by Teresa Grant
“I’m sorry,” Suzanne said. “I know this can’t be easy. You’re fond of him.”
Malcolm gave a wry smile. “It seems almost presumptuous to be ‘fond’ where Wellington’s concerned. God knows I disagree with him about enough political matters. But I suppose—” He stared at his hands for a moment. “Intelligence is a messy game, with its double crosses and betrayals. I long since accepted I’m not sure I know the limits of what Carfax is capable of. I suppose I liked thinking Wellington was above that.”
Her heart twisted. “You’re much too decent for the intelligence game, Malcolm.”
“Carfax often says the same. It’s not meant as a compliment.”
“I meant it as a compliment.” In truth, Malcolm’s empathy often allowed him to see things other agents would miss. It just burdened him with an intolerable load of guilt.
“But then you possess far more tact than Carfax. Not to mention a kinder heart.” Malcolm shifted his position on the bed. “There’s more,” he said. “Apparently Rivère also quarreled with Gui Laclos last week.”
Suzanne drew in her breath, Cordelia’s confidences sharp in her mind.
“I know,” Malcolm said. “About Gui and Cordelia. Harry told me.”
“So Cordy told him. I’m glad of that at least.”
“Yes,” Malcolm said, but she heard the slight hesitancy in his voice.
“Darling? What is it?”
He hesitated a moment. “Merely that confronting his wife’s past is a bit harder for Harry than he’d admit to anyone. Particularly Cordelia.”
She swallowed. “Yes, I imagine it would be. But he must realize—”
“I think at times he still finds it difficult to believe Cordelia loves him.”
“Rubbish. He has to know—”
“Not because he doesn’t trust her. Because he has difficulty believing a woman like her could love him. I can understand that.”
Suzanne fixed her husband with a firm stare, her throat torn by conflicting impulses. “Men,” she said, “sometimes can’t see what’s directly in front of them.”
“Oh, that’s undoubtedly true.” He grinned, though his eyes were vulnerable as spun glass. “For what it’s worth, I am glad Cordelia told Harry about Gui. And about Edmond Talleyrand. However painful the truth may be, it’s infinitely preferable to have it in the open rather than keeping it concealed.”
Her fingers dug into the padded satin of the bench. “Just so.” She drew a breath. “So now you know what Wellington quarreled with Rivère about.”
“Quite. Which doesn’t mean Wellington didn’t—”
Questions he couldn’t quite put into words lurked in his eyes. She was fond of Wellington, but she had no such loyalty to the British commander. “You think Wellington would have killed to keep this letter secret?”
Malcolm’s brows drew together. “Wellington can be ruthless, but I’d like to think not for personal reasons. He’s not the sort to put much stock in what others say about him. But he also has a temper. We don’t know what was in the letter. It mattered enough to him for him to withhold information from me.”
The concern behind his eyes belied his even tone of voice. Suzanne got to her feet and crossed to the bed. “Whatever he’s done, darling, it’s not on your conscience.”
He looked up at her with a quick smile. “That’s my Suzette. No false reassurances.”
“You wouldn’t believe them if I tried.” She rested her hand on his shoulder. “If anyone can get Wellington to talk it’s you.”
A bleaker smile pulled at his mouth. “I’m not sure that’s reassuring.”
“But it’s true.” She bent down and put her mouth to his.
His arms came up to circle her shoulders. She sank down onto his lap and tangled her fingers in his hair.
She could not have said which of them she was trying to comfort.
Harry eased open the door of the bedchamber he shared with his wife, trying not to wake her. Sharing a bedchamber was still new territory for them. There were times when he entered the room shocked to find her there or to smell the whiff of her perfume. And others when he woke stunned to feel the warmth of her beside him. Or the weight of her arm flung over his chest.
Candlelight spilled over the floorboards. Cordelia was sitting up in bed, her knees drawn up beneath the coverlet, a book in her hands.
“Harry.” She smiled at him. Her hair tumbled loose over her shoulders. Her eyes had that open look they got when she removed her eye blacking, though she still wore her sapphire earrings. “Did everything go all right?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d be awake.” He pushed the door to. “Is Livia all right?” Their daughter had been sickly as a baby, and though she seemed perfectly sturdy now, the worry still haunted him, despite the fact that he hadn’t seen Livia in those early years. Or because of it.
“Livia’s fine. Sound asleep when I got home with her face squished up against Portia.” Portia was Livia’s stuffed cat. “But I find it difficult to sleep when you’re on a mission.”
“A visit to a casino is a hardly a mission.”
“You’re investigating a murder.” She put a hand on the embroidered silk coverlet, a sort of invitation.
He dropped down on the edge of the bed. A ridiculously domestic action. If anyone had suggested three months ago that he’d be in such a position with his wife—“Rivère’s mistress might be called a dangerous woman, but hardly in that sense.”
Cordelia’s gaze shot over his face, her eyes lit with amusement. “She intrigues you.”
“Of course she intrigues me. She has information.”
“And she’s an intriguing woman.”
“Well, I’m hardly blind.”
“Thank goodness for that. Did she tell you anything? No, it’s all right if you shouldn’t talk about it. I won’t tease you.”
Harry looked into his wife’s blue eyes, open and trusting in a way he’d never thought to see them. The temptation to say nothing, to lean over and kiss her, to sink back into the pillows and blot out past knowledge and present questions, was almost overmastering. But for all his sins and fears, he’d known from the first that the only chance they had lay with honesty.
“We saw—” He almost said “a friend of yours,” but that would sound too arch. “We saw someone you know—” He was as tongue-tied as he’d been when he first met her at the Devonshire House ball, a callow young scholar dazzled by her glittering beauty.
“Edmond or Gui?” Cordelia asked in a level voice.
He met her gaze. She looked back at him, her own steady. He wasn’t the only one who understood about uncompromising honesty. “Gui,” he said. “Apparently he’s a regular at the Salon des Etrangers.”
Cordelia settled back against the pillows. She’d have looked relaxed to anyone who didn’t know her as well as her husband. Or perhaps one of her lovers. “Hardly a surprise. He once told me perhaps it was as well the family fortune had been left in France or ten to one he’d have gambled it away.”
“You liked him.” He could hear the memories in her voice.
“He was kind. It’s amazing how many of the men I—how many of my lovers weren’t.”
“You shouldn’t sell yourself short, Cordy.”
She gave a brief laugh, brittle as old paper. “I didn’t like myself very well. Perhaps it felt more convivial to be with someone I didn’t like very well, either.”
“But not Gui Laclos.”
Cordelia pleated a fold of the coverlet between her fingers. Her wedding band flashed in the candlelight against the apricot silk. “Not Gui. Though I rather think one of the things that drew me to Gui was that he suffered from as much self-disgust as I did.”
“Over what?” Harry kept his voice even, though he couldn’t quite manage a conversational tone.
Cordelia’s gaze skimmed over his face. “Did you just happen to encounter Gui tonight or does he have something to do with the investigation? You don’t have to answer that. But if you want
me to help you—”
“Quite. Apparently Gui quarreled with Antoine Rivère a week ago.”
He saw the surprise that ran through Cordelia’s eyes. Surprise and a jolt of concern. “Do you know what the quarrel was about?” she asked, her voice taut as a bowstring.
“Gui says he’d lost money to Rivère at the gaming table.”
“But you think it’s more than that.”
“So does Malcolm. Who’s a more unbiased judge.” Harry hesitated a moment. “Rivère dealt in blackmail.”
“And you wonder if Gui—” She was silent for a moment. He thought she might refuse to say more. “I can’t say the source of his self-disgust. Perhaps in part that he was safe in England while both his cousins had died fighting for France one way or another. And yet—”
“You think there was something more?”
“I think there was a great deal about Gui I didn’t know. But—”
“You’re sure he couldn’t be a killer?”
She swallowed. “I learned in Brussels I couldn’t be sure of that about anyone.”
He caught her hand. “I’m sorry, Cordy. That was unpardonable. I didn’t—”
“You were doing your job.” Cordelia put her other hand against his face, her eyes dark and fragile as stained glass. “What I meant to say is there are things about Gui I’m quite sure I didn’t know. I can’t say they have anything to do with Antoine Rivère. But if Rivère was blackmailing him—”
“Just so.”
She swallowed. Without eye blacking and rouge, her face framed by wispy bits of hair, she looked unexpectedly like a schoolgirl. “Do you want me to see what I can learn?”
He kept his gaze steady on her face. “It’s not a pretty thing, looking into people’s pasts. Especially people one cares for. I wouldn’t ask that of you, Cordy.”
“I know. But I’m offering.”
“You don’t need to do this to prove something.” His voice turned rougher than he intended.
“I’m not. I’d be a fool to think I could prove certain things to you. Those things can only be accepted with time, if at all. But you know I can’t bear to hang back once questions have been raised. I need to know.”
“You may not like the answers,” he said, in the tone he’d used with young intelligence operatives he was training.
“I daresay I may not. But avoiding the answers won’t make the questions go away.”
He seized her hand and lifted it to his lips. “I have a remarkable wife.”
“For a man who claims to despise flattery, you’re indecently good at it, Harry.” She leaned forwards, her dressing gown slithering from her shoulders, and put her mouth to his.
After two months her kisses still sent a shock of wonder through him. He closed his arms round her, carefully, because his impulse was to crush her to him as though she might be gone at any moment. They fell back against the pillows. There might still be ghosts between them. Perhaps there always would be. But this was the surest way he knew to drive them from thought.
Rupert stopped in the doorway of his wife’s bedchamber. She was at her dressing table, wrapped in a frothy dressing gown of blue silk and cream-colored lace, her hair already unpinned by her maid. Absorbed in unfastening her moonstone earrings, Gabrielle didn’t seem to be aware of the opening of the door. He stood watching her for a moment, memories and regrets tugging his mind in a dozen different directions.
He must have moved, because Gabrielle gave a sudden start. “Rupert, I didn’t hear you come in.”
He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. After three years of marriage, his wife’s bedchamber was still alien territory. “We need to talk, Gaby,” he said quickly, lest she should think he had come for something else. There hadn’t been anything else for some time.
Gabrielle swung round on the dressing table bench, eyes wide with inquiry. “What is it? Rupert, you look dreadful.”
“I had a scene with Father.”
“Oh dear.” She put out a hand, touched his arm, then let it fall as though she feared she’d pushed too far. “I knew living so close to him would prove difficult.”
“And it’s going to get more so.” Rupert pulled a scroll-backed chair away from the escritoire and drew it up beside the dressing table. “I’ve told Father he’s no longer welcome in our home. Nor is he to have any contact with Stephen.”
Gabrielle’s eyes widened. “Darling, I know how your father can anger you—”
“This goes beyond that.” The desire to smash something, to smash his father, roiled through him. “After what he’s done I’m severing all contact with him.”
Gabrielle drew a confused breath. “Rupert, whatever it is—”
“Father was responsible for Bertrand’s death.”
Shock flared in Gabrielle’s eyes. “How on earth—”
“Gaby—” Rupert sought for words that would be anywhere approaching appropriate. “I’ve done you a great wrong.”
“Rupert. Darling.” Gabrielle sprang up from the dressing table bench, dropped down on the floor beside his chair, and took his hands. “You aren’t making any sense. You and I don’t have anything to do with what happened to Bertrand. And you didn’t wrong me. You gave me everything. I’m afraid I haven’t been nearly as grateful as I should have been.”
He looked down at her face, familiar since childhood, lovely, deserving of so much more. “I should have told you before I offered for you. I should have made it clear that I couldn’t—”
“You never promised anything you couldn’t give, Rupert.” Gabrielle sat back on her heels. “I know what marriage is in the beau monde. Or I should. If I had expectations that were . . . unrealistic . . . it’s my own fault.”
The words of his proposal echoed in his head with bitter clarity. He’d been mad. Too caught up in his grief to see anyone’s feelings but his own. “You expected what you had every right to. You deserved a man who could pledge you his heart without reserve. Not one who gave his away long since.”
Her gaze moved over him with an understanding that was almost like relief. “I never realized—I never thought to ask. Was it someone in Spain? Was she already married? Or—”
“Gaby, no. Yes, it was someone in Spain. Someone I knew in Spain. But not in the way you’re thinking.” He swallowed, every instinct of secrecy tight in his throat. “Bertrand—Bertrand was my friend. But it was more. I—” He sought for words and realized there was only one way to say it. “I loved him.”
Confusion filled Gabrielle’s clear blue gaze and slowly gave way to understanding. He waited, braced for horror or disgust. Instead Gabrielle touched his hand. “Oh, Rupert, I’m so sorry. I should have seen it.”
“You couldn’t possibly—”
“Don’t be silly, Rupert.” Gabrielle’s mouth curved in a smile, the sort of smile she gave when she was thinking about France in her days of exile or her lost parents or anything out of reach. “I’m hardly innocent of such things. I hear gossip. I know there are men who—I just never thought—”
He pulled his hands from her clasp. “That I was so depraved.”
“Rupert, no.” Her eyes widened in what seemed to be genuine shock. “You can’t think—Is that how you see yourself?”
He swallowed, the past roiling in his head. Careless comments, confused thoughts. “I—” He straightened his shoulders. “No.” The conviction in his own voice shook him. “What Bertrand and I felt for each other—It was nothing but good.” The memories tugged at his senses, and he smiled despite everything. “But I didn’t think—”
“That anyone else could accept you? Or that I could?” Gabrielle got to her feet, but instead of drawing back, she touched his hair with tentative fingers. “How poorly you must think of me. I’m so sorry you couldn’t talk to me. You must have so needed a friend. And whatever else we were, I thought we were always that.”
“Always. But I’ve asked far too much of you as it is. I should never have offered for you.”
&nbs
p; Gabrielle shrugged her shoulders, one of those moments when she looked unmistakably French. “If you hadn’t, God knows where I’d be now. And we wouldn’t have Stephen.” She dropped back down on the dressing table bench but leaned towards him, as though not to break contact. “You were in touch with Bertrand even though he was working for the French?” Her brows drew together. “Or—?” Another question flickered in her eyes that she could not quite put into words.
He gave a faint smile. “I’m not a French agent, Gaby. And neither was Bertrand.”
Gabrielle drew a sharp breath. “But—”
He told her in as quick and controlled a tone as he could. Bertrand’s work for the British, the supposed revelation that he had in fact been a French double agent, his death on the orders of the British.
Gabrielle gave a strangled cry.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Rupert said. “But I had no proof. And God help me, even I had doubts. Until Malcolm Rannoch began asking questions.”
“Why—?”
“He’s looking into the Comte de Rivère’s death. And Rivère claimed to have information about Bertrand.”
“Suzanne Rannoch talked to me.” A shadow flickered through Gabrielle’s eyes. “Rupert—”
“I owe Rannoch a debt of gratitude,” Rupert said, determined to get the rest of the story out. “He learned what I couldn’t. What I should have learned four years ago.” Guilt and anger bit him in the throat, a rank taste he would never be rid of.
“But who—”
“Father.”
Gabrielle stared at him with growing horror as the picture formed in her eyes. “You can’t know—”
“I can. He admitted it.” Rupert pushed himself to his feet and strode across the room. The violence he hadn’t been able to unleash on his father coiled within him. He wanted to sweep the porcelain figurines off the mantel, hurl the lamp across the room, crush the crystal girandoles on the candle sconces beneath his heel.