CHAPTER 7
Even in early afternoon the shadows cast by the plaster and oak of the ceiling of the coffeehouse were forgiving and the thick leaded glass of the windows filtered the light in a comforting way. Ladies might be rare here, but enough actresses, milliners, and ladies of the evening were present that Suzanne attracted no more than a few casual glances. Only a half hour before she had been walking along the Serpentine in Hyde Park with Colin and Jessica and their governess, Laura Dudley. But then she should be used to combining the roles of mother and agent by now.
She waited for the glances to turn away before she scanned the crowd. Something alerted her to his presence before she actually spotted him through the haze of smoke and coffee steam. There, at a table in the corner.
She made her way across the room, careful not to walk too fast. He looked up from his newspaper, though she suspected he’d been aware of her from the moment she stepped through the door.
The strain of the past years showed in his face. He had always been thin, but he looked leaner and gaunter. As though the need to keep going had whittled away anything extraneous. The iron resilience was still there and his eyes burned as bright as ever, but the scars of defeat showed in his face. Still, his mouth lifted in a familiar smile as she approached. Despite everything, she felt an absurd wash of comfort.
“You look well.” He got to his feet and pulled out a chair for her.
“Rank flattery.” She sank into the chair and stripped off her gloves.
“Hardly.” He returned to his own chair, picked up the bottle of red wine on the table, and poured her a glass.
She reached for the glass and took a grateful sip. The tension coiled within her was so ever present she almost forgot it was there. “I didn’t think you’d be able to come so soon.”
“Britain is friendlier to me these days,” Raoul O’Roarke said. “My sins in the United Irish Uprising seem forgot in the wake of my supposed support of the
guerrilleros
in Spain. Ironic, is it not?”
Raoul’s cover during the Peninsular War had been that he worked with the
guerrilleros
who had been allied with the British in driving the French out of Spain. He had in fact been a spymaster, running a network and passing intelligence along to the French.
“An irony that works to your advantage,” Suzanne said.
“These days one takes blessings where one finds them. Not that having been allied with the
guerrilleros
is a universally welcomed calling card in Britain, either.”
After the war the restored Spanish king, Ferdinand, had repealed the constitution and re-established the Inquisition, to the despair of the Spanish liberals who had wanted the French out of Spain but had also wanted to remake their country along more progressive lines. The outcome might vindicate people like Raoul and her who had thought the best route to reform lay with the French, but she knew it sickened him to see it as much as it sickened her.
“Malcolm made a speech about it in the Commons,” she said. “Our—that is, Britain’s—lack of support for those who fought beside the British in Spain.”
“Yes, I know.” Raoul reached for his wineglass. “I read it. I thought I detected your hand. Or rather pen.”
She swallowed hard at the memory of poring over the speech with her husband late one night in his study, debating, scribbling, tossing out turns of phrase. “I may have helped with the editing, but the ideas were his. I think what’s happening in Spain makes Malcolm happier than ever that he left the diplomatic corps. He says he wonders sometimes what we were fighting for. That is, what he was fighting for. What the British were fighting for. You know what I mean.”
“Quite.” Raoul gave a faint smile as he took a sip of wine.
“What I’m trying to say is that Malcolm is happier in Parliament.”
“And are you happy as a political wife?”
She turned her glass on the tabletop. The wine glowed a dull red in the murky light. “I won’t deny I miss the excitement. But I think I’m rather a good political hostess.”
“Rumor has it even Tories seek out invitations to your parties.”
“I have novelty on my side for the moment.”
“The English ton isn’t an easy world to navigate. Speaking as one who’s lived my life on the fringes of it.”
She had known that, but she had still been overwhelmed by the feeling of stepping into an alien landscape when she and Malcolm had moved to Britain in the spring. Not a wild landscape but a garden laid out with meticulous care and governed by unwritten rules and indecipherable codes. “People are eager to see the Berkeley Square house. Redoing it has been a challenge. A welcome challenge, though I never saw myself as the decorating type.”
“It should be child’s play for one who helped stage a medieval tournament.”
She smiled, remembering the Carrousel in Vienna. Dear God. In some ways the Congress of Vienna seemed a much simpler time. She’d still been actively spying. But somehow in the midst of that activity she’d given less thought to consequences. “You have no idea how exhausting choosing wallpaper can be. It’s the first time we’ve had a proper home of our own. But I sometimes wonder if we were wise to move into the house. If Malcolm will ever see it as ours rather than his parents’ house.”
“It’s a beautiful house.”
She nodded. “I think that’s what decided Malcolm. He was planning to sell it, but we walked through and Colin was running up the staircase, and Malcolm said we’d be fools to walk away from it. But I worry it has a lot of ghosts for him. Though from what I gather he and Edgar and Gisèle were packed off to Scotland much of the time and then away at school.”
Raoul leaned back in his chair, wineglass tilting between his fingers. “The past months can’t have been easy.”
She nodded, surprised at what a relief it was to talk about it. Perhaps that was why she was prevaricating about the real reason she had asked to see him. She was indulging herself, basking in a few moments of understanding. There were so few people with whom she could really be herself. “Losing his father was hard on Malcolm for all they were never close. Perhaps particularly because they weren’t close. There’s so much unsettled business between them that now will never be resolved.” Including the question of who had actually fathered Malcolm. “He doesn’t talk to me much about it.”
“I suspect he talks about it more to you than to anyone.”
Suzanne studied Raoul across the table. He had been friends with Malcolm’s mother and grandfather and had known Malcolm since boyhood. In some ways, she thought, Raoul knew her husband better than she did herself. “He doesn’t share easily. But then I’ve always known that. I thought—” She bit back what she’d been about to say and snatched up her wineglass. It wasn’t for Raoul to know that she’d thought she and Malcolm had grown closer only to realize, here in the world in which he had grown up, the layers still between them.
Raoul regarded her with a shrewd gaze. “One holds the hurts of childhood close. It’s different from the things he’s been through with you. I suspect he’s afraid to burden you with those childhood hurts.”
“What else does he think I’m here for?” She slumped back against the hard slats of her chair. “Damn you. I suspect you’re right. As usual.”
“My apologies.”
She wadded up her handkerchief and threw it at him.
Raoul caught it one-handed. “How are the children?”
Their gazes locked across the table. How quickly one could step onto quicksand. “Adjusting to England better than their parents, I think. Jessica crawls all over the new house and pulls herself up and babbles as though she’s telling us something very important—which I suspect she is, we just can’t decipher it yet. She says ‘mama’ all the time, and I think she might actually have been referring to me yesterday. Colin is learning to read and loves the Berkeley Square garden. That convinces me we were right to take the house. And most of the time he’s quite fond of his little sister.”
“I’m glad.” Raoul smoothed out the handkerchief and handed it back to her. “It’s good for Colin to have a sibling. I suspect it’s good for Malcolm as well.”
She was silent for a moment. Of all the decisions she’d taken, having a second child with Malcolm was the one that tied her irrevocably to him. “Malcolm was happy when I said I wanted another child.” She could see his face across the breakfast dishes in their lodgings in Paris, a mix of surprise and wonder. Her fingers clenched on the handkerchief. Her initials were embroidered in the corner.
S.S.V.
Suzanne de Saint-Vallier. The alias she’d been using when she met and married Malcolm that had now become a permanent part of her fictitious past. “I can’t imagine my life without Jessica now. But I can’t help but wonder if it was selfish. One more person to be hurt if anything goes wrong.”
“All the more reason to be sure nothing goes wrong.” He watched her for the length of a measure of music. “Why did you want to see me,
querida?
”
Suzanne took a sip of wine, curling her fingers round the stem of the glass. “Did you know Lord Harleton was a French spy?”
Surprise shot through Raoul’s gaze. “Talk about old ghosts.”
She set the glass on the table, sloshing the wine. “So you did know?”
“Oh yes. I recruited him.”
The world spun, as it often did with Raoul. “You—”
“It was in the midnineties, after the Terror.” During the Reign of Terror Raoul had been imprisoned in Les Carmes. He’d been days away from the guillotine when Robespierre fell. It was something of a miracle Raoul had survived this long, all things considered. Raoul reached for his glass. “It seemed important to protect the gains of the Revolution.”
“So that was when you first offered your services to French intelligence?” Suzanne had never been sure of the chronology for all she knew of Raoul.
He nodded. “And what more natural than to have me spend time at the Salon des Etrangers and other haunts of British expatriates. I might be anathema to the British Crown, but I still had connections. There were a lot of heedless young aristos like Harleton sampling the joys of Parisian life. He had expensive tastes.”
“Gambling debts?’
“And a woman. A very expensive courtesan named Lilliane Moncoeur to whom he’d written indiscreet letters.”
“You extricated him from his difficulties in exchange for his services.”
“Always dangerous to have a hold on an asset that can breed resentment. On the other hand, burning idealism can have its own drawbacks. One needn’t fear disillusion when there’ve been no illusions to begin with.”
“But Harleton continued to work for the French for over a decade. Did he still need the money?”
Raoul took a sip of wine. “Not particularly after he came into the title and estates.”
“Do you think it was fear of his secret being exposed that kept him working for the French?” she asked.
Raoul twirled his glass between his fingers. “Actually, I think Harleton enjoyed the thrill of the chase. Which is also not the best quality in an agent. Though to a degree it can give one an edge.”
“He didn’t mind betraying his country?” Funny how the word “betraying” stuck in her throat these days.
“I don’t think Harleton had much loyalty—to his country, to any cause. Perhaps a bit to his friends. He liked the challenge of the game. It amused him to appear to have less of an understanding than he did. I wouldn’t say he was brilliant, but he was less of a bumbler than he let on.”
“He went on reporting to you?” she asked, piecing this together with what Malcolm had learned from Carfax.
“Off and on through Waterloo. After the United Irish Uprising, I was in Paris more than ever.”
In fact, Raoul had escaped Ireland by the skin of his teeth, Suzanne knew, narrowly avoiding the fate of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and others who had died in the wake of the failed rebellion. “Did you realize—”
“That Carfax was on to him? Yes, after a few years. I funneled information through him that I wanted to get back to Carfax.”
“And then?”
“Unlike most of my assets, Harleton didn’t need protecting after Waterloo, so he ceased to be a concern to me. I didn’t hear from him for almost two years. And then a few weeks before he died, he contacted me saying Carfax was going to bring him in.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I was hardly in a position to protect him.”
“You must have wondered when he died so soon after.”
“Of course. To own the truth, I wondered if he’d killed himself, though I’d have thought Harleton’s sense of self-preservation was too strong for that.”
“His son found a letter Harleton was drafting to you that he hadn’t yet put into code.”
Raoul grimaced. “I’m sorry for the son. Apparently Harleton at least had the wit not to use my name?”
He could face exposure so coolly. But then the ever-present threat of exposure was something they had both learned to live with. “Crispin Harleton would have said if his father had used your name. But could Harleton have letters from you?”
“He was supposed to have destroyed any communications from me. But even if he didn’t, I doubt Malcolm could recognize my handwriting on a coded letter written in capitals.”
Suzanne swallowed, aware of the ground she was stepping onto with her next question. “What about Alistair Rannoch?”
Raoul’s brows lifted. “What about him?”
She kept her gaze steady on Raoul’s face, the hooded eyes, the sharp nose, the ironic mouth. Trying to read the man who was so often unreadable, even to the agent he had trained. “Crispin Harleton found a letter from Alistair Rannoch to his father in his things. It implies Alistair was a French agent as well.”
Raoul released his breath, his enigmatic gray gaze gone wide with shock. “Dear God in heaven.”
“He didn’t work for you?”
Raoul reached for his glass as though he was unaware of what he was doing with his hands. “You don’t think I’d have warned you before you went off to England as his daughter-in-law?”