by Vienna Waltz
His wife, unmistakable with her dark hair and pomegranate silk gown, was standing by the velvet-curtained windows, laughing with Dorothée, Count Clam-Martinitz, and Aline.
“Champagne, darling?” Malcolm said, putting a glass into Suzanne’s hand. “Will you excuse me if I borrow my wife for a moment?”
Dorothée smiled at him with approval.
“What is it?” Suzanne murmured, head close to his own as he took her arm.
“What makes you think it’s anything?” he murmured into her glossy dark curls. A silk flower brushed against his cheek.
“You never call me darling in the general run of things. It’s practically an alarm code.”
That, he realized, was all too true.
“A very effective one,” Suzanne added as they stopped in front of the porcelain stove.
Malcolm took a sip of champagne and dug his shoulder into the gilded molding, a pose calculated to radiate casual ease. “I heard from Addison. Otronsky has a note tucked in his shirt cuff. Can you get it?”
She lifted her brows. “Need you ask?”
He touched his glass to hers. “Purely a formality.”
A few moments later, his wife off on her mission, Malcolm passed the open door to the music room to see a slight young man leaning over the piano, wire-rimmed spectacles slipping down his nose as he sorted through scores.
“Schubert.” Malcolm stepped into the room and walked toward the young composer.
“Herr Rannoch.” Schubert looked up with a quick smile.
“You’re to play for us? A pleasant surprise.”
“A great opportunity.” Schubert pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “I owe it to the princess.”
“Tatiana arranged for you to play for the Duchess of Sagan’s guests?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Schubert grinned. “Princess Tatiana sang my praises to the duchess so much and made such a point of how impossible it was to engage my services that the duchess made me a quite extravagant offer.”
“That’s Tania.”
“Yes.” The smile faded from Schubert’s eyes. “I owe her more than I can say.”
Malcolm glanced at the scores spread on the glossy rosewood of the piano and touched the young man’s shoulder. “If there’s any debt, your music will more than repay it.”
“Doro.” Suzanne slid her arm through her friend’s. “Walk across the room with me. You’ll excuse us, Count Clam-Martinitz?”
The count gave a smile that was as warm as it was dazzling. “How could I fail to grant so charming a lady anything she asked for, Madame Rannoch? So long as you promise to return her.”
“I suspect she’ll do that on her own, Count.” Suzanne drew Dorothée across the room. “The Carrousel produced some interesting results,” she whispered to her friend.
Dorothée flushed. “The count thinks it’s still his duty to fuss over me because he was my cavalier.”
“I think it’s a bit more than that.”
“That’s what my uncle said.”
“Prince Talleyrand is a perceptive man.”
Dorothée twisted her diamond bracelet round her wrist. “He—” She shook her head. “He’s very understanding.”
“Count Clam-Martinitz is an exceedingly handsome man.”
Dorothée flushed, gaze fastened on the sparkling flower links of her bracelet.
Suzanne cast a sideways glance at her friend. “Doro, surely after everything your husband’s done, you don’t feel qualms—”
“No. I don’t feel qualms about betraying Edmond.” Dorothée’s glance flickered infinitesimally to the side.
Suzanne turned, aware of a gaze upon them, and found herself looking at Prince Talleyrand. He was deep in conversation with Baron Hardenberg, but his gaze slid to the side for a moment and rested on Dorothée with a look that made Suzanne suck in her breath. Dear God. Why had she thought Talleyrand more immune than any other man in Vienna? Yet in his case it was more complicated than the usual intrigues. That look held not lust but a longing for the unattainable that she recognized all too well.
Talleyrand turned back to Hardenberg with an air of perfect unconcern.
Dorothée flashed a quick smile at Suzanne. “I’ve never been very good at flirting, is all.”
“I’d say you’re managing admirably.” Suzanne squeezed her friend’s arm. “You deserve happiness, Doro. Wherever you decide to seek it.”
“Oh, Suzanne. Who says love has anything to do with happiness? Unless you can manage not to take it seriously, but even Willie can’t do that properly.”
Her gaze moved to Wilhelmine of Sagan, who stood laughing with Alfred von Windischgrätz, her cheeks flushed too bright, her eyes glittering like cut glass.
Suzanne remembered the desolation in those brilliant dark eyes when Wilhelmine had spoken about her lost daughter only hours before. Now she appeared to be doing her best to forget.
Otronsky stood by the door with Julie Zichy and Count Nesselrode. “Help me distract him,” Suzanne murmured to Dorothée.
Dorothée scanned her face, then nodded. She was beginning to understand the life Suzanne and Malcolm lived.
“Count Otronsky, settle an argument between the Comtesse de Périgord and me,” Suzanne said. “Does the summer palace at Tsarkoe Selo have an English garden or a French garden?”
Otronsky inclined his head, dark brows lifted with amusement. “The grounds at Tsarkoe Selo include both an English garden and a garden à la française, Madame Rannoch. Never let it be said we Russians are anything but international in our tastes.”
“How splendidly diplomatic of Catherine the Great. You see, Doro, we’re both right.”
A footman was moving toward them with a tray of champagne glasses. “Oh good,” Dorothée said. “There’s seemed to be champagne everywhere but where I am.”
Otronsky sketched a bow and procured glasses for both of them.
“What a gallant man. It’s so insufferably hot. Champagne is just the—Oh dear.” Suzanne stumbled and fell against Otronsky, spattering champagne over both of them as well as the Savonnerie carpet.
“Are you all right, Madame Rannoch?” Otronsky steadied her with firm hands.
“Yes, so silly of me. The room started to spin.”
“It’s this dreadful heat,” Dorothée said. “You’d never know it’s November.”
“I’ve never done well with the heat since I had the baby. Oh dear, I’m so sorry about your coat.” Suzanne brushed a hand over Otronsky’s coat and stepped back, the note that had been tucked into his cuff now in the palm of her hand.
29
“Dr. Blackwell. Thank goodness.” Aline crossed to his side as he stepped into the duchess’s salon. “Does it sound dreadful to say I’m longing for a few moments of conversation where I don’t have to remember the map of Europe every time I open my mouth?”
“Entirely understandable. Though I have no doubt you have the map of Europe memorized. It seems to run in the family.”
She took his arm, and they moved to the relative privacy of a window embrasure. Aline dropped down on the window seat and glanced across the room where Malcolm was in conversation with Gregory Lindorff. “Dr. Blackwell, has Malcolm talked to you?”
Blackwell gave a dry smile. “I know my advanced years, but you’re getting to be quite grown-up yourself. Don’t you think you might bring yourself to call me Geoffrey?”
Aline returned the smile. “Much more egalitarian.”
“So I was thinking.”
“Your flexibility is impressive, D—Geoffrey. Most people have the hardest time acknowledging that one has grown up.”
“I may be a bit slow at times, Aline, but some things are unavoidably obvious.” Blackwell—Geoffrey—put out a hand, as though to touch her wrist, then drew it back. “Has Malcolm talked to me about what?”
“Everything. Well, Princess Tatiana, really.” Malcolm’s face was turned to the side, but Aline had memorized the wasteland in his eyes. “He’s taken it
hard.”
“Malcolm tends to take things hard. He makes everything his responsibility.”
“Yes, I know. But this is different. Was Princess Tatiana—”
Geoffrey turned to look her full in the face.
“His mistress,” Aline finished.
Geoffrey’s face was like a notebook page with all the ink jottings smudged to illegibility. “If so, he’d hardly confide it to me.”
“I thought gentlemen were always talking about their women.”
“Malcolm isn’t the sort for that kind of talk.” He gave a bleak smile. “And God knows I’m not.”
“No,” she said, “you’re sensible that way. As I am. But you’ve neatly avoided answering my question.”
“About Malcolm and Princess Tatiana? All I could do is speculate. As a good scientist I deplore theorizing without data.”
Aline’s gaze shifted to her cousin’s wife, crossing the room, her arm linked through Dorothée Périgord’s. “I was quite put off by Suzanne at first when Malcolm brought her to England last spring. To own the truth, I’d always thought Malcolm would be like me and never marry. It was a sort of—”
“Solidarity?” Geoffrey asked.
There was an odd note in his voice, but Aline was too intent on what she was trying to say to examine it. “I suppose so, yes. And then suddenly there he was with this Paris fashion plate on his arm, jacket and petticoat cut just so, satin straw hat with a veil worn at precisely the right angle, pearl-trimmed gloves without a smudge. She seemed entirely too perfect to be approachable. Or to be the sort of wife Malcolm needed, assuming he needed a wife at all. But I quickly discovered she’s every bit as eccentric as the rest of us and blessedly practical as well.”
Geoffrey’s gaze followed her own. “I still remember her kneeling over Malcolm on a camp bed, six months pregnant and cool as a cucumber as her husband lay wounded. But you could see the fear in her eyes. And her smile when he woke up was brighter than a dozen wax tapers.”
“Well then. And Malcolm—”
Geoffrey frowned down at the reflection of the flame from the candle sconce in the polished parquet floor. “I was at their wedding at the embassy in Lisbon. They hadn’t even known each other a month. Malcolm was distinctly white about the mouth, and Suzanne—” He shook his head, as though even now he could not make sense of what Suzanne had felt on her wedding day. “They took their vows seriously. But they were no Romeo and Juliet.” He turned his gaze back to Aline. “You’ve always been refreshingly free of romanticism. And God knows you saw enough of the world growing up in your family. You must know that what’s at the heart of most marriages is far more complicated than a fairy tale.”
“Is that why you’ve never married?”
He gave a short laugh. “I never married because I never found anyone who would put up with me.”
“Or who you thought worth putting up with?”
A smile pulled at his mouth. “Perhaps.”
Aline pleated the orange blossom crêpe of her frock between her fingers. She had a lowering feeling she wasn’t quite as free of romanticism as Geoffrey had confidently stated. “I’m not a fool. I know their courtship wasn’t moonlight and roses. But I can’t believe Suzanne doesn’t mind.”
“Marriages aren’t equations, Aline. One can’t always solve for the unknown variable. Take it from one who’s observed far too much and learned the hard way. It doesn’t pay to meddle.”
Aline studied Suzanne, who was now laughing up at Count Otronsky, head thrown back, ringlets stirring above her bare shoulders, a perfect study in flirtation. “I can’t help it,” she said, aware that her scientist’s detachment had quite deserted her. “I care about them both too much.”
“Rannoch.” Frederick Radley clapped a hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. “Hard to get used to seeing the same people night after night.”
“The society in Lisbon was even more confined.”
“But that seems centuries ago.” Radley leaned an arm against a pillar that supported a bronze of Persephone. “Where’s your lovely wife?”
“Amusing herself.”
“You don’t dance attendance upon her, do you?”
“What sensible husband does?”
“Yes, but I never thought you were the sort to follow society’s dictates.” Radley’s gaze skimmed round the room and settled on Suzanne. “Flirting with Otronsky. You’re a brave husband indeed. Or a complacent one.”
“My wife can take care of herself.”
“Like Princess Tatiana?”
Malcolm’s gloved fingers clenched. “What the devil’s that supposed to mean?”
Radley ran his fingers down the clinging folds of Persephone’s gown. “Merely that Vienna’s a dangerous place in a number of ways. A woman can slip through one’s fingers. As Prince Metternich has learned to his sorrow. If you’ll excuse me, Rannoch, I need to pay my respects to our hostess.”
Geoffrey Blackwell came to stand beside Malcolm as Radley moved off. “I was going to rescue you from the good colonel, but then I realized you might be in the midst of investigating. No, don’t answer, I wasn’t fishing for information.” Blackwell surveyed the crowd. The salon grew more closely pressed by the minute as guests continued to stream through the door. “Until I came to Vienna I never spent so many evenings in a row in company.”
“Enough to strain your patience with the human race?”
“My dear boy, surely you realize I never had much patience to begin with.”
“A trait with which I am much in sympathy. And yet you do a remarkable amount of good. I haven’t yet thanked you for what you did for Fitz.”
Blackwell waved his hand. “It’s my job.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Vaughn will do well enough. His recovery owes more to how he fell and the fact that the horse didn’t trample him than to any efforts on my part. And to Lady Fitzwilliam’s good nursing.” Blackwell’s gaze strayed across the room to where Fitz and Eithne stood talking with Paul and Thérèse Esterhazy. “Vaughn is fortunate in his marriage.”
As they watched, Fitz turned to look down at Eithne, like a man staring at a precious jewel that hovers just out of reach. As if aware of his regard, Eithne looked up at him with a quick smile. “Sometimes it takes a shock to make one realize all one has to lose,” Malcolm said.
“Quite.” Blackwell’s gaze shifted from Fitz to Malcolm, as acute as a lancet guided by a surgeon’s hand. “You told me a few days ago that it might have been a mistake for you to marry Suzanne. You were under a great deal of strain at the time. I hope it was the strain speaking. No one observing you and Suzanne together could think it a mistake.”
Malcolm forced himself not to look away from that keen gaze. “You don’t know how it seems from Suzanne’s perspective.”
“No. But I may have a more objective view of the matter than you do, lad.”
Malcolm glanced down at the bronze Persephone, burnished by the candlelight, her head tilted down to study the half-eaten pomegranate she clutched in one hand. “I told Suzanne about Tatiana this afternoon.”
Blackwell’s sharp breath cut the air. “Thank God.”
Malcolm shot him a sideways look. “You think I should have done it years ago.”
“I think everyone is entitled to their secrets. But sometimes keeping them causes more damage than sharing them. And what you and Suzanne have is strong enough to withstand most revelations.”
“You seem damned sure of what Suzanne and I have.”
Blackwell frowned into his champagne glass and then looked up at Malcolm’s face. “For God’s sake, Malcolm, she loves you. She’d be lost without you.”
Malcolm gave a laugh that grated against the rose-scented perfection of the air. “Have Viennese waltzes addled your brain? You’re the last person on earth I’d have thought to find turning into a romantic.”
“One doesn’t need to be a romantic to recognize the bond between two people.”
For a moment Malcolm h
ad an intense memory of the pressure of Suzanne’s hand in his own. There was a bond between them. But it was a bond built of necessity, shared danger, and the sins of the past, not romantic yearnings. He studied Blackwell, whom he’d known since childhood and whom he trusted and respected far more than his own father. “Bonds you’ve successfully avoided your entire life.”
“Good God, surely you wouldn’t expect me to advise you to follow my example. Besides—” The cynicism faded from Blackwell’s eyes, and he looked as perhaps he had in his undergraduate days, younger and more vulnerable than Malcolm had ever seen him. He was silent for a long moment, and then a faint smile played about his lips. “We can all change.”
“Lord Fitzwilliam. Lady Fitzwilliam.” Wilhelmine of Sagan swept toward them with a rustle of rose tulle over blue satin and a waft of subtle perfume. What was it about Continental women, Eithne wondered, that was so effortlessly sophisticated? “I’m so sorry I didn’t greet you when you came in. And so glad to see you recovered from your injury last night,” the duchess added as Fitz bowed over her hand.
Eithne stiffened instinctively, but she could detect nothing beyond polite gallantry in the brush of her husband’s lips against the duchess’s white-gloved fingers.
“It’s kind of you to come,” Wilhelmine said, touching her cheek to Eithne’s. “I know I’ve no hope of enticing Lord and Lady Castlereagh. They don’t approve of my being a divorcée.”
Fitz gave her one of his dazzling smiles. “As my friend Rannoch could tell you, Duchess, there are a number of matters upon which we do not agree with our chief.”
“Showing admirable good sense.” The duchess looked from Fitz to Eithne. “I do like watching the two of you. It’s so refreshing to see a married couple who actually enjoy each other’s company.”
Eithne gave the sort of practiced smile she had long since perfected as a diplomat’s wife. “I fear we’re dreadfully unfashionable.”
“No one with your dress sense could be called unfashionable, Lady Fitzwilliam.” The duchess cast a glance round the room. “I see my sister is enjoying herself. Count Clam-Martinitz is quite charming. Poor Prince Talleyrand. If you’ll excuse me. I must talk to our musician. A new talent. I think you’ll be impressed.”