“And you saw the makings of a brilliant agent.”
“That too. I make no pretense of disinterest.” O’Roarke flipped the book closed and rested his fingers on the gilt-embossed cover. “Her father had raised her on Paine and Rousseau and Godwin. She claimed to have stopped believing in anything, but it wasn’t hard for the ideals she’d been bred up on to reawaken.”
“The same ideals I was raised on.”
O’Roarke regarded him for a moment, gaze dark and still in the candlelight. “In many ways. Yes.” He pushed his hair back from his forehead. “She was a quick study. By that autumn she was ready for her first mission.” He drew a breath. “I tell you all this not to rouse your sympathy or make excuses, but to try to explain who the woman you married is. For Suzanne more than others, the cause was all.”
“The cause or the game?”
O’Roarke’s mouth twisted in a bleak smile. “Perhaps both. It can be difficult to differentiate. I don’t think she let herself think of the future. And she saw the human element as a distraction.”
“Except for you?” Malcolm tried to keep the bitterness from his voice but could not quite succeed.
“Oh no. To own the truth, I don’t think she ever let herself fully trust me. Which was probably wise.”
“She loved you.” Malcolm said it as a statement of fact.
“One can love without being lost in love.” O’Roarke’s fingers moved over the gilt-embossed book cover. “It was Colin who changed things for her, though he didn’t make her old loyalties go away.”
Malcolm met O’Roarke’s gaze. “Colin is my son.”
Part of him felt he shouldn’t have needed to say it, while another part of him felt it was imperative that he did.
“Of course.”
“Whatever happens between Suzanne and me.”
“I knew that the moment you married her.”
“Did Suzanne know it?”
O’Roarke hesitated, fingers tapping the tooled leather. “Suzanne was perhaps more caught up in the needs of the moment. She was younger. She didn’t take as long a view.”
“She thought she could leave me and take Colin with her.”
“If so, she quickly realized her mistake. After he was born and she saw what he meant to you.”
“And you? If you thought she couldn’t leave, what the hell did you think would happen?”
O’Roarke was silent for the length of a dozen heartbeats. Or pistol shots. “I knew that eventually the war would end, one way or another.”
“And Suzette would have no need to stay with me.”
“I rather thought by then she’d want to.”
Malcolm gave a laugh that scraped against his throat. “You can’t be serious.”
“It was fairly obvious how she felt about you after a few months. And the signs of what might happen between you were there sooner.”
“Next you’ll be saying you orchestrated the whole thing for our sakes.”
“No. I took advantage of circumstances and both your feelings to gain tactical advantage in a war we were trying desperately to win. By most standards what I did was unforgivable. But I wasn’t unaware of the feelings of those involved.”
“Colin—”
“We pick and choose our loyalties. I chose loyalty to a cause—so inextricably bound up in love of the game I’m not sure where one left off and the other began.”
“Over being a father.”
O’Roarke met Malcolm’s gaze, his own at once unusually open and unfathomably barricaded. “In a nutshell.”
“If it had been Frederick Radley who had offered to marry Suzette and give a name to her child, would you have encouraged her to accept?”
O’Roarke’s mouth curled. “Frederick Radley never would have offered his name and protection to a woman in trouble.”
“But if somehow he had? An officer who is friends with the British foreign secretary’s brother. Suzette could have gained valuable intelligence from him. And I flatter myself he’d have been easier to deceive than I was. If he’d offered for her—”
“You damn fool, what do you think?” O’Roarke slammed his hand down on the book. “I’d have done everything in my power to stop her short of kidnapping. Possibly not even short of that.”
Malcolm folded his arms across his chest. “Interesting.”
“Don’t make too much of it.”
Malcolm leaned forwards. Beneath the layers of betrayal, there were hard facts he had to ascertain. “Who else knows?”
“Knows?”
“Who else knows Suzette was an agent?”
“It’s not—”
“Damn it, O’Roarke, I can’t protect my wife if I don’t know who was aware of her activities. We may not agree on much, but I don’t think either of us wants to see Suzanne accused of treason.”
A slow smile spread across O’Roarke’s face. “I told her as much. She wasn’t at all inclined to believe me.”
Malcolm stared at Suzanne’s spymaster. His father. “What did she think I’d do? Turn her over to Carfax?”
“I think she wonders. She knows you’re loyal.”
“Not to Carfax.”
“To Britain.”
“Not blindly. Who else knows my wife was a French spy?”
O’Roarke’s mouth tightened. “I did my best to keep her identity secret from as many as possible. But unfortunately two years ago she discovered Fouché knew.”
“God in heaven.” Malcolm sifted back through the events of two years ago. “Did he try to use it to get her to stop my investigation into the Laclos Affair?”
“Your mind is as quick as ever. Yes.”
Malcolm’s fingers curled inwards with the—probably laughable—impulse to protect his wife. “You stopped him?”
“I tried. Fouché called my bluff. I think Suzanne fully expected Fouché to expose her.”
“What happened?”
“Talleyrand intervened.”
“Tall—My God, does he know, too?”
“Talleyrand has a way of knowing everything.”
“Alistair. You. Talleyrand. Is there anyone who helped shape my childhood who doesn’t know the truth about my wife?”
“Carfax, I would hope. Your aunt Frances. Your grandfather.”
“So Talleyrand knew what Suzanne was doing in Vienna? He was representing the Bourbon government. Suzette, I assume, was working for Bonaparte.”
“He’d have suspected. He’s fond of her, I believe. Grateful for what she’s done for Dorothée.”
“And being Talleyrand, he found it useful to have a foot in both camps.”
“That too. One can never be sure what Talleyrand will do with his back against a wall, but I think his instinct would be to protect you and Suzanne. Fouché doesn’t wield a great deal of power these days, but in any case Talleyrand will keep him in check.”
“There must be others who know. Former agents. Some of whom must be in England.”
“There are. Suzanne will always live with risk. As will you. Whatever—”
“Becomes of our marriage?” Malcolm pushed himself to his feet. “That’s for me to discuss with my wife.”
“Malcolm. Thank goodness you’re home.” Aline appeared in the library doorway as Malcolm walked into the entry hall of the Berkeley Square house.
It took a moment for Malcolm to remember the life he’d had before the day’s revelations. The investigation. The
Hamlet
manuscript. His grandfather and Aline’s work on the code.
Aline’s gaze flickered over his face. “Are you all right?”
“Splendid, love.” Malcolm forced himself to smile into his cousin’s bright gaze and took her hands. “You’ve learned something?”
“I think we have. That’s why we came here from David and Simon’s, only then neither of you were home at first.” Aline drew him into the library. “We’ve just been telling Suzanne.”
Malcolm stepped into the library to see his wife standing beside his grandfather. Their eyes met for an instant, heavy with the day’s revelations. Malcolm jerked his gaze away and glanced round the room. The marble library table was stacked with scribbled-over sheets of paper. Strathdon got to his feet and came forwards. In the light of the brace of candles on the table, Malcolm caught a gleam in his grandfather’s eyes that was very like Aline’s.
Aline cast a glance at her grandfather, but Strathdon inclined his head. “Go ahead, my dear. It’s your discovery.”
“It’s both of ours, really.” Aline reached for a sheet of paper. “It’s Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia. We don’t think Shakespeare wrote this version of it.”
Malcolm glanced down at the paper Aline had pulled forwards. “So you don’t think Shakespeare wrote the manuscript?”
“No, just this speech. It stands out from the rest. ‘Doubt that my blood is fire, /Doubt the raven for a dove, /Doubt the sea to be a mire, /But never doubt I love.’ The scansion is off and the imagery doesn’t really make sense.”
“Shakespeare uses the raven and dove comparison in
Midsummer,
” Suzanne pointed out. “When Demetrius wakes up in love with Helena. ‘Who would not change a raven for a dove?’ ”
“Yes, but here it’s juxtaposing two different things—I mean it’s logical to doubt a raven for a dove, which is the exact opposite of what the text is supposed to be saying.”
“Brandon Ford pointed out that Shakespeare knew the sun didn’t move, either,” Malcolm said. “But at least one could argue that there were people who thought it did, whereas I don’t think there’s any point in history where people have confused doves and ravens.”
“Precisely,” Aline said. “Even if Shakespeare was trying to make Hamlet sound like a typical love-struck undergraduate, these lines seem too clunky. Also, an earlier version of the speech has been crossed out. There’s a lot of smudging, but from what we can tell, the crossed-out lines seem to be the ones in the version of the play we all know or close to it. We think someone else crossed it out and wrote the new lines in.” She exchanged a look with Strathdon.
“So then of course we began to ask why,” Strathdon said. “Allie?”
Aline drew a breath. “We think it’s a code. Or rather a clue. The language is strained enough that whoever wrote the lines seems to have had reason to work in those particular images.”
Suzanne cast a quick glance at Malcolm. “Do you think the new lines were added to the manuscript recently?” she asked.
“We thought about that,” Aline said, “but though we can’t tell for a certainty, the manuscript seems to be old and the ink on the new lines looks as old as the rest. I don’t think this has to do with spies and this Elsinore League thing. If Malcolm’s right that Francis Woolright copied the manuscript and he and Eleanor Harleton made notes on it, we think they wrote this version of Hamlet’s letter.”
Strathdon grinned. His face had the delight of a little boy. “I’d hazard a guess we’re looking for sixteenth-century treasure.”
CHAPTER 27
Suzanne moved into the bedchamber and dropped down on her dressing table bench. A habitual action in a life that had been cracked asunder. Aline had left to go home and Strathdon had gone to his room to dress for dinner. As they did every night, Suzanne and Malcolm had looked in on the nursery, where Colin and Jessica were having their supper. Suzanne and Malcolm had sat at the nursery table and she’d nursed Jessica while he answered questions about the Essex rebellion. The Lady Jane Grey questions on their visit to the Tower had started Colin off on a fascination with the Tudor dynasty. It had almost felt normal save that Suzanne and Malcolm had avoided meeting each other’s eyes.
When they left she’d walked down the passage past the night nursery to their bedchamber because it was what she always did (why had she never realized how much she had become a creature of habit?) and because she did need to dress for dinner. She hadn’t been at all sure Malcolm would follow her, but now he appeared in the bedchamber doorway. “I saw O’Roarke.”
She spun round on the dressing table bench and met Malcolm’s gaze. “I’m glad. That is, I don’t know if it helped, but—”
“There were things I could only say to him directly. And he to me. If nothing else, I think one could say we both understood each other better at the end of the interview.” Malcolm pushed the door shut and advanced into the room. “We need to be careful of what the servants might overhear.”
With a pang Suzanne realized they could no longer talk easily in their own house. Not that they’d ever been able to do so completely, given the nature of their work, but they’d moved into entirely new territory.
“I understand you saw O’Roarke yourself this afternoon,” Malcolm said.
“I owed it to him to warn him. I know that probably sounds mad given what he’s done, but—”
“Not mad given your history.”
“I advised him to leave Britain. He chose not to.”
“Did you consider leaving yourself?”
She lifted her chin. “No. At the least I owed it to you not to run.”
“But you thought I might turn you over to Carfax, according to O’Roarke.”
“I wondered. I couldn’t be sure of what you might do in circumstances like these.”
He stared at her with a gaze like polished granite. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but after five years of marriage how in God’s name could you know me so little?”
“Darling—”
She saw the recoil in his eyes.
“Malcolm, you’ve been pushed beyond what anyone could be expected to bear. One can’t be entirely sure what anyone will do under those circumstances.”
He studied her, not with the anger of this afternoon but as though she were a new-met acquaintance he was trying to take the measure of. It was, she realized, a pang sharp in her throat, the way she was going to have to get used to him looking at her. “You may have been pretending all these years, but you can’t be so blind to who I am. You’re the mother of my children.”
She swallowed. “That’s not in question.”
“And I couldn’t do that to you. To them.” He dug his fingers into his hair. It was a gesture that always put her in mind of what he must have looked like as a schoolboy. He looked so unutterably weary that she longed to put her arms round him. “I’m not sure how far I’ll be able to go. I don’t know that I’ll ever get past being angry. But for Colin’s and Jessica’s sake we have to find a way to coexist. After all, I was a diplomat for almost a decade. I learned how to dine with the enemy.”
Some of the tension drained from her chest and left a gaping hole she knew would never heal. “That’s far more than I deserve.”
“It’s not a question of deserving. It’s a question of how we can go on living.” Malcolm continued to watch her. Something had shifted in his gaze, but she couldn’t put a name to it. “O’Roarke says I should blame him rather than you.”
“That sounds like Raoul.” She folded her arms over her chest and realized she hadn’t done up the buttons properly on the nursing bodice of her gown. “I know you wouldn’t be so foolish as to believe him. I’m responsible for my own actions.”
“I don’t think O’Roarke would deny that. It’s a matter of perceptions.” Malcolm advanced into the room and shifted so the light was at his back. “He also told me what happened to your family. I didn’t realize you had a sister.”
She couldn’t control her flinch. “Rosie wasn’t part of my cover story.”
“No. But your cover story was rooted in reality. Save that the soldiers were British rather than French.”
“Don’t, Malcolm.” Her fingers dug into her elbows. “Don’t make excuses for me or turn it into something so simple. I wasn’t striking out at the British out of some sort of blind vengeance. I know what I believe in. I chose my side.”
“I didn’t suggest otherwise.” His voice was level, but there was a softness beneath that threatened to undo her. “But I don’t see how it could help but weigh in the scales.” He paused, as though searching for the right words. The pressure of his gaze on her face was different. If not tenderness, it held compassion, which threatened to undo her. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
She steeled herself against the tone and the words. It would be unforgivable to use Rosie’s tragedy to ask for sympathy. “It’s worse because it was English soldiers rather than French?”
“I feel more responsible.” He dropped down on the edge of the bed, on a level with her. “And I know what it’s like to lose a sibling. I think it must be that much worse when the sibling is younger.”
She swallowed. She tried to shut her mind to the memories, but they welled up like blood from a fresh cut. The bullet smashing into her father’s head. Hands pulling at her. Her sister’s screams. “I keep going over the events of that day. Rosie and I were having a stupid fight when the soldiers broke in. I was trying to mend a tear I’d got in the hem of my costume the night before when Romeo stepped on it—I was playing Juliet for the first time—and Rosie wanted me to help her build a dollhouse beneath the table from bits and pieces she’d taken from the costumes and props. I wasn’t very patient. I keep thinking—”
“One always does.”
She nodded. She met his gaze in more understanding than she would have thought possible between them a few hours before.
“And then you were alone. You didn’t have Blanca with you then?”
“Raoul and I found her on a mission the spring after I started working for him. Her family had been killed in the retreat after Corunna as well. She lived with her uncle who ran a tavern that was a meeting place for
guerrilleros
. Blanca had to dodge her uncle’s blows and the wandering hands of the customers. She was all too happy to help us outwit her uncle. And having done, of course she couldn’t stay there. Even if she’d wanted to.”
“And of course Blanca is an agent, too.” He made it a statement of fact, something he had just worked out.
“Blanca wanted to fight the British. But it was my choices that trapped her in our masquerade. She warned me how difficult it would be. She warned me I’d care too much. And that you would.”
“Did she foresee that she would herself?”
Suzanne’s breath caught. “I think she’d begun to care for Addison, even then.” She pressed her fingers into the fabric of her sleeves. “This afternoon I told Blanca to tell Addison the truth.”
She saw the flinch in Malcolm’s gaze at what that talk would mean to his valet. “Before I could intervene? I wouldn’t have denied her that. I wouldn’t have denied it to Addison. He deserves to hear the woman he loves explain her actions. For better or worse.”
Suzanne hadn’t seen Blanca since her own return to the house. She shivered at the thought of her friend’s life being smashed as badly as her own.
Malcolm studied her as though he was sifting through lies for shreds of truth. “You were younger than Gisèle when you lost your family. A child.”
She tightened her arms over her chest. “After that day I wasn’t a child anymore.”
She saw the reality of it settle in his eyes. He pushed himself to his feet and took a quick step forwards. “Suzette—”
She put out a hand to forestall him. “Don’t, Malcolm. I’m not the loyal wife you thought me. I’m also not the tragic victim of war. Don’t build up another false image of me. I made choices. Limited choices at times, but still choices. Which I can’t honestly say I regret.”
He stared down into her eyes. “You must have been so angry.”
“It seemed such a waste. How could I believe in anything? Raoul changed that.”
“He gave you an outlet for your anger.”
“He gave me a glimpse of a chance of making the world a better place. He read the same writers as my father—Paine, Rousseau, Locke, Beaumarchais. My father was a dreamer while Raoul was a hardheaded pragmatist. Yet beneath it was still the dream of a world in which there was some respect for the rights of men—and women. Where children didn’t starve in the streets, where printing presses weren’t summarily shut down—”
“Where Habeas Corpus wasn’t abruptly suspended?”
Suzanne met her husband’s gaze. She had helped him write a speech urging the repeal of the suspension of Habeas Corpus only a fortnight ago. “Quite.”
“You’re saying you’re fighting for the same things I am.”
“I wasn’t saying that precisely. But . . .” She hesitated. Was she making excuses for herself or trying to make him understand? “I saw that in you from the first. How else do you think I could help you write your speeches? I can stretch to a lot, but I don’t think I could have penned Tory diatribes.”
“So the ends are all that matter and damn the means?” The words had a bitter edge, but he made it an honest question.
“You think it’s better to argue within the system? A system that itself is so circumscribed it gives the illusion of choice while keeping whole viewpoints out of the discussion? Or creates the illusion that arguing with the foreign secretary over a glass of port gives one a say in the course of the country?”
Malcolm swallowed. “Point taken.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You’re right. Why else did I leave the diplomatic service after all?”
She unclenched her hands and pressed them against the folds of her skirt. “Having Colin changed things for me. I had ties outside my work. I had ties to you. I could stand outside the game and see its flaws. But”—she drew a breath, searching for the right words—“in a way it also made me more committed than ever. Because the world we live in—Castlereagh and Wellington’s world—isn’t the world I want for my children. Despite how privileged they are. Or perhaps because of it.”
“My world.”
“The world you were born into. The world you’ve spent most of your life rebelling against. In your own way, you’re far more subversive than Lord Byron, darling.”
He gave a sudden, unexpected laugh. For a moment she was looking at her husband and partner of the past five years. “To think that I’d ever be called more extreme than Byron. And yet you’ve also claimed I’m a British gentleman underneath.”
“You are.” She studied him, chest tight with all the reasons she loved him and all the reasons they couldn’t be together. “It’s the paradox of who you are, darling.”
He was silent for a long moment, and she had the odd sense he was examining himself rather than her. “British gentleman or not, I don’t want that world for my children, either. But if I can’t offer them a world with personal loyalty, then it renders all other loyalties a mockery.”
“You have a way with words, Malcolm. You’ve just summed up the difference between us.”
He watched her for a moment, his gaze appraising but no longer filled with anger or guilt. “O’Roarke said he found you in a brothel.”
“Did he tell you he was there on a mission?” Somehow she felt she owed it to Raoul to make sure Malcolm knew that.
“He mentioned it.”
“He didn’t—There wasn’t anything between us until I asked him. Raoul’s made his share of compromises, but he has his own sort of honor.”
Malcolm gave a wry smile. “He’s quite obviously in love with you.”
It was her turn to laugh. “I don’t know what’s funnier—the idea of Raoul in love or the idea of you talking about love.”
“Don’t play games, Suzette. I’m not excusing what he did. I’m not saying he’s not a manipulative bastard who played dice with both of us. But I can see it in his eyes when he looks at you. If I hadn’t been so willfully blind I think I might have seen it before I knew the truth. He’s a good actor, but that sort of feeling is hard to deny.”
“Raoul is the epitome of putting personal feelings before the cause. And yet—”
“You admit he cares about you?”
“I was going to say, ‘And yet he obviously cared about you.’ Until these past few days, I hadn’t realized he could care in that way.”
“But he put the cause first. At the cost of manipulating both of us.”
“Yes.” Myriad conflicting emotions twisted in her chest.
Malcolm’s gaze drilled into her. “You loved him.”
“He gave me a sense of purpose, a way to fight, a role to play. How could I not love him? But I couldn’t let myself become lost in that love. Because I knew the cause came first with both of us.”
“For someone who talks eloquently about competing loyalties, I think you’re overemphasizing O’Roarke’s ability to only feel one thing.”
Her mind shot back six years. She’d been taken prisoner by the splinter group of
guerrilleros
she’d infiltrated. Logically Raoul should have left her there. She could have held out long enough to let him cover his tracks before she told them anything. Instead he’d rescued her at considerable risk to himself and the three operatives he’d brought with him. When, half out of her head, she’d asked him if he’d been afraid she’d break, he’d replied,
No, I was afraid they’d kill you before you broke
.
Her fingers dug into the lace that edged the sleeves of her gown. “Perhaps. But you can’t think—”