“Given that our marriage was a sham, it’s hardly any concern of mine whom you slept with when. But once Radley told me about the incident in León the rest of the pieces fell into place. The criminal thing is that I didn’t see it sooner.”
“Malcolm, you couldn’t—”
“Oh, but I could.” His voice was flat, his gaze unyielding. “If I hadn’t been willfully blind. If I hadn’t let my guard down in the worst way possible. If I hadn’t been so very bad at my job and you hadn’t been so very good at yours.”
“You had no reason to suspect—”
“I can think of a dozen reasons now, but I overlooked them all.” He moved upstage and dragged a straight-backed chair towards her. “You haven’t told me if you knew about my role in the Acquera tragedy when you invented your backstory.” He dropped into the chair, facing her like an interrogator.
She saw the dusty cottage in which she’d met with Raoul to plan the details of her mission to intercept British diplomat Malcolm Rannoch. The smoke from the open fire in the center of the floor had turned her stomach. She’d been more than two months pregnant, though she hadn’t realized it yet. “Raoul knew about Acquera. He thought—”
“That connecting your supposed family tragedy to Acquera would make me all the more sympathetic to you. Perhaps even get me to offer you marriage.”
“I told you your proposing wasn’t part of the plan.”
“Not part of your plan. I wouldn’t put it past O’Roarke. He’s obviously a master chess player.” He sat back in his chair and spoke in a tone of examining an obscure footnote that might or might not be of interest. “Did you know O’Roarke was my father?”
She swallowed, aware of the mines they were treading round. One could argue she owed Malcolm the truth. But then there was the question of what she owed Colin. “No. I learned when he admitted it to you yesterday.”
“That must have come as a shock.” He tilted his head back. “What did Alistair have to do with orchestrating our marriage?”
“Nothing.” She leaned forwards, appalled at this thought. “We didn’t even know about your—Alistair.”
“You’re asking me to believe my wife, my biological father, and my putative father were all French spies and each didn’t know what the other was doing?”
“Alistair must have learned about me at some point, given those comments about the Raven in his letter to Harleton. But I didn’t know about him, and Raoul says he didn’t, even when Alistair helped him escape Ireland. I’m far from believing Raoul in everything, but in this case I think I do.”
“And you expect me to believe you?”
“I don’t expect you to believe anything I say, darling. But it happens to be the truth. You know how fragmented intelligence operations are. It isn’t safe for agents to know the names of other agents and it often isn’t practicable, either. I’ve heard you bemoan the duplication of information often enough.” She sat back, drained by recognition of the futility of trying to get him to understand anything. “I was as shocked as you when Crispin told us about Alistair. And horrified.”
“Why horrified?”
He probably wouldn’t believe anything she said, so she might as well tell him the truth. “Because I didn’t like the idea that I was anything like Alistair.”
Malcolm gave a short laugh. “I suppose one could say Alistair married my mother under false pretenses as well, though not to spy on her. He certainly put less effort into being a husband than you did into being a wife. I doubt O’Roarke and Alistair would have much cared for the thought they had anything in common with each other.” He stared at her for a long moment. His gaze was at once hard and cold and unbearably remote, as though he had already moved an unbreachable distance from her. “O’Roarke is Colin’s father, isn’t he?”
The silence in the theatre seemed deafening. Dust motes danced in the air. Her throat ached with unbearable loss. “Malcolm—”
“Don’t.” He shot his arm out to silence her. “I may have been appallingly slow where you’re concerned, but I can still work some things out. You weren’t raped by French soldiers who attacked your family at Acquera. So that isn’t why you were pregnant. O’Roarke is the obvious candidate. Though I assume there were others.”
“Yes. But not—”
“You told me it couldn’t be Frederick Radley, but I suppose you might have been lying about that as well.”
“No.” The truth, bitter as it was, was better than furthering the web of lies. “That is, I know who fathered Colin. You’re right, it was Raoul.”
He hadn’t been quite sure. She saw the bitter weight of the revelation settle in his eyes. “Putting us all in the midst of a cross between a Greek tragedy and a Jacobean drama.”
“He didn’t know,” Suzanne said. “When he sent me on the mission, he didn’t know I was pregnant. I didn’t know myself. I wasn’t giving enough heed to such things.”
“But he knew when he told you to accept my proposal.”
“He didn’t tell me to accept you. He left it up to me.” She saw the gray sky that December day in the plaza in Lisbon. Raoul’s cool, veiled gaze and carefully detached voice. She paused, then added, “I’m not sure what I’d have done if I’d known the truth.”
“That’s an honest admission. Amazing we have any honesty left between us.” His hand curled round the edge of his chair. His fingers were shaking. “Is Jessica—”
“She’s your child, Malcolm. In every sense of the word. You may not believe me, but you can see it in her face.”
“Given my relationship to O’Roarke, that doesn’t really prove anything.”
“Raoul and I didn’t—We weren’t lovers after I married you. As it happens, there wasn’t anyone else after I married you.”
He stared at her. His eyes were like those of a wax figure at Madame Tussaud’s. Or a dead man. “You really expect me to believe that?”
“No.” She leaned forwards, bracing her hands on the step behind her. “But if you won’t take my word, look at it like an agent. It’s true ‘fidelity’ wasn’t really a word in my vocabulary when I married you. To own the truth, even after I came to care for you, what mattered to me was that fidelity was important to you, that I owed it to you out of respect. But you know the longer one is on a mission, the more deeply one has to enmesh oneself in a role, Malcolm. I was playing the part of a faithful, supportive wife. Sleeping with another man would have been completely at odds with the role.”
“Playing.” Bitterness danced through the word.
“In the beginning.”
His gaze moved over her face as though he was looking for hidden messages in a deciphered code. “Fidelity in the service of a larger goal. I can believe that. You’re a good enough agent. And obviously ruthless enough. You sacrificed a great deal to marry me.”
She could see it in his eyes, the memory of their wedding night and all the nights that had followed, the realization that the woman he’d taken to bed had been playing a part even when they were at their most intimate. So much couldn’t be mended, but it would mean something if she could at least make him believe this. “I’d be lying if I said I’d never even thought of another man in that way since I met you. One doesn’t stop noticing. I’m sure you haven’t stopped noticing beautiful women. But it was no sacrifice.”
He gave a short laugh. “You can stop pandering to my ego. That isn’t part of your job anymore.”
“Darling—” She sprang to her feet and crossed to his side. She would have taken his face between her hands, but he jerked back. “You can’t believe it was all pretense.”
“I’d have sworn not. But I’d also have sworn I knew you, Suzette. Any faith I had in my own instincts is entirely destroyed.” He pushed his chair back, scraping it over the boards of the stage, and stood to face her. “You made yourself into the perfect wife.”
“I’ve never been in the least—”
“Not the perfect wife in general. The perfect wife for me. The man who never thought h
e’d marry. You anticipated my every need, without letting me realize how much you catered to me. You shared my adventures. You helped draft my memoranda and dispatches, God help me. Do you have any notion how many people lost their lives—”
“It was war.”
“And that excuses it?” He closed the distance between them and seized her by the arms.
The last time they’d been this close they’d been moments away from a kiss. Probably their last. Oddly, as she confronted the full force of his anger in the grip of his hands and the fury of his gaze it was easier to maintain her resolve. “I’d never claim my actions were excusable, Malcolm. But in war no one’s hands are clean. If my actions took British lives, they also saved French lives.”
She saw the flinch in his eyes. “Is that how you justify it to yourself?”
She didn’t let herself jerk away from his touch or the anger in his eyes. “I have nightmares, Malcolm.” She could feel the comforting pressure of his fingers on the nape of her neck in the dark of the night. “As you know better than anyone.”
“Are you asking me to believe your nightmares are real?”
“I’m hardly in a position to ask you to believe anything. But as it happens they are.”
He was still gripping her arms but not quite so tightly. For all his anger, he was trying to puzzle it out. How very like Malcolm. “So you’re saying people would have died in any case?”
“That’s a gross oversimplification. But I suppose in a way I am.”
“And that you were acting in the service of your country as I was of mine.”
“That’s what agents do.”
“Except when they’re taken in and betray their own people through their blind idiocy.” He flung himself away from her and stepped back. “Whatever may be on your conscience is now doubly on mine.”
She’d always known Malcolm would never be able to forgive her if he knew the truth. She saw now that it was much worse. He would never be able to forgive himself. “Malcolm—” She took two steps towards him, then checked herself. She had no right to touch him. But she had to find a way to reach him. “Direct your anger where it belongs. At me.”
“Believe me, I feel no lack of anger.”
“Because it’s folly to blame yourself.”
His gaze clashed with her own. “Meaning that I’m a dupe who had no hope against you?”
“Meaning the circumstances were entirely stacked against you.” She swallowed. “You’re a brilliant agent, Malcolm. But I think you’re too honest a person to suspect this level of duplicity.”
“The perfect mark. How fortunate for you.” He stared at her for a long moment, as one might contemplate a lost illusion. Then he turned on his heel without another word and strode from the theatre.
CHAPTER 25
The stage door slammed shut, echoing through the wings. An exclamation point, marking the moment the unthinkable had come to pass. Suzanne stared at the greasy light on the boards of the stage, the crumpled folds of her gown, her bonnet, pelisse, gloves, and reticule lying forgot on a chair.
The door creaked again, the stage manager returning. Through the sick tumult, thoughts began to form in her brain. That was the thing about the unthinkable. The world didn’t stop. It might shift and crack, but one had to stumble on through the wreckage. And so she shook out the folds of her skirt, moved to the chair, put her bonnet on her head and managed to tie the ribbons in a bow, slid her arms into her pelisse and did up the frogged clasps, pulled on her gloves, and slipped her reticule over her wrist.
One thing at a time. That was the only way she would get through this. She made her way the mercifully short distance back to Berkeley Square, even managing to stop and exchange greetings with Henry Brougham on the edge of Green Park. She smiled at Valentin in the entry hall, relinquished her bonnet, pelisse, and gloves, and climbed the steps to the nursery.
Blanca looked round at the opening of the door to the night nursery. She was beside the chest of drawers, pinning a nappy round a wiggling Jessica, who was bouncing on the balls of her feet, clutching Blanca’s shoulder. “You’re just in time,” Blanca said with a smile. “I’m almost done changing her.”
Suzanne closed the door and leaned against the cool panels. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
Blanca went still for a moment, then adjusted the last pin and lifted an insistent Jessica to the floor. “More threats?”
“Worse. Malcolm knows.”
The stunned silence was broken by a shriek from Jessica, the sort of gleeful way she announced her presence, as she crawled across the nursery carpet, one leg tucked under her, one hand held aloft clutching a stray sock. “You told him?” Blanca asked.
“He discovered it.”
In Blanca’s gaze, Suzanne saw her friend’s world shatter much as hers had done. But Blanca merely nodded. “We always knew it was a risk.”
Jessica caught Suzanne’s skirt in her fists and pulled herself to her feet. Suzanne automatically reached down and lifted her daughter into her arms. Jessica pressed her face against Suzanne’s throat and wrapped her arms round Suzanne’s neck. Suzanne tightened her hold, wanting to lose herself in the fresh baby smell and resilient baby laugh. “I’m not sure when Malcolm will be back. You should tell Addison as soon as possible.”
Blanca’s gaze locked on Suzanne’s own. “You know that Addison and I—”
“I’m not blind. Neither is Malcolm.”
Blanca jabbed a strand of hair behind her ear. “It was always Addison who wanted to be discreet. It isn’t the done thing for valets and ladies’ maids to have lives of their own. But a fortnight ago—He asked me to marry him.”
“Blanca—” Happiness, grief, and guilt washed over Suzanne in quick succession. Jessica had looped one arm round Suzanne’s neck and seized Suzanne’s pearls in her other hand. “I’m so sorry. I dragged you into this. I locked you into a role and into a set of lies. You shouldn’t have to pay the consequences for my sins.”
Blanca lifted her chin. “No one forced me to go along with it. I wanted to fight the British as well.” Blanca’s family had been killed during the British retreat after Corunna in which Suzanne had also lost her own family, though they hadn’t known each other at the time. “And later I wanted to keep the secrets to preserve my relationship with Addison just as you did with Mr. Rannoch. I made my own choices.”
“If I hadn’t married Malcolm—”
“I wouldn’t have had a chance to become Addison’s lover.” Blanca shook her head. “It took long enough to get past his scruples.”
Jessica wriggled in Suzanne’s arms. Suzanne set her on the floor.
“How many others know?” Blanca asked.
“No one that I know of.” Suzanne watched her daughter crawl over the pastel carpet, crab-style, one leg tucked under her, the other foot flat on the floor, a silver rattle in her hand now instead of the sock. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t think we’ll have to flee the country. Obviously, you’ll always have a home wherever I do.”
Blanca picked up the towel spread over the chest of drawers and shook it out with a crisp snap of her wrists. “Mr. Rannoch isn’t going to turn you over to the authorities or throw you out.”
“Mr. Rannoch is never going to forgive me.” Malcolm’s rage echoed in her head.
“Right now he’s been felled by a boulder. Even he can’t know what he’ll be feeling in a few hours, let alone days or months. But he won’t want the scandal—”
“Malcolm doesn’t care about scandal.”
Blanca folded the towel and dropped it in the clothes hamper. “He won’t want the scandal for the children.”
Jessica was engaged in one of her favorite games, pulling out the contents of the rubbish bin and strewing them over the floor. Suzanne wanted nothing more than to catch her daughter up in her arms and hold her tight. She glanced towards the door to Laura’s room. Colin would be doing lessons with Laura in the adjoining day nursery. “He won’t—”
“Whatever he does or feels, he won’t take the children from you,” Blanca said. “And you won’t take them from him. Everything may have changed, but I don’t see us going anywhere.”
Jessica had pulled a note card from the rubbish bin and was turning it over in her hands, examining it with great interest. “Malcolm has never confronted anything like this before. It’s difficult to know what he’ll do.”
“Difficult but not impossible.”
“I don’t—”
Blanca crossed the room and seized Suzanne’s hands. “Stop wasting time worrying about what you do or don’t deserve and think about what you need to do for your children. Not to mention your husband.”
Jessica was now gnawing on a corner of the note card. Suzanne forced herself to look into the torn wreckage of her life. “What might be best for Malcolm is to be free of me.”
“Rubbish, but even if you think that way Colin and Jessica come first.”
That was true. It was what was going to get her through this. That and her own instinct for self-reliance. She wanted to barricade herself in the house that might not be hers anymore and hug her children to her, but that wasn’t what was called for at present. She squeezed Blanca’s hands. “Laura can watch Jessica so you can speak with Addison. I need to go out.”
“To look for Mr. Rannoch?”
Where had Malcolm gone? Folly to repine on that. “No, he wouldn’t speak to me right now.” Suzanne waved at Jessica, who had heard the words ‘go out’ and was waving good-bye. “To warn the other person whose life has been turned upside down. I need to speak to Raoul.”
Malcolm pushed his way through the stage door of the Tavistock, grateful he was at least gone before Simon or any of the others returned, and walked blindly, the buildings a blur of brick and plaster and ironwork, the sounds of bridles jangling, horse hooves clopping, and ironbound wheels rolling over the cobblestones a dull cacophony that could not drown out the relentless deluge of his thoughts. Fortune’s fool indeed. No, his folly was owed not to fortune but to his own stupidity. Had he been so eager to believe a woman like Suzanne—or the Suzanne he thought he’d known— could love him that he’d been willfully blind? Because there must have been clues. And it was his training to pick up on such clues. To weigh, to sift, to never take things at their face value.
The Berkeley Square Affair (Malcolm & Suzanne Rannoch) Page 30