CHAPTER 32
Suzanne slipped into the back of the Tavistock. They were in the midst of the “get thee to a nunnery” scene onstage. A relationship collapsing in the midst of treachery and divided loyalties, a woman set to spy on the man she loved. Poor Hamlet and Ophelia didn’t stand a chance. Suzanne sat at the back and let the words wash over her until Simon called a break.
Manon stretched her back. “In either version, whether Hamlet is trying to protect Ophelia or disentangle himself from a spy, he could manage it more adroitly. Oh, Suzanne, thank goodness. Do come to my dressing room for a cup of tea. I’ve been round actors all morning.”
Brandon threw a wadded-up piece of paper at her. “All morning isn’t very long considering when you get up.”
Manon pulled a face at him, then grinned. “So nice to have a leading man one can tease,” she murmured to Suzanne as they went down the passage to her dressing room. “He’s less arrogant and has a keener understanding than most.” She gathered up her flounced skirts to step round a basket of props. “I understand you had a very interesting visit to Richmond yesterday. Though even after listening to Crispin talk half the night I’m not sure what it all means.”
“I don’t think any of us are yet.”
“Crispin had me try on the emeralds. I must say they’re quite lovely.” Manon opened the door of her dressing room. “Tea, thank goodness. I have a headache.”
Suzanne pushed the door of Manon’s dressing room to and leaned against it. “Malcolm knows.”
Manon spun round, the kettle in one hand. Her gaze acknowledged the fear they both lived with and went past it in the same instant. “What’s your escape plan?”
“Who says I have an escape plan?”
Manon set the kettle on the spirit lamp. “An agent always has an escape plan.”
“But I’m not an agent anymore. I’m a former agent who hoped to go on living quietly with her husband and children.”
“There’s no such thing as a former agent.” Manon picked up a canister from the jumble on the chest of drawers and spooned tea into a Wedgwood teapot. “Have you thought about running?”
“Of course not.”
“Suzanne.”
“I can’t—oh, all right, yes.” Manon was perhaps the only person she could admit it to. She couldn’t even discuss it with Raoul. Suzanne dropped down on the settee. Her body ached as though she’d been pummeled black-and-blue. “I did. For about five seconds.”
Manon got up from the dressing table bench, picked up a bottle of cognac from atop a stack of boxes, filled a glass, and put it in Suzanne’s hand. “This calls for something stronger than tea. Don’t tell me you realized you couldn’t bear life without him. At this point in your life, after the Peninsula and Waterloo, you should know just how much you can bear.”
Suzanne closed her hand round the glass. Her fingers were shaking. She willed them to be still. “No, not that. I can’t take the children away from him. I can’t take him away from them.”
Manon frowned, the bottle in one hand. “I’ll own I’ve never had that problem. Roxane’s father would have had an apoplexy or called me a liar if I’d named him as her parent. And Clarisse’s was too busy advancing his own career to notice. Actors. Possibly the only worse choice for a lover than a fellow agent.”
Suzanne pressed the glass against her temple. “There was a time I was mad enough to think I could take Colin and leave. That Malcolm would even be glad to be free of us after he’d done the honorable thing by offering us his name. That delusion fled when I saw him holding Colin in his arms. Or as soon as I could think coherently thereafter.”
“And your baby girl ties you to him.” Manon poured a glass for herself. “I don’t suppose that pregnancy was accidental.”
Suzanne tightened her fingers round the glass. “You mean did I do it to tie Malcolm to me?”
“Or to tie yourself to him?”
“Perhaps.” Suzanne stared into the depths of the glass. “At least in part. The end result is the same.”
Manon took a thoughtful drink of cognac. “I told you I was afraid the girls were getting too fond of Crispin. It will make it difficult when it ends.”
“Who says it’s going to end?” Suzanne asked, despite or perhaps because of her conversation with Malcolm the evening before.
“Love affairs always do. Your husband knowing the truth about you makes it more likely Crispin and I will part.”
“Malcolm doesn’t know any more about you than he did before. He won’t learn more from me.”
“Of course not.” Manon dropped down on the settee beside Suzanne. “In any case, that’s my lookout, as Crispin would say. We were talking about you. I understand not wanting to deny your children their father. But they also need their mother.”
“Malcolm won’t throw me out.” Suzanne choked down another sip of brandy. “I thought he might, but now I see—”
“His feelings for you are too strong?”
“His feelings for me are blasted to bits. But he isn’t going to deny the children one of their parents, either. He’s told me as much. We’re even still investigating together.”
“So you’re safe.”
Suzanne took a swallow of cognac. It burned her throat. “I have a roof over my head and more money than nine-tenths of the world and no more risk of arrest than I did yesterday. I’m more fortunate than most former Bonapartist agents.”
“And you feel as though your life’s been shattered.”
Suzanne cast a sidelong glance at her friend. “You claim not to believe in love.”
Manon kicked off her slippers and drew her feet up onto the settee. “I claim not to believe love lasts. Quite different from denying it altogether.”
“Are you telling me I’ll get over it?”
Manon leaned back on the settee, arms hooked round her knees. “You’ll find a way to go on, because that’s who you are. You may even take another lover. As to whether you’ll ever care for another man as you care for Malcolm Rannoch, I don’t know.”
“Careful, Manon. Take that one step further and you’ll be talking like a romantic.”
“I’m an actress. I know how to observe.” She curled her fingers round her brandy glass. “I don’t know that I could do it.”
“Lose the man you love?”
“Go on living with him after the love burned itself out.”
Suzanne hunched her shoulders against an inward chill. “As you said, I don’t have much choice.”
The whistle of the teakettle punctuated the stillness. Manon got to her feet and splashed steaming water into the teapot. “Who else knows?”
“No one. That is, Blanca told Addison. Malcolm’s valet. I told her to tell him,” Suzanne added at a sharp look from Manon. “He’s in love with her. In fact, they’re going to get married, despite the revelations. He won’t betray either of us.”
Manon set the lid on the teapot. “Who else might find out in the course of this investigation? Because if you’re exposed, Mr. Rannoch will be suspected as well.”
“That’s absurd.” Though Suzanne’s tone was sharpened because Manon had given voice to a fear that lurked at the back of her mind.
“He’s known to be a brilliant agent.” Manon carried the tea tray to the hamper before the settee, an unlikely vision of domesticity as she gave voice to the harsh reality of a spy’s life. “To believe he went on for years without suspecting—”
“I wouldn’t let that happen.”
“I don’t see how you could stop it.” Manon dropped back down on the settee. “They’d hardly take your word as a former Bonapartist agent yourself. Nor do I think Mr. Rannoch would stand by while you were accused.”
Suzanne’s hand tightened round her glass. “You’re saying I’ve put him in even more jeopardy than I realized?”
“I’m saying you have to acknowledge the risks. To both of you. It’s something you’ll be living with for the rest of your lives if you stay together.” Manon tilted her head back against the frayed damask of the settee. “If I learned that Crispin was a British agent—Well, I’d be shocked. It’s hard to imagine someone more seemingly guileless than Crispin. And of course I wasn’t working as an agent when we met. But if I had been, if I learned he’d entered into our liaison for what he could learn from me—” She turned her glass in her hand, frowning at it. “I’d be angry. At him, but mostly at myself for being so gullible. To be deceived in a lover is bad enough. For a spy to be so deceived goes to the very heart of who we are.”
Suzanne tightened her grip on her glass. “Yes.”
Manon turned her head and sent Suzanne a shrewd look. “As to whether I’d ever be able to get past it—I don’t know. I think at some point I’d recognize that Crispin had only done something I’d have been proud to pull off myself.”
Suzanne met her friend’s gaze. “Are you saying you think Malcolm could get past this?” She heard the incredulity, and the suppressed undertone of hope, ripple through her own voice.
“Is that so hard to imagine? He’s a spy himself. If he’s honest at all—and I think he is—he has to acknowledge you’ve achieved something he might have done himself.”
“Malcolm—” Suzanne took another drink of brandy. “Malcolm is a good agent. But I don’t know that he’d ever do what I did.”
“Perhaps you’re underrating his abilities.” Manon leaned forwards and lifted the teapot to pour two cups of tea. “Or overrating his scruples.”
“He’s a brilliant agent. But he’s also a British gentleman. Despite Shakespeare, he thinks that honor is more than a word. I didn’t just betray him, I betrayed his comrades through him. And in turn he’ll think he betrayed his own honor. I don’t think he’ll ever get past that.”
“Crispin’s a British gentleman as well.” Manon set a cup of tea on the chest before Suzanne. “But he can be surprisingly broad-minded.”
“So can Malcolm.” Suzanne picked up the cup. Before she married Malcolm, tea had been a rarely drunk, exotic beverage. “But the core is still there. Beneath the liberal reformer, beneath the Radical politician, beneath the spy. We come from different worlds.”
Manon poured the last of her brandy into her tea and took a sip. “Yet you believe in many of the same things. You understand him very well. I don’t think it’s out of the question that he could come to understand you.”
Suzanne set aside her brandy—she needed her wits about her—and took a sip of tea. Hot and astringent, the sort of jolt she needed. “I never told you—that night you escaped from Paris. When I went back to your house pretending to be you to draw off Fouché’s men. A man came to the door. Pushed his way into the house. Handsome, dark haired. Obviously in love with you.”
“Oh, God.” Manon groaned. “Renard. The Vicomte de Valmay. He made my last months in Paris rather entertaining, but he could be importunate. What did you do?”
“Managed to pretend to be you talking through the door, but he insisted on going to sleep in the passage.”
“That sounds like him.”
“So I climbed out the bedchamber window and in through the dressing room window and emerged in the passage in the guise of a new housemaid.”
Manon smiled. “You’re a wonder, Suzanne.”
“I have to confess I rather enjoyed it. But this man—Valmay—he obviously cared for you. He was desperate to know if you had another man in the room with you. When I finally assured him you did not, he settled down in front of the door to wait for morning.”
“He fancied himself in love with me. Or at least he was in the moment.” Manon took a sip of brandy-laced tea. “I wrote to him after I reached England. Tried to say I was sorry while making it clear the whole affair had been light for me in the hopes he’d treat it similarly.”
“Was it light?”
Manon shrugged. “I couldn’t afford for it to be anything else. I never can, and in this case given the climate I knew I might have to leave Paris. Probably as well I left before I could grow more fond of him.” She drew a breath. “I confess it was . . . difficult when I first came here. The English are . . . different.”
Suzanne smiled despite herself. “Spoken with admirable restraint.”
Manon smiled as well. “I’ve got used to it. The fact that they don’t say what they’re thinking and that wall of reserve one can never break through and the casual anti-French comments they don’t even seem to realize they’re making. And the rain—somehow rain is so much more agreeable in Paris—and the lack of a good cup of coffee, though I finally found a passable café run by an émigré.” She set down her cup and drew her feet back up onto the settee. “But even as a leading lady at the Tavistock I’ll always be an outsider here.”
“I know the feeling.”
Manon rested her chin on her updrawn knees. “The girls are losing their accents.”
Suzanne pictured her own children in the nursery that morning. “Colin and Jessica seem wholly British. With Continental polish, perhaps, but their roots are here.”
Manon nodded. The look in her eyes might have been called wistful, were that not so unlike Manon. “I confess I missed Renard dreadfully at first. Like a lovesick schoolgirl. It was all bound up in my feelings about home of course. For a time I wondered—”
“If you really had loved him?”
“Well, we can all have delusions.” She reached for her cup. “Finding work helped a great deal. I’ll forever be grateful to you for introducing me to Simon. And then meeting Crispin helped as well. In the end I realized it was probably as well I left when I did. Renard was starting to act tiresomely like a husband, and I was in danger of letting him slip under my guard.” She frowned into her cup. “As I’m afraid I’ve allowed Crispin to do. Crispin’s so cheerfully carefree one doesn’t take him seriously. Until suddenly there he is, worked into the fabric of one’s life.”
“He’s impressed me these past days.”
Manon’s fingers curved round the cup. “Yes, me as well. He’ll make some girl a good husband.”
Suzanne studied her friend, seeking clues in Manon’s contained face. “Doesn’t it—”
“Bother me?” Manon tossed down a sip of tea and brandy. “Why should it? It’s not as though I want to be married myself.”
“You may not want to be married in the general run of things, but married to—”