The Berkeley Square Affair (Malcolm & Suzanne Rannoch)

by Grant, Teresa

  “Though she did manage to keep her Harleton daughter with her,” Crispin said.

  “She didn’t have any sons with Harleton?” Suzanne asked, absurdly comforted by the thought that Eleanor Harleton had not lost custody of her child.

  “No, they just had the one daughter. At the time of Harleton’s death there was no estate or title to pass on, but Harleton’s younger brother’s son eventually got both restored. Eleanor Harleton and Francis Woolright had a son and two more daughters, I believe.”

  “I confess it sounds on the surface as though they had an agreeable life,” Manon said. She took a sip of champagne. “But of course we all know appearances can be deceiving.”

  Jessica stretched and opened her eyes as Suzanne bent over her bassinet in the night nursery. She smiled in anticipation of her late-night feeding, a spit bubble forming on her lip. Malcolm smoothed the covers over Colin and tucked his stuffed bear, Figaro, back into the crook of his arm. Laura Dudley would have been listening for both children from her room next door, but she discreetly never bothered Suzanne and Malcolm at night when the children were sleeping. Suzanne hoped Laura was asleep herself.

  Suzanne carried Jessica through the door into their own bedchamber. Once again she wasn’t sure what Malcolm would do, but he adjusted the tin shade on the night-light and followed. Suzanne settled in the worn green velvet armchair, unfastened her net overdress, and undid the strings that held the nursing flap on her gown in place (Jessica’s birth had necessitated a whole new wardrobe). First things first, and it was for Malcolm to speak.

  Malcolm lit the Argand lamp, just as he always did when they returned from an evening out. The hiss and flare of light brought the comfort of the familiar and the ache of its loss. “Addison’s going to marry Blanca.”

  She nearly gripped Jessica too tightly as relief coursed through her. “Thank God.” Blanca had been bright-eyed and surprisingly cheerful when she had helped Suzanne dress for the evening. She must have been waiting for Addison to tell Malcolm before she shared the news with Suzanne. Suzanne studied her husband. The futures of so many different people depended on him. “Do you—”

  Malcolm shrugged out of his coat. “I want Addison to do what makes him happy. God knows he’s been tailoring his life to suit my humors long enough. I’ve told him we’ll find rooms for them. Perhaps we can rearrange the guest suite. I thought you’d have a better idea about that than I would.”

  “Malcolm—” Suzanne stared at his shadowed eyes in the wash of lamplight. “You want them both to stay here?” Even without the recent revelations it was an unorthodox arrangement.

  “I think at this point it’s a question of both of them or neither.” He kept his gaze on his cravat as he unwound it. “Did you think I’d revert to aristocratic type and refuse to have a valet who was married? Or that I’d refuse to allow Blanca to continue under this roof when you’re here?”

  “No.” She cradled Jessica closer. “That is—”

  He met her gaze, a bitter challenge in his eyes. “You weren’t sure. Once again I find myself wondering if you knew me any more than I knew you.”

  “Addison and Blanca were unsure enough that they put off their betrothal.”

  Malcolm tossed the cravat down. “Addison takes the forms seriously. But then as a valet he has to.” He started on the jet buttons on his waistcoat. “Even granted I’m the prisoner of my world that you think me, I don’t think I’d ever have been so barbaric or so shortsighted as to tell Addison and Blanca they couldn’t marry and keep their employment.”

  Her heart turned over. “No. I do realize that, darling.”

  He tossed the waistcoat after the coat and cravat. “I probably should have realized Addison would have these scruples and have told him straight out they were ridiculous. But that would have meant stepping onto personal ground Addison and I avoid.” He unfastened a shirt cuff. “Addison’s ability to see the situation from Blanca’s viewpoint is remarkable.”

  Jessica was still suckling industriously, though her eyes were closed, her arm curled over Suzanne’s breast with comforting familiarity. “Blanca was swept into the masquerade along with me. She never meant to entrap Addison. Addison saw where to place the blame.”

  “That’s much what he said.” Malcolm pulled his shirt over his head and quickly wrapped himself in his dressing gown, as he would have done in the early days of their marriage, when they were still physical strangers. “But not the part about placing the blame. In fact, I’d say he saw the situation from your perspective better than I did. Of course he wasn’t wallowing in his own stupidity.”

  She swallowed. “Malcolm, if I could—”

  “I doubt it.” He tied the belt on his dressing gown and leaned against the bedpost. “I doubt you’d do anything differently. You’re too good at your job. At least Addison’s going into his marriage with his eyes open. And it’s what he wants. I owe it to him to do my best to help him make it work.”

  “Thank you.” She swallowed. How could a few feet of their bedchamber seem an uncrossable gulf? “That is, I know you didn’t do it for me, of course, but I’m very happy for them. You know how much they both mean to me.”

  He looked at her for a moment, his gaze not so much angry as remote. “No, I don’t really. I know you’ve seemed fond of them, but then you’ve seemed a lot of things. I’m still adjusting to the fact that I don’t know you at all.”

  Jessica stirred in her sleep and threw her head back, kicking her legs. Suzanne coaxed the baby’s head back to her breast. “Sometimes I’m not sure I know myself.”

  “I can well imagine it after living a lie for so long.” Again it was a statement of fact rather than an accusation. Which somehow cut deeper than a dagger thrust.

  “Darling—Malcolm—You can’t think it was all—”

  “I think you made yourself into the perfect wife for me.” He crossed his arms over his chest, turning the burgundy silk of the dressing gown into armor. “Who knew just what I needed, just what I would respond to.” He glanced round the room, the sconces with crystal girandoles she’d chosen, the gray and cream wall hangings, the moss green and burgundy embroidered silk coverlet she’d purchased in Lisbon, the theatrical prints she’d hung on the walls. “You created the perfect home.” His gaze went to the door behind which Colin slept. “The perfect nursery—”

  “You can’t think the children are part of it.” The words were stung out of her.

  “The children are at the heart of it.” He looked at Jessica in her arms, then studied Suzanne herself as though she were a text written in code. “You used me. You used yourself. That’s what spies do. But you dragged Colin into the game before he was even born. What in God’s name were you thinking?”

  “Of the spring campaign.” She could feel the insistent tug of Jessica’s mouth on her nipple and the weight of the baby’s arm across her breast. “How vital it would be to the course of the war. I could barely think ahead to June, when he’d be born.”

  “That’s no way for a parent to think.”

  “No.” She looked down at Jessica’s profile. In the warm lamplight, the bones of her face stood out beneath the baby softness, showing the woman she would grow into. God knew what that woman would think of her mother. “I wasn’t a parent then. And even now I still sometimes think like an agent. In many ways I’m not a very nice person.”

  “Don’t, Suzette.” His voice was like a shock of cold water.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Take the easy way out.” He watched her a moment longer, the way he’d look at a code when a pattern began to form in his head, but the data remained tantalizingly out of reach. “All right. With Colin you responded tactically. I can even perhaps understand that. But what in God’s name were you thinking when you told me you wanted to have Jessica?”

  Instinctively she pulled the baby closer. Miraculous, the boneless way they melted into you. “That I wanted another child with you.”

  He gave a harsh laugh, then stared
at her. “So I’d be tied to you? Because you thought you owed it to me? So Colin would have a sibling?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  His gaze shot over her face, hard and level. “Well, that’s honest at least.”

  “I think I wanted—” She stumbled, picking her way through an unfamiliar landscape. “A child that we created together. That wasn’t part of past deceptions.”

  He gave a rough laugh that bounced off the freshly painted plasterwork. “Christ, Suzette. Everything between us is mired in past deceptions. And always will be.”

  She smoothed a tuft of Jessica’s hair that curled up at the back of her head. “I know I wanted Jessica. For reasons that had nothing to do with being an agent.”

  “You can’t possibly be sure of that.” He glanced away, then looked back at her face. “But it’s hard for me to quarrel with events that gave me Colin and Jessica. I just want to be sure they don’t suffer for our sins.”

  “My sins.”

  “And mine, at least of omission. If I were halfway good at my job, I’d have had the wit to see what was going on.” He grimaced. “I knew I wasn’t cut out for marriage. I told myself you needed me”—he gave a wry laugh—“and that gave me license to try.”

  “Malcolm, no.” She leaned forwards, then checked herself because of Jessica and because she saw the recoil in her husband’s eyes. “Whatever I’ve done to you, don’t doubt yourself. You’re a wonderful husband. And father. Don’t let me prevent you from caring for others.”

  “Thank you. I think you can leave it to me to manage my personal relationships.” He watched her for a moment as though he were looking through a telescope at an object receding into the distance. “I was going to move my things into the dressing room, but I don’t want to alert the servants to anything being amiss between us. The next thing we know there’ll be talk and ten to one it will get back to Carfax. So we’ll have to muddle through in the same room.”

  “I’ve never objected to sharing a bed.” She wondered when, if ever, he’d touch her again. After all, anger and lust were far from mutually exclusive. But with Malcolm, passion had always been inextricably linked to tenderness.

  His look told her it would be a long time. “For Colin and Jessica’s sake, we have to find a way to live together without hating each other. I’ve seen what it does to children to grow up with parents with nothing but contempt for each other. I’d give anything to spare Colin and Jessica that fate.”

  “I could never hate you, Malcolm. But I don’t know that you’ll ever be able to stop hating me.”

  He released his breath and she saw some of the tension drain from him, leaving a void that made her ache for his loneliness. And her own. “I don’t hate you, Suzette. A part of me can admire how well you did your job. Another part of me is horrified that you caught our children up in it. But I’d be a hypocrite not to recognize intelligence is a slippery slope. And God knows I can understand your reasons for entering into that world after what O’Roarke told me. In the end, you, like me, are left tied to a marriage that wasn’t of your choosing.”

  Their daughter was warm and secure in her arms. Her husband was as closed to her as the walls of a fortress. “I don’t expect you to believe this, any more than I expect it to make a difference. But if I didn’t choose it then, I’d choose it now.”

  He didn’t laugh her words off. It might have been better if he had. “You can’t possibly be sure of that, Suzette. After so many lies how can you be sure of who you are, let alone what you want?”

  She swallowed as the cut struck home. “I’ll own at times I feel I don’t know what trace of me is left under the trappings of the world we live in.” She shifted her arm, suddenly aware of the way her nursing corset bit into her skin over the goffered muslin of her chemise. “But you can’t think it’s all pretense.”

  A stranger stared at her out of his familiar gray eyes. “I think a good agent builds a persona to fit the demands of the mission. Tweaks and tailors it to whoever is the mark. I think you’re a brilliant agent. And you’ve had years to build your persona.”

  She stared at him, aware of just how insurmountable the gulf between them was. For how could she expect him ever to recognize the real her when she wasn’t sure she’d recognize that person herself?

  She thought back to a moment three years ago on the beach at Dunmykel Bay. Malcolm had had Colin on his shoulders. She’d removed her shoes and stockings so the sand could squish round her toes. Malcolm had just capped one of her Shakespeare quotations, and she’d looked into his eyes and been sure—“I know it sounds mad, but there are times when it seems you know me as no one else ever has.”

  He looked in her eyes, his own dark with what might have been pity. “My darling, if that’s true I think it only means you’ve come to believe your own deceptions.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Colin looked up at Laura as she put on her bonnet. “Why aren’t you coming to Richmond with us?”

  “Because it’s her afternoon off.” Suzanne Rannoch was coaxing a wriggling Jessica into her pelisse.

  Colin blinked and looked from his mother to Laura. “Where are you going?”

  Laura smiled. He was a very grown-up four, but he still quite failed to understand that adults might have lives outside the time they spent with him.

  “That’s her business.” Mrs. Rannoch got Jessica’s second arm into a sleeve. Jessica’s attention was on her stockings. She had one half-off and was staring at the black merino toe with great concentration as she tugged it.

  “To see a friend,” Laura said. It wasn’t precisely the truth, but it was closer to it than some of the things she said. Though she often felt hopelessly compromised, she tried at least to be honest with the children.

  Colin smiled at her. “Have a pleasant afternoon.”

  “I’m sure I will.” Laura tightened the ribbons on her bonnet and bent to kiss his cheek, something she wouldn’t have done a year ago. She straightened up and turned to Suzanne. “I should be back by five.”

  “Stay out for the evening if you like.” Suzanne gave Jessica a hairpin to hold and managed to get the stockings in place with that distraction. “I don’t know what time we’ll be back from Richmond, and Malcolm and I don’t have plans this evening.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Rannoch.” Laura looked at Jessica. The pelisse was on and the stockings were more or less in place, at least for the moment. “Do you want me to help you get her shoes on?”

  “No, I’ll manage.” Suzanne reached for the shiny black shoes. “Go and enjoy your day off.”

  Laura smiled at Suzanne, touched her fingers to Jessica’s cheek, picked up her gloves and reticule, and whisked herself out of the room.

  Suzanne Rannoch had seemed pale lately, lines of strain showing about her eyes, but she looked better now that she was with the children. Laura had glimpsed the same tension in Mr. Rannoch’s face last night when the couple came into the nursery for supper. Perhaps it was the investigation they were in the midst of, but Laura had seen them involved in investigations before and she’d swear this was something different. She’d almost say the tension was between the two of them.

  Laura shook her head at herself as she reached the ground floor hall. Dangerous for a governess to care too much about her employers. Particularly dangerous for someone in her other line of work. She should know better than anyone what a downfall personal entanglements could be.

  She tugged on her gray doeskin gloves, smiled at Valentin, and stepped through the front door he was holding open for her.

  A crisp wind cut across Berkeley Square, tugging at the ribbons on her bonnet. The day was gray, but the air had a bracing chill with none of the damp promise of rain. She walked at a brisk pace, grateful for the distraction of the cold and the exercise. Her dark blue pelisse, trimmed with black braid, and plaited straw bonnet with blue satin ribbons were her best going-out clothes, chosen because the household would expect her to wear them on her afternoon off, but still dark and an
onymous. The habit of a governess made for an excellent disguise. No one looked at governesses. If she was doing her job well, a governess blended entirely into the background.

  She thought for a moment of the black net and champagne satin Suzanne Rannoch had worn to the theatre the night before. Mostly Laura would have said she was resigned to her lot in life. That her past was buried so deeply it was like a dimly remembered foreign country. And of all the things she missed from her old life, Laura wouldn’t have said clothes were high on the list. But there were times....

  She went into a bakeshop and ordered tea, drank half a cup with the careful sips of a governess savoring a rare moment alone, then got to her feet, teacup still on the table, and went behind the screen to the ladies’ retiring room. He was already there, in the shadows. She could smell his citrus shaving soap before she made out his form. “Right on time as always.”

  “A governess needs to be punctual. There’s little room for spontaneity. Though the Rannochs aren’t as strict about nursery schedules as some families.”

  “You like them.” It was neither censure nor praise.

  Laura swallowed. Perhaps she should have put sugar in the tea. It left a bitter aftertaste. “I can’t afford to like them.”

  “As a governess?”

  “Among other things.”

  It was too dark to make out his expression, but she could feel his gaze moving over her face. “What do you have to report?”

  Jessica had taken three more faltering steps, a fortnight after the first set, before deciding crawling was safer. Colin could sign his name and was autographing every paper he could get his hands on, including one of his father’s draft speeches. Berowne had got off his lead in the square garden, and Laura had had to climb one of the plane trees to get him down, with the children calling anxiously to her from the ground. But of course that wasn’t what he’d been asking about. “The Rannochs are involved in an investigation. I don’t know the precise details, but it centers round this new version of Hamlet that the Tavistock Theatre is putting on. Mr. Tanner came to see them about it late one night. He was injured, according to Valentin.”