by Teresa Grant
“If the information was wrong, I should have seen it.” Malcolm cut off a length of linen with a sharp snip of the scissors.
Suzanne looked up at him from her perch on the dressing table bench. She knew that set mouth and those hooded eyes. She knew the weight of guilt it meant he was trying to hold at bay. “I hate to break it to you, darling, but you aren’t superhuman.”
“I should be able to recognize faulty intelligence.” Malcolm placed a pad of lint over the wound in her arm, then secured the dressing with a strip of linen. “A man’s dead, Suzette.”
“Which is tragic. But not your fault.”
He knotted off the ends of the bandage. “You’re stubborn, sweetheart.”
“I’m practical.” She pulled her dressing gown up about her shoulders. “Tell me what else you know about Bertrand Laclos.”
Malcolm snapped closed the lid on her medical supply box, which seemed to get as much use in peacetime as it had during the Peninsular War and the Waterloo campaign. “He was a couple of years older than me. He went to Eton, so as a Harrovian I didn’t see a great deal of him until we both got to Oxford. He tended to keep himself to himself. He was serious, but he had a quick wit. He was a decent man. I liked him.” He put the medical supply box on the chest of drawers.
Suzanne drew her legs up on the dressing table bench and hooked her arms round her knees. “And after he went to work for the French? And supposedly really for the British?”
“I didn’t have any contact with him in the Peninsula. He must have reported to someone in military intelligence. I’ll see what Davenport knows.” Malcolm leaned against the bedpost. “Bertrand Laclos made a rather interesting friend in the French cavalry before he was sent to the Peninsula. Edmond Talleyrand.”
Suzanne frowned. “You said he had a quick wit. Edmond Talleyrand can’t talk about anything but horses and gambling. And women.”
“Yes, well, Laclos was playing a part.”
Suzanne rested her chin on her updrawn knees. “Did Edmond’s uncle have anything to do with the two of them becoming friends?”
Edmond’s uncle, Prince Talleyrand, who had survived Napoleon’s downfall to now head the government under the restored Louis XVIII, was a master manipulator. He was also an old friend of Malcolm’s family. “You mean did Talleyrand put Edmond up to it because he guessed Bertrand Laclos was a British agent? Or because he knew Laclos was in fact working for the French?” Malcolm shook his head. “I wouldn’t put it past him. But I’ve no proof.”
“I’ll talk to Doro. Though she’s not exactly on terms of intimacy with Edmond even if she is his wife.” Dorothée de Talleyrand-Périgord had served as hostess for her husband’s uncle, Prince Talleyrand, at the Congress of Vienna. When she returned to Paris, she had taken up residence with Talleyrand, rather than with Edmond himself.
Malcolm nodded. “I’ll talk to Talleyrand, though as usual I have precious little hope of getting much out of him. But I also need to ask him about—”
“Tatiana.”
Malcolm’s mouth tightened. “Yes.”
Malcolm rarely mentioned Tatiana, but Suzanne knew he carried the guilt of his sister’s death like a talisman. Sometimes she would catch him staring off into the distance and know he was replaying some moment of his time with Tatiana, especially those last weeks, wondering what might have been different. “In Vienna Tatiana supposedly said becoming pregnant was one mistake she’d never made.”
“So she did. But then Tania wasn’t above lying. Especially about something like that. Quite the reverse in fact.”
“And even a clever woman can make a mistake,” Suzanne said. Her chest tightened as she framed the word, but Malcolm, so quick to see so much, didn’t seem to notice anything amiss.
“As I’ve said before, I’d like to think she’d have told me if she’d had a child,” Malcolm said. “But I can imagine any number of reasons she’d have kept it secret.”
“Including to protect you. If the father was someone powerful enough.”
Malcolm shot her a surprised look.
“I understand Tatiana rather better now than I did at the start of things in Vienna,” Suzanne said. “She had her own sort of honor. And she cared about you. A great deal more, perhaps, than even you realized.”
Malcolm swallowed. “Sometimes I argue with myself until it seems blindingly obvious that there was a right course of action I could have taken. That would ensure she was here now. Much good it does. Except to ensure sleepless nights and endless questions.”
Suzanne stared at him, startled not by what he had admitted but by the fact that he had admitted it at all. A year, even six months ago, he would not have spoken so to her, nor would have he let her see his face as raw and cut with torment as it was now. She, too, knew what it was to carry guilt, too keenly to try to argue his away. She got to her feet, went to his side, and took his face between her hands. “All we can do is do the best we can within the moment, dearest. You do that better than anyone I know.”
He gave a bleak smile. “ ‘Render me worthy of this noble wife!’ ”
She returned the smile, her own deliberately playful. “You promised not to turn into Brutus.”
“Brutus appreciated his wife’s strength. I can at least do that. While not making the mistake of not confiding in her.”
She slid her hands behind his neck and kissed him, the tang of guilt on her lips. Because when it came to confiding in one’s spouse, she had her own sins on her conscience.
(Photo: Raphael Coffey Photography. http://www.raphaelcoffey.com)
TERESA GRANT studied British history at Stanford University and received the Firestone Award for Excellence in Research for her honors thesis on shifting conceptions of honor in late-fifteenth-century England. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, with her young daughter and three cats, and is on the board of the Merola Opera Program, a professional training program for opera singers, pianists, and stage directors. Her real-life heroine is her daughter, Mélanie, who is very cooperative about Mummy’s writing. Teresa is currently at work on her next book chronicling the adventures of Malcolm and Suzanne Rannoch. Visit her on the web at www.teresagrant.com.
THE PARIS AFFAIR
From the ashes of war rise the secrets of its darkest hearts....
In the wake of the Battle of Waterloo, Paris is a house divided. The triumphant Bourbons flaunt their victory with lavish parties, while Bonapartists seek revenge only to be captured and executed. Amid the turmoil, British attaché and intelligence agent Malcolm Rannoch and his wife, Suzanne, discover that his murdered half sister, Princess Tatiana Kirsanova, may have borne a child—a secret she took to the grave. And Malcolm suspects there was more than mere impropriety behind her silence....
As Malcolm and Suzanne begin searching for answers, they learn that the child was just one of many secrets Tatiana had been keeping. The princess was the toast of Paris when she arrived in the glamorous city, flirting her way into the arms of more than a few men—perhaps even those of Napoleon himself—and the father must be among them. But in the mêlée of the Napoleonic Wars, she was caught up in a deadly game of court intrigue, and now Malcolm and Suzanne must race against time to save his sister’s child from a similar fate....
IMPERIAL SCANDAL
Amid the teachery of war and the whirl of revelry, no one is what they seem. . . .
Nights filled with lavish balls . . . lush, bucolic afternoons. . . Removed to glamorous Brussels in the wake of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, Intelligence Agent Malcolm Rannoch and his wife, Suzanne, warily partake in the country’s pleasures. But with the Congress of Vienna in chaos and the Duke of Wellington preparing for battle, the festivities are cut short when Malcolm is sent on a perilous mission that unravels a murderous world of espionage....
No one knows what the demure and respectable Lady Julia Ashton was doing at the château where Malcolm and a fellow British spy were ambushed. But now her enigmatic life has been ended by an equally mysterious death.
And as the conflict with Napoleon marches toward Waterloo, and Brussels surrenders to bedlam, Suzanne and Malcolm will be plunged into the search for the truth—revealing an intricate labyrinth of sinister secrets and betrayal within which no one can be trusted....
VIENNA WALTZ
Nothing is fair in love and war. . . .
Europe’s elite have gathered at the glittering Congress of Vienna—princes, ambassadors, the Russian tsar—all negotiating the fate of the Continent by day and pursuing pleasure by night. Until Princess Tatiana, the most beautiful and talked about woman in Vienna, is found murdered during an ill-timed rendezvous with three of her most powerful conquests....
Suzanne Rannoch has tried to ignore rumors that her new husband, Malcolm, has also been tempted by Tatiana. As a protégé of France’s Prince Talleyrand and attaché for Britain’s Lord Castlereagh, Malcolm sets out to investigate the murder and must enlist Suzanne’s special skills and knowledge if he is to succeed. As a complex dance between husband and wife in the search for the truth ensues, no one’s secrets are safe, and the future of Europe may hang in the balance....
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2012 by Tracy Grant
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ISBN: 978-0-7582-8771-7
First Electronic Edition: November 2012