“Suzanne Rannoch has a great deal to lose and that makes her dangerous,” Laura’s companion persisted. “Rannoch has a few more scruples, but even he’s done things you’d cavil at. Don’t waste your sympathies on them.”
“I don’t waste my sympathies on anyone.”
“You’re a clever woman, Laura. But you have more compassion than you admit, perhaps even to yourself. If you don’t take care, it could be your undoing.” He reached out and touched her hand.
Laura jerked away from his touch. “I always take care.”
“It’s those with the most confidence in their abilities who make mistakes.” The floorboards creaked faintly as he shifted his weight from one foot to another. “Does Carfax share Rannoch’s suspicions about Alistair Rannoch?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think Mr. Rannoch fully trusts Lord Carfax. But I do know Mr. Rannoch is asking questions about the League.”
She felt the jolt of tension that ran through him. “And?”
“For the moment he seems to think it’s a hellfire club.”
He gave a short laugh. “God knows there’s an element of truth to that. One can only hope there’s enough smoke to distract him.”
“Mr. Rannoch has a way of unearthing the truth. So does Mrs. Rannoch.”
She felt the pressure of his gaze on her face. “Just remember the consequences for all of us if they unearth this particular truth.”
She drew her reserves about her. It would never do to let him see her shiver. “You’ve reminded me of it often enough.”
He nodded. “Next week. The same time.”
She tugged on her gloves. Her hands were clammy.
“Laura,” he said in a soft voice.
She looked at him in the shadows.
“I don’t need to remind you of the consequences if you have any foolish thoughts about confiding in the Rannochs, do I? If I told them the truth, it would ruin any trust they have in you. Not to mention other repercussions.”
She tugged her second glove, breaking a stitch, and nodded. It was damnably hard to maintain one’s autonomy when one was playing a wretched hand.
Crispin scowled at the pilasters that flanked the library fireplace at the Richmond villa. “I had such high hopes for those birds. They look like ravens.”
Suzanne studied the carved birds that topped each pilaster. “I think they may actually be hawks. We were looking for ravens.” Ravens seemed to be everywhere these days.
“In any case, there’s nothing hidden behind them.” Malcolm pushed himself to his feet. He had been kneeling in front of the pilaster, tapping to look for a secret panel. Harry was doing the same with the other pilaster.
Happy shrieks came from the window seat, where the children were bouncing. Suzanne glanced over, but the capable Roxane had things well in hand. The five adults moved to the central library table. Crispin leaned against the gleaming oak, brows drawn together. “It looks as though we have to move on to another room. I was so sure this was where Eleanor Harleton would have hidden something. It’s the heart of the old house. And the story is that it was her favorite room.”
Excited young voices bounced off the fretted ceiling. The children were marching towards the fireplace now the adults had moved on. Jessica, Suzanne noted, was walking holding Livia’s hands. “I think we’ve checked every possibility for a hidden compartment,” she said. “Perhaps—”
She broke off because out of the corner of her eye she saw Jessica’s foot catch on a corner of the hearth rug. Suzanne was already running across the room before Jessica stumbled. Livia caught her, but the rug slipped and both girls landed on the floor in a tangle of muslin, merino, and lace-edged petticoats. When Suzanne reached Jessica, her face had the stillness of breath being drawn for a scream. Suzanne snatched her daughter up just as Jessica let loose a full-throated howl.
Suzanne pressed her lips to her daughter’s head. “I’m here,
querida,
it’s all right,” she murmured.
She’s fine,
she mouthed to Malcolm, who had run across the room after her, the other adults close behind him.
Livia looked up at Suzanne and Jessica with stricken eyes. “I’m sorry. I thought I was holding her steady.”
“It’s all right, sweetheart,” Suzanne said. “You just slipped.”
Cordelia moved to touch her daughter’s hair.
Clarisse was peering at the floor. “Did Jessica hit her head? It looks like there’s blood.”
Colin plopped down on the floor and touched his fingers where she was pointing. “It’s just a bit of stone,” he said, relief in his voice.
As she was occupied stroking Jessica’s hair, it was a moment before Suzanne made the connection. She glanced at Malcolm. He had already dropped down beside Colin. The square before the fireplace, which had been covered by the hearth rug, seemed to be inlaid with a pattern. Malcolm tugged at the rug. “It seems to have been nailed down,” he said. “Then a corner came free. Do you have a hammer somewhere, Crispin?”
While Crispin went in search of a hammer, Suzanne and Cordelia took the children to the kitchen and settled them under the watchful eye of a kitchen maid with lemonade and cookies. Jessica, enthusiastically breaking off pieces of cookie, had long forgot the fall and even Livia seemed to be over her worry about it.
Suzanne and Cordelia returned to the library to find Malcolm pulling up the last nail. He rolled the hearth rug back to reveal an image of a dragon with a sword between its teeth.
“Good lord,” Crispin said. “It’s the Harleton crest. I never knew it was there.”
“The hearth rug had been carefully positioned over it,” Malcolm said. He touched the carnelian that formed the dragon’s eye. “Bloodred. The copper of the sword hilt could be called fire.”
“The tip of the dragon’s tail looks like onyx,” Cordelia said. “Raven black.”
“And the sword blade is mother-of-pearl,” Suzanne said. “Not exactly dove gray, but—”
“Poetic license.” Harry dropped down beside Malcolm. “The aquamarine in the hilt is obvious for the sea, but what about the mire?”
“There’s the bronze on the dragon’s spine.” Cordelia knelt beside her husband. “At least unpolished it looks sort of muddy, like a mire.”
Malcolm pressed his fingers against the carnelian, the copper, the onyx, the mother-of-pearl, the aquamarine, and last the bronze. The central square tilted beneath his fingers. He pressed again. Hinges creaked and the square of floor with the Harleton crest slid to the side to reveal a shallow compartment.
CHAPTER 31
Crispin released a breath of wonder. “My word. It really does exist. Half of me thought we were on a wild-goose chase.”
“That’s the thing about investigations,” Harry said. “One often has to put in a damnable amount of time before one knows if there’s anything to it.”
Crispin studied the plain brown box in the compartment before them. “Of course I haven’t a clue where the key might be.”
“I wouldn’t worry, Lord Harleton,” Cordelia said. “You have quite a collection of proficient lock pickers present.”
In the end it was Malcolm who went to work on the box once they had carried it into the library and set it on a table by the mullioned windows, with the added light of a lamp. Suzanne watched her husband’s long fingers go through the familiar motions with his picklocks. It was an old lock, and from the tension in his neck and shoulders she knew picking it was harder than he made it look. The kitchen maid had taken the children to the garden. The children’s gleeful shouts carried through the windows, a counterpoint to the quiet tension of the adults in the library. Her two worlds colliding. Or two of her many worlds.
“There.” Malcolm sat back in his chair. “Do you want to do the honors, Harleton? It’s your family’s treasure.”
Crispin hesitated a moment, then moved to the table. For all the layers of deception in the room, Suzanne felt the thrill that ran through the company. She and Malcolm and Harry might be hardened agents, but the prospect of unearthed treasure awakened something in them as young as the children scampering on the lawn outside.
Crispin pushed back the lid of the box. Two drawstring bags, one of brown wash leather, the other of black velvet. Crispin picked up the leather bag first and tugged at the drawstring. A necklace, bracelet, coronet, and earrings spilled onto the chamois cloth Malcolm had spread on the table. Emeralds sparked in the sunlight, undimmed by the years. The setting was gold, aged to a fine luster, the design suggested the fifteenth century. Crispin drew a breath of wonder. “So she did hide the jewels away.”
“You’re sure that’s what these are?” Cordelia asked.
“Oh yes. I can show you a painting in the stairwell of Eleanor Harleton wearing them. And they all seem to be accounted for. Which makes me wonder about the other bag.” He reached for the velvet and tugged the string. Loose stones spilled onto the chamois cloth, glittering with fire against the dark fabric.
Harry let out a whistle. “In addition to the emeralds, your ancestors seem to have hidden a fortune in diamonds.”
Crispin frowned. “Odd.”
“If the family was attainted, they’d have wanted to hide away whatever they could,” Malcolm said.
“Yes, but I never heard any talk about diamonds being missing. Surely jewels on this scale couldn’t have gone missing without attracting notice.”
Suzanne studied the sparkling stones. “And these were broken up, which makes them seem less like a family heirloom.”
“Perhaps the Elizabethan Lord Harleton received them as payment from Lord Essex,” Cordelia suggested.
“Difficult to imagine Essex handing over such a fortune,” Malcolm said. “These must be worth far more than the emeralds.” He reached for the black velvet bag. “And this doesn’t look anything like two hundred years old. I wonder if the diamonds were hidden far more recently.”
“By my father?” Crispin asked.
“That would be likeliest.”
“So he found the emeralds but kept them hidden?”
“Perhaps as insurance against needing to make a quick escape,” Harry suggested.
Crispin’s face darkened. “You think the diamonds were payment from the French?”
“Even were Lord Harleton the best asset imaginable, that would be an incalculably large payment,” Suzanne said.
Malcolm met her gaze and nodded. Sometimes it was best to brazen things out.
“We don’t know what secrets my father gave up,” Crispin said, a grim edge to his voice.
Malcolm watched through the diamond panes of the window as Crispin swung a giggling Clarisse in the air.
“He’s so good with them,” Suzanne said.
“Remarkably. Of course, as I well know, one can become a father in a number of ways,” Malcolm said. Outside Crispin bent down to acknowledge Jessica, who was tugging at his boots. “It will cut him in two if Manon leaves him.”
Suzanne swung her gaze to Malcolm. “I was thinking of what it will do to Manon when he marries.”
Malcolm looked down at his wife. “Whom would Crispin marry?”
“A girl from a good family cut out to be a baron’s wife.” She paused for a moment, then added, “Much the same sort of girl you’d have married if I hadn’t contrived to stumble across you.”
Malcolm looked into the sea green eyes of the woman who had changed his opinion about marriage. “On the contrary. If it weren’t for your predicament—what I thought was your predicament—I wouldn’t have married at all.”
Her gaze had the wry, wistful quality of one remembering something long ago, like a lost love. “My predicament was real enough, even if the circumstances weren’t what you thought them. And I know you always say you wouldn’t have married, dearest, but if I hadn’t got past your scruples, someone else would have. I know how sought after you were—it’s plain from the hostility of the matchmaking mamas to whom I’m an interloper. You can’t help but—”
“Damn it, Suzette, if you say once more that I’m a prisoner of being a British gentleman—”
“I was going to say you can’t help but do everything in your power to take care of people. There’d have been some other girl you’d have felt impelled to take care of.”
A series of faces flashed through his mind. David’s cousin Honoria Talbot, lovely, blond, self-possessed. The girl many had assumed Malcolm would marry and whom he might even have offered for if he hadn’t been sure he’d make a hash of both their lives. Dark, elfin-faced Evelyn Mortimer, a poor relation who had grown up in a great house but lacked a dowry. She had cried on his shoulder one summer, and in the end he’d helped find a living for the equally penniless curate she was in love with. Elegant Jane Murchison, left on the shelf after a childhood bout with smallpox left her scarred. He’d wondered, home on leave one Christmas, if marriage to him would be preferable to spinsterhood. But in the end he’d decided it would make them both unhappy. Which was abundantly the case, as Jane had later eloped with the estate manager with whom she’d apparently been in love for years. “I doubt it,” he said.
“You take care of everyone, Malcolm.”
The tender mockery in Suzanne’s voice scraped him raw. “But inevitably I’d have calculated the odds and decided whoever it was, was better off without me.”
“And my case was so extreme you didn’t think I would be?”
“On the contrary. I was terrified I was taking advantage of you. If not, I’d have proposed far sooner. It was only when Stuart pushed me—”
“Into doing your duty?”
Malcolm saw the ambassador’s face that afternoon in Lisbon. “It was only when Stuart started insisting we had to find some solution for you that I realized I was more terrified he’d push you into someone else’s arms than that I’d make a mull of things.” He looked at his wife’s clear eyes, her winged brows, the curve of her mouth, and remembered the first moment he’d seen her in the Cantabrian Mountains, face smeared with dirt and blood, eyes brilliant with life. “The truth is I wanted you. Your predicament gave me an excuse for my selfishness in offering you a marriage built on Spanish coin.”
He saw a spark in her eyes—relief? triumph? fear?—quickly suppressed. “Eventually you’d have wanted someone else.”
“No. Not in this way. Not to the point of throwing caution to the wind. If I hadn’t met you I’d be alone.” And he wouldn’t have the children, either. “I suppose one could even argue I have cause to be grateful for your deception.”
“No one would claim that, darling.”
He dragged his gaze away. Outside the window, Crispin was on his back, with Colin and Livia sitting on his chest and Clarisse tugging at his hair, while Roxane held Jessica and Drusilla. “Crispin could marry Manon.”
Suzanne’s sharp laugh cut the air. “Don’t be silly, darling. Men like Crispin don’t marry actresses. Even Sir Horace hasn’t married Jennifer Mansfield.”
“Some gentlemen marry actresses. Some even marry courtesans. Henri Rivaux married Rachel Garnier.”
Who had worked in a brothel. And Malcolm had helped create a cover story for Rachel to mask her past. “Henri was remarkable. And it meant a great deal to me that you helped them. But—”
“What?”
“You wouldn’t have married me if you’d known the truth of my past.”
He bit back the instinctive defensive quip. “I wouldn’t have married you if I’d known you were a French spy. At least not if I’d known you intended to go on spying.”
“And if you’d known I was a whore?” She flung the word out like a glove tossed down in challenge.
He forced himself to look honestly at his thoughts and motives. “I don’t know.”
Her gaze had softened. It was almost pitying. “It’s not that I think you’d have considered the idea and rejected it, darling, so much as that I think it wouldn’t have even occurred to you. You wouldn’t have seen me as in want of protection. Not that sort of protection.”
“I think you do us both a disservice. Your child would have still been in want of protection. And I’d have still—”
“Wanted me? Well, if you’d known the truth, you’d have known you could have me without marriage.”
“Don’t, Suzette. I wouldn’t—That cheapens both of us. And no matter what, that’s not a way I’d ever have seen you.”
She looked at him a moment longer. He might now know she was a stranger, that she had been his enemy, but it didn’t kill the tug of desire.
“Did you work with Manon Caret during the war?” he asked, drawing on his defenses, reminding himself of who his wife was and what she’d done.
He felt Suzanne’s hesitation. He kept his gaze steady on her. “You’re hardly betraying anything. I already know she was a French agent.”
Suzanne swallowed but didn’t look away. “I first met her in 1809 when I was fresh from my first mission. Later she probably saved my life when I stole some documents from the ministry of police.”
“You were working against Fouché?”
“As we’ve discussed, intelligence alliances are complicated things.”
He watched her for a moment, thinking of the friendship that had seemed to spring up so easily between his wife and the actress, and the way Suzanne had introduced Manon to Simon. “You helped Manon escape from Paris two years ago, didn’t you?”
This time she didn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”
“With O’Roarke.”
“Yes. I owed her my life, Malcolm. More than that—I owed something to all my former comrades who were hunted by Fouché’s agents while I danced and dined with the victors.”
He inclined his head. “I can understand that.”
“Can you?”
“I understand loyalty.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d believe I was capable of it.”
“You were loyal enough to your cause that you went into an arranged marriage for it.” He studied her for a moment, this woman who had betrayed him in so many ways. “That’s where you and O’Roarke met the Kestrel, isn’t it?” The Kestrel had been Bertrand Laclos’s nom de guerre when he rescued victims of the White Terror.
“Raoul had found him, though he didn’t know the Kestrel’s true identity.”
“So without your rescue of Manon Caret we might not have been able to rescue Paul St. Gilles. And Bertrand might still be presumed dead and might never have been reunited with Rupert.”
“Ironic the way things can work out.”
“I can hardly quarrel with saving anyone from the White Terror.” He turned back to the window and smiled as Crispin sat up on the lawn with all six children climbing on him. “I think you’re not giving me enough credit, though, in your certainty I wouldn’t have married you. And not giving Crispin enough credit when it comes to Manon.” He was silent a moment. Crispin lifted a giggling Jessica overhead. “We should start thinking about Jessica’s birthday,” Malcolm said abruptly.
Her first birthday. Suzanne swallowed and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’ve started planning a party with Cordy. I’ll find an excuse to cry off.”
“No need. We won’t let the investigation disrupt it.”
“No, but—”
“It’s her first birthday. We can manage to sit down to dinner with our friends.” He shifted against the wall. “Have you bought her presents?”
“A stuffed cat and some blocks. And I’ve ordered a new dress. She’ll be more interested in the paper and ribbon, if I remember from Colin’s first.”
Malcolm nodded. “We have a couple of birthdays before she’s dictating what she wants. I ordered a strand of pearls from Asprey’s. Small ones. She can wear them now on special occasions and have them as she grows.”
“She’ll chew on them.”
“Very likely. But I wanted her to have something she could keep as she gets older. I meant to tell you. I did it when I ordered your—Your anniversary present.”
She swallowed. “Fortunately, Asprey’s is good about returns.”
He gave a wry smile. “Having gone to the trouble of picking it out, I’d just as soon you had it.”
Her throat constricted. “Malcolm—”
He gave a smile that was somehow at once honest and distant. “After all, you are still my wife.”