by Tracy Grant
Raoul reached for her hand.
"And to think I discounted Sylvie St. Ives as frivolous," Suzanne said. "I must be slipping. So we know part of what was behind the break-ins. But not who killed Ben Coventry."
"No," Malcolm agreed. "But if Carfax knew what his agents were doing, he'd certainly have wanted to recover the papers first."
"If that were true." Laura stared at her hands, spread over the cinnamon-striped fabric of her skirt. "And if St. Juste is working for Carfax. Could St. Juste be the other person who broke into Whateley & Company and killed Coventry?" She looked from Raoul to Suzanne.
Raoul met Suzanne's gaze for a moment, then looked at Laura. "A break-in, even one that leads to murder, is far beneath the scope of what a man like St. Juste takes on. But if he's working for Carfax on something bigger and if these papers are as important to Carfax as Lydgate made it sound—"
"A lot of ifs," Suzanne said. "We don't know that Julien is working for Carfax at all. Or that Carfax engaged whoever killed Ben Coventry."
"I need to talk to Cuthbertson," Malcolm said. "And try to learn who set up this plot to break away from Carfax." He looked at Raoul.
"You know far more about Carfax than I do," Raoul said.
"But you've been gathering intelligence against him for years. You must have sources. We need to pursue every angle."
Raoul inclined his head.
"We can find them at the Waterloo banquet tonight," Malcolm said. "It's a good thing Wellington invited you."
"It's amazing how an investigation can get complicated without taking one any closer to the solution," Suzanne said. "By the way, Bertrand was here earlier today. I almost forgot with everything else that's happened. A source of his saw Germont in Bruton Street with a woman who looked as though she was a relation. Bertrand and I speculated on everything from her being Germont's sister to actually being his anonymous-sounding colleague in disguise." She frowned. "Julien's coloring is similar to Germont's."
"And he's quite convincing disguised as a woman," Raoul said. "Interesting. Though hardly conclusive."
Suzanne drew a determined breath. "It's difficult to speculate more until we discover more information. Which Bertrand is endeavoring to do."
"And to think I once wondered if I would find life dull when I stopped working for the Elsinore League," Laura said.
"Not in this family," Suzanne said.
Laura didn't even seem surprised at the word family.
Chapter 34
Laura watched Raoul as the library door closed behind Malcolm and Suzanne. The Rannochs had gone upstairs to dress for the Waterloo banquet. She and Raoul had lingered in the library, to give the other couple time alone, and because unlike Malcolm and Suzanne, they couldn't publicly share a bedchamber, so any talking they did would have to take place here. Raoul was frowning at the windows. Outside the leaded glass, the Berkeley Square garden was washed gray by the early evening light.
Laura moved to his side and slipped her hand into his own. "I was fond of Will. But it never meant more to me than a momentary escape. So I can scarcely be upset to learn that his feelings for me weren't all they seem."
Raoul turned his head to cast a quick glance at her. "One's reaction to such news isn't always rational. Quite the reverse, often."
"Perhaps if my feelings had been more engaged. Perhaps if I'd learned earlier. Before I"—she hesitated, then said it anyway—"met you."
He drew her hand up to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. "I'm honored."
"Mostly now I just feel foolish for not seeing the truth. To be intimate with a person and not realize—I don't think I properly appreciated how beastly it must have been for Malcolm—" She bit her lip.
"Quite," Raoul said. He looked down at their interlaced fingers. "It doesn't necessarily make Cuthbertson a bad person. Malcolm worked for Carfax."
"My dear. Are you pleading his case?"
"I'm endeavoring to be objective." Raoul's gaze moved back to the windows. "Much as my instincts may scream not to be."
"It doesn't change anything either way." Laura tightened her grip on his hand. "Malcolm took that better than I expected. Better than Suzanne feared, I think."
Raoul squeezed her hand but continued to frown at the window. "No. Sensible of him to suspect Carfax, though it can't be easy for him."
Laura leaned her head against his shoulder. "It's rather a relief to know you can be afraid of something."
Raoul turned his head and gave a bleak smile. "It's a dangerous life we live. But until this afternoon I was under the delusion that London was now more or less safe. I'm sorry."
Laura lifted her head to look up at him. "For what?"
"If it weren't for me, you and Emily wouldn't have to worry about St. Juste."
"You don't know that. We don't know for a certainty that he isn't working for the Elsinore League. And in any case Emily and I would be connected to him through Suzanne. We'd have been at Gunter's with her and Colin and Jessica today even if you were still in Spain."
"A point." He put his lips to her hair. "But I suppose it reminded me—"
She leaned in to him. "What?"
His arm slid round her. "I tend to live under the illusion that whatever risks I run don't affect Emily and you."
Laura moved to face him and gripped his arms. "Raoul. You can't think I'd worry—"
He smiled again. "I know full well that you don't."
"I should hope so. Especially given what I've been through. After Trenchard and the Elsinore League, Julien St. Juste doesn't scare me."
His gaze settled on her own. "But you must realize that I worry."
Laura released his arms and took his face between her hands. "My love." Odd that that word should come to her lips now. "You sound as though you're having what Suzanne calls Malcolm's 'Hotspur' moments. You can't seriously tell me that you're wasting your energies—"
"It's one thing for you to run risks on your own. It's another for you to be dragged into them because of me. And you have a right to be concerned for Emily."
For some reason, now was when panic closed her throat. "If you have any illusions that we'd be better off without you—"
"No. Or at least, I manage to be deaf to them. But I worry about what I've exposed you to."
"That's what it means to have people one cares about," Laura said, picking her words with care.
"Which is precisely why I've avoided doing so for most of my life, as much as I could."
"I think you've just avoided letting anyone catch on that you care about them."
"Perhaps." He took one of her hands and dragged it across his mouth. "Don't worry, my darling. I'm too selfish to let such qualms interfere with what we have."
"You're one of the least selfish people I know, Raoul O'Roarke." Which, at the moment, was worrying.
He pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. "I'd never before have said you were deluded, Laura."
"You sent Suzanne to face St. Juste."
"Which rather proves my point. It was an appalling risk."
"She was an agent. Everything she did was going to be a risk. She had to start somewhere. This was in Paris with you nearby. And because St. Juste was loyal to Josephine, it was less of a risk than sending her against the British."
His mouth twisted. "You're good at making excuses for me, sweetheart."
"I'm good at reading you."
"That too. All you say is true. It's what I told myself. But I paced the floor the entire night. Because there was no guarantee St. Juste wouldn't put a knife in her ribs if he caught her."
Laura put up a hand to turn his face towards her. "There's no guarantee for any of us."
"So I've told myself for most of my life. But it occurred to me today—"
She set her hands on his shoulders. "What?"
"That I'd very much prefer not to have Julien St. Juste know what you and Emily mean to me."
Laura's fingers froze on his shoulders. A chill went through her again. And yet, spok
en in a level voice, it was an astonishing declaration. "My dear—"
To her surprise he pulled her into his arms. "For once it's as well you're a respectable widow and I have a wife. There's no reason for St. Juste to guess."
She didn't pause to examine precisely what that meant their relationship would be if he didn't have a wife. "Does St. Juste know what Suzanne means to you?"
"More than I tried to let on in the past, I think. For just this reason."
She pressed her face against his shoulder. "Does he know Malcolm is your son?"
"No." Raoul's arms tightened round her. "At least I hope to God he doesn't."
Laura lifted her head to look up at him. "My dear. I know how one's loved ones can be used against one. Trenchard controlled me that way for years. But if one lives that way, one lets the Trenchards of the world win."
Raoul pressed a kiss to her forehead. "I should have thought—You've lived these fears more than any of us. But you never asked to play this game. I chose it."
"I chose to stay in it." She touched his face. "I chose you."
Colin and Emily looked up almost in unison as Suzanne and Malcolm came into the day nursery where they were eating supper under Blanca and Addison's supervision. "You missed supper," Colin said. "Is something wrong?"
"Just some new information we had to discuss." Malcolm smiled at Colin, then exchanged a look with Addison.
"Is it to do with the man we saw at Gunter's?" Colin asked.
Suzanne drew a breath, aware of Blanca shooting a look at her. She hadn't yet told Blanca about their sighting of Julien St. Juste. "You saw a man at Gunter's, darling?"
"Right before Uncle Raoul said we all had to leave."
"I saw him too," Emily said. "He had yellow hair. Is he dangerous?"
Suzanne bent to kiss Jessica who was eating boiled carrots with great concentration. "He's just someone we were surprised to see in London." She almost said "an old friend," but in the disconcerting eventuality that the children encountered Julien, she didn't want them to consider him a friend.
"So he's not dangerous?" Colin said.
"We're going to make sure he isn't," Malcolm told their son.
"Nothing to worry about with your parents managing things, lad," Addison said. Blanca didn't say anything, but her gaze asked Suzanne myriad questions.
Suzanne sent her companion a look that promised later explanations and smiled at Emily. "Your mother will be up in a bit."
"And Uncle Raoul?" Emily asked.
"And Uncle Raoul," Suzanne said.
She and Malcolm promised to come back after they changed, and went down the passage to their own room. They had a brief window in which they could talk, and she wasn't sure where to begin.
Malcolm pulled the door to, stepped up behind her, and put his arms round her shoulders. Her impulse was to turn round and bury her face in his coat. But they didn't have time for that, and she couldn't afford an emotional breakdown. She put a hand over his, but said, "I'm all right. Silly to react so."
"You have a right to be shaken."
"By a chance encounter with a former fellow spy?"
"By an encounter with a man even Raoul O'Roarke fears. That's enough to make me go cold myself."
Suzanne pulled away from her husband before he could feel the chill running through her and turned to face him. "Julien St. Juste is one of the few men I know who could outwit Raoul. That's enough to make me grow cold at the thought of him. But it's no excuse to be missish."
"I would imagine your feelings are complicated when it comes to St. Juste."
Despite herself, Suzanne's gaze jerked to Malcolm's face. His gaze was at once gentle and ruthlessly neutral. "You spent a great deal of time with him," Malcolm said. "You said you became comrades."
Suzanne nodded. "I suppose you could call it that. We each saved the other's life on that journey. But I can't claim to have really known him." She met her husband's gaze, which offered to talk without demanding, and knew that he was aware of something else in her dealings with Julien St. Juste. "We weren't lovers. Not on the journey with Hortense. Not after—that first night."
His gaze remained steady on her face. "I didn't ask."
"No. You never ask." She searched Malcolm's face. Sometimes his gaze was as open as that of anyone she had ever known. And at others as armored as siege walls. "You have to wonder."
"Do you wonder?" he asked. "About my past?"
She swallowed, mind filled with memories of moments when a look or a touch would send questions racing through her head. The knife cut of her suspicions about Tatiana Kirsanova, which seemed so laughable now. The small bite of seeing him with a woman he'd grown up with, the sort of girl he'd been expected to marry. The questions that had run through her mind only yesterday, talking to Cordy. "Sometimes. But in my case—"
Malcolm leaned against one of the fluted walnut bedposts, arms folded, legs crossed at the ankle. "I hate what you've been through. I'd give anything to be able to go back and protect you. But of all the things you've done, I'd say whom you slept with before you married me has the least to do with me. You weren't married to me. You weren't betraying me."
"No one said it was logical, darling."
"This is no different from Frederick Radley. When you told me about him in Vienna, my only desire was to throttle Radley."
Odd now to think that at that point, early in their marriage, she'd been afraid the revelation that she'd had a lover before their marriage would destroy her husband's image of her. He was a British gentleman, but she constantly overestimated how much he was a prisoner of his upbringing and underestimated the flexibility of his thinking. She could still feel his arms about her that day in Vienna when she'd told him and his lips against her hair. "But my affair with Radley wasn't part of a spy mission. That is, it was, but you didn't know that then." She swallowed. "You didn't know I slept with men to get information." It was by no means the only technique she'd employed as a spy, but it had certainly been part of her arsenal.
"That's not—"
"In many ways I never stopped being a whore."
He crossed to her side in a quick stride and seized her wrists. "Damn it, Mel, I won't have you talking about yourself that way."
"It's a word. It describes what I did."
"I'm familiar enough with self-hatred to recognize it in someone else. And in that sense all agents are whores. Though I never—"
"No," she said. "I didn't think you would. Which rather goes to my point."
He released her wrists. His gaze moved to the watercolor she'd done of a stream at Dunmykel that hung over the chest of drawers, a misty idealized world of greens and blues and grays. A muscle twitched beside his jaw. She thought he wasn't going to answer, but after a long pause, he said, in a low, rough voice, "You were pretending. On our wedding night. That shouldn't bother me more than your other pretenses. But I can't deny that at times it does."
She swallowed. The memory of that night trembled through her nerve-endings. She'd thought a wedding night was the least she owed him. She'd realized, with a shock of surprise, that she wanted him. She'd gone into his arms conscious of the role she was playing. Which was nothing new for her. She was usually playing a role in the bedchamber, one way or another. But that night she had forgot her role, lost track of her masquerade, lost control of her own feelings in a way that could spell death for a spy. She'd wondered, lying with her head pillowed on his chest and his lips against her hair afterwards, if she'd betrayed herself. "It wasn't all pretense," she said. "You can't think it was."
"No? I love you, Suzette. But it's hard for me to be sure I can see anything when it comes to you. At least at that point in our marriage."
She turned her head away. "I deserved that."
"I didn't mean it that way." He put out a hand, then let it fall to his side. "I was being—"
"Honest." She forced her gaze back to meet his own. "I asked for honesty."
"You're very good at what you do," Malcolm said. "I ca
n't but wonder sometimes just how good."
She looked into the gaze she knew so well and had hidden the truth from for so long. "I didn't have to pretend with you. Or if I did, it was only not to let you see—"
"The real you."
"No. Yes, in a way." Her fingers had locked together behind her back. "You'd better ask me what you need to ask."
The gaze he turned to her cut her in two. "I can't—"
"I wasn't a very good whore," she said. "I didn't understand—much of anything. All I could muster was a cheap pretense. But later. On missions. It was part of the job. But there were times I enjoyed it. Slipping into the skin of a fictional character, knowing it was just for that night. There's no other escape quite like it." With Malcolm, lovemaking was never an escape. He took it far too seriously.
"Is that what you found with St. Juste?" Malcolm asked. His voice was ruthlessly controlled, yet it held the tone of one who genuinely wanted to know.
"In a way. The sort of escape one finds in a bottle of rotgut."
Malcolm took a quick step towards her. "Did he hurt you?"
"No. He wasn't inconsiderate. He tied me to the bedposts—"
"What?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake, darling. You've read the Marquis de Sade. At least I assume you have. His books are in Alistair's library."
"And you let him—"
"I wouldn't have let him do it if I hadn't known I could get free in twenty seconds if I wanted to."
"Surely—"
"It wasn't the first time. Malcolm"—Might as well be blunt. Better for him to face it. Better for her not to worry about what she was holding back. "There isn't a lot I haven't done. Besides"—she glanced down, then forced her gaze back to him. She wanted honesty. They needed honesty—"it had a certain piquancy."
He drew a harsh breath.
"Don't look at me like that, Malcolm, it's not something I want you to do. That is"—she hesitated again; odd how one could share someone's bed for five and a half years and not be sure of certain things—"you could if you wanted to, but—"
"Thank you. No."
"That's a relief. It doesn't seem at all like us."
