The Berkeley Square Affair (Malcolm & Suzanne Rannoch)

by Grant, Teresa

  Malcolm pushed aside the questions crowding his brain for later. “Did you ask her about it?”

  “No. It was time to end the affair in any case.”

  “To abandon her.”

  “Call it what you will.” Radley took an appreciative sip of claret. “I didn’t know who O’Roarke was at the time as it happens. Our paths never crossed in the Peninsula. It was only when someone pointed him out to me at the ball last night that I realized who it had been.” Radley settled back in his chair, the stem of his glass held between two fingers. “Thought you should know, Rannoch. After all, whatever our differences, we’re both Harrovians.”

  Malcolm pushed through the coffeehouse door and turned down Piccadilly, only dimly aware of the artists and tradesmen he brushed past. He could scarcely remember what he had said when he left Radley at the table, save that he knew he’d refrained from planting the man a facer.

  Suzanne had known O’Roarke in the Peninsula. A friend of her parents? Could the embrace Radley exaggerated actually have been more paternal? Or perhaps they had been lovers. He’d accepted that she’d had lovers before Radley. She hadn’t known Malcolm then and certainly hadn’t known O’Roarke’s connection to Malcolm. O’Roarke wouldn’t have known she would end up married to the man he had fathered. Malcolm wouldn’t have expected O’Roarke to become the lover of an unmarried girl and then abandon her to her own devices, but perhaps there was an explanation in the chaos of war. O’Roarke had a wife in Ireland. He couldn’t have married Suzanne. God knew people could behave irrationally. Perhaps—

  Fragments of memory swirled in his brain, slashing through the scenario he attempted to construct. Aunt Frances quoting his father—People will remark on Malcolm’s good fortune. But it’s some comfort to know that one day he’ll realize what it is to be betrayed by one’s spouse. “La Corbeau.” Alistair’s letter to Harleton—I own the revelation of the Raven’s identity holds particular dangers for me.

  The pieces shifted, broke apart, re-formed into an unmistakable scenario.

  Malcolm walked full tilt into a woman carrying a basket of turnips. The turnips scattered over the pavement. He gathered them up and murmured an apology, scarcely aware of the words he framed. The woman moved on, mollified.

  Malcolm took a half-dozen more steps and paused, gripping the black metal of a lamppost. The metal was cold even through the York tan of his gloves. He knew how to gather and sift information and follow it to its logical conclusion, however surprising. However unwelcome. The image formed by those fragments hung before his mind, inescapable, unavoidable.

  His wife had been the Raven. And the man who had fathered him had been her spymaster.

  Somehow he let go of the lamppost and walked down the street without stumbling under carriage wheels or knocking over other pedestrians. Of course, of course, of course. So much seemed so obvious now. The papers for Count Nesselrode that had disappeared from his dispatch box in Vienna. The British code that had found its way into French hands on the eve of Waterloo. The way O’Roarke had suddenly known in Paris two years ago that they needed help rescuing the father of Tatiana’s son. The instinctive sympathy between Suzette and Manon Caret.

  He remembered a glimpse of his wife in the theatre yesterday, Jessica in her arms, bending over Colin as he played with the Caret girls. He had stopped for a moment to drink in the sight. In the midst of the investigation and the torrent of revelations about his parents, he’d reminded himself of what a truly fortunate man he was.

  He’d never been one to use terms like “happiness.” Perhaps because he’d thought of himself as possessing a worldly wisdom that regarded such words as trite and oversimplistic. Or perhaps because it had seemed to be tempting fate. But he saw now that he had been happy. Beneath the everyday ups and downs of his life had been a solid, steady core of contentment. Built on everyday trivialities. His son’s babble over breakfast in the nursery. His daughter’s arm curled round his wife’s breast as she nursed. His wife applying blacking to her lashes or unpinning her hair.

  He’d been happy. Simply. Wholeheartedly.

  Blindly.

  He stopped walking, seconds before he smashed into another lamppost. His hands had curled into fists. He gripped the lamppost with shaking fingers. One couldn’t really know another person. He knew that better than anyone. Should know it. Should have known it. He’d long since accepted that he’d never fully understand either of his parents. Tatiana remained an elusive mystery, dancing just out of reach, even years after her death. Edgar had closed down all but the most rudimentary lines of communication between him and Malcolm after their mother’s death. Gisèle had grown up without him. Even Aunt Frances, who he would have sworn was beyond her ability to surprise him, had shocked him with the revelation of her affair with Alistair.

  But Suzette—

  He’d been cautious when he’d married her. Afraid of hurting her, of offering more than he was capable of giving. But if he was honest, he’d been protecting himself as well. Afraid to take the risk of emotional intimacy with a woman he was convinced was only marrying him as a way out of her predicament. Why else would she choose him? How odd that he’d been right, though for all the wrong reasons. Were it not for her circumstances, Suzanne would certainly not have married him.

  When had he changed? When had caution and prudence and a practical recognition of the limitations of human relationships given way to blind idiocy? In Vienna he’d still been so careful of his feelings that Suzanne had been convinced Tatiana was his mistress. His guilt over misleading her bit him in the throat now, an irony so sharp it sliced to the bone. Even at Waterloo he’d been cautious enough he hadn’t told her where he was going when he slipped off to the château the night of Julia Ashton’s death.

  Was Waterloo when it had changed? Saying good-bye to Suzette at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, knowing he might be kissing her for the last time? In the blood and smoke of the field, wondering if he’d got his loyalties hopelessly muddled and should have put staying with his wife and son above the call of Crown and country? In the aftermath, the horror of the battle stamped on his imagination, Edgar and Harry fighting for their lives, when he had clung to her as though to his last vestiges of sanity?

  Or had it been in Paris, his views diverging seemingly inescapably from Castlereagh’s and Wellington’s, the White Terror making a mockery of any vestige of belief that they’d been fighting for anything but the preservation of the status quo, the search for Tatiana’s child bringing his guilt over her death welling to the surface? Suzette had been his touchstone, the one constant he could rely on. He’d said things to her about his family, his feelings, his conflicting thoughts on his work and future that a year, even a few months, before would have been unthinkable.

  And then there was the morning the following spring when she’d told him she wanted to have another child. A further bond between them, consciously created. His fingers tightened round the lamppost. Why in God’s name had she done it? What had she had to gain from another child? Had it been some sort of insurance against what might happen if he ever learned the truth?

  Images of the night of Jessica’s birth sliced into his brain. Holding Suzanne’s hand, her fingers a vise round his own. The wriggling baby sliding into Geoffrey Blackwell’s arms with a reassuring squawk. Placing her on Suzette’s chest. A tiny hand gripping one finger. Showing her blanket-swaddled form to Colin. Perhaps the best night of his life.

  And then there had been the night he’d formally resigned from the diplomatic corps and written to David saying he’d stand for Parliament. He could see Suzanne’s steady dark gaze, glowing with the light from the brace of candles on their dinner table, when he told her. Feel the reassuring pressure of her hand on his own. He’d never have felt strong enough to face the demons of his past without her beside him. But even then some barriers had remained, stronger perhaps when he’d returned home and confronted his family and his relationship—or lack of relationship—to them.

  Un
til Alistair’s death and its aftermath had smashed the last of the barriers. Malcolm flinched as his raw sobs echoed in his ears, as he felt again the force of Suzanne’s arms round him. The seduction had been complete. He’d held nothing back. And so now he had no defenses left. No refuge to hide in because the refuge he had learned to rely on had proved to be a painted sham.

  A gust of wind cut down the street, rattling the gold-painted key of a locksmith’s sign overhead. He took one hand from the lamppost and dug his fingers into his hair. He’d lost his hat somewhere. Probably when he bumped into the woman with the turnips.

  Once he’d taken it for granted that he faced everything alone. He was going to have to do that again.

  Because though his world might be in wreckage, he needed answers more than ever.

  CHAPTER 24

  Suzanne heard Malcolm’s footsteps in the shadows of the wings and moved across the stage to meet him. “Darling? Manon was charming about saving the evening for the duke. Everyone just left to get ready for the performance this evening. I’d have left myself if you hadn’t been so insistent about walking me home. Really, if you haven’t got more important—”

  Something checked her before she could even see into his eyes. The tension in his footfalls? The quality of the silence? “Malcolm?” She moved towards him. “What is it? Something about your father?”

  Malcolm had gone stone still, his gaze fastened on her face. The thick yellow light from the rehearsal lamps slanted across him, leaving his eyes in shadow, but the quality of his gaze at once singed her and chilled her to the bone.

  And she knew. Before her brain could form the thought, the sick certainty settled inside her. It seemed inevitable, something that had always been as sure to arrive as Christmas or a birthday or a change of seasons. Yet at the same time so unthinkable she seemed to have been robbed of the power to speak or move or even formulate a thought.

  His gaze held her own for what might have been seconds or minutes. Long enough for a marriage to shatter like shards of crystal, never to be re-formed.

  “When you married me,” he said, “how long did you think it would last?”

  “Darling—” Somehow it was the first word that broke from her lips.

  “Don’t.” His voice was like the slap of a sword blade on rock. “There’ve been enough lies.”

  “That’s not a lie. It’s how I think of you.”

  How had she never realized the way his gaze changed when it rested upon her? The particular quality, half-ironic, half-vulnerable, at once intimate and a little removed, as though he could not quite believe the bond between them. She wouldn’t have been able to describe it before. But it was so clear to her now it was gone.

  “My first thought,” he said in a strangely detached voice, “was that you must have been blackmailed into it. Not for money. Through a threat to a family member or someone you loved. I had myself convinced of that.”

  “Malcolm—”

  “But then I realized you’re much too strong. You’d have found a way out. Or told me the truth eventually. Odd. I obviously don’t know you at all. Yet I’m sure enough of you to know you aren’t a victim.”

  She swallowed. “It’s true. I’m not proud of what I’ve done, but I did it freely.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” he said. “About what you expected when you married me.” She’d never credited those who called him cold, but now his voice could freeze raw spirits.

  The unthinkable had come to pass. Like pregnancy or illness or a natural disaster, something one could barely contemplate went from unimaginable to stark reality. All these years. The fear that had been a pressure behind her eyes, a tension coiled in her chest, a nightmare vision dancing on the edge of her consciousness. You’d think she’d have planned, strategized, had a dozen speeches written in her head, a score of contingencies planned for. Instead she was living the actor’s nightmare, onstage without knowing her lines or even the plot of the play in which she found herself.

  “When I married you, I was mad enough to think I could walk away in a few months or a few years.” Her voice came out flat and strangely under control. When a mission went wrong, one answered as simply and straightforwardly as possible and didn’t elaborate.

  He stood watching her in the shadows, tension writ in the lean angles of his body. “I suppose you didn’t realize the extent of the information you’d be able to uncover.”

  “I didn’t have the least understanding of you. Or of myself.”

  “Was it all a plan?” His voice cracked, the dead cold breaking open to reveal an abyss of pain. “Did you have the whole thing in mind from the moment we met?”

  “You’re an agent, Malcolm.” It seemed, somehow, important to remind him of that. “You know one can never foresee the twists and turns of a mission so accurately. One has to improvise in the field. I didn’t expect you to take me to Lisbon. I was calculating how long I could afford to stay there and continue my masquerade when you proposed.”

  “And in doing so played right into your hands.”

  She could see the same images in his eyes that ran through her own head. The cool, moonlit wrought-iron balcony where he’d proposed during a ball at the British embassy. The airless sitting room in which they’d taken their vows. The bedchamber smelling of lavender and spilled champagne in which they’d spent their wedding night.

  “I was shocked,” she said. “Shocked that you asked me to marry you.”

  “You underestimated your talents.”

  “I underestimated your kindness and determination to take care of those in need.”

  “You think that’s why—”

  “You married me to protect me, Malcolm. I’ve always been grateful.”

  His harsh laugh carried through the theatre. “You’re probably less in need of protection than anyone I’ve ever encountered.”

  “That doesn’t change my gratitude.”

  He took a step closer, gaze trained on her face. “You’re good, I’ll give you that. Probably the best agent I’ve ever encountered. I can scarcely comprehend the extent of what you’ve done. And I obviously don’t know you at all.”

  “Malcolm—” She put out her hand, then let it fall to her side. “I think you know me better than anyone.”

  He laughed again, a sound that cut through the dusty air of the theatre. “Don’t, Suzette. Don’t add more lies. As two seasoned agents, we should be able to be honest with each other.”

  Her throat ached with the impossibility, not just of trust but of any sort of honest communication between them. “I don’t expect you to believe it. But the fact that you know me is perhaps the truest thing about me.”

  “In Vienna. In Brussels. During Waterloo.” Once again she saw memories chase through his mind, but this time they were of the two of them talking, debating, devising strategies, drafting memoranda. Of his dispatch box sitting on the dressing table in their shared bedchamber. Papers left out when he took her in his arms as they undressed after a party. Malcolm was careful, but he’d come to trust his wife implicitly.

  “I remember how Davenport looked when he first came to the Peninsula,” Malcolm continued, in the flat, detached voice of one speaking about distant acquaintances. “As though the curtains had been ripped down in his world to reveal a hollow comedy. I understand that now. In a way I never thought I would.”

  She sank down on the bottom step of the rehearsal stairs where Hamlet confronted Ophelia. She wasn’t sure she could stand any longer. “Ask me what you will. We’d better get this over with.”

  He turned, pinning her with his hooded gaze. “Whom are you working for now?”

  “No one. I stopped after Waterloo.”

  “Why? There are plenty of Bonapartist plots still.”

  She kept her gaze locked on his own. “I decided whatever I worked for I’d do it openly as your wife.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “No. I’m not sure I would in your place. But it happens t
o be the truth.”

  “And yet you stayed.”

  She linked her hands round her knees. Her fingers, predictably, were trembling. “I told you. I realized I couldn’t walk away. Because of the children. Because of how I feel about you.”

  “You can’t expect—”

  “I’m not nearly as nice a person as the person I created for you, Malcolm. But the core of me is the same.”

  “Don’t, Suzette.” He strode across the stage as though his thoughts would not let him be still. “I can admire the skill of the woman who pulled off what you’ve accomplished. But such emotional appeals make me ill.”

  “Yes, I know. Which is why I wouldn’t have said it if it weren’t the truth.”

  His face was in shadow now, but she saw her words bounce off the armor in his eyes. “Obviously your family didn’t die in the French attack on Acquera.”

  Her fingers tightened, pressing against the bones of her hands. “No.”

  “Did you know Tania’s and my intelligence had been responsible for misdirecting the French to Acquera?” He paused a moment. She could feel the pressure of his gaze, like a sword point beneath her chin. “Or did O’Roarke?”

  He knew about Raoul. In the dead cold of his voice, she knew that more than just their marriage had shattered. Whatever fragile, unvoiced thing he and Raoul had discovered was broken as well.

  “Yes, I know about O’Roarke,” Malcolm said. “Frederick Radley saw the two of you embracing in León.”

  A bitter sound broke from her lips. She could not have said whether it was a laugh or a sob. “Dear God. I underestimated Radley.”

  “He didn’t have the least idea what he’d really seen. He was trying to convince me O’Roarke was your lover. Which I presume was the case. Is the case.”

  “Was.” The word tumbled quickly from her lips. Probably folly to care so much about drawing certain boundaries round her crimes. “It ended . . . a long time ago.”