“Well, days at any rate.”
“Mrs. Rannoch.” A tall man in an austere black evening coat, his fine-boned face distinguished by a distinctive hook nose and piercing blue eyes, materialized out of the crowd. “You look lovelier every time I see you.”
Suzanne held out her hand to the commander of the Allied army. “Is that the secret of your success, Your Grace? Always knowing precisely the right thing to say?”
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, gave one of his brusque laughs. “Hardly. My brother’s the diplomat in the family. Like your husband. Where’s he disappeared to?”
“I fear I haven’t the least idea,” Suzanne said. “Though I thought perhaps Your Grace might.”
Wellington gave her a shrewd look. “Possibly, my dear. Possibly. Don’t let it get about that I said so, but diplomats can often prove remarkably useful.”
Despite the heat in the candle-warmed room, a chill coursed through her. She knew Wellington was fond of Malcolm. And she also knew the duke wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice her husband or anyone else if he thought it necessary to achieve victory.
Malcolm tightened his grip on La Fleur’s arm and kept stone-still until he could make out the shadowy form standing just inside the gate. Then he hurled himself across the garden in three strides, kicking up a hail of gravel, and knocked the man to the ground. They crashed through a hedge. Branches broke. Something prickly jabbed Malcolm in the eye. He gripped his fallen adversary by the shoulders. “Qui êtes-vous?”
“Easy, Rannoch. Don’t take my head off.” The other man’s voice was hoarse but acerbic. “Your French is impeccable, but I know damn well it’s you.”
Those incisive, mocking tones were unmistakable. Malcolm sat back on his heels. “Davenport. What the devil are you doing here?”
“Warning you.” Harry Davenport pushed himself up to a sitting position and stared at La Fleur, who had crossed the garden to them. “You must be La Fleur. Hanging back from a fight that isn’t yours?”
“Never know what the hell Rannoch’s up to. Seemed better to stay back. Who the devil are you?”
“Lieutenant-Colonel Harry Davenport,” Malcolm said. “Aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington. Currently seconded to Colonel Grant.”
Colquhoun Grant was the head of British military intelligence, keeping watch for movement of French troops near the border.
“Grant sent me.” Davenport pulled himself free of the hedge and reached for his hat. “He intercepted a dispatch that implies the French may have broken one of our codes. Which means you could be compromised, La Fleur. We need to extract you tonight and get you back to Brussels.”
“See here,” La Fleur said, “selling you information’s one thing. If you think I’m going to turn my back on everything—”
“You should have thought of that before you started selling out your fellows,” Davenport said.
La Fleur whirled on him, hand raised. “Damn you—”
Malcolm grabbed La Fleur’s arm. “Who knows where—”
Shots rang out. Malcolm flung himself down and heard Davenport and La Fleur slam into the gravel beside him.
Davenport lifted his head. “What the devil—”
Another shot whistled overhead from the direction of the garden wall. Malcolm rolled onto his back and fired off an answering shot.
“Compromised, you say?” La Fleur aimed a shot at the wall. “What the hell have you got me into?”
“Risks of the trade.” Davenport fired as well, as a fresh hail answered from the wall. Whoever they were, they had the devil’s own skill at reloading.
Malcolm jammed fresh powder into his pistol. A cry sounded from above, and he caught a glimpse of stirring blue fabric and pale hair. A light glowed behind one of the windows of the château. What the devil—
La Fleur flung himself over Malcolm just as a fresh volley rang out. Malcolm felt the impact of the bullet that struck La Fleur, an instant before the other man collapsed on top of him.
2
“Suzanne.” Georgiana Lennox, the petite, elfin-faced third daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, fell upon Suzanne, dragging Malcolm’s cousin Aline Blackwell by the hand. “What have you learned? What was the duke saying?”
“Everything to be charming and reassuring, nothing of substance.” Suzanne met the gaze of the chief footman and nodded to him to open more champagne.
Georgiana groaned. “No matter now much ice water Wellington has in his veins he can’t be completely sanguine.”
“I am quite sure that he isn’t.” Suzanne glanced at the dance floor. A quadrille had just begun. The nearest set was made up of two young lieutenants partnering a blond girl in white and a brunette in pink. The soldiers were laughing as though they hadn’t a care in the world.
Suzanne took Georgiana and Aline by the arm and steered them to an ivory damask bench against the wall.
“Have you thought of leaving?” Georgiana asked as she sank down on the bench, her eyes wide and candid. “Going to Antwerp or even back to England?”
England. An alien land Suzanne had only visited once and to which she only belonged by marriage. She touched the younger girl’s arm. “It’s not as though there’s a great deal waiting for me there.”
“It’s Malcolm’s family’s home.” Georgiana cast a glance at Aline. “They’d look after you.”
“Yes, the Rannochs and the Dacre-Hammonds could be counted on for that.” Aline settled the peach muslin folds of her skirt. “At least some of us. But no sense pretending it’s easy living among the English ton, Georgy. Goodness knows I’ve never felt I properly belonged, and I was born one of their number.”
“Are you thinking of leaving, Georgy?” Suzanne asked.
Georgiana shook her head. “My parents wouldn’t dream of it, with Father in command of the reserve forces and my brothers in the army. But the Mertons and Grandisons have left. Does Dr. Blackwell want you to go home, Allie?”
Aline snorted. “Geoff knows better than to tell me what to do.” Her cool, dark gaze turned serious as it settled on the young soldiers in the quadrille. “I didn’t marry a military doctor to sit across the Channel wondering what would become of him.”
“But you’re going to have a baby. And Suzanne already has one.”
Aline touched her stomach, nearly flat beneath her embroidered muslin gown, as though she still couldn’t quite make sense of the fact that she was pregnant.
Suzanne saw her son’s bright-eyed face when she’d kissed him good night before they left for the party. “Colin was born in the midst of a war, and Malcolm and I dragged him across the Peninsula. Perhaps it was selfish of us to have kept him with us, but he seemed to thrive on it. I often think that’s why he sleeps so well through the night. He’s used to being jolted over rough roads in an ill-sprung carriage with musket fire in the distance.”
Aline’s gaze moved from the young lieutenants in the quadrille to a group of riflemen talking on the edge of the dance floor. “The French aren’t monsters if it comes to that. Even if we’re taken prisoner, there’s another seven months before my baby’s born. And more of a chance Geoff will be here to deliver it.”
Georgiana shuddered. “How can you joke about it?”
“Difficult to do much else,” Aline said, her smile sharp with irony.
“I’m sorry.” Georgiana pushed a light brown ringlet behind her ear with an impatient tug. “I’m all right most of the time. And then I look at my brothers and Lord Hay and our other friends—”
Suzanne squeezed Georgiana’s shoulders. “We’re all frightened, Georgy. We just have different ways of showing it.”
Georgiana smiled. “Where’s Malcolm? He’s always so wonderfully sensible.”
“Hiding out in the library I suspect,” Suzanne said, shutting her mind to images of the danger her husband might be in. “I got one waltz out of him and count myself fortunate.”
“I saw you dancing. I’d give a great deal to have a gentleman look at me the way
Malcolm was looking at you. I wish—Good heavens!” Georgiana exclaimed. “I didn’t realize she’d come to Brussels.”
“Who?” Aline asked, looking round the ballroom.
“Cordelia Davenport. By the door with Caro Lamb. They’re great friends. Not surprisingly, they share a penchant for scandal. But I wouldn’t have thought Lady Cordelia would dare show her face here.”
Suzanne turned her gaze to the door. Lady Caroline Lamb had entered the room, clad in one of her trademark clinging gauzes, her feathery curls clustering close to her delicate, pointed face. Beside her stood a woman Suzanne had never seen before. She was not particularly tall, but she held herself with a presence that somehow radiated across the room. She wore a gown of claret-colored silk, cut close to her body and veiled in black net drapery. Stark and dramatic among the pastels of the other ladies. Her bright gold hair was dressed in Grecian ringlets and threaded through with a diamond filet that caught the light from the branches of candles framing the door.
“Why are you surprised to see her here in particular?” Suzanne asked. Society in Brussels was popularly held to be looser than that in London.
“Because her husband’s one of Wellington’s officers,” Georgiana said. “Harry Davenport. I don’t think they’ve set eyes on each other for four years.”
Davenport dragged La Fleur off Malcolm. Malcolm drew a ragged breath and fired off a shot from his reloaded pistol. He reached toward La Fleur and felt the spreading sticky warmth of blood. He yanked at his cravat, undid the twists of linen (there were advantages to favoring simple styles), and pressed the fabric to the wound in La Fleur’s chest.
“Don’t worry ’bout me.” La Fleur’s voice was a hoarse rasp. “Get the bastards.”
“Got it covered.” Davenport fired off a shot. A scream sounded from beyond the garden wall.
Another hail of fire came from the wall. Another scream sounded, this time from above, startlingly high-pitched.
Malcolm could feel blood seeping through the folds of linen. The sickly smell choked the air. Davenport jammed fresh powder into his pistol, but the garden had gone almost eerily still. Crashing sounded from the underbrush beyond the wall, not approaching but retreating.
“Made ’em run,” La Fleur said in a faint voice. “Good for you.”
Malcolm increased his pressure on the wounded man’s chest. Blood welled between his fingers. “Don’t waste your energy.”
“Done for in any event,” La Fleur muttered. “Listen, Rannoch.” He switched to his native French. “The Silver Hawk.”
“The what?”
“Be careful. Don’t trust—”
La Fleur’s head fell to the side. Even in the murky moonlight, Malcolm saw the life fade from the other man’s eyes. He put his fingers to La Fleur’s neck for confirmation. No blood pulsed beneath his touch.
“Poor blighter,” Davenport murmured. “Though at least he’s out of whatever the rest of us bastards are going to be up against in the next weeks.”
“If he hadn’t flung himself over me—” Malcolm stared down at the still features of the dead man in whose place he could so easily be lying. Suzanne’s and Colin’s faces swam before his eyes. Fear squeezed his chest. Sometimes he thought he hadn’t known the true meaning of fear until he was a husband and father. “Why in God’s name—”
“Don’t waste time questioning it, Rannoch. Just be grateful that if La Fleur had to be an idiot he was the sacrificial sort. You’re lucky.”
“Damned lucky.”
“Not that.” Davenport picked up La Fleur’s pistol and stowed it in his pocket. “You’re lucky that you actually care whether you live or die.”
Malcolm cast a sharp look at the other man, but Davenport was looking down at La Fleur. “What’s the Silver Hawk?” Davenport asked. “It sounds like something out of a lending library novel.”
“I don’t know.” Malcolm closed La Fleur’s eyes, as he had closed the eyes of too many soldiers and civilians in recent years. He glanced up and saw the light still glowing behind one of the French windows on the first floor of the château, illuminating the balcony before it. A pale mass lay behind the wrought-metal filigree of the balcony railing, a mass that had not been there when he arrived. The stir of blue fabric and pale hair registered in his consciousness for the first time.
“What the devil—” Davenport had seen it as well.
Of one accord, the two men reloaded their pistols and got to their feet. They made their way up the shallow stone steps to the terrace. A glance at the balcony confirmed that it would be too difficult to climb without rope. Malcolm’s picklocks made quick work of one of the French windows off the terrace. They stepped into a room that held the faint, musty smell of lack of use. Shadowy blurs round them seemed to be furniture under Holland covers. Some sort of sitting room or salon.
They moved over the floorboards, Malcolm going first, Davenport covering him. His eyes now adjusted to the dark, Malcolm found a door and turned the handle. A passage stretched before them, lit faintly by a shaft of moonlight coming through a single window at one end. Thank God for the lighter walls favored in Belgian houses. Much easier to see than if they had faced a mass of English oak paneling. He could make out a staircase at the end of the passage farthest from the window.
He moved forward, testing the floorboards for squeaks, grateful now for his kid-soled evening shoes. Davenport was booted but was managing quite well behind him. Up the stairs, keeping close to the wall where the treads were solider. A window on the half landing let in a bit more light. At the stair head, a glow of candlelight came from a partially open door. Malcolm went still for the length of several heartbeats, senses keyed to any sound or movement. But nothing indicated the presence of any living creature but themselves.
Sliding his feet over the narrow strip of carpet, he picked his way down the passage to the open door. Davenport followed several paces behind. Malcolm flattened himself against the wall beside the door that was ajar. Through the narrow sliver he could make out the glow of a single candle. It stood on a small, round table against one wall, casting warm light on the flowered wallpaper. A dark mass on the opposite side of the room looked to be a four-poster bed. A breeze stirred the filmy curtains at the French window. The window was open.
Malcolm slipped into the room. Cool night air, dust, and a whiff of jasmine and iris. Not from nature, but expertly blended. Two and a half years of sharing a dressing table with his wife in cramped quarters had taught him to recognize the scent of good perfume.
He crossed the room and pushed open the unlatched French window. A tangle of robin’s egg blue fabric and pale blond hair lay against the railing. Even as his mind screamed a hundred questions, Malcolm knelt beside the fallen woman. The smell of blood washed over him. She lay on her side, curled toward the railing. He pushed her hair, half fallen loose from its pins, back from her face, and felt the base of her throat. Sticky blood met his fingers. The bullet had gone through her carotid artery. He could feel no pulse.
“Good God.” Davenport had dropped down beside him.
The woman’s fashionably cropped ringlets fell over her face. Malcolm touched her shoulder and rolled her onto her back.
Her pale blue gown was a robe fastened with diamond clasps over a slip of white satin. A ball gown. Her tangle of hair still obscured her face. Malcolm smoothed the disordered curls back from her forehead.
She was young, probably close to his wife’s one-and-twenty. Delicate features, a retroussé nose, a faint wash of rouge on her creamy skin, pale blue eyes that stared up at him with the fixed glassiness of death. She looked familiar, but he couldn’t place her. Though Brussels society was confined, one still met a score of people at each entertainment.
He felt Davenport’s sudden stillness. Malcolm turned to look at the other man. Davenport was staring down at the dead woman as though a musket ball had pierced his memory.
“Do you know her?” Malcolm asked.
“You could say so.” Davenport
’s voice was without expression. “It’s my sister-in-law.”
3
Suzanne studied Lady Cordelia Davenport. “Of course, her husband must be Harry Davenport.” She had known Davenport since her days in the Peninsula when she first married Malcolm. A quick mind, a caustic wit, a general impatience with humanity. He’d never mentioned a wife that she could recall. “Colonel Davenport hasn’t been home on leave in four years?”
“I remember now.” Aline watched Lady Cordelia and Caroline Lamb as they advanced into the ballroom. “I was still in the schoolroom, but I heard the gossip in Mama’s drawing room. There was another man involved, wasn’t there? Not that that would be so shocking, particularly not to Mama’s set, but I remember someone commenting that Lady Cordelia was ‘positively flagrant’ about it.”
Georgiana nodded. “My sisters and I could talk of nothing else for weeks. It seems quite beastly of us now, but when one’s a child one just feels the ghoulish fascination of the story.”
Stuart, always quick to recognize pretty women, had crossed the room to greet Lady Caroline and Lady Cordelia. Suzanne watched him bow over the two ladies’ hands. Her time on the Peninsula and in Vienna had given her an acquaintance with many of the soldiers and diplomats present tonight. She knew how to make herself at home in a Spanish farmhouse or on a rocky patch of ground, and she could negotiate a diplomatic salon and make her way among Continental royalty. But London society still remained uncharted territory for her. Her brief visit to Britain with Malcolm a year ago had only left her with a sense that it was an alien land set with mines and governed by a code to which she would never discover the key.
She watched Lady Cordelia, who had advanced into the room and, without so much as waving her fan or lifting a white-gloved finger, acquired a crowd of gentlemen about her. Two were offering her glasses of champagne, and the others appeared to be clamoring for the next dance. “Colonel Davenport learned of his wife’s love affair?” she asked.
Teresa Grant Page 2