Suzanne had betrayed him. But it had worked because she was brilliant at her job and he had woefully failed at his.
His pace quickened. His chest was tight with the sort of exertion that came from running from a foe, as though he could outpace the hell the revelations had unleashed. He gave no thought to where he was headed until he found himself in Marylebone, before a shiny blue door with a neat brass knocker and late primroses in a brilliant yellow spilling from the window boxes. He stared at the door in surprise for a moment, thinking he should turn and leave. But perhaps it made sense. He rang the bell.
Gavin, the manservant, a cheerful man of middle years with receding hair and a wry gaze, admitted him with a friendly smile and waved him towards the back of the house. “She’s in her study.”
Malcolm stepped round a stack of books, a tumble of brightly colored blocks, a tangle of wool scarves and boots, a dog’s ball, and a skein of yarn that looked like a cat toy. The smell of paint drifted down the stairs from Paul St. Gilles’s studio two floors above.
“Malcolm.” Juliette Dubretton turned round at her desk when he knocked at the door of the study. “Are Suzanne and the children with you?”
“No, just me this time.” The answer came easily from his lips, seconds before the reality slammed into him that Suzanne would never again be such a natural, automatic part of his life. How long would it be before the new reality smashed the old one to bits and became settled fact? It had taken him a long time to adjust to being married, to remember that his life was bound up with another person’s and he had obligations to her. Would it take an equally long time to adjust to his marriage being over? “I found myself in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop in.”
“I’m glad you did. Paul’s upstairs painting and the children are in the garden.” Juliette gestured towards the window in front of her desk. Redheaded ten-year-old Pierre was pushing Rose, a three-year-old with her mother’s dark hair and strong features, in the swing that Malcolm had helped Paul hang from the old oak tree. Eight-year-old Marguerite, fair-haired like her father but with Juliette’s sharp blue gaze, threw a stick for Daisy, an energetic King Charles spaniel.
“You must tell Suzanne how much I appreciate her notes on my latest draft,” Juliette was saying. “She has a wonderful eye for clarity.”
“Yes, she’s remarkable at editing my speeches.” Malcolm managed to keep the grim edge out of his voice.
“And for a woman with a remarkably happy marriage, she has a keen understanding of the potential pitfalls of matrimony.”
“My wife is a woman of many talents.” Hard to avoid the irony, but perhaps he only heard it because it fairly leaped from the context.
Juliette turned her chair round and waved him towards a frayed blue velvet armchair. “Is it true that Simon Tanner’s discovered a lost Hamlet manuscript?”
Malcolm sank into the chair, relieved at the shift to safer conversational ground. “He’s certainly discovered a manuscript that’s an alternative version of Hamlet. Whether or not it’s by Shakespeare remains to be determined.”
Juliette’s blue eyes lit with the same sense of magic Malcolm remembered feeling when he first heard of the manuscript. “I confess it gives me chills.”
“I’m sure Simon would be happy to have you stop by a rehearsal. And I’d welcome your thoughts on it.”
“I’ll be sure to take you up on it.” Her gaze shifted over his face. “It’s more than a Shakespeare manuscript, isn’t it?”
“It may be.”
“Knowing you and Suzanne, I imagine that’s a mixed blessing. Not that your lives aren’t complicated enough, but I can’t but think you’ve both missed having something to investigate.”
“How well you know us.” The words again came automatically. It was what he would have said in response to her comment a few hours before. Now it brought a reminder that even Juliette, for all her skill at reading people, didn’t know the real Suzanne. Unless—No, he couldn’t start jumping at shadows.
“I won’t pretend I’m not intrigued, but nor will I tease you to reveal things that aren’t your secrets to share. It goes without saying that Paul and I will do whatever we can to help should our assistance ever prove useful.”
“You’re too kind.”
“We owe you a great deal.” She grinned. “And you aren’t the only one who misses adventure. Though I can’t claim ever to have experienced it on your level.”
“The events you lived through in France were their own sort of adventure.”
“Though not one I’m eager to repeat.” Juliette got to her feet. “Come out into the garden. I’m at a stopping place, and the children would like to see you.”
The day was cool, but a hint of sun peeped through the gray clouds and the children seemed undimmed by the weather. Marguerite ran over to give Malcolm a hug, Daisy frisking at her heels. “Oncle Malcolm. Where are Colin and Jessica?”
Malcolm touched his fingers to Marguerite’s bright hair. “I’ll bring them next time.”
“Jessica gets bigger every time I see her. Is she walking yet?”
“Not quite steadily. To her endless regret. And frustration.” He blinked away the image of Jessica taking careful steps holding Suzanne’s hands. He bent down to pet Daisy, who was nuzzling his boots.
“She will be soon. Rose walked just after her first birthday.”
Pierre carefully brought the swing to a stop and lifted Rose, who was crowing with excitement, into his arms. Rose wriggled to be put down and ran over to throw her arms round Malcolm’s knees.
“It’s good to see you, Oncle Malcolm.” Pierre crossed the garden at a more dignified pace and reached out for Malcolm. At ten he was, blessedly, not too old for hugs.
Malcolm embraced his sister’s son and then looked down into the blue eyes that were so like Tania’s it still stopped the breath in his throat.
You have the mind of a brilliant agent, Malcolm. Tania’s voice echoed in his head. But not the temperament. You haven’t learned that collateral damage is inevitable. Sometimes there are no good choices. Merely a choice of which is least damaging. And whom to try to avoid hurting. You do so much better in this business if you can accept it’s a game.
What would Tania have made of Suzanne? Malcolm wondered, his hand on her son’s head. Close on the thought came his sister’s voice again, speaking words she’d never spoken but that he knew instinctively were what she would say to him now. Shocked, Malcolm? Hurt? She’s beaten you at your own game. You always claimed to admire ability in women. Or is it that you thought she loved you? But you knew she didn’t when she married you. Are you angry with yourself for being deceived into thinking there was something real between you?
“I’m learning the St. Crispin’s Day speech,” Pierre said. “Tell Tante Suzanne. She helped me choose it. She said she’d coach me before speech day at school.”
“I’m sure she will.” He saw Suzanne sitting in the Berkeley Square library with Pierre, bent over a book. Had that only been last week? In the St. Gilles family’s escape from Paris two years ago, she’d saved Pierre’s life. That hadn’t been part of her mission.
“Tante Suzanne taught me how to pick a lock.” Marguerite looked up from petting Daisy. “I’ve been practicing on the garden shed. She’s going to show me how to do a more complicated one next time, like the front door. I want to be like her when I grow up. And like you, Maman.”
“Diplomatically spoken. I think you’ve been taking lessons from Oncle Malcolm.” Juliette smiled and bent down to scoop up Rose.
“Tante Suzanne doesn’t let people tell her she can’t do things because she’s a girl,” Marguerite said. “She doesn’t need to be afraid because she can take care of herself. And other people—she was splendid with those armed men who wanted to take Pierre. That’s the sort of person I want to be.”
“Someone who picks locks?” Pierre asked.
“Someone who has adventures and doesn’t let people tell her what to do and has children
and still gets to wear pretty clothes and jewels and curl her hair.”
“You don’t ask for much, do you, chérie?” Juliette said.
Marguerite scratched Daisy between her ears. “I don’t see why I can’t have all those things.”
“Nor do I, ma chère, nor do I. Perhaps you should write my next book.”
“What if your husband doesn’t want you having adventures?” Pierre asked his sister.
“Pierre!” Marguerite sprang to her feet and stared at him in outrage. “Are you saying you’d try to stop your wife—”
“No, of course not. But some men would. That’s what Maman writes about.”
“I’ll marry a man like Oncle Malcolm or Papa.”
“Men like Oncle Malcolm and your father are rare and precious, ma belle,” Juliette said.
“I’ll find one. They have to be on the lookout for the right women.” Marguerite looked at Malcolm. “You wouldn’t want a boring wife who didn’t want to have adventures, would you, Oncle Malcolm?”
“Perish the thought,” Malcolm said. And it was true. He couldn’t imagine being married to a woman who didn’t share his work. But you thought you had the best of both worlds. He could hear the words Tania might have spoken again. An agent wife who became an agent to assist you. Not an agent in her own right, with her own loyalties and priorities and moral compromises. A phantom she created to take you in. The real woman is probably a great deal more interesting.
Perhaps. But then the real Suzanne was someone he didn’t know.
Rose wriggled in Juliette’s arms. “Story,” she said.
“That,” Malcolm said, “is one request I can comply with.”
The coffeehouse was the same. The dark, scarred woodwork. The faded hunting prints in chipped frames on the walls. The smell of strong coffee and sharp red wine and newsprint that hung in the air. Just as it had been on a score of occasions in the past two years when she had met Raoul at the Crystal Heart. The setting was the same, but everything else was different.
This time Raoul had got there first. The urgency of her communication must have come through. She dropped into the chair across from him, gloved hands gripped tight on the tabletop to hold on to some semblance of sanity. “He knows.”
Raoul’s gaze flickered over her face. “You told him?”
“He put it together himself.”
A dozen thoughts and emotions raced through Raoul’s gray gaze, but he merely said, “Impressive.” He picked up the bottle of wine on the table and poured a glass.
“Apparently Frederick Radley saw us together in León five years ago.”
“Damn it.” The wine sloshed as Raoul set down the bottle. “I knew Radley was a danger. Why the man couldn’t have had the decency to fall at Waterloo—”
“Decency’s never been much in Radley’s line. He told Malcolm you’d been my lover. Malcolm put the pieces together.”
“A hellish coincidence.” Raoul put the glass of wine in her hand.
She pushed the glass aside. “We probably should have guessed that he’d put it together eventually.”
“Hardly.” Raoul’s voice was taut but level. Faced with the unthinkable, they’d both fallen back on their training. “For all Malcolm’s talents. I doubt he would have done without the current investigation. Drink some wine. You’re two shades paler than usual.”
She pulled her gloves from her numb fingers and managed a sip of wine. Malcolm’s bleak gaze in the shadows of the theatre reverberated in her memory. “I think Malcolm is cursing himself for a fool for not guessing sooner.”
“Querida—I’m sorry.” He reached across the table and gripped her free hand. “Sorrier than I can possibly say.”
For a moment, the desire to spring up from the table and run to him and bury her face in his cravat in a way that had nothing to do with the passion that had once been between them was almost overmastering. She forced a smile to her lips and another sip of wine down her throat. “I went into my marriage knowing it wouldn’t last forever after all. One could say I got far more out of it than I deserved. We none of us had any illusions our goal in life was personal happiness.”
“I’d have given anything to spare you this,” he said in a low voice.
Something in his tone shook her. Why now, of all times, should she be sure he spoke the unvarnished truth? “I’m still better off than those in France who face execution.” She drew a breath. She felt chilled and numb at the same time. “He knows about you as well. And about Colin. I’m sorry.”
Raoul’s mouth tightened. “From what you said about Radley I assumed so. It makes it worse for all of you.”
“No. I mean I’m sorry for what you’ve lost.”
She saw his defenses flash into place in his eyes, just as Malcolm’s did. “My dear girl, when it comes to Malcolm I could hardly be said to have had anything to lose.”
“You had the memories of his childhood. And what you’d recently shared.”
Raoul’s gaze shifted to the side. “Malcolm learning about his biological parentage hardly made me a father.”
“No.” She kept her own gaze trained on his face. “But I think perhaps his recasting the past did, on his side. On yours, I think you may have been his father all along.”
“Sentimental twaddle, querida.” His voice was still level but rougher than usual. “Whatever I’ve lost, one could say it’s no more than I richly deserve.”
“Aren’t you always saying it would be a sad world if we all got what we deserved?”
His mouth twisted. “One could make a fair case that I deserve more than most.”
“Then one could certainly say the same of me. I’m still safer than many of our friends.” She pulled her hand from his own, because she couldn’t give way to the need for comfort, and took another sip of wine. “I’m not sure where Malcolm has gone. I’m not sure what he’s going to do. You should consider leaving England while you can.”
Raoul poured a second glass of wine and took a sip. “He can’t betray me without betraying you.”
“What makes you so sure he won’t betray me?”
“What I’ve seen of the two of you over the past five years.”
“What you saw was an illusion that ended this afternoon. Malcolm now knows the woman he thought he loved never existed.”
“Malcolm is too sensible a man to think that.”
“He’d be right. I’m not sure who I am anymore.”
“I don’t think you have cause for alarm on this score, but if you do—Do you want me to help you leave?”
She curled her hands round her glass and shook her head. “I can’t take the children away from him. And obviously I can’t leave the children.” Her fingers tightened round the glass. “Make no mistake, if Malcolm goes to Carfax or tries to throw me from the house, I’ll fight to protect myself. I’ll fight to keep the children. I actually found myself thinking of what leverage I have to use against him. That’s the depths I’ve sunk to. Or perhaps the depths at which I’ve always existed. But I won’t be the one who breaks up the family.” She took a drink of wine and set the glass down, willing her fingers to be steady. “I’ve let myself go soft these past years. I need to remind myself I’m good at coping with the unexpected.”
“Suzanne.” Raoul reached out and closed his hand over her own again. “I can do little enough for you. God knows I’ve done little enough in the past save complicate your life. But I can be someone to whom you can openly admit your feelings. You have few enough people who can offer you that. I know because it’s the same for me.” He met her gaze across the table. “If it helps, I’ll admit that losing the brief flicker of what I almost had with Malcolm is cutting me in two.”
She swallowed again, but this time the torrent of feelings came welling up. “Damn you, must you always be right? Of course it hurts like hell. Of course I feel as though my soul’s been ripped out and shredded in pieces, and I’ll never be whole again. And I know I haven’t any right to feel that way, to mourn the los
s of something that was only mine through false coin, but that doesn’t make the feelings go away. I never thought I was supposed to be happy, I never thought it was possible, but I was, and there’s no way to capture it again. He’ll never look at me in the same way because I’m not the person he thought I was. And I don’t even know who I am anymore.” She drew a breath, throat raw with unshed tears.
“Feel better for having said it?”
She tugged at the brim of her bonnet. “I’m wondering how I can even be thinking about myself when I’ve smashed Malcolm’s life to bits.”
“And your own.”
“But I knew what I was doing. And now I’m wallowing. I hate wallowers.”
“You don’t have to worry about how you look with me. You never did.”
She jabbed her side curls back beneath the brim of the bonnet. “I underestimated the human element. I was blind to the pain I was causing—or at least I didn’t give it enough weight.”
“That rather sums up my own feelings.”
“But it doesn’t make the other elements go away.” She stared into her wineglass, forcing herself to confront the ugly, gnawing truth. “For all my wallowing, I can’t say I’d act differently.”
“Nor can I.”
“Which makes us hypocrites.”
“Which makes us aware of conflicting loyalties. The question is what we do about them.”
“Damn it, Raoul. I’ve seen you weigh the odds and sacrifice an agent as though he or she was a pawn.”
“My dear girl. You know how badly I sleep. I assure you it hasn’t got any better.”
“But you knew where your loyalties lay. You’d accepted the necessity of betrayal in the game we were playing.”
Raoul picked up the bottle and refilled her glass. “Loyalties conflict every day. Causes, countries, friends, comrades, lovers. It’s often impossible to be loyal to all. One has to make choices.”
The Berkeley Square Affair (Malcolm & Suzanne Rannoch) Page 31