London Interlude

by Tracy Grant

  Her arms tightened round her son again, this time to cradle him closer. Colin released her breast, stretched, and squirmed round to nurse on the other side.

  Malcolm shrugged out of his coat. "I forget how tedious these evenings are."

  As he turned, the candlelight fell across his face, and she saw shadows she hadn't noticed earlier. "Darling?" she asked. "Is anything the matter? Is it your father?"

  The words came out instinctively, more a wifely question than the probing of a spy. She expected him to turn them aside with a quip or a quote. Whether to protect her or himself or both of them, he wasn't the sort to confide. He did give a quick smile. "God knows. I'll own seeing Alistair rattled me more than I'd like, but if meeting him could ruin an evening I'd scarcely be able to show my face in London."

  "Was it something else? I don't mean to pry, but—"

  "No, it's just—" He looked up and met her gaze, his own surprisingly unarmored. "Carfax asked me to do an errand for him at the ball."

  For a moment the breath stuck in her throat. Malcolm confided in her about his work more now than at the start of their marriage, and had even enlisted her help on more than one occasion. But he still had a spy's instinct to hold secrets close. "And the errand didn't work? Or—I understand if you don't want to talk about it."

  To her surprise he crossed the room and dropped down beside her on the yellow chintz dressing table bench. "In truth, I could use your advice."

  For a moment she couldn't breathe. Not because of the mission. Because of the trust in his gaze.

  "Carfax wanted me to intercept some papers that were being traded," Malcolm said. "A Bonapartist agent had turned on his comrades and was selling information to the Austrians."

  "No wonder I saw so little of you tonight. Your industry never fails to amaze me, Malcolm."

  He grimaced. "If it wasn't for this I'd have been with you when you encountered Alistair."

  "What sort of information was it?" That at least would tell her how much he knew.

  "Carfax just knew it was valuable." Malcolm gave an abashed grin. "So naturally I was curious. When we got back and you were drinking tea with Aunt Frances and Aline, I decoded the first page."

  "That quickly?"

  "It wasn't a very complicated code."

  "And the papers?"

  "They appear to be a list of Bonapartist agents who've sought refuge in London."

  "Dear heaven. Carfax will be pleased."

  "I know." Malcolm turned to the side and cupped his hand round Colin's head. Something about the angle of Malcolm's head as he bent over their son looked particularly tender. "They'll be rounded up, pumped for information, sent back to France perhaps to face the Royalists. For a war that's over."

  "You think it's over? You were telling David—"

  "That Carfax won't stop. Oh, I have no illusions that the Bonapartists will stop either. I daresay there are plans afoot to get Bonaparte off Elba, whether those plans are ever put into action. But I doubt it will be agents in London that will be responsible if they do make an attempt. The agents on this list aren't people who were working in London through the war. They were based in France or Spain or Portugal and sought refuge here when the Royalists were restored. They're probably more focused on staying alive than spying. Their lives will be destroyed and the lives of people they've brought with them. Spouses. Children, for all we know."

  "You sound remarkably tolerant."

  "I'm thinking ahead to Vienna. The world needs a fresh start. A blood bath of revenge isn't the way to begin." He looked down at their son again. "That isn't the world I want for Colin."

  Suzanne watched her husband in the flickering candlelight. "What are you going to do?"

  "Carfax would say it isn't up to me to decide. I do the errands, he makes the hard choices. But then for Carfax I always wonder how hard those choices are."

  "And so?" Her breath seemed to be bottled up in her throat.

  Malcolm was staring at an oil painting of a young man in uniform and a brown horse that hung on the wall opposite, but he seemed to be looking beyond the confines of the room. As though he were attempting to sift through different possible futures. "I've never been very good at following orders. It doesn't always make me the best agent."

  He reached inside his coat and drew out two sheets of paper. The object of her mission, inches from her fingers and an incalculable distance away. "Carfax is a realist," Malcolm said. "He understands some missions fail."

  He got to his feet, crossed to the table by the door and fed the papers to the flames of the candle.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  "I failed," Suzanne said.

  Raoul turned to look at her. They were meeting in the open. He had fallen in beside them as she walked along the banks of the Serpentine in Hyde Park with Aline, Gisèle, Judith, Colin, and Chloe. "Hardly. The list is destroyed."

  "No thanks to me."

  "It could be partly thanks to the influence you're having on your husband. Though I can imagine Malcolm making such a decision on his own."

  She shot a sideways look at him. "Thanks perhaps to your influence on him as a boy."

  Raoul's face tightened, as though pulling the shutters closed. "Perhaps."

  Suzanne looked ahead on the gravel walk. Chloe and Colin had run ahead, and Aline picked up her muslin skirts to run after them. Judith and Gisèle exchanged glances, then followed. "We were lucky."

  "In this business, one has to be grateful for luck. It's the results that count, not the often messy way one gets there."

  Suzanne gripped her gloved hands together. The thread net pulled tight. "I don't know what I'd have done. If he hadn't burned the list. If I'd have tried to take it and risked exposure."

  "Yes, well, you don't have to face that decision now. No sense agonizing over it. There are enough actual choices to focus on." Raoul touched her arm with careful restraint. "I won't pretend the coming months won't be difficult. We'll need you more than ever in Vienna."

  She nodded. She wouldn't expect him to tell her if he knew of plans for Bonaparte to escape. She wouldn't want to know. That is, she would, but she understood the danger and her life was complicated enough without the weight of keeping that confidence. "I'll do my best," she said.

  "I'm sure you will. But I hope for the next few weeks you can enjoy your time in Britain with your husband and son."

  Up ahead, Colin was tossing bread to the ducks, while Aline held him round the waist. Gisèle caught Chloe's arm as she darted close to the water's edge. Suzanne managed a smile. "Odd to hear you using the words enjoy and Britain in the same sentence."

  "I have nothing against Britain," Raoul said. "I've spent many enjoyable times here and I count many Britons as good friends. I just wish the British government would cease to occupy the countries I call my own. Or any countries for that matter. Or try to change their governments."

  A gust of wind tugged at the ribbons on her bonnet and ruffled the smooth waters of the Serpentine. "You make it sound so simple."

  "It isn't simple at all. And it's going to get more complicated. But in our life we have to snatch moments when we can. I hope you can snatch some in the next weeks." His gaze moved to the group up ahead. Judith was kneeling beside Colin, heedless of her white muslin gown. Gisèle spun Chloe in a circle while Chloe shrieked in delight. "You were younger than Gisèle Rannoch when I met you."

  With another man, she might have fancied a hint of self-reproach beneath his easy tone. "Gisèle has been through a lot from what Malcolm says, and I think there's a great deal about her I don't understand. But she's still a girl. When you met me, I hadn't been a girl for a long time." She watched Colin giggle with glee as a duck flapped across the water. "Raoul?" she asked, her gaze on her son. "What would you have done in Malcolm's position?"

  Raoul was silent for a long moment, his gaze also fixed on Colin. "It's easy to say a spy should be too hardened to have done as Malcolm did. But in truth, I think it takes one who's lived the damnable complex
ities of a spy's life to have the empathy he showed." He drew a harsh breath as Colin and Chloe knelt at the water's edge with Aline and Gisèle holding them steady. "I don't know what I'd have done," he said at last. "But I hope to God I'd have the courage to act as Malcolm did."

  ***

  Malcolm came out of the study as Suzanne, Aline, Gisèle, Judith, and the children came into the hall in South Audley Street. Suzanne scanned his face, wary because she knew he'd been meeting with Carfax, but he was smiling. In fact, he looked more relaxed than he had since they'd set foot on British soil.

  "What did Colin think of the Serpentine?" he asked, taking their son from Suzanne.

  "Duh," Colin said, which might have been ducks. Or Daddy.

  Malcolm grinned at him, then at his sister and cousins. Gisèle actually gave a half smile in response.

  "How did Carfax take it?" Suzanne murmured to her husband as they went upstairs.

  "Like one who knows when to cut his losses." Malcolm opened the door of the yellow bedchamber and stepped aside for her to go in first. "He said he trusted I'd be less rusty in Vienna."

  "Do you think he suspects?"

  "I'm not sure." Malcolm moved to the hearthrug and set Colin down beside his blocks. "Carfax is a lot of things but he knows when to pick his battles."

  Suzanne scanned her husband's face. "Regrets?"

  "On the contrary. It felt amazingly good to do something on my own initiative." Malcolm knelt down beside Colin. "I wonder if it's too much to hope that's the last Carfax's errands will intrude while we're here."

  Suzanne dropped down beside her husband and son. "Are you sure you want it to be?"

  Malcolm helped Colin place a blue block atop a red one. "Meaning?"

  "Sometimes Carfax's errands are a welcome distraction."

  She wasn't sure if saying it was an invasion of privacy, but he gave one of his crooked smiles that were surprisingly open. "Particularly when it comes to my home and family? Perhaps. They certainly have been in the past. But not when it comes to you and Colin." He coaxed Colin to stop chewing on a green block and set it atop the tower. "I doubt everything will be sorted in time for the Congress to start in July. Colin will have his first birthday here. I hope we have time to go to Dunmykel. It has a lot of memories. Not all unpleasant."

  The memory of his mother lingered between them, but she knew better than to push her luck. "I'm excited to see it. Colin seems to love the water."

  "There's more to show him in London as well. The Tower. Perhaps a day at Hampton Court. A boat ride to Greenwich. And I'd like to get to Oxford." He paused, his long fingers curling round another block. "I don't know that Britain will ever be home again, whatever David says. But it's part of who I am. And I'd like you both to see that."

  Her breath bottled up beneath the crisscrossing muslin bands of her bodice. The admissions that shook their marriage to the foundation seemed to come at the most innocuous moments. She put her hand over his own and spoke on instinct rather than thought, as so often in their marriage. Perhaps too often. But for better or worse, these moments were the basis of their family. "Then we should understand it as well."

  EXCERPT FROM THE MAYFAIR AFFIAR

  Chapter 1

  London

  March 1818

  Rifle fire peppered the air. Malcolm Rannoch came awake with a jerk and tightened his grip on his wife. Suzanne froze in his arms, then sat bolt upright in a tangle of Irish linen sheets and embroidered Portuguese satin coverlet, her hair spilling over his arm. Another hail of bullets. One rifle. No, not a rifle. Rapping. On the stout English oak of the door panels.

  "I'm sorry, sir. Madam." It was Valentin, their footman, outside the door. "But Inspector Roth is below."

  Malcolm pushed back the coverlet, letting in a blast of chill air. "Dressing gown," Suzanne said, which was sensible, as he wasn't wearing a nightshirt. He grabbed his dressing gown from the bench at the foot of the bed and struggled into it. By the time he got to the door, Suzanne was beside him, tugging at the sash on her own dressing gown.

  Valentin's young, fine-boned face was white above the flame of his candle. "Mr. Roth didn't say what the trouble was. But he insisted I wake you. I thought—"

  "Yes." Malcolm touched him on the shoulder. "Quite right. Thank you, Valentin."

  He met his wife's gaze for a moment. A dozen possibilities, each more unpleasant than the last, hovered between them. "Best to know at once," Suzanne said.

  But before they went downstairs they moved to the cradle where Jessica, fifteen months, was sharing her pillow with the family cat, then opened the connecting door to the night nursery. The tin-shaded night light showed Colin, four and a half, tangled in the coverlet, his arm round his stuffed bear. Malcolm heard Suzanne give a sigh of relief he thought only he could have detected. He took her hand, only in part because the house was shrouded in darkness.

  The light of his candle jumped and leapt over the stair wall and the curving balustrade as they made their way downstairs. In the ground floor hall, cloud-filtered moonlight spilled through the fanlight over the front door, casting a cool wash of light over the long-case clock, the velvet-covered bench, the hall table with its basket for calling cards. The marble tiles were cold underfoot. When they were close enough to see the dial, the long-case clock said that it was twenty-five minutes past four. Jeremy Roth, now a Bow Street runner, had become a close friend when he was an army sergeant in the Peninsula during the war, but even their closest friends weren't in the habit of making calls at this hour.

  A visit from a Bow Street runner could not but raise a host of unpleasant possibilities. Given the revelations that had recently shaken their marriage, the possibilities reverberated through the air like a cannonade that warns of a coming battle. Outside the carved library doors, Suzanne met Malcolm's gaze for a moment. Malcolm could see the jolt of terror in the eyes of his usually imperturbable wife, the fear that whatever news Roth had brought would rend the fragile rapprochement between them.

  Suzanne gave the bright smile with which Malcolm had seen her face down every crisis from the Battle of Waterloo to an attack on their house when she was about to give birth. "Best see what Jeremy has to say."

  Malcolm nodded and reached for the door handle.

  Roth was pacing before the banked coals of the library fireplace, mud-spattered greatcoat whipping about his ankles. He turned at the opening of the double doors and came quickly forwards. The sharp-featured face that Malcolm had seen alight with compassion as Roth closed the eyes of a fallen comrade, and intent with the chase as he raced down a London alley after a suspect, was now set, the mobile features folded into severe lines, the eyes oddly hooded.

  "I'm sorry," Roth said. "But this couldn't wait."

  "It's hardly the first time we've been awakened in the middle of the night. And I doubt it will be the last." Suzanne gestured Roth to a chair, as though she wore a morning dress with every hook done up, her hair dressed, and all the accoutrements in place instead of being wrapped in seafoam silk and ivory lace with her feet bare and her dark hair spilling in a tangle over her shoulders.

  "Mrs. Rannoch—"

  "I thought you'd finally got round to calling me Suzanne."

  Roth took a step forwards, then checked himself, arms clamped at his sides. "Do you know where Miss Dudley is?"

  Of all the names they might have heard, that of their children's governess was the last Malcolm had expected. "Asleep upstairs," he said.

  Roth's gaze moved from Malcolm to Suzanne. "When did you last see her?"

  "In the drawing room after dinner. We played lottery tickets with Colin." And then they had all shared a cup of tea while Suzanne nursed Jessica. Laura Dudley was part of the family circle.

  "What time did she go up?"

  "About half-past ten, I think," Suzanne said. "I wasn't looking closely at the clock." She exchanged a look with Malcolm.

  "You're sure she went to her room?" Roth persisted.

  "I thought I was." Suzanne h
ad gone still, fingers taut against the folds of her dressing gown. "Colin and Jessica are asleep. But we didn't look in Laura's room. I'll be right back."

  Malcolm watched the doors close behind his wife and turned back to Roth. "What in God's name—"

  "Was Miss Dudley acquainted with the Duke of Trenchard?" Roth asked.

  Malcolm rubbed his eyes. The aquiline nose and hawklike features of the duke flickered in his memory. "Trenchard? Good God, no. At least, not to my knowledge."

  "She hadn't met him at your house?"

  "Trenchard doesn't exactly move in our set." The last time Malcolm had seen the duke, outside the House of Commons, Trenchard had called Malcolm a dangerous Jacobin whose ideas would lead to the downfall of all that Britain stood for.

  "He's a duke. You're a duke's grandson."

  "It's not a club."

  Roth raised a brow. "Isn't it?"

  Malcolm met his friend's gaze and inclined his head in acknowledgement of a hit. "Trenchard's a Tory, a crony of the Prime Minister. I'm a Whig, whose ideas are too radical even for some members of my own party."

  "And his wife's father is your spymaster."

  Malcolm swallowed. Anything to do with Lord Carfax cut a bit too close to the bone just now. "Former spymaster. But yes, Trenchard's second wife is Carfax's daughter and my friend David's sister."

  "You grew up with the Duchess of Trenchard."

  "In a manner of speaking. I was closer to David and their sister Isobel than to Mary. But she and Trenchard have been here once or twice. I can't remember Laura ever meeting him, but it's possible they shook hands at one of our larger parties. We often have her bring the children in. Why is this important?"

  The candlelight seemed to bounce off Roth's dark eyes. "How long has Miss Dudley been in your employ?"

  "A year. Suzanne engaged her when we were still in Paris." Malcolm had been away on a mission, but he could still remember his wife's relief at having found a governess who would fit into their unconventional household.