CHAPTER 26
Malcolm climbed the stairs at Mivart’s Hotel. The fashionable hotel in a terraced house at the corner of Brook Street and Davies Street was only five years old, but he remembered climbing similar steps in another London hotel as a small boy, holding his mother’s hand, to visit her friend Mr. O’Roarke. He rapped once at the door of room 212. His fingers felt numb beneath the York tan of his glove. The December chill had settled deep inside him.
O’Roarke opened the door. He wore a paisley silk dressing gown over an immaculate white shirt. The dressing gown also held memories from that childhood visit and country house parties. The same one? Or something similar?
O’Roarke’s gaze flickered over Malcolm’s face for a moment before he stepped aside. “Rannoch. Do come in.”
Malcolm strode into the room and turned round, one hand gripping a chairback. The air smelled of cedar and paper and ink. Familiar smells. There had been hunting prints on the walls in that other hotel as well and mahogany furniture, though the upholstery was red and white striped where twenty years ago it had been green damask.
O’Roarke surveyed him in the flickering light of the single brace of candles that burned against the late afternoon shadows. Malcolm had seen that look in the eyes of senior diplomats gauging the extent of a diplomatic breach. Though perhaps beneath it was something else. Something Malcolm wasn’t prepared to think about at present.
“Sit down,” O’Roarke said, waving his hand towards one of the red-and-white-striped chairs. He picked up the gray coat strewn over the other chair. “I’ve just come in myself.”
“I imagine Suzanne sent word to you.”
O’Roarke met his gaze. Malcolm was quite sure O’Roarke knew, but of course the other man wasn’t going to admit anything without being sure of the extent of Malcolm’s knowledge. “What makes you think Mrs. Rannoch would have wanted to speak with me?” O’Roarke asked, laying the coat over the escritoire.
“To warn you your cover had been blown. Or perhaps to ask for help escaping.”
Their gazes locked. O’Roarke still wasn’t going to be the first one to step over the precipice.
“It must have been quite an advantage,” Malcolm said. “Knowing what you did of me from boyhood when you set one of your agents to marry me. I make you my compliments. As one agent to another, it was a brilliant plan.”
“Malcolm—” O’Roarke stretched out his hand, then let it fall. “I would say you had every right to call me out save that I know what we both think of dueling.”
“How far in advance were you planning it?” Malcolm heard his voice, crisp, even, detached, taut as a bowstring. It sounded as though it belonged to someone else.
“Believe it or not I was more shocked than anyone when Suzanne told me you’d asked her to marry you.”
“Did you know she was pregnant?”
“Not when she first went on the mission. I don’t think she knew it herself.”
“Yes, that’s what she said as well. What a lucky accident.”
O’Roarke drew a harsh breath. “Malcolm—I make no pretense that what I’ve done is anything other than unforgivable. I won’t even attempt to defend the choices I’ve made. But you can’t think Suzanne and I would trivialize Colin as convenient.”
“No? You were quick enough to make use of him.”
“A palpable hit.” O’Roarke tightened the belt on his dressing gown and took a turn about the room. “Ask me whatever you will.”
Malcolm stared at the man he had trusted since boyhood. “Why should I believe anything you say?”
“I don’t suppose you will.” O’Roarke came to a stop in front of the windows, the gray light at his back. “But at least you can evaluate my answers.”
The heat from the fire in the grate choked the air. Malcolm shrugged out of his greatcoat and tossed it over one of the chairs. “Whether or not you planned it, you must have been pleased when you saw how neatly my chivalry played into your plans.”
“Pleased?” O’Roarke gave a short laugh, then bit back whatever he had been about to say. “No, I wouldn’t precisely say I was pleased.”
“Yes, there is that, I suppose.” Malcolm watched as O’Roarke’s gaze slid away.
“What?”
“I may be the most gullible fool since Malvolio, but it’s quite apparent to me that you’re still in love with my wife.”
O’Roarke’s gaze shot to Malcolm’s face. For a moment Malcolm would swear he’d caught the other man off guard. “Don’t romanticize things, Malcolm. If you had any illusions about the sort of man I am, today’s revelations should have destroyed them.”
“I don’t see why there should be any correlation between the ability to betray and the lack of ability to love.”
“Spoken like a true idealist.”
“Spoken like a man who has no illusions about the ennobling power of love.”
O’Roarke moved to the other striped chair and dropped into it. “Don’t confuse your own feelings for her with mine.”
“I’m not.” Malcolm pushed aside the folds of his greatcoat and sat in the chair opposite O’Roarke, keeping his gaze trained on the other man. “What did it cost you to let her go?”
O’Roarke settled back in the chair, legs crossed with an appearance of nonchalance. “Obviously not a great deal considering how readily I did it.”
“On the contrary.” Malcolm began to remove his gloves, tugging at the York tan finger by finger. “I know how much you’re willing to sacrifice for the cause. I think this may be proof of just how far that goes.”
“Don’t lapse into lending library language, Malcolm.”
“I have eyes.”
O’Roarke was silent for a moment. “Odd the things one can deny with impunity. And the things one can’t bring oneself to deny.” He pushed back the cuff of his dressing gown and stared at it, as though unfathomable secrets lay in the twists of black silk braid. “What was between Suzanne and me ended with your marriage.”
Questions he would never be able to answer and that shouldn’t matter in the light of everything else sliced through Malcolm’s brain. “She told me that as well.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
“I’m not sure.” Malcolm slapped the gloves down on the table beside his chair. “Either way, ending being lovers doesn’t end being in love.”
O’Roarke drew a breath, looked away, drummed his fingers on the arms of the chair. “Suzanne would rake me over the coals for making excuses for her. And I’d be the first to say we all make our own choices and have to live with them. But she didn’t have the least idea what marrying you truly meant.”
Malcolm bit back the instinct to tell O’Roarke not to presume to talk about Suzanne’s feelings. One could make a fair case that O’Roarke was in a better position to do so than Malcolm himself. “You’re saying she didn’t know what it meant to me?”
“Oh yes. She herself would admit she didn’t realize how seriously you took it. But I was thinking more that she didn’t know what it meant to her.”
Malcolm saw his wife sitting on the steps in the theatre, refusing to make excuses for herself. “Clearly not a great deal. Though I suppose there’s always a risk an agent will take a role too seriously.”
O’Roarke drew a breath, the rough breath of one picking his way round ground strewn with explosives. “She’d also never forgive me for implying she was ever mine to lose. Which is true. We’d never made any promises that gave each other those sorts of rights. But I remember when I knew it would never be the same between us. I met her in the church of St. Roque in Lisbon on a cold December morning. A few days after your marriage. She was as contained as always, but her hands were like ice. She said it wasn’t at all as she’d expected. That it meant more to you than she’d realized.”
Where had Malcolm himself been that day? Was it the afternoon he’d come back to their rooms to find her hanging prints of Lisbon on the walls? Or the day she’d met him for dinner at the embassy, cheeks bright with color from the cold air, the pearls he’d given her round her throat? “That doesn’t necessarily mean it meant anything to her.”
“No. But I can read subtext.”
“Now who’s putting a romantic gloss on things?” Bitterness welled up on Malcolm’s tongue. “You can’t expect me to believe marrying me was anything other than a tactical decision for her.”
“Not at the time.” O’Roarke stared down at a book left open on the table beside the chair that he must have been in the midst of reading. “When I met Suzanne she’d lost everything.”
“Meaning what? She obviously wasn’t the daughter of the Comte de Saint-Vallier.” The blank that was his wife’s past yawned before him. Everywhere he looked there were more layers to the deception.
“No, though her father was French and her mother Spanish.”
“Good cover story strategy. Always good to use what truth one can.”
“Quite. Suzanne’s father had a small traveling theatre company that moved between France and Spain.”
“Let me guess. They performed Shakespeare in translation. Though her father must have taught her the plays in English. Did you tell her she’d catch my eye if she could cap my quotations?”
“I imagine I did, but thanks to her father she already quoted Shakespeare freely. Though I believe she’s actually named after Figaro’s Suzanne.”
“Of course.” Malcolm felt his mouth twist. “She named Colin’s stuffed bear Figaro. I found it charming that she was far from anti-Republican, despite her family having fled the Revolution. I imagine her father was a fervent Revolutionary?”
“At least a Republican who supported the Revolution at the start. I think playing a Royalist was the hardest part of her masquerade. Or the part furthest from her real self.”
Malcolm studied O’Roarke. Part of him didn’t want to tread on personal territory, but he needed to know. “What happened to her parents?”
“Her mother died in childbirth when Suzanne was seven.”
“She has a sister? Or a brother?” The moorings of the past had been cut from beneath him. He’d always thought of his wife as an only child. For all he knew, Colin and Jessica had a passel of uncles and aunts and cousins.
“She had a sister. Rosalind.”
Unease coiled through him. “Had?”
“In December of 1807, her father’s company was performing in Spain on the northern coast.”
“Good God. In the middle of Moore’s retreat?” Sir John Moore’s forces had been driven from Spain in late ’07 and endured a disastrous retreat after the battle of Corunna. The commissariat had not been able to keep up and the starving troops had left a trail of destruction in their wake.
“My thoughts when she first told me. Apparently her father thought they could stay out of it. They had friends on both sides.”
“And then?” Malcolm was almost afraid to ask. Strange he could fear any revelations after the truths that had already been revealed this day, but he shied away from what he could sense coming.
“The village the theatre company was staying in that Christmas was attacked by a band of English soldiers.”
O’Roarke’s voice was flat. For a moment, Malcolm entirely understood the effort it took the other man to keep it that way. He met O’Roarke’s gaze in the candlelight and shadows that filled the room. “That part of her cover story is true as well, isn’t it? Soldiers attacking her family—” He couldn’t quite say the rest.
O’Roarke nodded. “I’ve only heard the story in bits and pieces through the years. She saw a bullet strike her father in the head. Through the window of the house where they were staying. Then soldiers burst in. She and her sister were dragged into the plaza.”
“And raped.” He wouldn’t have thought the story of Suzanne’s past could be worse than what he already knew.
“Yes.” O’Roarke’s fingers, Malcolm noted, were curled into fists on the arms of his chair. “I’d known Suzanne for two years before she admitted she’d crawled round the plaza afterwards and found her sister bleeding to death, tossed in a pile of rubbish. Rosalind was eight.”
For a moment Malcolm thought he was going to be sick. His children’s faces swam before his eyes. And then his wife’s face. She’d been scarcely more than a child herself. At fifteen, his sister Gisèle had barely left off playing with dolls.
“So in sum it was much like her cover story,” O’Roarke continued in the same flat voice. “Save—”
“That the soldiers were British, not French.”
O’Roarke loosed his fingers from the chair arms as though by conscious effort. “Acts of brutality are committed by both sides during a war. In the Peninsula both sides—all sides—were particularly savage.”
It sounded logical. It didn’t erase the images of redcoated soldiers and his wife holding a dying child in her arms. “She must have hated—she must hate—the British.”
“I don’t think that was the only thing that drove her. But yes, that was part of it.”
Malcolm drew a breath, forced air into his lungs. “And then?”
O’Roarke stared at a patch of candlelight on the carpet. “She went to León with some of the actors who had survived. But the friends of her parents she’d thought she could stay with had fled north and by the time she realized it the actors were gone.”
“And she was alone in a strange city.”
“She lived by her wits for a time.”
“On the streets?”
O’Roarke nodded. “Picking pockets. She had light fingers even then.”
“Where did you find her?”
“In a brothel.”
Malcolm felt his chin jerk up.
“Someone caught her picking his pocket and told her she was too pretty for the streets. She’d been there for a few months when I met her.” O’Roarke paused. “I don’t know why I should feel impelled to say this or why you should believe me, but I was there in search of information. About a
guerrillero
leader who frequented the brothel. Suzanne not only supplied the information, she offered to obtain more. Her quick wits and keen understanding were obvious.”
“She wasn’t even sixteen. Why the hell didn’t you—”
“Send her off to safety? She’d have gone mad. She didn’t want to be safe, she wanted to fight. She needed a focus for that anger.”