Teresa Grant - [Charles & Melanie Fraser 01]

by Vienna Waltz

  “Your confidence may be misplaced.”

  “I doubt it. When you let me down it’s due to your ideas, not your abilities.” Castlereagh walked up to Malcolm and looked him directly in the eye. “I needn’t remind you what a dangerous pass we are at, need I? Tsar Alexander has unilaterally handed Saxony over to Prussia and wants to gobble up Poland, the German states can’t agree among themselves, no one can agree about the Italian situation. Metternich and Tsar Alexander have seemed ready to come to blows on more than one occasion. And not always about their women. Talleyrand’s doing his best to turn France back into a country powerful enough to cause problems for Britain. And if we aren’t careful, Tsar Alexander could be more dangerous than Bonaparte ever was. We’re one wrong decision away from plunging the Continent back into war. Any incident would be like putting a match to a powder keg. The truth behind Princess Tatiana’s death could turn into just such an incident if we don’t take appropriate measures. Besides, she was ours. We can’t let her death go unanswered. You should understand that better than anyone.”

  Malcolm scraped a hand through his hair. “I’ll learn what I can. I make you no guarantees.”

  Castlereagh gave a dry smile. “You won’t let the matter rest until you’ve learned the truth. I may not have been in Spain with you, but I know what you’re like when solving a problem.”

  Malcolm tossed off the last of his brandy. “There seems little more to be said. If you’ll excuse us, sir? It’s been an exceedingly long day.”

  He took two candles in silver holders from a side table, lit them from the burning taper, and handed one to Suzanne. They went downstairs to their bedchamber in silence. Malcolm set his candle on the chest of drawers. Suzanne eased open the door to the tiny adjoining dressing room. Her candle flickered over the cradle where their seventeen-month-old son, Colin, slept. His eyes were shut, one small fist curled beside his tousled dark hair, the other tucked beneath the blankets. In the shadows beyond, her maid, Blanca, slept on a narrow bed, nearby should Colin wake.

  Suzanne pulled the door to and set her own candle on the dressing table. “Malcolm.”

  He had washed his bloodstained hands in the basin on the dressing table and was drying them with a towel. He looked up at her, his gaze black and questioning. A bruise was rising on his cheekbone from the fight in the alley. The events of the evening must have left emotional bruises that went deeper. Her throat thickened with all the words that could not be spoken.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Finding her like that must have been brutal.”

  A muscle tightened along his jaw. “Yes.” He glanced away for a moment, drew a harsh breath, then began to undo his frayed shirt cuffs, suppressed violence in the tugs of his fingers. “Though it’s hardly the worst sight I’ve seen. I suppose I should be grateful what I witnessed in Spain didn’t completely numb me to brutality.” His gaze shifted over her. “Do you need to bandage your hands?”

  “I’ll be fine. Only minor scrapes.” She picked up the ewer, splashed water over her hands, and scrubbed them with rosewater soap, staring at the pinkish brown water in the basin. Her blood and Malcolm’s and very likely Princess Tatiana’s as well. “I can help you.” The words came out quickly, before she could consider a dozen other ways of framing the suggestion.

  She turned to look at her husband. He’d pulled his shirt off and was wrapping himself in a wine-colored dressing gown. His fingers stilled on the braid-edged silk. “Suzanne—”

  “I’ve helped you in the past.”

  “On several occasions I’d have been lost without you. But—”

  “You can’t claim that this will be more dangerous than what we went through in Spain.”

  “My God, wasn’t tonight danger enough for you?”

  “Tonight proves that if people are after you, I’ll be in danger in any case. I’ll be better able to protect myself if I know what’s going on.”

  He grimaced. “To think I thought Vienna would be a safe assignment.”

  “And I can be of more help here than I was in Spain. If you want to get at the truth of what’s going on in Vienna’s salons, you’ll have to get a number of ladies to reveal their secrets. They’re more likely to confide in me.”

  He regarded her in silence for a long interval. Then he stepped forward, hesitated a moment, and as though yielding to a compulsion, brushed his fingers against her cheek. “You’re an extraordinarily generous woman. After tonight, your help is the last thing I have the right to ask for.”

  She caught his hand and drew it away from her face, her fingers gripping his own. “Malcolm, there are a great many things we don’t know about each other. But whatever I may have blurted out in the moment, I can’t believe you killed Princess Tatiana.”

  His fingers clenched round her own, then went still. “You were asking the obvious question. It’s what I’d have asked of you in the same circumstances.” For a moment she saw remembered horror smash through his eyes. The brutal shock of finding Princess Tatiana dead, the stark reality that she was gone. He released her hand. “You have the instincts of an investigator.”

  “Well then. I’d rather be in the midst of the investigation helping you than on the sidelines imagining things.” About the dangers he was in. About Princess Tatiana and how deeply her death had shaken him and what she had been to him in life.

  A twisted smile played about his lips, though his eyes were dark and raw. “I undoubtedly don’t deserve you. But I can’t deny this will be easier with your help.”

  She released a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. “You never fail to surprise me, darling. Thank you.”

  He shook his head. “You’re not the one who should be saying thank you.”

  A dozen questions trembled on her lips. She bit them back, because she had no right to be that sort of wife. And perhaps because she was afraid of the answers. Instead she turned, putting her back to him. “Can you undo my gown? I don’t want to wake Blanca.”

  His fingers shook slightly as he unfastened the tapes and pins that held her gown together, but his touch was as gentle as ever. The brush of his hands sent a current through her as it had from their wedding night, unexpected that first night, now familiar but no less strong. It was scarcely the first time he’d helped her undress, though usually it was the prelude to something they couldn’t indulge in tonight. Something he surely wouldn’t want to indulge in, though for a moment she knew an impulse to fling herself into his arms and blot out the events of the evening.

  “Did Tatiana really send you a note?” he asked as he tugged the last tape loose.

  An effective antidote to amorous impulse. She turned round, the tattered gauze and satin of her gown slipping down to her waist. “Asking me to call at three in the morning.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  She hesitated. Easy enough to claim she had lost the note, and deception had become a protective instinct with her. But any evidence might be of help in the investigation. She reached into her corset. She had tucked the note there when she stripped off her gloves during their escape over the roofs.

  Malcolm took the much-creased note and stared at it, his face carefully blanked (a trick he only employed, she had learned, when he was being very careful not to reveal anything).

  “Is it her handwriting?” Suzanne asked.

  “I can’t swear to it, but I think so.” He folded the note and put it in his dressing-gown pocket. “My apologies. I don’t know why Tatiana summoned you, but I’m sorry you were pulled into the middle of this.”

  Suzanne removed the brooch from the bodice of her gown and placed it carefully on her dressing table. “As things played out, I’m rather glad I was there.”

  “It was certainly very fortunate for me.”

  She stepped out of her gown and put it in the laundry basket beside the dressing table for Blanca to see what she could salvage. “We never did get our story straight.”

  “No. You received Tatiana’s note at the opera?”
>
  She was rather surprised he remembered where she was supposed to have been this evening. “From a footman in the midst of the third act.”

  “Who was with you at the opera?”

  “Fitz and Eithne and Aline.” She started on the laces that ran down the front of her corset.

  “None of them should make too much trouble.” Lord Fitzwilliam Vaughn, one of Malcolm’s fellow attachés, and his wife, Eithne, were close friends. Malcolm’s cousin Aline was visiting them from England and fiercely loyal to Malcolm. “What did you tell them about the note?”

  “That Colin had been fussing earlier, and Blanca had sent word he was safely asleep. We all went on to Fanny von Arnstein’s after the opera, but Eithne had a headache and Aline was tired, so Fitz took them home soon after we arrived. I said Tommy Belmont would escort me back to the Minoritenplatz later.”

  “So we can say I returned from Pressburg and went to Baroness Arnstein’s because I knew you’d be there,” Malcolm said in a quick, expressionless voice, his gaze armored as though to staunch a welling of shock and pain. “With the press of guests, her footmen will never be able to say for certain if I was there or not. Tatiana’s note was delivered to me there. You insisted on accompanying me to call on Tatiana, as you explained to the tsar and Metternich. We came into the Palm Palace through the side entrance just before three to find Tatiana murdered.”

  “That seems to account for everything.” She slipped the unlaced corset from her shoulders and added it to the pile of clothing. “Where did you receive Princess Tatiana’s note?”

  “She sent it after me.”

  “She knew where to find you?”

  He nodded.

  While his wife hadn’t had the least idea where he was. Of course fellow agents were in many ways more intimate than married couples. Suzanne glanced down at her chemise. Her nightdress was across the room, where Blanca would have left it tucked beneath her pillow. Why on earth should she suddenly feel awkward being naked in front of her husband?

  She pulled her chemise over her head, tugging a little too hard. She heard a stitch give way. By the time she emerged from the folds of linen, Malcolm had crossed to the bed to retrieve her nightdress. She undid the string on her drawers with deliberate unconcern, stepped out of them, and took the nightdress from her husband. She could feel his gaze on her, but she couldn’t have said what he was thinking or feeling.

  She dropped the folds of lawn over her head and did up the ties at the neck. The night air cut through the thin fabric. Or perhaps that was reality sinking in. Malcolm wasn’t the only one feeling the cold shock of the night’s events.

  She sat at the dressing table, removed her pearl earrings and necklace, and began to pull from her hair the pins she hadn’t lost in their escape over the roofs. Malcolm draped her dressing gown over her shoulders, then retreated to perch on the edge of the bed.

  “Tell me about Princess Tatiana,” she said.

  She heard him draw a breath. She met his gaze in the looking glass. The barriers were up in his eyes as though what he felt was too raw even to contemplate himself, let alone to share with his wife.

  “Darling, I’m sorry,” she said, spinning round to look at him directly. “You needn’t—”

  “No, you’re right,” he said in the crisp voice he’d use to outline a policy option to the foreign secretary. “You know next to nothing about her background, and you’ll need to if you’re to help me investigate.” He braced his hands on the bed behind him. “Tatiana was the daughter of a minor prince from northern Russia. She came to St. Petersburg at eighteen and married Prince Kirsanov, who was four decades her senior and from a considerably wealthier and more powerful family. She became a fashionable St. Petersburg hostess. Kirsanov died when they had scarcely been married two years. The bulk of his fortune went to his son from a prior marriage, but he left Tatiana enough to set up her own household. She took to spending much of her time in Paris.”

  Suzanne dropped a handful of hairpins into their porcelain box. If control was what he needed, she could match him. “Did her stepson resent her? Were there other stepchildren?”

  “Several, I believe, though Tatiana didn’t talk about the family much. Are you suggesting they could have been behind her death?”

  “Family often turn out to have the strongest motives when it comes to murder.”

  “Very true,” Malcolm agreed, his voice a model of cool dispassion, “but I don’t think Tatiana saw herself as much a part of the Kirsanov family. She even preferred her girlhood style of Princess Tatiana to calling herself Princess Kirsanova. The Kirsanov children had most of the family fortune and seem to have cheerfully ignored her. None of them is in Vienna.”

  Suzanne pulled a silver comb through her tangled hair and forced herself to view Princess Tatiana simply as the subject of an investigation. “Was she a Bonapartist or a Royalist when she lived in Paris?”

  “Tatiana was a Tatiana-ist. She had friends among Bonaparte’s court and friends among the Royalists.”

  “She was dealing in information then?”

  Malcolm nodded. “She was an agent for Talleyrand.”

  Suzanne twisted her head round to stare at her husband. “Princess Tatiana worked for the French foreign minister?”

  “Off and on for a number of years. Talleyrand’s always had excellent sources of information, and Tatiana was connected to powerful people in a number of countries.”

  “But you said she worked for the British in Spain.”

  Malcolm leaned back on the bed, resting his weight on his hands. “It was Talleyrand who sent her to us.”

  “Talleyrand sent an agent to work with the British when they were at war with France?”

  “He’d quarreled with Napoleon and resigned as foreign minister. He was still advising Napoleon, but he was afraid Napoleon had overreached himself. Sending Tatiana to us was a sort of peace offering.”

  “He was talking to you behind Napoleon’s back.”

  “And to the Austrians and the Russians as well, I think. Survival tactics.”

  “Some would call it treason.”

  “If he’d got caught. Talleyrand’s rather good at not getting caught.”

  “Was Princess Tatiana working for Talleyrand in Vienna?”

  “I think she brought him information occasionally. But for all Talleyrand’s efforts, France isn’t one of the major power brokers at the Congress. Tatiana thought we could offer her more in terms of money and power.”

  Suzanne tugged at the comb. The wind had wreaked havoc on her hair during their escape over the roofs. She picked at a snarl that had once been a ringlet, but a knot of dark hair still came away with the comb. “Her affair with Prince Metternich was some time ago, wasn’t it? The gossip isn’t very specific.”

  “When he was in Paris for Marie-Louise’s marriage to Bonaparte,” Malcolm said. If Tatiana’s affair with the other man bothered him, he gave no sign of it.

  Napoleon Bonaparte’s marriage to Austrian Archduchess Marie-Louise had taken place only four years ago, yet that had been a different world, in which Napoleon had ruled a vast empire and Bonapartist France and imperial Austria had been allies. Hard sometimes to remember that Austrian Emperor Francis, host of this Congress to divide up the remnants of Napoleon’s empire, was also the father of Napoleon’s young second wife, Marie-Louise, and the grandfather of their small son. These days political alliances broke up as quickly as love affairs.

  Suzanne dragged the comb through her side curls. Her eyeblacking had smeared beneath her eyes. Or perhaps that was the strain of the evening already showing up. “And when Metternich and Princess Tatiana saw each other again in Vienna at the Congress—?”

  “At the moment, Metternich has eyes for no one but the Duchess of Sagan.” Metternich’s obsession with the beautiful duchess was the talk of Vienna. She had recently broken off their love affair, but Metternich plainly remained besotted. “But it’s obvious he’s still very fond of Tatiana. As he is of Catherin
e Bagration.”

  Princess Catherine Bagration, the Duchess of Sagan, and Princess Tatiana Kirsanova. The three beauties who resided in the Palm Palace, all three linked to both Metternich and Tsar Alexander. “Given the number of women in Vienna,” Suzanne said, “one would think Metternich and the tsar could find inamoratas who hadn’t shared the other’s bed.”

  In the looking glass, she saw Malcolm’s mouth tighten. “I rather suspect that’s part of the attraction. Metternich and Alexander compete in everything, whether it’s women or who will draw the borders of Poland.”

  Suzanne set down her comb. “Was Princess Tatiana involved with the tsar before they came to Vienna?”

  “Their affair began when Alexander was in Paris last spring at the time of Napoleon’s abdication. Though there may have been something between them in Russia years ago.”

  Malcolm spoke in the same cool tones he had used to describe Princess Tatiana’s affair with Metternich. That seemed to be what was enabling him to get through from moment to moment. Suzanne watched him in the glass for a moment, then blew out her candle, moved to the bed, and climbed beneath the coverlet. “Did Princess Tatiana have enemies?”

  “Everyone at the Congress has enemies.” Malcolm shrugged out of his dressing gown and slid under the covers beside her. Though they were talking about Princess Tatiana, something had eased between them. This, she had learned early in their marriage, was the place they could communicate best, putting their heads together over a shared problem. This and sometimes when they reached for each other in their darkened bed, where words weren’t necessary at all.

  “Other former lovers?” Suzanne was pleased with how cool she managed to keep her voice.

  “A great many, I suspect. But I hadn’t heard of any being particularly jealous.”

  “She never mentioned to you that she was afraid?”

  He shook his head, though in the light of the single candle she caught the flash of anger in his eyes. Berating himself for not having seen the danger to the princess coming. “Tatiana was one of the least fearful people I’ve ever encountered. She had that in common with you.”