Teresa Grant - [Charles & Melanie Fraser 01]

by Vienna Waltz

  She picked up the shaving kit to move it to its place atop the chest of drawers so she had room to take off her bonnet and tidy her hair. But as she moved to the dressing table, carrying the shaving kit and the yellow block and the sheet music, she lost her one-handed grip on the polished walnut of the kit. It tumbled to her feet. The brass clasp came open, scattering shaving brush, soap, four razors, strop, and silver comb and mirror over the carpet. She knelt down to gather up the contents, wondering if she could train Colin to put his things away before he became too accustomed to having servants.

  As she tucked the silver-handled razors back into their compartment, she noticed something shiny caught against the hinges of the box. A gold chain. Odd for a piece of her jewelry to end up there. Normally she’d never invade the sanctity of Malcolm’s shaving things. She disentangled the chain and saw that there was a larger piece of gold attached to it, now dangling over the side of the box. She held the chain up to the light from the windows.

  Her breath froze in her throat. It was an oval locket of antique gold on a slender chain, the metal mellowed with age. An A was engraved on one side in a curling script. She turned the locket over and saw a P in the same script. She pressed the catch on the side of the locket, and the case snapped open to reveal a lock of blond hair beneath the glass.

  She closed the locket and stared at it for a long moment, her senses refusing to make sense of what was irrefutable. Malcolm had had Princess Tatiana’s locket (for surely it strained the bounds of belief to think the locket could belong to someone else) in his possession. Which meant he must have taken it from round her throat the night she was killed. As to why—

  The door swung open. “Suzanne—”

  Malcolm’s voice broke off. Suzanne looked up, the locket clutched in her hand, and met her husband’s gaze.

  For a moment his eyes held the horror of worst fears come true. Then his face went shuttered.

  “I’m sorry.” Suzanne got to her feet, her voice taut as a bowstring to her own ears. “I was moving your shaving kit, and I dropped it, and it fell open. Under normal circumstances, I’d never ask about your private possessions. But given that I’m your partner in the investigation—Malcolm, why did you take Princess Tatiana’s locket?”

  For a long moment he said nothing, and she feared he would deny her an answer altogether. “I should have known,” he said at last in a low, rough voice that held a trace of desperate amusement. “What hope do I ever have of keeping anything from you? I should have told you from the first. But it was never my secret to share.”

  “I already suspected you were lovers,” Suzanne said quickly, compelled to put it into words herself before he could deliver the worst blow. “I was almost sure of it when I saw how her death affected you. That’s not—”

  “No,” he said with sudden force. He crossed the room, sending the shaving brush and comb skittering across the carpet, and grasped her by the shoulders. “Sweetheart, it’s not like that at all. Tatiana—”

  The words seemed to catch in his throat. He looked down into her eyes, his own dark with conflicting loyalties. At last he drew a harsh breath, as though releasing an age-old burden. “Tatiana was my sister.”

  26

  Suzanne stared up at her husband. She had been so armored against the words she expected to hear from him that for a moment she simply couldn’t comprehend what he had actually said. “Your sister?” she repeated.

  “Half sister, to be precise.”

  She took a step back and pressed her hand over her eyes. “Good God, this is a scene out of The Marriage of Figaro.”

  “Except that I’ve known who Tatiana was since I was twelve.”

  Malcolm spoke little about his family, but in almost two years of marriage Suzanne had learned the general outlines, many of them from Malcolm’s soldier brother. In England and Scotland the previous spring and summer, she had met his father and his sixteen-year-old sister, the only other surviving members of his immediate family. His mother had died when Malcolm was nineteen. The night he proposed, Malcolm had told her that his parents’ marriage had given him a poor impression of the institution.

  “Your father had a child out of wedlock—”

  “No.” He bent down and picked up the silver comb. “My mother did.”

  The portrait of Lady Arabella Rannoch that hung in the Rannochs’ Scottish country house shot into Suzanne’s memory. A slender woman with a delicate, sharply boned face, thick fair hair, and restless, discontented eyes that blazed out of the canvas, as though seeking something she knew would always be denied her. “Your poor mother.”

  “You never met her.”

  “I can imagine the pain of giving up a child.” Suzanne’s hand went to her stomach as she recalled the feel of Colin tucked inside her. She saw Wilhelmine of Sagan’s anguished expression when she told the story of giving up little Vava. “Tatiana was older than you?”

  “Four years.”

  “So your mother was—”

  “Eighteen when she was born. Seventeen when she was conceived.” Malcolm stared at the silver comb clutched in his hand for a moment. “I was twelve when I first met Tania. When I first had the least idea she existed.” He took a turn about the room, then crouched down and began to return the rest of the fallen objects to the shaving box with precise, controlled gestures. “It was the autumn of 1799. We were at war with France. My mother came to Harrow unexpectedly and took me out of school.” He gave a bleak smile. “I hadn’t seen her in two months. She was like that. Gone for weeks on end, and then she’d suddenly sweep one off and make one feel one was the center of the world.”

  Suzanne’s throat tightened. For all she had been through, in some ways her childhood had been easier than his. “Darling—”

  “She took me to the coast. She’d hired smugglers to ferry us to France when they went to pick up a load of brandy and champagne. I still remember her sitting among the barrels in a violet-striped gown and a cloak lined in white satin. It was on the boat that she told me the story.”

  He snapped the box closed with a rattle of the brass hinges, picked up the yellow block and the sheet of music, then got to his feet and returned them to the chest of drawers. “When she was seventeen, her father took her to the Continent. He was consulting with scholars, but of course she was thrilled by the delights of society.”

  Suzanne had only met Malcolm’s ducal grandfather once. He had bowed over her hand, murmured that his grandson was a fortunate man, and then given her a sharper second look when she capped his quotation from Measure for Measure with one of her own. The duke was a reclusive scholar, kindly but detached. More so, Malcolm’s aunt had told her, after the death of his wife, when his three daughters were still young. “I don’t expect he gave her much supervision.”

  “No. And the governess they’d brought along as a chaperone was no match for my mother’s determination.” Malcolm leaned against the chest of drawers. “Despite all her liaisons, I don’t think I ever saw my mother really in love in all the years of my growing up. But from the way she told the story, I think she did love this man.”

  Suzanne moved to the chest of drawers. “Who?”

  “She didn’t tell me. She made me promise never to ask and never to try to discover the truth on my own. My mother feared the revelation of the truth of Tatiana’s parentage as she feared few things.”

  For a moment, his gaze held a weight of loss and unanswered questions. Suzanne took his hand. In two years of trying to sort out her feelings for Malcolm and struggling with her own deceptions, she had never properly seen him as a man who had left boyhood behind not so very long ago. She had failed to grasp that at times he was as much in need of comfort as she was herself.

  He looked into her eyes and gave a quick smile. “The smugglers let us off on the coast near Dieppe. A coach was waiting for us. Mama was nothing if not resourceful. We went to a girls’ school near Amiens. Tatiana had been moved there when she was eleven.”

  “Where was she
before that?”

  “Another school.” Malcolm’s mouth tightened in an angry line. “No one ever told me the full story, but from the bits I’ve heard, I think the drawing master forced himself on her.”

  Suzanne made a strangled sound and tightened her grip on his hand, her own memories sharp with cutting images.

  Malcolm drew a breath that scraped against her skin. “The people at this new school seemed kind. My mother and I were shown into a sitting room. Tania—” He shook his head. “She wasn’t called Tatiana then. Her name was Pierette. I still remember when she first came into the room, eyes defiant. My mother’s eyes.”

  “Your mother had seen her during her childhood?”

  “Every year or so. It had obviously grown more difficult with the war with France. She said she wanted Pierette and me to know each other, because one could never tell what the future might hold. We devised a code together that first day. We used it for years to send letters.”

  He turned toward her, still holding her hand. “At sixteen Pierette was growing old for school. She wore a muslin frock with a green sash and kept staring at my mother’s silk gown and pearls. She was restless to spread her wings.”

  “So she ran away?”

  “Not precisely.” Malcolm drew her over to the armchair and pulled her down beside him. “Talleyrand was a family friend. My grandfather had known him before the Revolution. We saw a great deal of him when he was in exile in England during the Terror. What I didn’t know, as a boy of five, when I first met Prince Talleyrand, was that my grandfather had enlisted Talleyrand’s aid in arranging for my mother to go abroad and have her baby in secret and in finding a place for the child afterward. Except for his years in exile, Talleyrand had kept an eye on Pierette from the moment of her birth. Even in exile, he helped when she had to move schools.”

  “And then he recruited her.”

  “Yes.” Malcolm stared down at their linked hands. “Or rather Pierette offered her services to him. Easier to pass her off as foreign than as a Frenchwoman. He crafted her identity as Princess Tatiana, daughter of Prince and Princess Sarasov, and arranged her marriage to Prince Kirsanov. The identity he created for her worked very well until Catherine Bagration’s inquiries.”

  “And she could spy for Talleyrand in the Russian court.”

  “Bonaparte and the tsar teetered between enemies and allies in those days. As Tania told it she was very useful, and even allowing for her exaggeration, I suspect she was. My mother was furious at first—I remember her hurling a vase against the wall and dashing off an angry letter to Talleyrand. Then she went to meet him in secret on the French coast. When she came back, she told me she could understand a woman’s need to find something to do with her life.”

  “You saw Tatiana in those years?”

  “Not while she was in Russia. For several years we only wrote. Then Kirsanov died, and Talleyrand decided Tania could be more useful to him in Paris. In early 1807 I went secretly to Paris to tell her of our mother’s death.”

  Suzanne touched her husband’s arm. He pulled her tight against him and held her in silence for a long moment. “We could look at each other and see our mother. That meant a great deal.”

  “She was a French agent,” Suzanne said, against his cravat.

  “And within a year I was in the Peninsula, theoretically an attaché and actually a British agent. But by then Talleyrand was out of power and exploring alliances with Napoleon’s enemies. He sent Tatiana to work with us in the Peninsula as a sort of peace offering.”

  “And so you became allies.”

  “We worked together closely for over a year.” He paused, as though caught in a web of memories. “She returned to Paris shortly after I met you.”

  A grim note sounded in his voice on this last, but he drew her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips against her palm.

  Suzanne looked down at the locket, which she still held in her free hand. “The locket was a gift from your mother?”

  He nodded. “The A engraved on it is for our mother, the P for Pierette. The lock of hair inside is our mother’s.” He took the locket from her and held it to the light, the chain twisted round his fingers. “I’d put it in my pocket seconds before you came into the room the night of the murder. The old instinct to protect my family.”

  “And a keepsake of your sister.”

  “That, too.” He ran his finger over the engraved P. “I should have told you. But—”

  “You’d made a promise to your mother. It was a secret you’d been protecting more than half your life.”

  “Yes.” For a moment she thought he meant to say more. She could almost see the conflict in his gaze, the impulse to confide warring with some other claim she could not fathom.

  Some other, stronger claim, for in the end he kept silent.

  “I heard another story very similar to your mother’s earlier today,” Suzanne said. She told him about her visit to Wilhelmine of Sagan and the history of little Vava.

  Malcolm grimaced when she mentioned Tatiana using the information against Wilhelmine but did not interrupt her. Nor did he seem surprised.

  “I can imagine a lot,” Suzanne concluded. “But to have to give up a child, not because it was what one wanted but because society’s dictates would not allow otherwise, to have no access to her or him—”

  Malcolm tightened his arm round her and bent his head to cover her mouth with his own. She tasted sorrow in his kiss and anger and a raw need. As though having finally told her the story, he had released himself to seek solace.

  She slid her fingers into his hair, holding him against her as long as she could. When he lifted his head, she leaned against his shoulder.

  “I feel for Wilhelmine of Sagan,” he said. “Mama was at least able to oversee Tatiana as she grew up. And knowing my mother’s fears, I can understand the duchess’s panic if the story about her secret daughter became public.”

  “And why she is so desperate to recover the letter Princess Tatiana took,” Suzanne said, letting her head sink into the hollow of his throat.

  “So now we know what Metternich’s agent was trying to buy from me at the masquerade and at the opera,” Malcolm said, his voice muffled by her hair. “Which doesn’t mean Metternich himself didn’t go to the Palm Palace the night of the murder and try to force Tatiana to return the duchess’s letter.”

  “But surely if the princess was the only one who knew where the letter was, he wouldn’t have killed her?”

  “He might have lost his temper,” Malcolm said in a grim voice. “One of the games Tania was playing got her killed.”

  Suzanne shivered at the thought of Princess Tatiana, her life mired in intrigue, her past shrouded in mysteries the princess herself would not have understood. “Malcolm.” She sat up so she could look her husband full in the face. “Was Tatiana curious about who her father was?”

  “She could scarcely have failed to be so. When I first knew her, she kept trying to get me to reveal the truth. I think it was only when we worked together in Spain, after Mama died, that she finally believed I didn’t know the truth myself.”

  “She told Schubert she now found herself identifying with Figaro. Figaro is a lost heir who discovers his parents. Could she have been trying to uncover the truth of her parentage in Vienna?”

  His brows drew together.

  “Important people are gathered here from all over the Continent. It’s quite likely someone at the Congress is related to her. Perhaps her father himself is here.”

  Malcolm’s face went still, but something in his eyes told her this was not an entirely new thought to him.

  “You’ve wondered yourself,” she said.

  “How could I not? She stopped asking me after our time in Spain, but I’m quite sure she was still making inquiries from time to time. And you’re right—living here, surrounded by people from across the Continent, she could hardly fail to wonder and therefore to ask questions.”

  “And if your mother was so desper
ate to keep the secret of Tatiana’s parentage, perhaps her father was desperate to conceal it as well.”

  “You’re suggesting my sister’s father might be her murderer.”

  “The man who seduced and abandoned a seventeen-year-old girl and has had no contact with his child for over thirty years.”

  Malcolm’s mouth tightened. “If that made for a murderer, the capitals of Europe would be crawling with them. But I take your point. While I know no details about the man in question, I’ve long had a desire to thrash him.”

  “It doesn’t necessarily have to be him. It could be members of his family, being as protective of him—”

  “As I am of my mother?” Malcolm gave a taut smile.

  “Do you know where your grandfather and your mother traveled on the Continent?”

  “Only from anecdotes. Paris certainly. Vienna. Berlin. St. Petersburg—my grandfather wanted to consult with a classicist there. The Italian Lake District—Mama talked about Lake Como. Possibly Milan. Given the way a certain set moves about the Continent, they could have encountered almost anyone in almost any of those places.”

  “Malcolm.” Suzanne drew her feet up onto the chair. “You said Prince Talleyrand was a friend of your grandfather’s. He helped look after Tatiana—”

  “Don’t imagine I haven’t thought of it. I even asked my mother once. It was the one time I broke my promise and questioned her. She swore he wasn’t Tania’s father. With a dry asperity that rang true.”

  “If your mother was anything like you, she was an excellent actress.”

  “She was. I can only add that observing my mother and Prince Talleyrand together growing up, I never had the impression they were ex-lovers. Also, Talleyrand and my grandfather remained on good terms. My grandfather has his eccentricities, but I don’t think he’d be so forbearing with the man who had seduced his daughter.”

  “Are you sure your grandfather knows the man’s identity?”

  Malcolm scraped a hand through his hair. “I always assumed—You’re right. Mama might have refused to tell him.”