She swallowed, realizing she had not yet fully lifted the lid from the box. “Did you know?” She blurted the words out, as she would have done when she was an awkward schoolgirl.
He tilted his head back, somehow managing not to disturb his wig by so much as a fraction of an inch. “Surely Malcolm told you that Tatiana eventually admitted to me there was a child but made me swear not to inquire into the identity of the father.”
“Yes, that’s what Malcolm said.” Dorothée fingered her riding crop. She stood before the desk instead of perching on the edge as was her usual practice when talking to him. Somehow that represented an intimacy that seemed inappropriate now.
“But you don’t believe it.” Talleyrand gave a faint smile.
She lifted her chin. “I don’t believe that’s all of it, no. Any more than I imagine Malcolm does.”
His smile deepened. “You both know me well.”
“We both know you wouldn’t hesitate to withhold information if you thought it important.”
“Certainly not.” He picked up the pen and tapped it against the gilt-embossed burgundy leather of the blotter. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean I possess such information.”
“Damn it, Uncle.” Dorothée bit her lip, more at the word “Uncle” than at the curse. It felt odder and odder to call Talleyrand Uncle. “You had to have been curious about the father’s identity. How can you talk about it so coolly?” She took two quick steps forwards and gripped the edge of the desk. “You must have cared about her.”
His gaze moved over her face with a curiosity that seemed quite genuine. “What makes you think so?”
“You’d known her since she was a child. Her mother and grandfather were friends of yours.”
He lifted his brows. “Your point being?”
“I know you. Enough to know that that relationship couldn’t have left you entirely unmoved.”
“My dear child. You’re developing a healthy cynicism, but your faith in humanity is still touchingly naïve. You remind me a bit of Malcolm.”
Dorothée pushed aside a stack of papers and perched on the edge of the desk. “Don’t try to change the subject. You always say I’m a good observer. That also applies to observing you.”
He ran the pen through his fingers. “Touché.”
“Which brings us back to the question from which you’ve adroitly managed to divert me.” She rested one hand on the desktop and leaned towards him. “What did you learn about Tatiana Kirsanova’s child’s father?”
He set down the pen and rested his jeweled hands on the ink blotter. “You’re right of course that I made inquiries. Rather exhaustive inquiries. But Tatiana covered her tracks well. I had trained her, and she was a brilliant student. I spoke the truth when I told Malcolm I learned nothing conclusive.”
“ ‘The truth.’ Such an elusive word, as you’re always saying. I’m wary when you use it.”
“And yet sometimes even I mean what I say.”
Dorothée searched his face, his hooded eyes, the lines in his forehead, the curve of his full-lipped mouth, which could be at once ironic, mocking, and warm. She drew a breath of frustration. She knew he revealed parts of himself to her that he didn’t to anyone else. Yet there were still untold layers to him she couldn’t read. A source of frustration. And fascination. And fear. “This is different. This isn’t politics—”
He gave a brief laugh. “
Ma chère
. Everything Tatiana did had to do with politics, one way or another.”
“But we’re talking about a child who made no such choices. A child no different from my own boys. Or little Anne.” For a moment the face of her little daughter who had died a year ago hung before her eyes.
Talleyrand touched her hand. His fingers were gentle, but when he spoke his voice was unyielding. “I’m not entirely insensible of that. But in this world children are victims of their parents’ intrigues.”
“And yet you’ve gone to great lengths to save Flahaut.”
Talleyrand’s gaze darkened. The Comte de Flahaut, his illegitimate son, had fought for Napoleon at Waterloo and then found himself on the proscribed list. Dorothée had seen the concern in Talleyrand’s eyes over him and a few moments of naked fear such as she had never before glimpsed on her uncle-by-marriage’s face. “I take my responsibilities seriously.”
Dorothée put her other hand on the desk. “So do I. This is my responsibility.”
“The child of—”
“A woman my family should have protected and didn’t. And by lying you’re preventing me from meeting my responsibility.”
“You can’t be sure I’m lying.”
“I know you’re withholding something.”
“My dear child. First you credit me with finer feelings than I would ever admit to. Then you accuse me of not having a care for Tatiana and her child.”
Dorothée straightened up. “I believe you couldn’t help but care for Tatiana and for any child of hers.”
“And?” Talleyrand asked, gaze trained on her face.
She got to her feet, the full horror of what she’d unloosed from the box washing over her. “And I don’t think that would stop you for a moment from sacrificing them to your ends. If you thought it was important enough. I don’t think you hold anyone inviolable. Even me.”
CHAPTER 12
“Thank you for coming with me,” Suzanne said to Simon as their fiacre clattered through the cramped, twisting maze of the Left Bank. Colin bounced on her lap, face pressed to the grimy window.
Simon grinned. “I’m always pleased when you and Malcolm let civilians assist you.” He leaned back in his corner of the cracked leather seat and studied her across the fiacre. “How are you?”
Suzanne steadied Colin as he squirmed on her lap. “You mean besides investigating another mysterious death?”
“I haven’t asked you in a while. You look a bit less haggard than you did in Brussels.”
“Aren’t we all?” Her mind went back to their house in the Rue Ducale in Brussels, the black-and-white marble floor tiles lined with pallets on which wounded soldiers lay, the smells of laudanum and beef tea and sickness in the air and Waterloo had touched all of them, but in addition the investigation into Julia Ashton’s murder had been a strain, not just on Suzanne and Malcolm and Cordelia and Harry, but on Simon and David as well. The secrets uncovered had scarred all of them.
“Quite,” Simon said. “But I don’t think you’re finding Paris entirely easy, either.”
Simon understood her confoundedly well. Which meant he saw far too much. She often thought it was because like her he was an outsider in the beau monde, so the usual assumptions didn’t apply. “You have to admit the atmosphere in Paris is rather fraught.”
“And the politics not what one could call convivial.”
Simon was a Radical. He hadn’t supported war when Napoleon escaped from Elba. The politics in Paris now weren’t convivial to him or to Malcolm or to David. It didn’t mean he had any special knowledge about her and her past. She had to remember that. “Scarcely.”
Simon tilted his head back. “Just remember that I’m here to listen if ever needed.”
Colin bounced in her lap. “Dragons,” he said, his face pressed to the glass.
Three British dragoons had stopped before a bakery to flirt with a couple of Parisian girls. Colin had become good at spotting different types of soldiers in Brussels. Simon gave an ironic smile. “Even on the Left Bank.” He glanced out the window. “I grew up only a few streets over. One saw more tricolor in those days. And then Republican soldiers.”
They pulled up in a narrow winding street before a blue-shuttered house with a riot of violets spilling from the window boxes. Emile Sevigny himself opened the door to greet them, a wiry man in his early thirties with a bony face and a shock of disordered dark hair. His neckcloth was carelessly tied and a spot of blue paint showed on the shirt cuff peeping out from beneath his rumpled blue coat. “Simon, we got your note this morning. Splendid to see you.”
When Simon introduced Suzanne and Colin, Sevigny said, “Forgive the informality. Simon and I’ve known each other since we were boys. His father was my mentor.”
Emile Sevigny took them through a hall with walls hung with bright watercolors, charcoal sketches, and vivid oil portraits, and floorboards strewn with blocks and tops and a toy wagon, and out into the back garden. Louise Sevigny came towards them. She’d been fashionably dressed when Suzanne met her at the exhibition at the Louvre. Now she wore a simple muslin gown and her red-brown ringlets slipped from their pins beneath a gypsy straw hat. “Simon. It’s been too long since you’ve come to see us.” She lifted her face for his kiss and then held out her hand when he introduced Suzanne and Colin. “Of course. Madame Rannoch. Your husband is the dashing man who does all sorts of secret things for Wellington.”
“My husband would say not to listen to gross exaggerations. Colin, make a bow to Madame Sevigny. You saw some of her husband’s pictures when we went to the Louvre.”
Colin bowed and shook Madame Sevigny’s hand. Louise Sevigny called over her own children, two boys of about eight and two, and suggested they might like to show Colin their fort. The three boys at once darted across the garden to the fort, a paint-spattered tablecloth draped over two bushes. Louise and Emile Sevigny smiled. It was a good thing, Suzanne thought, that most spymasters didn’t realize how wonderful children were at creating diversions and putting suspects at their ease.
Louise Sevigny waved the adults towards a wrought-iron table set in the shade of a lilac tree. A maid emerged from the house with a tray of chilled white wine and almond cakes.
Emile cast a glance at the children as he poured the wine. “Simon and I were like that once at his parents’ house.”
“Save that Emile always dragged me off to the studio.” Simon accepted a glass of wine. “He found the sight of my father at work much more entrancing than I did.”
“It meant a lot, having someone take my youthful paint smears seriously.” Emile returned the wine bottle to its cooler. “I’ve started a new painting. The conspirators in the capitol after the assassination of Julius Caesar.”
Simon stared at him. “Good God, you madman.”
Emile gave a grin that turned him into a mischievous schoolboy. “It’s a classical subject. Something of a tribute to your father’s style.”
“My father could be a madman, too, when it came to running risks with the authorities.”
“And you’re a model of sober caution? I read the reviews of your plays, Simon. You’ve had the government censor close you down more than once.”
“There’s a big difference between risking a theatre being closed and risking—”
Emile shot a glance at Louise. She was watching him with a steady concern that reminded Suzanne of the moments she watched Malcolm go into danger. Knowing that to give way to any impulse to stop him would be to deny who he was. Not to mention who she was. Emile settled back in his chair. “People can take from the painting what they will. The assassination of a general who aspired to be an emperor could easily be a commentary on Bonaparte. A way of atoning for having painted the Bonaparte family.”
“My father would be proud of you,” Simon said.
“I hope so.”
“The truth is Emile has to do something other than society portraits or he’d go mad,” Louise said.
Simon took a sip of wine. “You both seem more at ease than the last time we met.”
Emile exchanged a look with his wife again. “We’ve just learned to laugh in the face of adversity. Forgive me, Madame Rannoch,” he added quickly. “These aren’t easy times for someone who painted the Bonaparte family.”
“I quite understand, Monsieur Sevigny. My husband deplores what’s been happening in Paris. As do I.”
Emile inclined his head. “It’s worse for others. Men like St. Gilles, who were more outspoken.”
“Including against Bonaparte.” Simon glanced at Suzanne. “Paul St. Gilles is a committed Republican.”
“So he was equally disgusted with Bonaparte and Louis?” Suzanne recalled a striking seascape by Paul St. Gilles she’d seen at the Louvre.
“He thought Bonaparte was the lesser of two evils,” Emile said. “Which is enough to render him anathema to the Ultra Royalists.”
Louise shivered. “I keep thinking about Paul and Juliette and the children. Dreadful.” She cast a glance at her own children, whose shiny black shoes and white-stockinged ankles peeped out from beneath the tablecloth fort.
“But I’m far less important than St. Gilles,” Emile said.
Louise turned her gaze to him, frowning.
Emile touched her hand. “My wife has an inflated sense of my importance.” He leaned back in his chair. “It hasn’t stopped the commissions, thankfully.”
Simon brushed crumbs of almond cake from his fingers. “I’d like to see what you’re working on. Particularly this Julius Caesar piece.”
“Of course.” Emile turned to the ladies.
“I’d best stay out here.” Suzanne glanced at the tablecloth fort from whence high-pitched chatter now emitted. “You wouldn’t think it, but ever since Waterloo Colin gets a bit nervous when I’m out of sight.”
“It will give us a chance to talk,” Louise said with an easy smile.
Emile refilled the ladies’ wineglasses before he and Simon went into the house, already deep in a conversation about capturing the quality of light.
“Simon’s a dear friend,” Louise said, looking after them.
“One of the first of my husband’s friends I felt at ease with,” Suzanne said. “I often think it’s because he knows what it is to be an outsider.”
“Yes, that’s it precisely.” Louise gave her a quick smile. “And that makes him at home anywhere.”
“It’s quite a knack.” Suzanne settled back in her chair in the sort of pose that invited confidences. “I can’t say being an outsider has quite done that for me. I certainly didn’t feel at home when Malcolm took me to Britain last year.”
“I know precisely what you mean. Marriage is supposed to make one belong, but sometimes it just makes one feel hopelessly lost and lonely.” Louise glanced round the garden. “Though it doesn’t seem to have done that for me.” She took a sip of wine. “I was married before Emile.”
“To the Comte de Carnot.”
“Yes.” Louise stared into the pale gold wine, as though looking into a troubled past. She must have been in her midtwenties, but her wide blue eyes and soft-featured face made her appear younger than her years. “A very different life. I’d say it seems like a dream now, save that it’s more like a nightmare.”
Sometimes honesty was the best way to discover information. Which was rather a relief. Suzanne took a fortifying sip of wine and set down her glass. “Madame Sevigny. I confess I’ve been hoping for a word with you.”
“With me?” Louise’s brows—which looked as though they had once been carefully plucked but now received less attention—rose, but her voice betrayed no alarm.
“My husband’s latest unofficial exploit is looking into the death of Antoine Rivère.”
“Good heavens.” Louise Sevigny adjusted the brim of her hat. “I thought he died in a tavern brawl.”
“It may have been a bit more complicated. And in looking into the Comte de Rivère’s past, Malcolm has come across the name of a friend of yours.”
Louise’s frown deepened. “A friend of mine? Who?”
“Bertrand Laclos.”
Louise Sevigny drew a breath and then sighed. “I might have known the gossip would still be in circulation.” Her voice held no denial or outrage, merely weary acceptance. Years of experience showed beneath her ingénue features. She leaned back in her chair. “What have you heard?”
“Merely that you and Monsieur Laclos were close when he was in Paris.”
“Yes. You could say that.” Louise gave a bleak smile. “I miss him.” She drew a sharp breath. “Madame Rannoch, you said Rivère’s death had led you to Bertrand’s. Do you have reason to suspect Bertrand’s death was also not what it appeared?”
“Do you?” Suzanne asked.
Louise stared at the bits of almond cake on the plate before her. “There was always something odd about it. Bertrand was a careful man. Not one to get caught in a tavern brawl. He didn’t fight—at least not for sport—and he didn’t drink to excess. I’ve often wondered—” A shadow crossed her face.
“I understand your first husband was jealous,” Suzanne said.
“Odiously so, though he didn’t seem the least bit burdened by the marriage vow himself.” Louise crumbled a piece of almond cake between her fingers. “I grew up in the country, in Normandy. Our family name is old, but our fortune negligible. I was only sixteen when my parents married me off to Carnot. He looked quite dashing in his military uniform. But the glamour was gone before dawn broke on our wedding night.”
“From what I’ve heard of Bertrand Laclos, I can see how he’d have been a refuge.”
“Yes, but not in the way you think.” Louise Sevigny cast a glance at the children. Colin and her younger son lurked behind the fort, a fringe of hair showing above the sheet, while her elder son appeared to be standing guard. “I used to worry that Jean would be like his father, but he’s far too sensitive to take after Carnot. Jules, on the other hand, is very like my Emile.” She turned her gaze back to Suzanne, open and direct. “I’ve loved Emile for a long time. I first met him when he painted my portrait, the autumn after my son was born. Emile was making a name for himself as a society portraitist and names mattered to Carnot. I went to Emile’s studio every day for a month. With my maid, of course, but during the sittings we could talk. Such a novelty to have a gentleman listen to one.”
“How very true,” Suzanne said. “My husband’s ability to listen is one of the reasons I fell in love with him.”
Louise Sevigny shot her a quick smile. “You understand then. It was so lovely. The hopes, the foolish fears that keep one awake at night, the relief when those fears dissolve, the unexpected discoveries. The brush of fingers that affects one more than a kiss. Everything one thinks a first love ought to be. Except that I was already married.”
“An uncomfortable situation.”
“Beastly.” Louise smoothed her hands over the primrose-sprigged muslin of her skirt. “Eventually the painting was done. For a time I thought that would be the end of it. I can’t tell you how desolate I felt. Then I encountered Emile at an exhibition. We talked. And the next thing I knew, I sent him a note, and we arranged to meet.” She flushed, though the wonder of it still showed in her eyes.
“I’m glad you were able to snatch some happiness,” Suzanne said. That sort of wonder had never been part of her life. She’d been long past it by the time she met Malcolm. Even by the time she met Raoul.
“It was dangerous.” Louise pushed aside the plate, her eyes darkening. “I didn’t know how to navigate Parisian society as a bride. How to dress, what to say, what not to say. Carnot found me embarrassingly naïve. Worldly gentlemen may be entranced by innocent young girls from the country in novels, but in my experience it isn’t that way at all in real life. They far prefer their women as sophisticated as they are themselves.” She jabbed a curl beneath the brim of her hat. “I knew about my husband’s mistresses. He was scarcely discreet. And I knew other ladies with lovers—well, my husband’s mistresses were all married to other men. But one night Carnot caught me flirting—just flirting, laughing over a glass of champagne—with a young officer at a party, and he dealt the young man a blow that sent him crashing into a vase of roses. That was when I learned a man can feel no desire for a woman and yet still think he owns her.”