The Paris Affair

by Teresa Grant

  “ ‘Frémont.’ I have no idea who that is. Or what. I shook him awake. He stared at me quite wild-eyed, as though for a moment he wasn’t sure where he was or who I was. Then he came to and apologized profusely, He said he should know better than to fall asleep in a lady’s bed. I asked if anything was the matter, and he assured me it was just the champagne talking. But—”

  “What?” Suzanne asked.

  “He asked if he’d said anything tiresome.” Cordelia’s fingers tightened on her fan. “Perhaps it’s nonsense, but I had the oddest sense he thought he’d betrayed something while he slept.”

  “Did you ask him about Frémont?”

  “No. It seemed better to ignore the whole thing. He continued perfectly charming after that, but he was more guarded than ever.” Cordelia flicked her fan open and looked down at the copy of a Fragonard painting on the silk. A couple in a decorous garden obviously about to indulge in some very indecorous behavior. “I can’t claim Gui and I were confidants. I certainly didn’t confide in him about my life and past. But we were both outsiders in society in one way or another. He because of being an émigré and coming here late, and I because of my own scandals and folly. I think that was part of what drew us together.”

  Suzanne drew a breath, but Harry came up beside them before she could speak. “I’ve been getting the oddest number of sympathetic glances,” he said.

  Cordelia slid her arm through her husband’s own. “Poor darling.” Her voice was light. The undertone was not.

  Harry grinned down at her, mockery tempered by something softer. “It’s amazingly easier to take when one knows the sympathy is quite misplaced.”

  Suzanne touched his arm. “You’re a generous man, Harry.”

  “Don’t let it get about. You’ll ruin my reputation.”

  Dorothée Talleyrand swept up to them and claimed Suzanne. Cordelia watched her friend move off. “Harry—”

  “Mmm?” Harry was studying her face.

  “Do you think that Suzanne—”

  “What?” Harry’s gaze turned sharp.

  Cordelia watched Suzanne, a slender figure in pomegranate gauze over ivory satin, laughing with Dorothée and Lord Granville and the Russian envoy Pozzo di Borgo with just the right blend of charm and flirtation. “We shared so much in Brussels. I’ve confided things to her I haven’t shared with anyone. And yet there are times I feel there are whole sides of her I don’t know at all.”

  Harry’s gaze narrowed as he too looked at Suzanne. “That’s true of most people, I expect. And Suzanne’s had a more difficult life than most of us.”

  “But I’m—”

  “Not everyone is as wonderfully straightforward as you.”

  “Harry.”

  “It’s true. You have a wonderful, dangerous knack for doing what seems right to you and damn the consequences.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Why else would you have run off with George Chase in the teeth of society?”

  Cordelia bit her lip. Talking, even thinking, about George was painful. But she understood why Harry didn’t shy away from mentioning him. Ignoring him would make it worse. “That was because—”

  “You loved Chase, or thought you did, and that came first. It was more important than anything.”

  “Including my marriage.”

  “Well, yes.” Harry returned her gaze without recrimination or any hint of softness. “You weren’t in love with me at the time. And afterwards you didn’t hide away—”

  “No,” she said, the bitterness back in her throat, “I fairly flaunted my damaged reputation.”

  “You have a great knack for being yourself, Cordy. It’s the same knack that had you in Brussels, caring for your bitter fool of a husband when all common sense dictated you should be elsewhere. And that made you jump in to help Suzanne and Malcolm with their investigation, whatever the consequences to your own reputation.”

  “What you’re saying is, I blunder straight into trouble. Suzanne’s much more sensible. But she’s not the sort to pretend simply because of what society thinks.”

  “No,” Harry agreed. “But I think her life has taught her to foresee consequences.”

  Cordelia’s gaze returned to her friend, now accepting a glass of champagne from Pozzo di Borgo with a smile that held just the right flirtatious edge for a beautiful woman who was also a virtuous wife. “I just hate to think—”

  “What?”

  “Of her hiding anything from Malcolm.” Worry bit Cordelia in the throat. Suzanne and Malcolm had been an inspiration to her in Brussels when she took the seemingly impossible step of reconciling with Harry. Perhaps she needed to believe in the solidity of their happiness to believe she and Harry had a chance at making their fragile, wonderful reunion work.

  “Don’t you think we all hide things from the people we love?” Harry said in a soft voice.

  Her fingers tightened on his arm, for she feared he was right. “But—”

  “Malcolm understands his wife. Whatever’s between them, he understands its limitations.”

  Cordelia cast a quick glance up at him. “I hate the thought of limitations.”

  Harry squeezed her fingers. “That’s what makes you you, my darling.” He looked down at her for a moment, his gaze still and neutral. “Did it go all right with Edmond Talleyrand?”

  She drew a breath. Perhaps she had been worrying over Malcolm and Suzanne’s relationship to avoid having to concentrate on her own. “Yes. Edmond was . . . Edmond. But he mentioned Bertrand was Louise Carnot’s lover, which gives Suzanne a new lead.”

  Harry nodded. “And?”

  “I didn’t say ‘and.’ ”

  “No, but it’s in your eyes. Not that you need tell me of course.”

  Cordelia closed her fan and ran her fingers over the silk and ebony. “Edmond’s not—That is, he isn’t the only—”

  “The only one of your former lovers in Paris? I wouldn’t have thought so. A matter of mathematical odds.”

  She looked up at him with a surprised laugh, torn between amusement, exasperation, and the sharp bite of guilt. “Damn you, Harry—”

  “You needn’t tell me who else if you’d rather not.” His voice was level, but he seemed to be choosing his words with a trifle more care than usual. “I’ve no objection to hearing, but there’s no need to drag out tiresome details simply to satisfy some urge of confession.”

  “No, I wouldn’t—But it seems it may have to do with Malcolm and Suzanne’s investigation. And if you hear any gossip—”

  “Who?” Harry asked, in a voice of carefully calibrated disinterest.

  She drew a breath and looked steadily into the eyes of the man she loved. “Gui Laclos.”

  Harry considered for a moment. “Yes, I can see how that could touch on the investigation. I saw you and Suzanne talking to him earlier, didn’t I?”

  “Were you—”

  “I wasn’t spying on you. But it’s difficult for me not to be aware of you. It always has been.”

  She flushed. “Gui came up to me. So I told Suzanne, and then of course she had questions.”

  “I never knew him well, but he strikes me as having more wit than Edmond Talleyrand.”

  “Yes. And he’s a nicer person.” She forced her gaze to stay on Harry’s face. “He wasn’t—I liked him, but it never meant anything—Oh, poison, that makes me sound horrid. It never meant more than a fortnight’s diversion, on either side. I wasn’t looking for more. I didn’t want to feel more. I didn’t think it was possible to feel more.”

  He kept his gaze steady on her face. Resolutely honest and yet barricaded. “What was between us was over. You can’t betray vows that are already broken.”

  “I was the one who’d broken them.”

  “I walked away.” His voice turned rough. It was an admission he hadn’t made before, even to her.

  She touched his arm. “You didn’t—”

  “Think you had the least desire for me to stay? No, that’s true. But i
t’s also true I was afraid to fight for you. Easier to walk away and damn the world to hell than face the messy consequences. And then I left you to raise our daughter alone.”

  She drew a breath that cut through her. “That was because—”

  “Because I didn’t know if I was her father? But having given her my name, I was. I realized that in Brussels. Ignoring Livia is one of the things for which I’ll never forgive myself.”

  She shook her head. “You shouldn’t—”

  “Berate myself now? That applies to you as well, sweetheart. We can only move forwards.” He regarded her for a moment. “For what it’s worth, the few times I sought consolation in the years we were apart, it didn’t mean more than a momentary escape, either.”

  Her chest constricted beneath her corset laces. Not that she’d thought Harry had been celibate in the years they’d been apart. But she didn’t like thinking of him with another woman. Which was absurd. She could lay no claim to him in those years. “I never thought—”

  “That I was chastely pining? That would be a bit too clean and romantic.”

  Which perhaps was why he had told her. Not to punish her, but to even out the field between them.

  “It’s now that matters,” he said. He slid his hand down her arm to grip her own and drew her onto the dance floor.

  She stepped into his arms. She knew he was right. Save that it wasn’t just now that mattered. She needed to be confident of the future.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Laclos was set up.” Malcolm turned up the Argand lamp in the privacy of the bedchamber he and Suzanne shared. His fingers shook. “Damnation.”

  Suzanne touched his arm. “Darling—”

  “Don’t, Suzette.” He jerked away from her touch. The lamp hissed. He turned it up again. “Don’t tell me it’s not my fault or I couldn’t have known. I bloody well should have seen it.”

  He felt her gaze on him. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Talleyrand says Bertrand wasn’t working for the French.” His fingers curled inwards. “As inclined as I am to take everything Talleyrand says with numerous grains of salt, I don’t know why he’d lie about this.” Bertrand Laclos’s face shot into his memory, bent over books at Oxford, on the sidelines in a Mayfair ballroom. Dark, serious eyes, an unexpectedly infectious grin. “I fell for some bastard’s deception. I fell right into the trap they laid for me, and the cost of my idiocy was the life of a man who was running incalculable risks for my own side.”

  “People die,” Suzanne said, her voice quiet and steady. “Because of things we do. Because of things we don’t do. People on our side, people on the opposing side. Sides. A death is a death. And we have no choice but to live with them on our conscience. Or we’d go mad.”

  He swung his gaze to her face. Her sea green eyes were haunted and yet unusually hard, like Perthshire agate. “It has to matter. If it ever stops mattering I won’t be able to live with myself.”

  “I know, dearest. That’s what makes you you.”

  He strode across the room. The watered-silk walls seemed damnably close. “If I’d thought to question—”

  “I know. It’s rather an insult to one’s intelligence.”

  “What?”

  “Falling for a deception.”

  “That’s not—” He spun towards her and gave a rueful grin. “Oh, all right. That’s part of it. I like to think I’m above being deceived.”

  “We none of us are, darling. In the right circumstances.”

  Malcolm struggled out of his coat and tossed it over a gilded chairback. “Whoever was behind the deception knew Bertrand Laclos was a British agent. Knew his methods of communication. Knew the codes to use.”

  “Rupert Caruthers would have known all that.” Suzanne struck a flint to the tapers on her dressing table. “Are you sure he and Laclos remained the greatest of friends?”

  Malcolm frowned, seeing the anger on Rupert’s face when he talked about Bertrand Laclos’s death. “There’s no reason to think otherwise.”

  “Rupert married Bertrand’s cousin after Laclos’s death. Could they have been rivals? Or could Bertrand have opposed the match?”

  “The way you described your conversation with Gabrielle, it sounds more as though Rupert married Gabrielle because he took pity on her.”

  Suzanne undid the clasp on her necklace and stared at the pearls and diamonds as they glowed and sparkled in the candlelight. “Or because he felt guilty?”

  “Possibly.” Malcolm unwound the folds of his cravat. “So you’re suggesting Rupert and Bertrand had some sort of falling-out and Rupert chose this method to get rid of him?”

  “I’m only suggesting that it’s possible.” Suzanne set the necklace in its velvet box. “Lord Caruthers would have been ideally positioned to put the plan into place.”

  Malcolm dropped his cravat on top of the coat. “Whoever was behind it planned to use me.”

  “Because they knew your intelligence would be believed without question.”

  He stared at the starched white linen folds of the cravat, pristine when Addison had handed it to him, now creased and stained. “Quite.”

  “And they did their job well.”

  Malcolm grimaced. “Gabrielle’s brother Gui became heir to the title with Bertrand Laclos’s death, as Étienne had already died in the failed Royalist plot.”

  “I met Gui Laclos tonight. He came up to Cordy and me. It seems he and Cordy were once rather close.”

  Malcolm stared at his wife. He was very fond of Cordelia and he wasn’t a prude—or so he kept telling himself—but the reality of Cordelia’s past still brought him up short. “Poor Davenport.”

  “I don’t think it was very serious. But Cordelia seems to have been fond of him. And he of her. Cordy said he was an outsider, like her, because he came to England so late in his growing up and had been separated from his family for so long. He seems to have felt a great deal of guilt at having survived when both his cousins had lost their lives.”

  Malcolm tugged at his waistcoat buttons. “Understandable.”

  “But apparently it was more than that.” Suzanne unfastened one of the diamond earrings he had given her for her birthday last year and held it swinging from her fingertips. “Cordelia said Gui Laclos had a nightmare one night and called out, ‘Frémont.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No.” Malcolm shrugged out of the waistcoat. “Cordelia didn’t know what it meant?”

  “No. Only that when Gui woke he seemed afraid he’d betrayed himself somehow in his sleep.”

  “Interesting.” Malcolm perched on the chair arm and started on his shirt cuffs. “I’ve never known Gui well. We ran in different crowds.”

  Suzanne removed the second earring. “Gabrielle said her brother has a weakness for gambling.”

  “So rumor has it. I’ve never been one to haunt gaming hells.”

  “Except in the line of duty.” Suzanne’s mouth curved in a smile.

  “Quite.”

  Suzanne began to pull the pins from her hair. “Perhaps he was indulging himself and making up for lost time all those years living in Provence.” She twisted a hairpin between her fingers. “Or perhaps he was trying to distract himself from whatever he felt guilty about.”

  “Perhaps.” Malcolm frowned at his shirt cuff. He’d got a spot of red wine on it at some point in the evening. “Rupert dismissed the idea that Gui might have tried to get rid of Bertrand. But then Gui is Rupert’s brother-in-law, and Rupert’s the sort who wants to think the best about everyone.” He pulled the shirt over his head. There was more he had to say, though he was oddly unsure how to put it into words. “Talleyrand revealed more than that Bertrand Laclos was framed. Apparently Rivère was telling the truth, at least in part. It looks as though Tania did have a child.”

  “Oh, Malcolm.” His wife’s voice was warm with a sympathy that threatened to undo him.

  He moved to the bed and wrapped himself in his dressing gown while he told her, as matter-of-
factly as possible, about his conversations with Annina and Talleyrand.

  “So it sounds as though Tatiana became pregnant in late 1806 or early 1807,” Suzanne said.

  “Yes.” He tightened the belt on the dressing gown. His fingers were shaking. Damnable not to be in more control. “I just can’t understand—”

  “Why she didn’t tell you?”

  “Why she didn’t at least leave a message for me.” The burgundy silk slipped through his fingers. He tugged at it and heard a stitch give way.

  “She wouldn’t have been expecting to die, Malcolm.” Suzanne hesitated, and he knew she was thinking of the letters he’d written to her and Colin in case he didn’t survive their various adventures. The letters that were still in his dispatch box. He never knew when they might be necessary. “Not everyone plans for contingencies as carefully as you do, darling. And she wasn’t going into a battle as you were at Waterloo.”

  “She was—”

  “Your sister. I know.” Suzanne crossed the room, her half-unpinned hair falling over one shoulder, and dropped down on the bed. “It sounds as though she was concerned for her child’s safety. God knows I can understand that.”

  Malcolm sat beside his wife. He saw Colin, curled in his bed when he and Suzanne had looked in on him a quarter hour before. Relaxed in sleep, one arm curled round his stuffed bear, the other flung up beside his head. So content. So vulnerable. “That’s just the point. I would have—”

  “Protected Tatiana’s child? She may have been trying to protect you as well.” Suzanne touched his back, her fingers warm through the silk of his dressing gown.

  “She made Talleyrand swear to keep his knowledge of the child from me in particular.” That revelation still hammered him, a blow from which he’d never recover.

  “I don’t think it means she didn’t love you or trust you, darling. I think it means quite the opposite.”

  Myriad fears sliced into his brain. “If she thought the child represented a danger—”

  Suzanne hesitated a moment. “If her affair with Napoleon began earlier than we thought—”

  “Quite. But Talleyrand’s right. Even that wouldn’t have seemingly needed to be so secret at the time. But if the father was someone less exalted—” He shook his head.