wide with shock. “Dear God in heaven.”

  “He didn’t work for you?”

  Raoul reached for his glass as though he was unaware of what he was doing with his hands. “You don’t think I’d have warned you before you went off to England as his daughter-in-law?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Raoul gave a faint smile. “When I taught you to question everything, I wasn’t extending that to my own motives.”

  “You’d question mine.”

  He tossed down a swallow of wine. “You have a tendency to see me as more of a chess player than I am, querida.”

  “Which is just the sort of thing a master chess player would say.”

  “It can be an advantage to see when someone is being sincere. Think what you will of me, querida, I didn’t know Alistair was an agent.” He stared into his glass, as though viewing the past through a different filter. “I don’t say this often, but I’m shocked.”

  “Couldn’t he have done it out of self-interest, like Harleton?”

  “Perhaps.” Raoul turned the glass on the tabletop. “Alistair’s main loyalty was also to himself. He was cleverer than Harleton. And more ruthless.”

  “You knew him well?”

  “I knew the family.”

  “But you believe it?”

  Raoul’s brows drew together. “Alistair Rannoch was a penniless young man who went to Harrow and Oxford on his godfather’s charity and came into a legacy from a distant cousin in Jamaica just after he left university. Supposedly. I begin to think I was very credulous to have believed the story. He was keenly aware of being a charity boy. Cleverer and poorer than his friends. If he saw becoming a French spy as a way to make his fortune and give him the place he sought in the world—Yes, I can believe it.” He was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry for Malcolm.”

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Her fingers curled into her palms. She saw Alistair Rannoch’s face again, heard him delivering a cutting remark to Malcolm, felt the instinctive recoil Malcolm wouldn’t own to. “I just can’t bear to think—”

  “What?”

  “That a man like Alistair Rannoch was in any way like me.”

  Raoul gave a short laugh.

  “It’s not funny.”

  His gaze skimmed over her face. “You know the game, querida. You know how it corrodes the soul.”

  She swallowed. The wine had gone sour in her mouth. “I suppose I liked to believe one could play the game and have some core of integrity left.” She glanced across the room at two young men, students by the look of it, debating over a stack of books and papers, then forced her gaze back to his face. “Go on, say it. I’m a deluded fool.”

  “On the contrary. I think holding on to even a shred of your ideals after what we’ve been through is a remarkable achievement. You’re to be commended.”

  “Don’t be ironic.”

  “I’ve never been more sincere in my life. If anything, I’m envious.” Raoul leaned forwards. His gaze turned compelling and unusually open in that disconcerting way it could. “You’re no Alistair Rannoch, querida. You couldn’t be if you tried.”

  She forced a sip of wine past the bitterness in her throat. “I betrayed my husband. He betrayed his son.”

  “You married a fellow spy who was already part of the game. Alistair failed Malcolm from the moment he was born.”

  Beneath Raoul’s cool voice was unexpected bitterness. “You knew Alistair well.”

  “I knew him once.”

  Suzanne searched his face, but he revealed no further clues. No one could put up better barriers than Raoul when he put his mind to it.

  Raoul picked up the bottle and refilled both their glasses. “Why did this come up now?”

  She told him about the Shakespeare manuscript. “But you must have known about it if Harleton was using it as a codebook?”

  “He gave me a copy of one scene we based the code on. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to see the rest of the manuscript.” Raoul twisted the stem of his glass between his fingers. “It seemed rather like sacrilege to use a manuscript that could be by Shakespeare as a codebook.”

  “But clever. No one but the two of you had a copy.”

  “Yes, that’s what Harleton said. It was a fair point, though he didn’t seem to have the least appreciation of what he had in the manuscript.” Raoul took a sip of wine. “The Irish were rebelling when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. I’ve always thought that had something to do with Hamlet’s bitter take on fighting over a little patch of ground.”

  “Is that when your ancestor fled to Spain?” Suzanne asked, sorting through the stories Raoul had told her.

  “Eventually, when the rebellion was quashed, as rebellions in Ireland are wont to be.” Raoul’s mouth tightened. “Though first the rebels dealt quite a blow to the British under Essex.”

  “Harleton’s ancestor was a supporter of Essex, though I don’t know if he fought in Ireland.”

  “A pity the investigation couldn’t be confined to the manuscript and history.” Raoul sat back in his chair and regarded her. “As it is, it’s not an easy investigation for Malcolm. Or for you.”

  She tightened her fingers round the stem of her glass. “I said I’d help him. But I can’t of course.”

  Raoul took a sip of wine. “You don’t work for me anymore.”

  She jerked the glass to her lips and tossed down a swallow. “I can’t lead Malcolm to one of our own. I can’t see someone who was an ally arrested on treason charges. I may be capable of a lot but not of that kind of betrayal.” She swallowed, the Bordeaux raw in her throat. “I know I’ve betrayed Malcolm. Horribly. My loyalty to my comrades may not be stronger, but it’s older.”

  “Commendable.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Querida—” He scanned her face and for a moment his gaze was like the brush of fingertips. “You could walk away. Pretend you didn’t know any of us or any of this.”

  She reached for her wine, then folded her hands in her lap. “And Malcolm’s investigation?”

  “Play dumb and try to stay out of it.”

  “He wouldn’t believe me.”

  Raoul’s mouth curled in a smile of acknowledgment. “You have a point there. Still, you’re a good enough actress I think you could manage to stay out of it. Not implicate anyone but not risk yourself actively trying to protect them.”

  She shook her head. Her nails curled into her palms. “I can’t. I told you in Brussels after Waterloo I was walking away, but by the time we got to Paris a few weeks later I knew that was impossible. I could stop actively working for you, but I couldn’t turn my back on my former comrades.” She forced her hands to unclench and took a sip of wine, searching for words. “I have a hard enough time remembering who I am these days. Sometimes it seems that all that’s left of me is the shell I built for my masquerade as Malcolm’s wife. If I stopped protecting my friends, I’d lose track of myself completely. I don’t think I’d like the person who was left. I don’t think I’d want her to be the mother of my children. I want to be someone Colin and Jessica can be proud of. Though if they ever learn the truth, they’ll probably hate me.”

  “I don’t think so.” Raoul’s gaze was steady on her face. “They’re being raised by you.”

  “And they’re growing up here.” She saw Colin clutching a Royalist cockade the summer before last in Hyde Park. “It makes a difference.” She tossed back another swallow of wine. “I thought I could find a way to help my friends without betraying Malcolm’s trust. Yet here I am doing just that.”

  “Are you?”

  “I’m telling you about his investigation. So you can help me stop it. But I very much fear—”

  “What?”

  She drew a breath and looked into her fears. “Ma
lcolm is very, very good at what he does. If he’s determined to ferret out French spies in London, I think he’s all too likely to ferret out me.”

  “It’s a risk.” Raoul was never one to offer false reassurance. “Malcolm is clever. But so are you.”

  Her gaze flickered over his face. “Did you hear anything about the leak that led to the Dunboyne affair?”

  Raoul’s brows drew together. “I was in Dunboyne at the time, but I never heard the source of the leak.”

  She stared into the wine in her glass, bloodred in the candlelight. “Malcolm won’t stop.”

  “Querida—” Raoul slid his hand across the table, then stilled it, inches from her own. “Whoever this man is who was behind the leak, he’s in a position of power. He may not even have been working for the French. He could have had other reasons to help the United Irishmen.”

  “That hardly makes me less sympathetic to him.” She could hear the passion in Raoul’s voice when he talked to her about the United Irish Uprising.

  “Perhaps not. But he could also have been driven by something other than Republican ideals. Ireland was never your fight. You don’t owe him anything.”

  “Perhaps not.” Her fingers twisted round the fragile stem of her glass. “Loyalty used to seem so much simpler. My family were gone. The cause came before everything. We had a war to win, and the choice between the sides seemed clear, even if our own was tarnished. Then I had a son. And a daughter. And a husband.” She flashed a quick look at Raoul. “I know it sounds mad, but I realized early on I was loyal to Malcolm. Even as I betrayed him in myriad ways.”

  “I’m not laughing.” Raoul took a sip of wine. “Your loyalty was quite apparent.”

  “But those loyalties didn’t make the other loyalties go away. To the cause, to the people we worked with.”

  “Yet perhaps in this case the happiness of your husband and children comes first.” How could Raoul’s voice at once be so neutral and so gentle?

  “But that’s just it.” Without realizing she had moved, she was gripping the edge of the table. “The man behind the Dunboyne leak has a life here as well. A family. People he cares for. If I help Malcolm expose him while doing my utmost to maintain my own secret and go on with my own comfortable life with my husband and children, then I’m the worst sort of hypocrite.”