The Berkeley Square Affair (Malcolm & Suzanne Rannoch)

by Grant, Teresa

  Cordelia pulled the door of the night nursery closed on her sleeping daughters. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked Harry.

  “Yes. No.” Harry gave a twisted smile. “That is, I’m not at all sure I do, but I probably should.”

  Cordelia leaned against the closed door and touched her husband’s face. She and Harry had gone to Dewhurst’s house in case he was there and so had missed the confrontation at the Tavistock and had only arrived at the theatre in time to speak briefly with a subdued Malcolm and Suzanne. “What will happen to Dewhurst?”

  “Rupert is determined to try to bring him to justice and to find Francis Woolright’s descendants, but I don’t know if either will be possible.” Harry rubbed a hand across his eyes. “Odd. Rupert wants his father brought to justice. And I’m profoundly relieved that Archibald won’t be.”

  Cordelia scanned her husband’s tired face. “The scope of what they did can hardly be considered the same.”

  “No. In fact, it’s not a great leap for me to find myself in sympathy with Archibald’s views. Still. I never thought his fate would be a matter of such moment to me as it has been these past few days.”

  “Parents.” Cordelia glanced over her shoulder at the nursery door. “The bond is there whether we realize it or not.”

  “And perhaps having our own children drives that home.”

  Cordelia leaned her head against her husband’s shoulder. “Do you think Malcolm and Suzanne will be all right?”

  “It was just a flesh wound to her arm.” Harry stroked his fingers against Cordelia’s hair. “It looked worse than it is.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Cordelia lifted her head to look at her husband, struck by how very precious the tenderness in his gaze was. “Something’s . . . shifted between them these past few days.”

  “I know.” Harry’s mouth turned grim. “That is, I know something’s changed between them, though not why.”

  “And?” For a moment Cordelia felt like a child, desperately wanting to be reassured that fairy-tale endings were possible.

  But Harry was never one for false reassurance. He touched her hair again, his gaze clouded with concern. “I’m afraid only time will tell.”

  Malcolm knotted off a clean dressing round Suzanne’s shoulder. “It’s good to be home.”

  She looked up at him. The light from the tapers on her dressing table shadowed his eyes and sharpened the bones of his face. “Do we have a home?”

  “It’s time Berkeley Square became ours and not Alistair and Arabella’s.”

  Her fingers closed on the silk and lace of her dressing gown. “You can’t seriously want me here.”

  He pulled the dressing gown up about her shoulders. “I don’t see where else you’d be.”

  “Don’t, Malcolm.” She steeled herself against the seductive brush of his fingers. “We’ve settled that we’re sharing a house. That doesn’t mean we have a home. Or that you want me in it.”

  He dropped down on the dressing table bench beside her. “At the moment, the prospect of you being anywhere else is bloody terrifying.”

  Her fingers closed round his wrists. “I know what this is, and it won’t work.”

  “What is it?”

  “I almost died, and you’ve had a rush of remorse.”

  “If you mean contemplating a future without you adjusted my thinking, you’re right.”

  “But it won’t last.” She tightened her grip on his wrists, wondering how many more times she’d be able to touch him. “We’ll settle into everyday prosaic reality, and you’ll remember all the reasons you have to hate me.”

  He slid his fingers behind her neck. A glint of familiar laughter lit his eyes and made her heart turn over. “When have we ever been able to exist in everyday prosaic reality for five minutes?”

  “Don’t be clever, darling, you know what I mean. You’ll go over every secret I might have exposed. You’ll think of every one of your friends who died in battle. You’ll think that through me you betrayed comrades and Crown and country and that your own honor was compromised.”

  “You don’t believe in honor.”

  “No, but you do.”

  He turned his hands in her grip to brush his thumbs against her fingers. “I wonder if Cordy put Davenport through this?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “On the contrary. I’d say it’s remarkably similar. He told me she did her best to argue to him that it couldn’t possibly work. That he couldn’t forget.”

  “It’s one thing to forget infidelity. It’s another—”

  “You don’t call what you did infidelity? Betrayal is betrayal, my darling.”

  She swallowed. “Cordy regrets the past.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Of course I do. But I can’t say I’d behave differently if I did it again.”

  He pulled one hand free of her grip and brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek. “I doubt you would. I think I know you that well.”

  “Can you seriously tell me you think you can go on as we did before?”

  “I should hope we won’t. We’ll be a deal more honest.” The laughter faded from his eyes. “We have two children. I don’t think either of us has much choice about where and how we live.”

  She couldn’t suppress an inward flinch. Though it was no more than the truth. “You said it yourself. You don’t want Colin and Jessica to grow up with two parents at each other’s throats like—”

  “Like I did?” His mouth curled with derision. “I don’t think we could be like Alistair and Arabella if we tried.” He drew a breath. She felt it rough against her skin. “I wonder sometimes if Arabella kept us in Scotland so much because the atmosphere in Berkeley Square was so poisoned. I don’t think that was all of it. I think she genuinely did find being a mother wearing. And God knows packing the children off to the country isn’t unusual in our set. But I think it was part of it.” He looked at Suzanne for a long moment. “I can’t imagine you packing your children off.”

  “Well, I’m not an aristocrat.”

  “I don’t want the children to grow up afraid to trust.”

  “Nor do I. But it’s a bit of a challenge when their parents don’t trust each other.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “Poor word choice. I trust you with my life, Malcolm.”

  “Yet you thought I could take the children away from you.”

  “I’d never seen you pushed to this extent.”

  “We have to find a way to go on. Not just to live under the same roof. To keep the atmosphere from being poisoned.” He watched her in silence a few moments longer. “It must drive you mad. Planning seating arrangements, ordering dinners, answering cards of invitation. That isn’t what you were trained for. What O’Roarke trained you for.”

  “Sometimes it drives me mad. Sometimes I find myself enjoying it. And then I think I’m a hypocrite.”

  “Enjoying the trappings of a life you’re fighting against?”

  “In a nutshell.”

  “I feel much the same when I make use of being the Duke of Strathdon’s grandson.”

  “You don’t have any choice about being the Duke of Strathdon’s grandson.”

  “I could repudiate my heritage.”

  “And upend your life and destroy your family’s.”

  “Which is what telling the truth would have done to you.” His gaze locked on her own. “Whatever else, I don’t doubt you love Colin and Jessica. And our marriage began to protect Colin after all. At least on my side.”

  Once again she felt a well-deserved flinch. She curled her hands into fists at her sides. “Plenty of couples in the beau monde live nominally under the same roof but lead separate lives.”

  His gaze hardened. “So they do. Is that what you want?”

  Her nails bit into her palms. “I’m trying to figure out what you want.”

  “To be honest, I don’t know.”

  “You should be able to fall
in love, forge your own life.”

  “That isn’t an option anymore. I don’t mean that as an accusation, it’s a statement of fact. We’ve forged a life. Even if it’s a false one, we have to make it work.”

  She met his gaze. “There are different ways to make it work. You don’t have to be married to fall in love.”

  His gaze hardened to polished steel. “You’re giving me permission to take a mistress?”

  “In the circumstances I hardly think my permission is required.”

  She felt the tension that ran through him. “Are you saying you want to take a lover?”

  “No! That’s the last thing—I’m trying to find a way to give you the life I took away.”

  “It’s too late for that, Suzette. It was too late the moment we married. Maybe the moment we met.”

  His words bit her in the throat. “If—”

  “Save your energies for more important battles.” His gaze flickered over her face. “Don’t get any ideas about disappearing.”

  “I’m not. That is”—something compelled her to scrupulous honesty—“I thought about it, but I couldn’t leave the children, and I couldn’t take them away from you.”

  “Well then. It comes back to the children, and what we owe them.”

  He was offering her more than she would have dreamed possible a few hours before. She should be grateful. Much of her life, after all, had been making do with the cards she was dealt. The ache of loss would ease and she would stop feeling torn in two. “Every time you open your mouth you’re going to wonder what I’ll do with the information.”

  “Probably. It will make for some strained conversations for a time.”

  “You won’t be able to leave the room without locking your dispatch box.”

  “Yes, well, I do finally learn my lessons.”

  A host of losses ran through her head. Laughing over a draft of one of his speeches in exhausted delirium. Passing pages of the Morning Chronicle back and forth with the toast and coffee. Marking up the draft of a dispatch, fingers smeared with ink. “We won’t—”

  She saw a flash of the same sense of loss in his own gaze. “No.”

  “Then what—”

  “The children. Some of the things we believe in. The investigations that always seem to find us.” He looked down at her for a moment. “When Dewhurst fired his pistol, I knew that whatever our life together may hold, I infinitely prefer it to life without you.”

  “We’ve been through a crisis. We haven’t resolved anything.”

  He took her face between his hands. She could feel the warmth of his breath. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. But Malcolm had always been too honest to seek escape in passion or romance. Or perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to kiss her. “Let’s just take it a day at a time and see what happens.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “When we both put our minds to something we’re usually rather successful.”

  EPILOGUE

  The smell of citrus shaving soap wafted through the close air in the space behind the screen in the tea shop. Laura swallowed, tasting stewed tea and self-disgust.

  “Well?” His voice, low and even, came through the shadows.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Rannoch and Lord Caruthers are trying to trace the descendants of Eleanor Harleton and Francis Woolright and to build a case against Lord Dewhurst.”

  “And Dewhurst, I understand, has taken himself off to the country. I shall be interested to see the next move.”

  “You don’t mean to come to his rescue?” She should stay out of it, but she couldn’t resist asking. It would be even worse, somehow, to work for someone who came to Dewhurst’s aid.

  He snorted. “This is the second occasion on which Dewhurst has shown appallingly bad judgment. And he broke our one inviolate rule.”

  “Turning against fellow members of the League?”

  “Quite.” His shoes creaked as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “What about the Rannochs?”

  She hesitated, partly because it stuck in her throat more and more to disclose details about her employers, partly because she wasn’t sure of the answer. “They seem easier with each other.”

  “But?”

  Sometimes when Malcolm Rannoch looked at his wife, Laura had the oddest notion he was looking at a memory. And yet at other moments, it was more as if he was regarding a stranger. But to say so would sound absurdly fanciful and in any case she had no intention of sharing so much. “The constraint is still there.”

  “Interesting.” The shadows shifted and she heard him drawing on his gloves. “I shall be eager for your next report, Laura. It will be intriguing to watch this play out.”

  Laura’s fingers clenched on the folds of her pelisse. She said nothing, for there was nothing she could say.

  Hamlet, like most Shakespearean tragedies, ended with a stage strewn with corpses. By contrast, most of Shakespeare’s comedies ended with some sort of group celebration. Not, Malcolm thought, looking round the group gathered in the Berkeley Square drawing room, that this was a comedy. Or an ending. But it was a welcome interlude, a few moments of respite from the questions that still swirled about Dewhurst. And between Malcolm and his wife.

  Suzanne was across the room before the fireplace, kneeling beside Jessica, who was examining her new pearls with great interest (she seemed fonder of holding them than wearing them). The firelight cast a warm glow over mother and daughter, and Malcolm found himself smiling, even though he knew domestic security was nine-tenths illusion.

  Colin, the Davenport and Caret girls, and the children of the other guests were investigating Jessica’s other birthday gifts (though it was a small party, the carpet was strewn with boxes, paper, and toys). Aline and Geoffrey seemed to be helping them build something, while Berowne, amazingly comfortable with so much company, jumped from box to box. Paul and Juliette were talking to Crispin and Manon, who sat on the sofa, Crispin’s arm tight round his betrothed. More surprisingly, Malcolm noted, glancing across the room, Addison had his arm round Blanca as well. They were talking to Laura Dudley and Simon, who had a way of relaxing social conventions. David stood with his sister Isobel and her husband, Oliver, Rupert and Bertrand, and Gabrielle Caruthers and her friend (lover?) Nick Gordon. Amazing how much more comfortable Rupert and Gabrielle appeared with each other than they had two and a half years ago, with so many secrets still between them.

  Cordelia’s infectious laughter cut the air. She was by the windows with Strathdon, Lady Frances, Archibald Davenport, and Raoul O’Roarke. Malcolm could still see the surprise in Suzanne’s gaze when he’d suggested they invite O’Roarke. He’d wondered at himself even as he made the suggestion, yet as he looked at O’Roarke now, it seemed like the right decision, though Malcolm himself could not articulate the reasons why.

  “Congratulations.” Harry appeared at Malcolm’s side and handed him a glass of champagne. “As the father of a recently turned one-year-old, I can say it’s quite an accomplishment for the parents as well as the child.”

  Malcolm smiled and took a sip of champagne. Trust Harry to know when he needed a drink even if his friend couldn’t understand all the reasons. “Hard to believe it’s been a year.” And hard to believe how much had changed in that year.

  Harry glanced at Rupert. “Any news of Dewhurst?”

  Malcolm shook his head. “We’re still poring through parish records looking for Francis Woolright and Eleanor Harleton’s descendants. Even if we can find them, it will be damnably difficult to prove anything.”

  “Dewhurst’s lost any shred of position he had left.”

  “Quite. But as Rupert says, it’s a poor substitute for justice.”

  “And you?”

  “You mean do I feel a burning need to revenge myself on Alistair’s killer? No, I confess I’m a less dutiful son than Hamlet.”

  “Or a more clear-sighted man who knows to look to the future.”

  “And yet I don’t think we’ve heard
the last of the past. Certainly not of the Elsinore League.”

  “We still don’t know who else may be members.”

  “No. I think Carfax was hoping the manuscript would somehow be the key to decoding the names, but that’s one secret it doesn’t seem to contain.”

  “Malcolm . . .” Harry hesitated a moment. “Things do get back to normal eventually, you know. Difficult as it may be to imagine it at times.”

  Malcolm met his friend’s gaze and managed a smile. “Define ‘normal.’ ”

  Harry gave a wry laugh that smoothed over the undertones Malcolm was sure his friend was as aware of as he himself.

  Across the room, Suzanne got to her feet, Jessica in her arms, and moved towards Malcolm and Harry. The pendant of blue topaz and aquamarine that he’d given her for their anniversary sparkled at her throat. He’d been afraid it would be a reminder of a past they would never recapture. But it just possibly might be a promise of the future.

  Suzanne’s gaze seemed to hold the faintest of questions, as it often did these days, but she gave a bright smile. “The princess seems to be getting a second wind. Shall we bring in the cake?”

  “Sounds like a good plan.” Malcolm held out a finger for Jessica to grasp hold of. Jessica lifted her head from Suzanne’s shoulder and smiled at him. She had run about with glee at the start of the party and then had taken a nap in Suzanne’s arms.

  Harry lifted his glass. “Here’s to Jessica.”

  Malcolm took a drink of champagne and lifted his glass to Suzanne so she could take a sip. The sort of simple interaction that for a time it had seemed they never would recapture. Her eyes widened for a moment, then she smiled, a quick, seemingly casual smile that, like a line from Shakespeare, held layers of meaning.

  Malcolm returned the smile and put an arm round his wife and daughter. “And to another year of adventures.”

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  The Hamlet manuscript referred to in this book is fictional (as are Francis Woolright and Eleanor Harleton), but there are three different versions of Hamlet that we know of: the First and Second Quartos and the First Folio. The First Quarto version of the play wasn’t rediscovered until 1823, which is why Malcolm only mentions two versions. As Malcolm also says, there are mentions of an earlier play that was a source for Hamlet, perhaps by Thomas Kyd, perhaps even by Shakespeare himself.