CHAPTER 24
Suzanne heard Malcolm’s footsteps in the shadows of the wings and moved across the stage to meet him. “Darling? Manon was charming about saving the evening for the duke. Everyone just left to get ready for the performance this evening. I’d have left myself if you hadn’t been so insistent about walking me home. Really, if you haven’t got more important—”
Something checked her before she could even see into his eyes. The tension in his footfalls? The quality of the silence? “Malcolm?” She moved towards him. “What is it? Something about your father?”
Malcolm had gone stone still, his gaze fastened on her face. The thick yellow light from the rehearsal lamps slanted across him, leaving his eyes in shadow, but the quality of his gaze at once singed her and chilled her to the bone.
And she knew. Before her brain could form the thought, the sick certainty settled inside her. It seemed inevitable, something that had always been as sure to arrive as Christmas or a birthday or a change of seasons. Yet at the same time so unthinkable she seemed to have been robbed of the power to speak or move or even formulate a thought.
His gaze held her own for what might have been seconds or minutes. Long enough for a marriage to shatter like shards of crystal, never to be re-formed.
“When you married me,” he said, “how long did you think it would last?”
“Darling—” Somehow it was the first word that broke from her lips.
“Don’t.” His voice was like the slap of a sword blade on rock. “There’ve been enough lies.”
“That’s not a lie. It’s how I think of you.”
How had she never realized the way his gaze changed when it rested upon her? The particular quality, half-ironic, half-vulnerable, at once intimate and a little removed, as though he could not quite believe the bond between them. She wouldn’t have been able to describe it before. But it was so clear to her now it was gone.
“My first thought,” he said in a strangely detached voice, “was that you must have been blackmailed into it. Not for money. Through a threat to a family member or someone you loved. I had myself convinced of that.”
“Malcolm—”
“But then I realized you’re much too strong. You’d have found a way out. Or told me the truth eventually. Odd. I obviously don’t know you at all. Yet I’m sure enough of you to know you aren’t a victim.”
She swallowed. “It’s true. I’m not proud of what I’ve done, but I did it freely.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” he said. “About what you expected when you married me.” She’d never credited those who called him cold, but now his voice could freeze raw spirits.
The unthinkable had come to pass. Like pregnancy or illness or a natural disaster, something one could barely contemplate went from unimaginable to stark reality. All these years. The fear that had been a pressure behind her eyes, a tension coiled in her chest, a nightmare vision dancing on the edge of her consciousness. You’d think she’d have planned, strategized, had a dozen speeches written in her head, a score of contingencies planned for. Instead she was living the actor’s nightmare, onstage without knowing her lines or even the plot of the play in which she found herself.
“When I married you, I was mad enough to think I could walk away in a few months or a few years.” Her voice came out flat and strangely under control. When a mission went wrong, one answered as simply and straightforwardly as possible and didn’t elaborate.
He stood watching her in the shadows, tension writ in the lean angles of his body. “I suppose you didn’t realize the extent of the information you’d be able to uncover.”
“I didn’t have the least understanding of you. Or of myself.”
“Was it all a plan?” His voice cracked, the dead cold breaking open to reveal an abyss of pain. “Did you have the whole thing in mind from the moment we met?”
“You’re an agent, Malcolm.” It seemed, somehow, important to remind him of that. “You know one can never foresee the twists and turns of a mission so accurately. One has to improvise in the field. I didn’t expect you to take me to Lisbon. I was calculating how long I could afford to stay there and continue my masquerade when you proposed.”
“And in doing so played right into your hands.”
She could see the same images in his eyes that ran through her own head. The cool, moonlit wrought-iron balcony where he’d proposed during a ball at the British embassy. The airless sitting room in which they’d taken their vows. The bedchamber smelling of lavender and spilled champagne in which they’d spent their wedding night.
“I was shocked,” she said. “Shocked that you asked me to marry you.”
“You underestimated your talents.”
“I underestimated your kindness and determination to take care of those in need.”
“You think that’s why—”
“You married me to protect me, Malcolm. I’ve always been grateful.”
His harsh laugh carried through the theatre. “You’re probably less in need of protection than anyone I’ve ever encountered.”
“That doesn’t change my gratitude.”
He took a step closer, gaze trained on her face. “You’re good, I’ll give you that. Probably the best agent I’ve ever encountered. I can scarcely comprehend the extent of what you’ve done. And I obviously don’t know you at all.”
“Malcolm—” She put out her hand, then let it fall to her side. “I think you know me better than anyone.”
He laughed again, a sound that cut through the dusty air of the theatre. “Don’t, Suzette. Don’t add more lies. As two seasoned agents, we should be able to be honest with each other.”
Her throat ached with the impossibility, not just of trust but of any sort of honest communication between them. “I don’t expect you to believe it. But the fact that you know me is perhaps the truest thing about me.”
“In Vienna. In Brussels. During Waterloo.” Once again she saw memories chase through his mind, but this time they were of the two of them talking, debating, devising strategies, drafting memoranda. Of his dispatch box sitting on the dressing table in their shared bedchamber. Papers left out when he took her in his arms as they undressed after a party. Malcolm was careful, but he’d come to trust his wife implicitly.
“I remember how Davenport looked when he first came to the Peninsula,” Malcolm continued, in the flat, detached voice of one speaking about distant acquaintances. “As though the curtains had been ripped down in his world to reveal a hollow comedy. I understand that now. In a way I never thought I would.”
She sank down on the bottom step of the rehearsal stairs where Hamlet confronted Ophelia. She wasn’t sure she could stand any longer. “Ask me what you will. We’d better get this over with.”
He turned, pinning her with his hooded gaze. “Whom are you working for now?”
“No one. I stopped after Waterloo.”
“Why? There are plenty of Bonapartist plots still.”
She kept her gaze locked on his own. “I decided whatever I worked for I’d do it openly as your wife.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“No. I’m not sure I would in your place. But it happens to be the truth.”
“And yet you stayed.”
She linked her hands round her knees. Her fingers, predictably, were trembling. “I told you. I realized I couldn’t walk away. Because of the children. Because of how I feel about you.”
“You can’t expect—”
“I’m not nearly as nice a person as the person I created for you, Malcolm. But the core of me is the same.”
“Don’t, Suzette.” He strode across the stage as though his thoughts would not let him be still. “I can admire the skill of the woman who pulled off what you’ve accomplished. But such emotional appeals make me ill.”
“Yes, I know. Which is why I wouldn’t have said it if it weren’t the truth.”
His face was in shadow now, but she saw her words bounce off the armor in his eyes. “Obviously your family didn’t die in the French attack on Acquera.”
Her fingers tightened, pressing against the bones of her hands. “No.”
“Did you know Tania’s and my intelligence had been responsible for misdirecting the French to Acquera?” He paused a moment. She could feel the pressure of his gaze, like a sword point beneath her chin. “Or did O’Roarke?”
He knew about Raoul. In the dead cold of his voice, she knew that more than just their marriage had shattered. Whatever fragile, unvoiced thing he and Raoul had discovered was broken as well.
“Yes, I know about O’Roarke,” Malcolm said. “Frederick Radley saw the two of you embracing in León.”
A bitter sound broke from her lips. She could not have said whether it was a laugh or a sob. “Dear God. I underestimated Radley.”
“He didn’t have the least idea what he’d really seen. He was trying to convince me O’Roarke was your lover. Which I presume was the case. Is the case.”
“Was.” The word tumbled quickly from her lips. Probably folly to care so much about drawing certain boundaries round her crimes. “It ended . . . a long time ago.”
“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.”