London Gambit

by Tracy Grant

  Malcolm stared at his father. "Don't tell me you saw this coming."

  "My God, do you imagine I would have stood by if I had? But as soon as I heard I cursed myself for a fool."

  "So did I." Malcolm stared out the windows at the branches of the plane trees in the Berkeley Square garden, thick with leaves. He had forgot how dangerous a wounded lion could be. He and Suzanne had spent the past four days investigating a case that had come down to Carfax's agents trying to break free of his influence. And now that same influence was driving Suzanne and him from Britain. "Not the first time I've underestimated Carfax."

  Raoul watched him for a moment. "If Carfax was determined to intervene between Worsley and Tanner, he'd have found something else if not this. It's up to Worsley and Tanner how they respond. From what I've observed, they both have considerable strength of will."

  Malcolm nodded, though the searing bitterness in David's gaze burned in his memory. "I should start on my letters." That was all one could really do now, hold on to what needed to be done, one step at a time. But at the door, he turned back to his father. "Raoul? Thank you for coming with us."

  Raoul's hand gripped his arm for a moment, steady and warm. "I wouldn't be anywhere else."

  Malcolm went out onto the landing, but at the stairhead he paused for a moment, drinking in the smells of lemon and walnut oil, the curve of the stair wall, the way the girandoles on the wall sconces danced in the candlelight.

  Damn it. As a boy, he hadn't even liked this house. His hand closed hard on the stair rail. Then he went quickly down the stairs to do what needed to be done.

  Simon dropped down on the sofa in the Brook Street library. "Well. This explains a lot."

  David stared at his lover. "Don't tell me you knew?"

  "That Suzanne was a French agent? Not in the least. That Suzanne wasn't quite what she seemed to be? That was obvious from the first. That she had secrets? Which of us doesn't?"

  David clenched his hands at his sides. Rage and disbelief still roiled through him. But Simon's voice was even, contemplative. He might have been analyzing the characters in one of his plays. "You never said anything."

  "What was there to say? I didn't know anything for a certainty. I didn't even have any definite suspicions. I'm not given to speculating about other people's most intimate secrets."

  "Simon." David dropped down on a chair arm, gaze level with his lover's. "She gave information to the French."

  "Yes, you said she was a French agent. I would assume that's what you meant."

  "She sold the French information—"

  "I wouldn't say sold. It doesn't sound as though she was doing it for the money."

  "Information used against us in the war."

  "A war that was never mine."

  Echoes of their quarrel when Bonaparte escaped Elba and David, who had initially opposed war, supported the Government once war had been declared, hung in the air. "Englishmen died because of her."

  "A point. But I'm sure there are Frenchmen who survived because of her."

  "Are you saying it's the same thing?"

  "Rather depends on one's perspective. Suzanne's French, after all. Even granting I should have some bone-deep loyalty to England, shouldn't she have the same loyalty to France?"

  "Damn it, Simon, you always do this. You deliberately take positions even you don't agree with, just to provoke me."

  "I don't—"

  "You like to raise questions. You like to poke and prod at things. But these are our friends."

  Simon slumped back against the sofa cushions and passed a hand over his face. Even in the warm candlelight, his skin looked ashen. "You're right. Not that I don't agree with what I'm saying or that I'm deliberately quarreling. But I'm not thinking about our friends properly. My way of dealing with the news, perhaps."

  "She's Malcolm's wife."

  "Yes." A shadow crossed Simon's face and settled in the depths of his eyes. "This must have been hell for Malcolm."

  "I can scarcely imagine."

  "But he told you he still loves her, didn't he?"

  "How can you—"

  "Thinking back, I'd hazard a guess he discovered the truth round last Christmas. It was obvious something had happened between them then. But they're still together. And things seem easier between them."

  "Malcolm—" David squeezed his eyes shut, recalling his scene with his friend. "It's as though I was talking to a completely different person."

  "It can't be a revelation that Malcolm has always seen the world a bit differently from you."

  "She lied to him. She stole information from him. Everything between them is built on lies."

  "Not everything."

  "You can't possibly be sure of that."

  "You've seen them together. How can you possibly doubt it?"

  David winced. He had a keen image of Suzanne running down the hall of the Rannochs' house in Brussels and flinging her arms round Malcolm, returned from the field the night of Quatre Bras. David's undemonstrative friend had kissed his wife and spilled half the glass of whisky he carried over both of them, heedless of their other friends standing in the hall. David didn't know if he'd ever seen two people so seemingly in love. "Suzanne is obviously brilliant at deception."

  "Some things can't be manufactured."

  David looked at the man with whom he'd shared more than anyone on earth. "You're a playwright and an actor, Simon. You see every day how love and other emotions can be convincingly manufactured on stage."

  "A point. But close up, one can tell the difference."

  "Can you?" David shot a hard look at his lover. "In a way make-believe and deception are your stock in trade just as they are an intelligence agent's."

  Simon leaned forwards, hands between his knees. The mockery was gone from his gaze. "Think, David. The care she shows for Malcolm round his family. Her kindness to the children. The way she nursed the wounded after Waterloo—"

  "Wounded men she helped put there."

  "My God, David, you remember what it was like. Wounded slumped in the streets, blood on the hall tiles, sleepless nights spooning water into their mouths to keep them alive. Suzanne worked harder that anyone."

  "And that excuses that she was a Bonapartist agent?"

  "No, but I think the fact that she was a Bonapartist agent makes her actions all the more remarkable."

  David shook his head, disbelief sharp within him.

  "Could you have done the same for French soldiers?" Simon asked in a soft voice. "Knowing they were fighting your countrymen. Knowing you might be patching them up to go on fighting against your own people?"

  "I don't know." David passed a hand over his hair. "I'd like to think I could. I'm quite sure you could. And I mean that as a compliment."

  Simon gave a faint smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "I'll take it as one."

  "But it doesn't change—" And yet—David saw Suzanne, kneeling beside a Highland private, holding young Henri Rivaux to life by sheer force of will. The bonds that had formed between them in that house in the Rue Ducale in those days had seemed unbreakable.

  "I saw her face when Malcolm left," Simon said. "And her relief when he returned. If all that was play-acting, she's an actress on a level I've never encountered. And I've worked with some of the finest actresses on the stage today."

  "What Malcolm must have gone through—"

  Simon nodded. "Betrayal would hit him particularly hard. Thank God they've found a way to go on together."

  "Thank God?"

  "Would you rather have them separate? Divorce? Live together in icy silence? Shatter their own lives and those of their children?"

  "No, of course not. That is—" David's hand curled into a fist. Difficult to envision a happy solution to any of this.

  "More than five years of deception," Simon said. "It must have been an unbelievable strain on her."

  David stared at his lover. "You sympathize with her."

  "I suppose I identify with her, in a way.
I know what it is to have to live a lie."

  "Don't you dare." David felt anger shoot through him again. "Don't you dare compare our loving each other with—"

  "I'm not. I'm comparing our being compelled to live in deception because we love each other with how Suzanne had to live."

  "Suzanne wasn't compelled to do so."

  "Not at first. Once she fell in love with Malcolm, I don't suppose she had much choice." He watched David for a moment. "Have you thought about what it's going to be like for them now?"

  "Now, what?"

  "Your father knows, David. I can't imagine Malcolm was aware of that or he wouldn't have been so sanguine. I can't imagine he'll feel safe staying in Britain now."

  "It's not as though I would—"

  "Expose Suzanne as a traitor?"

  "I couldn't do that to her. To Malcolm's wife. To Colin and Jessica's mother." He drew a breath. "To the woman we went through Waterloo with."

  For a moment the air was so still he could feel Simon's indrawn breath. "So that means something."

  "Whoever she is, whyever she did what she did then, you're right the memories won't go away."

  "Her politics are probably closer to yours than your father's are."

  "I'm English, Simon. I have to believe that stands for something."

  "You have to believe being an English gentleman stands for something."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Suzanne's not just a spy for a foreign power. She's a revolutionary."

  "I live with a revolutionary."

  "Only in a very theoretical sense. That is, I'm a revolutionary in theory. But it's true I don't want a world run by people like your father. I don't think Suzanne does either. I'm not sure I'd do what she's done to try to change that world. But I can understand why she did what she did."

  David met Simon's gaze again. The first rush of anger had drained from him. And yet, Simon, a few feet from him across Louisa's claret-and-blue library carpet, seemed an incalculable distance away. "I suppose that's the difference between us," he said.

  "Quite," Simon said.

  David started to lift a hand, then let it fall. "I never thought—"

  Simon watched David. They were both standing stock-still, but he looked at David as though his lover were retreating into the distance. "It's a difference that's always been there, David."

  Chapter 42

  Raoul rapped at the door of Laura's bedchamber and strode into the room the moment she answered. It was, Laura realized, the first time he had come into her bedchamber without climbing through the window, slipping in in the middle of the night, or otherwise disguising his visit. They were rather beyond considerations of propriety at this point.

  "Suzanne said she wanted to be alone," she said, turning from the wardrobe. "But I think you should talk to her."

  "Laura." He pushed the door to. "Don't think I don't appreciate the solidarity. On the contrary." He drew a rough breath. "It meant more to me than I can say. But you have to consider—"

  "I have considered." Laura pulled a valise from the bottom of her wardrobe.

  Raoul set his shoulders against the door. "You could—"

  "Pretend to be shocked I'd been in a nest of Bonapartist spies, marry William Cuthbertson and become an officer's wife?" She grabbed her nightdress from behind the pillow and threw it in the valise.

  She saw the recoil in his eyes, but when he spoke his voice was even. "Among other things. You have options."

  She picked up two gowns and a spencer she had laid out on the bed. "I don't care about commitments or vows or the lack of them." She folded the clothes automatically, as she once had schoolroom laundry. "I don't care that you disappear half the time and can't tell me where you are. I'm not leaving you." She put the spencer in the valise on top of the gowns. "My options were severely narrowed one night in Maidstone." She looked at him over the valise, breathing hard. "You have to know that by now."

  This time the flash in his eyes was anything but a recoil. He crossed to her side in two strides and seized her by the shoulders. "You have to know it was the same for me, sweetheart. Perhaps even before that night."

  "Well, then." She looked up into his eyes. "Besides, I promised I'd look after them for you. I can't very well do that if I stay in England." She pulled away towards the door to the night nursery. "I should pack for the children. Suzanne's good at it, but she's scarcely in the most stable state and there are things she's used to me remembering."

  He dragged her back to him and covered her mouth with his own. "I don't deserve you. I just want you to be happy."

  She tangled her fingers in his hair. "Idiot. I am."

  Suzanne paused at the door of her wardrobe, a pomegranate gauze and sarcenet dress in one hand, a coral lace in the other. She wouldn't need as many evening gowns. But she should take at least one, and both of these would travel well and were favorites. She'd worn the pomegranate on Colin's birthday, and the coral lace to the ball they'd given six weeks ago, their first since Malcolm had learned the truth of her past. She could remember him clasping the garnet pendant he'd given her that night round her throat—

  She dropped the gowns on the bed and closed her arms over her chest. She was shaking. She couldn't remember when she'd been so cold inside. She paced across the room, dropped down on her dressing table bench, gripped the edge of the table to keep herself from smashing her fist into the looking glass.

  She jerked at movement in the looking glass.

  "I knocked," Raoul said. "You didn't answer."

  She met his gaze in the looking glass. "Let me guess. Malcolm asked you to make sure I don't make any mad sacrificial gestures. I hope you told him I'm not the self-sacrificial sort."

  "Yes, but even I can't be sure."

  She pressed her fingers against her temples, then spun round on the bench to face him. "I know what I owe to the children. I know what I owe to Malcolm. I'm not going to do anything crazy."

  Raoul crossed the room and dropped down in front of the dressing table. "Querida—"

  "I can handle this." She dragged her hands from her face to prove she could do it and locked them together in her lap. "I've always known I might have to."

  "Knowing isn't the same as confronting the reality." His voice was steady but his gaze held a bone-deep fear that shook her to the core.

  "Isn't confronting hard realities what we've always done?" She put her hands on his shoulders, though she could not have said which of them she was trying to comfort. "It's all right, I won't break. You trained me well."

  Harry leaned against the desk in Malcolm's study, arms folded, gaze stripped of its usual irony. "She's the Raven, isn't she?"

  Malcolm stared at his friend. "My God. How long have you known?"

  "I didn't know anything until just now. Despite speculating that the Raven might be a woman, I didn't even suspect it could be Suzanne until we were in the midst of the Hamlet investigation and looking into the Raven's identity. There was a night at the theatre when it was suddenly obvious something had gone wrong between you and Suzanne. At first, I was merely worried. It was so unlike anything I'd ever seen between the two of you that I couldn't help but wonder had happened."

  Every moment of that night was vividly imprinted on Malcolm's memory. He'd been too overwhelmed by his own feelings to take much note of other people's. Still, he'd noted Harry's conversation that night. "You started talking to me about betrayal. You knew then?"

  "It occurred to me. I was shocked at my own thoughts. But there was a certain logic to the way the pieces fell together."

  "And so you—"

  "If I was right—and half the time I couldn't believe I was—it was for you to decide what to do about it. I can't tell you how relieved I was when things started to seem easier between the two of you."

  Malcolm studied Harry, recalling dozens of moments in the past six months, Harry and Cordelia dining with them, sharing a glass of whisky after an evening out, playing on the hearthrug or in the p
ark with the children. Harry waltzing with Suzanne, handing her a glass of wine, taking Jessica from her arms, putting Drusilla into them. "Did you decide you were mistaken?"

  "I decided whatever had happened, you were a man who knew what was important in life."

  Malcolm drew a breath and felt it cut through him. "Does Cordy know?"

  "Not from me. I tell my wife a lot—more now than I'd have ever thought possible—but these speculations weren't mine to share."

  Malcolm looked into Harry's dark blue eyes, at once veiled and yet more open than he had ever seen them. "Thank you."

  "My dear fellow. I owe you an abject apology. When I think of the times I've blathered on about my concerns about my wife's past infidelities or whether she might grow bored—"

  "You couldn't blather on if you tried, Davenport. And I'm glad you can talk to me about Cordelia."

  Harry gave a twisted smile. "I just wish you could talk to me about Suzanne."

  "I am. Now. It means a great deal."

  "I always knew Suzanne was a brilliant agent. I didn't realize just how good."

  Malcolm understood the appreciation in his friend's voice, though it had taken a while for him to get to that point himself. Still, Davenport had fought on the opposite side for over four years. "It doesn't—"

  "My dear Malcolm. Given my attitude to Uncle Archie's activities, did you expect me to go Crown and country over this? Unlike Archie, Suzanne was working for her own country." Harry was silent for a moment. "It's a dirty game. I went into it out of boredom and desperation. I can't help but rather admire someone who went into it out of conviction."

  "You're remarkable, Davenport."

  "Easier, I think, to look at it from a distance. I'm not married to her." Harry drew a breath, as though debating whether to say more. "That I understand it—even that you understand it—doesn't change the hell this must have been for you."

  Malcolm looked at his friend. Who, when Malcolm had first met him, had claimed not to believe in feelings. Who even now would raise an ironic brow at the idea of emotional display. Yet his keenness of understanding about the feelings of others never failed to amaze Malcolm. "I confess at the beginning, I was rather inclined to see it all from my perspective."