The Tavistock Plot

by Tracy Grant

  "You don't know Carfax very well if you think that. He'll cross just about any line in pursuit of what he thinks must be done. Including crossing his own government."

  "In which case, this whole conversation Lewis told me he heard between Kit and Simon might be made up."

  "Perhaps."

  "That would be a relief. But—" Roger frowned.

  "What?" Malcolm asked.

  Roger shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "I was horrified by what Lewis told me. And I was shocked. But at the same time, a part of me wasn't surprised. Because the truth is I've suspected Kit was keeping something from me for some time." He released his breath. "That's part of why I didn't do anything to follow up on my talk with Thornsby sooner. I was hurt at first, but then I told myself we were going to have to have secrets from each other in my position, as you did with Simon. That Kit was protecting both of us and I should do the same."

  Malcolm hesitated. But Roger had confided so much he could not but do the same. "I've had a similar sense about Simon. Or rather, my wife did and told me."

  Roger nodded, as though a truth he'd been trying to deny had settled on his shoulders. "So they are plotting something."

  "Probably. Which may have nothing to do with Thornsby's murder."

  "But now we're going to have to find out. And even if it's nothing to do with the investigation, we'll have to decide what we're going to do."

  Malcolm nodded.

  They started walking again. Roger frowned at his boot toes. "Do you think Lewis and Will were in this together? That they're both moles for Carfax or the League?"

  "It's one possibility. They wouldn't be the first allies to fall in love with the same girl. Or their quarrel might have been about their work, and Letty Blanchard was a convenient excuse."

  "And you think Mrs. Ashford fits in somewhere."

  Malcolm drew a breath. The air was rank with smells from the river. "How do you think Kitty Ashford fits into this?"

  "She's your friend, Rannoch."

  That was true. He'd have once thought he and Kitty couldn't be friends, but in the past months they had grown to be. Which made all of this so much more complicated. "I'm not sure my being her friend is helping me see the situation clearly."

  "Because you don't want to believe there was—er—something between her and Lewis? I know Kit seemed to think there was, but for what it's worth I never had any sense of it. But you say she told you it was true."

  "I think she was lying. To cover up some other connection to Lewis Thornsby. And it wasn't an easy lie to tell. Which means whatever she's trying to cover up is something she's even more determined to keep from me."

  "Surely she wouldn't be working for Carfax or the League."

  "I don't think so, no."

  Roger's eyes narrowed. "Kit said Julien St. Juste was at the Tavistock when Mélanie found Lewis."

  "He arrived just after."

  "And St. Juste and Mrs. Ashford—"

  "Are living together. Yes, that makes the questions even more complicated."

  "Do you think St. Juste is telling you the truth about what he knows about Lewis's death?"

  "The whole truth? Oh, no, I'm quite sure he isn't. But then, Julien St. Juste rarely tells the whole truth about anything."

  Chapter 17

  Mélanie turned from her dressing table to look at Malcolm. He'd found her in the breakfast parlor when he returned from seeing Roger and Kit, eating a light dinner with the children and Laura and Blanca and Addison, before they went to Paul and Juliette's. She'd known at once that he had something important to tell her, but he'd waited to swallow a few mouthfuls of shepherd’s pie and admire Jessica's latest drawings before they went to change for the evening. When they'd gone into their own room, he'd at last given her an account of his talks with both men.

  She stared at him now he had finished, one garnet earring on, the other dangling from her fingers as she pieced together the information. "Are you going to talk to Simon?"

  He grimaced. "That prospect weighed on me all the way home. I want to wait at least until after we talk to Will tonight. Once Simon—and Kit—know what we know, they'll close ranks."

  "They might have an explanation."

  "They'll undoubtedly have an explanation. Just as Kitty did. And then we'll have to figure out if it's the truth." Malcolm pulled off his coat and tossed it onto the frayed green velvet chair that he always resisted her efforts to have recovered. "You know, with everything we've been through, sweetheart, neither of us has ever had to investigate the other. I find myself intensely grateful for that."

  "There is that." She smiled and found she could do so without bitterness. Somehow it was getting easier between them. Instead of laughing at the past because the alternative was unthinkable, they could do so with relative ease. "Anything Thornsby said about Simon and Kit has to be suspect, considering we know Thornsby was living a double life and very likely spying on the Levellers."

  "True enough." Malcolm threw his waistcoat after his coat and pulled his shirt over his head. Sadly, this was not a moment when she could appreciate the sight. "But Roger suspected Kit was concealing something, and you had the sense Simon was. That suggests to me that there's at least a grain of truth in what Thornsby told Roger."

  Her fear last December when she'd first suspected Simon was concealing something from them shot through her again. "It's hard to make the pieces add up." She stared at the earring dangling from her fingers, then flicked open the clasp and threaded it through her ear. An automatic task that seemed suddenly harder. "I suppose if Thornsby was an agent provocateur he might have told the story to Roger to provoke dissent among the Levellers."

  "And if he was an agent provocateur he might have been listening in on conversations and overheard a real argument between Kit and Simon." Malcolm went to the chest of drawers and took out a clean shirt. "As I said to Roger, a lot of things are treasonable. A lot of things we wouldn't find questionable. That we think should be done. So even if Thornsby was telling the exact truth about what he overheard, it doesn't remotely prove Kit and Simon are doing something we'd disagree with." He pulled the shirt over his head.

  Mélanie watched his head emerge from the clean linen, wondering if he'd hesitated just a bit over the word "we." She couldn't be the only one who wondered what they'd both do when they learned the truth of whatever their friends were plotting.

  "No." She picked up her brush and ran it over her hair. "What about the list of places and dates?"

  "Thornsby could have taken the coded paper from someone in the Levellers and decoded it."

  Mélanie set down the brush and tucked a pin into her hair. She'd left it down with just the front pulled back, as she tended to wear it these days. They were only going to Juliette and Paul's, after all. "You think the Levellers were behind all those incidents? Despite what Kit and Roger said?"

  Malcolm was doing up his shirt cuffs. "I think it's possible."

  "If they were, it seems odd they'd keep a list like that, even in code."

  "It does," Malcolm agreed.

  Mélanie reached for her rouge pot and dabbed rouge on her cheeks without looking in the mirror. "What if someone in the Levellers put the list together because they thought the incidents had been orchestrated? Perhaps by an agent provocateur."

  "Possible." Malcolm went to his wardrobe and pulled out a silver-striped waistcoat. "Has Will Carmarthen ever told you anything about his past?"

  "No." Mélanie frowned at her eye-blacking brush, thinking back through her interactions with Will. Fragments of conversation in the green room, in coffee houses, during breaks from rehearsal. "I've talked to him quite a bit about characters in plays—from Shakespeare's to Simon's to my own—but not at all about his own life." She turned to the glass and deepened the blacking round her eyes. "But surely if he was a plant, he'd have a constructed backstory. Look at what you found in Thornsby's Montford rooms in Rosemary Lane, and that wasn't even a life he was living full-time."
r />   "Yes, that is odd." Malcolm was doing up the buttons on the waistcoat. "But Carmarthen seems to be tangled in a great deal of this one way or another. Even if he wasn't involved in the incidents on that list, he was close enough to a number of them that he may know something."

  Mélanie set down the brush and turned to look at her husband, who was pulling on a black cassimere coat. "Malcolm, you don't think that Simon—"

  Malcolm tugged his coat smooth. "You've said you can't be sure what you'd do in various circumstances, Mel. I can't be sure of myself. How can I be sure about Simon?"

  Mélanie pulled her gown on over her satin slip and fastened one of the silver buttons that ran down the front. The metal shimmered in the light from the tapers on her dressing table, bright and sharp as memories cut into her brain. "Raoul used to talk to me a lot about the Irish uprising. Especially when he'd had a few glasses of wine. I think he kept trying to make sense of what had gone wrong." She could see him, wine glass in hand, leaning towards her across a table or sprawled on the floor by the fire.

  "He used to talk to me about it too, when I was a boy," Malcolm said. "It wasn't the fact that it turned violent that infuriated him. Difficult for an uprising not to be violent, he'd argue. It was the disorganization."

  Mélanie nodded and did up another button. "The lack of communication between the factions, the wanton destruction that served no purpose—"

  "You think he'd claim the acts on that list we found in Rosemary Lane served a purpose?" Malcolm pushed the wardrobe doors closed.

  "I'm not sure. But I don't know that he'd have shrunk from them if he thought they'd achieve the ends he wanted." She smoothed her hands over the burgundy silk of her gown. She knew Raoul could be ruthless. She knew she could be ruthless herself. The question was how ruthless Simon could be. "Whom do you identify with in Julius Caesar?"

  "Portia," he said without hesitation. "I never know what my spouse is plotting."

  She gave a faint smile that did not reach the coldness inside her. "Then we're consistent, at least. I've always felt an affinity for Brutus."

  "So when Napoleon Bonaparte made himself Emperor, you thought about assassinating him?"

  Mélanie met her husband's gaze across their bedchamber. "That's my Malcolm. No fancy footwork, just a nice, clean thrust to the heart. No, obviously. But I can imagine—"

  "Killing someone for a good cause?"

  Her fingers clenched on the soft silk. "What else is war?"

  "Except that in a war, someone else is trying to kill you."

  "Someone has to start the killing. Raoul would say that we've been at war against poverty and injustice for years."

  "Fair enough." The wood creaked as Malcolm leaned his shoulder against one of the bedposts. "Antony thinks that Brutus's motives set him apart from the other conspirators. But it doesn't change his thinking Brutus was wrong."

  "And yet in the end he calls Brutus the noblest Roman. Brutus put his cause above the life of his friend."

  "And his wife died because of it. Most causes come down to people, in the end. If you overlook the people for the cause, then how do you warp the cause?"

  "But how can you change anything by playing by the rules, when the rules are being set by the people running the system you're trying to change?"

  For a moment she had a clear memory of sitting round their dining table downstairs one evening the previous autumn. David and Simon and Harry and Cordy had come to dine. Raoul and Laura had been there, of course. The port had long since been brought, but none of the women withdrew from the table in Berkeley Square these days. David had been discussing a speech he planned to make in support of Lord Althorp’s motion for an inquiry over the Peterloo carnage. Simon had clunked down the decanter and said, Where the hell is that going to get you? Even if it passes, do you think it will change anything? The usual irony had been quite gone from his face and voice.

  David had taken out his handkerchief and blotted up the port that had splashed from the decanter. It's a start, he'd said, in a hard, even voice.

  That's brilliant, David. Simon had stared at David with the full force of the caustic wit Mélanie had never seen him turn on his lover. The government used troops to break up a peaceful meeting. Women and children were trampled in the streets. And you're going to make a speech saying they shouldn't have done it.

  It had been Raoul who'd said, There can be a value in putting things into words. But a few weeks later, when the bill had failed to pass, Simon hadn't said anything. He hadn't needed to.

  Mélanie did up the last button on her gown. "Sometimes I think I've become the most shocking coward."

  Malcolm took a step forwards and reached out a hand to cup her cheek. "My darling, you're a lot of things, but you're no coward."

  "I just enjoy living a life of luxury in a system I claim to disapprove of."

  He tucked a strand of her hair into its pins. "The sacrifices one makes for marriage."

  "I'm not sure how funny that is."

  He set his hands on her shoulders. "I'm not sure how funny I meant it to be."

  Before she could reply, the door opened and Jessica came hurtling in and flung her arms round both their knees. She was wearing the pink tulle princess dress Blanca had cut down from one of Mélanie's old dresses. Which she wore whenever she could.

  "Are you ready?" Colin followed her in, Emily beside him. "We've been ready for ages." He looked between them. "We're Investigating tonight, aren't we?"

  "We're certainly keeping our ears open." Malcolm touched Colin's hair while Mélanie scooped Jessica up. Laura came in, carrying Clara. Her gaze went from Mélanie to Malcolm for the briefest moment. Mélanie sent her a silent promise to update her as soon as they could. Laura returned the smile. "It's raining," she said. "I brought umbrellas."

  "It's too bad Daddy isn't back." Emily looked over her shoulder at her mother. "He always likes Juliette and Paul's."

  Without looking round, Mélanie could feel the tension that ran through Malcolm. It wasn't that unusual for Raoul to be out all day without saying where he was going, but he tried at least to be back in the evening for the children. And with the uncertainty about the investigation, they were all on edge.

  "You know he never knows how long things will take him when he's making inquiries." Laura's voice was easy, perhaps determinedly so.

  "He's Investigating," Colin said.

  "I know," Emily said. "I just wish he could Investigate with us."

  "I expect he'll be back to say goodnight before you go to sleep," Malcolm said in a voice as easy as Laura's.

  Emily nodded. "Oh, there's the carriage," she added, with the sharp hearing of the young.

  A short time later they pulled up in front of Paul and Juliette's terrace house in Henrietta Street. A sedate, uniform house, but its orderly sash windows, neat chimneys, and shiny blue door contained a family that were decidedly unorthodox.

  Gavin, the family manservant, who had joined the household after Malcolm helped get him acquitted of charges of thievery three years before, ushered them into the slate-flagged entry hall, took their dripping umbrellas, and helped them out of their outer garments.

  "They're all in the drawing room," he said, nodding towards the stairs. "You know the way."

  The children ran ahead with the ease of family, which in a sense they were in the Dubretton-St. Gilles household. The strains of a new song by their friend Schubert, which Mélanie had given Paul the music for, drifted from the drawing room. The air smelled of colza oil from the urn-shaped hanging lamps, drying wool garments, Cotswolds cheese, and sherry.

  "I'm so glad you're all here." Juliette swept up to them in a stir of gold satin and citrine earrings that glowed in the candlelight. Strands of dark hair escaped their pins and fell about her face, probably because she'd been working rather than because of time spent at her dressing table, but with an equally artful effect. She bent down to return Jessica's hug. "Pierre and Marguerite and Rose have been asking about you all day."
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  "We'll find them." Laura exchanged a look with Mélanie and threaded her way through the crowd to the parlor that was set aside for the children's games at Juliette and Paul's parties, though the younger generation always mingled freely through the house.

  Juliette looked after them with a smile, then turned to Malcolm and Mélanie. "I wasn't sure you'd make it, with everything that's happened. Poor Mr. Thornsby."

  "Did he come here often?" Malcolm took Juliette's hand and leaned forwards to kiss her cheek. "I don't remember seeing him."

  "Only a couple of times, but the last one was just last week. I have a clear memory of his sitting at the piano turning the pages of the music for Letty Blanchard. One never thinks—" She looked between them. "Between the play and the investigation I'm sure you aren't here simply because it's Tuesday evening. Whom are you looking for?"

  "Will Carmarthen," Mélanie said. "And we'd have done our best to be here, regardless."

  "Carmarthen?" Paul St. Gilles joined them. He had sandy hair and keen blue eyes that burned with equal parts intensity and kindness. "He's in the drawing room." Paul shook his head. "Funny how easily I say drawing room. Three years out of Paris and I'm practically an Englishman. It's good to see you both. I saw Laura and the children. Where's O'Roarke?"

  Where indeed? "You know O'Roarke," Malcolm said in the same easy voice he'd used talking about Raoul earlier. "It's unusual when he does share where he's going."

  Paul grinned but his gaze said he perhaps saw more than he let on. He touched Malcolm's arm and kissed Mélanie's cheek. "With everything else, we're looking forward to the play."

  "It's quite brilliant," Juliette said. "I was fortunate to have a preview of the script, and the children loved the rehearsal I brought them to."

  "You're very kind," Mélanie said.

  Juliette smiled. "I can be when necessary, but with you I don't have to."

  The company were ranged about the drawing room with the ease of familiarity. The intense, fair-haired young man at the piano played for rehearsals at the Tavistock. Lord Palmerston, the secretary at war, was lounging against the wall on the opposite side of the room, exchanging flirtatious banter with Cecily Summers, who was also in the Tavistock company. He looked up, nodded at Malcolm, and blew a kiss to Mélanie. Juliette and Paul's elder daughter, Marguerite, moved about the room, replenishing drinks with aplomb.