The Paris Affair (3 page)

“What happened?” Suzanne asked. The air in the room had turned as heavy as if it held the promise of a thunderstorm.

Wellington’s gaze met Castlereagh’s again. “He knew too much,” Castlereagh said. “Names of British agents. Codes. He was too dangerous a liability.”

“So you got rid of him.”

“He died in a tavern brawl,” Castlereagh said in an even voice.

Suzanne glanced at her husband. She’d heard the guilt in his voice when he first mentioned Laclos. “Darling? You said you had something to do with it?”

“I was the one who discovered Bertrand Laclos was a double.” Malcolm’s voice was controlled, but his hand tightened on her shoulder. “I intercepted communications he’d sent to a courier. I took the information to—”

Malcolm bit back his words. Castlereagh met his gaze. “My brother.”

“Lord Stewart was my adjutant general at the time,” Wellington said.

Suzanne began to see the dangers. Lord Stewart, Castlereagh’s half-brother, was a hotheaded man given to impulsive behavior and bursts of temper. Suzanne could well imagine him leaping to the conclusion that Laclos must be got rid of.

Sir Charles Stuart, who saw Lord Stewart as a potential rival for the ambassadorship, kept his gaze fixed on his shoe buckles.

“The evidence seemed conclusive,” Malcolm said. He looked from Castlereagh to Wellington to Stuart. “Sir,” he said, in a voice taut with strain, the word addressed to all three of them. “Could we have been wrong?”

“Nonsense,” Castlereagh said. “There’s nothing to suggest—”

“Rivère said what he knew about the Laclos affair could shake the British delegation to its core.”

“That doesn’t—”

“And he implied it could bring about renewed hostilities between us and France.”

“A preposterous suggestion—”

“Laclos’s father is a crony of the Comte d’Artois,” Malcolm persisted. “If he learned the foreign secretary’s brother gave the order for the death of his son, who was in fact working for us—”

“It’s a theory, Malcolm.” Wellington advanced into the center of the room, as though laying claim to the Aubusson carpet. “But Rivère was a desperate man. Desperate men will say anything.”

“But this desperate man was murdered just after he said it.”

Wellington’s gaze flickered to Castlereagh again.

“The intelligence was good,” Castlereagh said. “We had no reason to doubt it.”

“But that doesn’t mean we haven’t wondered,” Stuart said.

Wellington grimaced. He was not a man to shirk harsh truths. “We didn’t misread the intelligence. It would have to have been faked. Which would mean Laclos was set up.”

Silence hung over the room for a moment, as the implications reverberated off the gilded moldings and damask wall hangings.

“If the French had learned Laclos was our agent—,” Malcolm said.

“Why not simply kill him themselves?” Castlereagh said. “Or feed us false information through him.”

Stuart moved away from the wall. “If it wasn’t the French it would have to have been one of our people.”

Castlereagh drew a sharp breath.

“Only stating the obvious,” Stuart said.

Wellington gave a curt nod. “One way or another we have to know. What happened to Laclos. What Rivère knew. And who killed him.” He looked from Malcolm to Suzanne. “It looks as though you needn’t fear being bored in Paris.”

 

“Malcolm,” Suzanne said to her husband when at last they were in the privacy of the robin’s egg blue walls and white moldings of the bedchamber in their lodgings in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. “Even if you were wrong about Laclos, it’s not your fault. All you did was pass along information.”

“If the information was wrong, I should have seen it.” Malcolm cut off a length of linen with a sharp snip of the scissors.

Suzanne looked up at him from her perch on the dressing table bench. She knew that set mouth and those hooded eyes. She knew the weight of guilt it meant he was trying to hold at bay. “I hate to break it to you, darling, but you aren’t superhuman.”

“I should be able to recognize faulty intelligence.” Malcolm placed a pad of lint over the wound in her arm, then secured the dressing with a strip of linen. “A man’s dead, Suzette.”

“Which is tragic. But not your fault.”

He knotted off the ends of the bandage. “You’re stubborn, sweetheart.”

“I’m practical.” She pulled her dressing gown up about her shoulders. “Tell me what else you know about Bertrand Laclos.”

Malcolm snapped closed the lid on her medical supply box, which seemed to get as much use in peacetime as it had during the Peninsular War and the Waterloo campaign. “He was a couple of years older than me. He went to Eton, so as a Harrovian I didn’t see a great deal of him until we both got to Oxford. He tended to keep himself to himself. He was serious, but he had a quick wit. He was a decent man. I liked him.” He put the medical supply box on the chest of drawers.

Suzanne drew her legs up on the rose-flowered white silk of the dressing table bench and hooked her arms round her knees. “And after he went to work for the French? And supposedly really for the British?”

“I didn’t have any contact with him in the Peninsula. He must have reported to someone in military intelligence. I’ll see what Davenport knows.” Malcolm pushed aside the silk bed-curtains and leaned against the white-painted bedpost. “Bertrand Laclos made a rather interesting friend in the French cavalry before he was sent to the Peninsula. Edmond Talleyrand.”

Suzanne frowned. “You said he had a quick wit. Edmond Talleyrand can’t talk about anything but horses and gambling. And women.”

“Yes, well, Laclos was playing a part.”

Suzanne rested her chin on her updrawn knees. “Did Edmond’s uncle have anything to do with the two of them becoming friends?”

Edmond’s uncle, Prince Talleyrand, who had survived Napoleon’s downfall to now head the government under the restored Louis XVIII, was a master manipulator. He was also an old friend of Malcolm’s family. “You mean did Talleyrand put Edmond up to it because he guessed Bertrand Laclos was a British agent? Or because he knew Laclos was in fact working for the French?” Malcolm shook his head. “I wouldn’t put it past him. But I’ve no proof.”

“I’ll talk to Doro. Though she’s not exactly on terms of intimacy with Edmond even if she is his wife.” Dorothée de Talleyrand-Périgord had served as hostess for her husband’s uncle, Prince Talleyrand, at the Congress of Vienna. When she returned to Paris, she had taken up residence with Talleyrand, rather than with Edmond himself.

Malcolm nodded. “I’ll talk to Talleyrand, though as usual I have precious little hope of getting much out of him. But I also need to ask him about—”

“Tatiana.”

Malcolm’s mouth tightened. “Yes.”

Malcolm rarely mentioned Tatiana, but Suzanne knew he carried the guilt of his sister’s death like a talisman. Sometimes she would catch him staring off into the distance and know he was replaying some moment of his time with Tatiana, especially those last weeks, wondering what might have been different. “In Vienna Tatiana supposedly said becoming pregnant was one mistake she’d never made.”

“So she did. But then Tania wasn’t above lying. Especially about something like that. Quite the reverse in fact.”

“And even a clever woman can make a mistake,” Suzanne said. Her chest tightened as she framed the word, but Malcolm, so quick to see so much, didn’t seem to notice anything amiss.

“As I’ve said before, I’d like to think she’d have told me if she’d had a child,” Malcolm said. “But I can imagine any number of reasons she’d have kept it secret.”

“Including to protect you. If the father was someone powerful enough.”

Malcolm shot her a surprised look.

“I understand Tatiana rather better now than I did at the start of things in Vienna,” Suzanne said. “She had her own sort of honor. And she cared about you. A great deal more, perhaps, than even you realized.”

Malcolm swallowed. “Sometimes I argue with myself until it seems blindingly obvious that there was a right course of action I could have taken. That would have ensured she was here now. Much good it does. Except to cause sleepless nights and endless questions.”

Suzanne stared at him, startled not by what he had admitted but by the fact that he had admitted it at all. A year, even six months, ago, he would not have spoken so to her, nor would have he let her see his face as raw and cut with torment as it was now. She too knew what it was to carry guilt, too keenly to try to argue his away. She got to her feet, went to his side, and took his face between her hands. “All we can do is do the best we can within the moment, dearest. You do that better than anyone I know.”

He gave a bleak smile. “ ‘Render me worthy of this noble wife.’ ”

She returned the smile, her own deliberately playful. “You promised not to turn into Brutus.”

“Brutus appreciated his wife’s strength. I can at least do that. While not making the mistake of not confiding in her.”

She slid her hands behind his neck and kissed him, the tang of guilt on her lips. Because when it came to confiding in one’s spouse, she had her own sins on her conscience.

CHAPTER 3

“How should I have the least idea what Edmond may or may not know?” Dorothée de Talleyrand-Périgord flung herself down on the rose and gold silk chaise-longue in a stir of blue-sprigged muslin. “I’m the last person in Paris he’d confide in. You should have seen the way he was looking at Karl and me at the opera the night before last.”

“I did see. It argues something other than lack of interest.” Suzanne took a sip from the gilt-rimmed coffee cup Dorothée had given her.

Dorothée grabbed a cushion from the chaise-longue and plucked at the fringe. “Edmond isn’t any more interested in me than he ever was. His pride is piqued. Stupid honor.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more there.”

Dorothée flung the pillow aside. “I’m sorry, Suzanne, I’m not usually so pettish. It’s being back in Paris. Having Edmond here even if I see next to nothing of him. Facing down the gossip. Worrying about Karl.”

“And then there’s the strain Monsieur Talleyrand is under,” Suzanne said.

“That too.” Dorothée reached for her own cup of coffee and took a careful sip. In Vienna, she had fallen in love with the handsome Austrian Count Karl Clam-Martinitz, who was still her lover. But her relationship with her husband’s uncle, Prince Talleyrand, had also deepened in ways she would not admit even to a close friend like Suzanne. Perhaps not even to herself. “Who is this man who was a friend of Edmond’s?”

“Bertrand Laclos. He came to France in 1807 and died in the Peninsula in 1811.”

Dorothée frowned a moment, then shook her head, her glossy brown ringlets stirring about her fine-boned face. “I didn’t marry Edmond until 1809. Paris bewildered me, and I tended to want to sink into the shadows. His friends were all a blur.”

“What are you looking so serious about?” Dorothée’s eldest sister, Wilhelmine, Duchess of Sagan, swept into the room with a rustle of Pomona green sarcenet and a waft of custom-blended scent. She dropped down in a chair and began to strip off her gloves. “Do pour me out a cup of coffee. I drank too much champagne at the Russian embassy last night.”

“Do you remember a Bertrand Laclos?” Dorothée asked, reaching for the silver coffeepot. “A friend of Edmond’s.”

“I make it a point to avoid Edmond’s friends.” Wilhelmine accepted a cup from her sister and took a grateful sip of coffee. She lowered the cup and looked at Suzanne over the gilt rim. “Is this to do with the Comte de Rivère being killed last night?”

“That’s quick even for you,” Suzanne said. “How did you guess?”

Wilhelmine tugged at the ribbons on her cottage bonnet and lifted the straw and satin from her burnished gold curls. “Someone dies under mysterious circumstances, and you and Malcolm start asking questions. I’ve learned to put two and two together.”

Dorothée regarded her sister. “Besides, I suspect Lord Stewart told you.”

“Possibly.” Wilhelmine took another sip of coffee, then shrugged her shoulders, fluttering her gauze scarf. “Oh, very well. I was there when he got the message from Castlereagh this morning.”

“I don’t know what you see in him, Willie.” Dorothée made a moue of distaste. “When I remember how he pinched me at the Metternichs’ masquerade—”

“I admit Stewart isn’t always subtle—”

“That’s an understatement if I ever heard one. I think Talleyrand would have struck him at the masquerade if I hadn’t intervened.”

Wilhelmine took another sip of coffee. “Yes, well, we know how protective Talleyrand is when it comes to you.”

Dorothée flushed. “Don’t make this about me, Willie. I liked Alfred—”

“Alfred, if you’ll recall, left me.” Wilhelmine rubbed at the lip rouge smeared on her cup.

Dorothée bit her lip. “I’m sorry, Willie—”

“Don’t be. Every love affair has to end with someone leaving.” Wilhelmine’s mouth curved with customary cynicism. Yet in Vienna last autumn, Suzanne had seen how deep Wilhelmine’s feelings for Alfred von Windischgrätz ran.

“Then there was Fred Lamb,” Dorothée said. “I liked him as well.”

Wilhelmine leaned forwards to pour more coffee into her cup. “Agreeable. But not serious.”

“And now Alfred’s in Paris and seems very—”

Wilhelmine clunked the coffeepot down on the silver tray. “Are you saying you think I should come running the moment he crooks his finger?”

“No, course not. But if you love him—”

“I don’t believe in love. Or at least I don’t trust it.” Wilhelmine tugged out her handkerchief and wiped at the coffee that had spattered on the tray and the porcelain tiles of the table. “Whatever Alfred may think he feels, within a few years he’ll be married to a nice, respectable girl. It was never going to last—”

“And you think—” Dorothée stared at her sister. “Willie, are you considering
marrying
Stewart?”

Wilhelmine lifted her cup, full to the brim, and took a careful sip. “You say that as if marriage was some new form of sin.”

“You’ve sworn you’re never going to marry again.”

Wilhelmine, twice divorced, gave her sister a careless smile. “You’ve known me all your life, Doro. Surely you realize I’m changeable.”

Dorothée shook her head. “I can’t believe you love him.”

“My dear child. You’re almost two-and-twenty. You can’t still think love has anything to do with marriage.”

“It does for some people.” Dorothée flicked a glance at Suzanne.

“There are always exceptions.” Wilhelmine’s face relaxed into a smile. Then she studied Suzanne. “Though I don’t know that even Suzanne would claim her marriage began with love.”

“It began with necessity,” Suzanne said. Which was the truth. Though, as with so much else to do with her marriage, a twisted truth.

Wilhelmine’s gaze held perhaps more understanding than Suzanne would have liked. “There are all sorts of reasons one marries. Necessity. Security. Position.”

Dorothée stared at her sister, as though she were a puzzle with unexpected angles. “And you think Stewart will give you—”

“His brother is the foreign secretary of England. It might be amusing.”

“It sounds beastly.” Dorothée reached for her lace shawl and pulled it tight round her shoulders. “Take it from me, there’s nothing worse than being tied to a man one can’t respect.”

“But then I’m not a romantic, Doro. That makes it easier.” Wilhelmine turned her gaze back to Suzanne. “I don’t know anything about this Bertrand Laclos, but if you want to learn about Rivère, you should talk to Lady Caruthers.”

Suzanne was used to making quick leaps of thought, but this was too much even for her. Gabrielle Caruthers was a French émigrée now married to a British officer. “Why?” she asked. “What does she have to do with Rivère?”

Wilhelmine settled back in her chair. “She was his mistress.”

“Gabrielle Caruthers?” Dorothée said. “That’s a bit of gossip I hadn’t heard.” Her eyes narrowed. “I suppose Stewart told you.”

“No, Annina did. Maids always hear gossip first.”

“Lady Caruthers seems so demure.”

“They’re often the most scandalous ones.”

Dorothée shot her a sisterly look. “You’ve never been the least bit demure, Willie.”

“There are always exceptions.” Wilhelmine settled back against the cushions, cradling her coffee cup in one hand. “It’s odd you were just asking about Bertrand Laclos. Gabrielle Caruthers is his cousin.”

“I hadn’t realized,” Suzanne said. She still found the family trees of Malcolm’s friends difficult to sort out. That Bertrand Laclos’s cousin had been Antoine Rivère’s mistress strained coincidence.

“She went to England with her uncle and aunt as a child during the Terror,” Wilhelmine said. “I think her parents were both killed.”

Dorothée shivered. “The Laclos family have been through a great deal.”

“Like many French families. And like many émigrés, I imagine they’re now hoping to have their estates restored.” Wilhelmine took a sip of coffee. “I expect you want to talk to Lady Caruthers. I understand she’s in the habit of taking coffee in the late morning in the Café Luxembourg. Quite like a Frenchwoman. Which of course she is. Though she hasn’t lived here for years.”

“Much like me,” Suzanne said. Which was a truth, caught in the myriad lies she told about her past, even to her closest friends.

“Is that why you’re looking into Rivère’s death?” Dorothée asked. “Because you suspect Lord Caruthers was involved?”

Suzanne took a sip of coffee. “Until two minutes ago I hadn’t the least idea Lady Caruthers was involved with Rivère.”

“According to Annina, Rivère and Lady Caruthers had become quite reckless,” Wilhelmine said. “Though Lord Caruthers doesn’t particularly seem the jealous sort. He strikes me as decidedly—” Wilhelmine’s delicate brows drew together as she searched for the right word.

“Temperate?” Suzanne suggested. She pictured Lord Caruthers, well-cut features, an agreeable smile. The sort of man to get a lady lemonade at a military review or return to the carriage for her parasol. And it was all done with sincerity rather than an attempt at flirtation.

“Yes, that’s it precisely.” Wilhelmine nodded. “Too well-bred to fight a duel.”

“That’s all very well,” Dorothée said, “but betrayal can take people the oddest ways.”

Suzanne reached for her coffee, a dozen thoughts tumbling through her brain, not all to do with Antoine de Rivère and the Carutherses. Her fingers closed hard round the delicate porcelain handle. “So it can.”

 

“Malcolm.” Colonel Harry Davenport looked up from his paperwork with a grin. The grin held the familiar ironic mockery but considerably less cynicism than it had before the battle of Waterloo. Two months could change a lot. Two months and reconciling with an estranged wife against all the odds.

Malcolm pushed aside a stack of papers and perched on the edge of the desk where Davenport was working in the attachés’ sitting room at Wellington’s Headquarters. “Do you remember the Bertrand Laclos affair?”

Davenport grimaced. “Difficult to forget. It was a bad business.”

“I was the one who uncovered the information that led to his being exposed.” A dozen uncomfortable questions circled through Malcolm’s brain. “I knew him a bit in England as a boy. But I didn’t work with him in the Peninsula.”

“Nor did I.” Davenport leaned back in his chair, flexing his bad arm, a legacy of the Peninsular War. “I didn’t even know about him except by his code name until after he was exposed. He had very special handling. He only reported to Caruthers.”

“Rupert Caruthers?” Malcolm asked in surprise.

“You know him?”

“Off and on growing up. He’s a couple of years my senior, and he went to Eton. I know his father better.” Earl Dewhurst, Rupert Caruthers’s father, was a senior British diplomat who had been sent to the Peninsula on several special missions and was currently attached to the British delegation in Paris.

“I remember when Dewhurst came out to Lisbon,” Davenport said. “Caruthers retreated, metaphorically, and literally when he could. Not an easy father to live up to, I imagine. I often thought Caruthers went into the army to differentiate himself from his parent.”

Malcolm grinned at the image of Lord Dewhurst’s imperious face. Just a lift of his eyebrows could dampen all pretensions. “I didn’t realize Caruthers was so involved in intelligence.”

“I think the Laclos affair gave him a distaste for it. He asked to be transferred to Clinton’s staff not long after.”

Malcolm stared down at a bronze paperweight atop what looked like a pile of coded documents. “I remember when I gave Stewart the information about Bertrand Laclos. I’ve never heard such invective.” He drew a breath. “I tried to convince Stewart not to act precipitously. But it seemed conclusive.”

“ ‘Seemed’?” Davenport scanned his face. “You’re questioning what you learned? Does this have to do with Antoine Rivère?”

“My God.” Malcolm lifted his gaze to his friend. “I forget how quick you are. How did you guess?”

“I can still do simple arithmetic.” Davenport twisted the handle of the coffee cup beside the papers on his desk. “Were you there last night when he was killed?”

“With Suzanne.”

“I might have known it.” Davenport regarded him for a moment. “What’s the connection to Bertrand Laclos?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Malcolm told Harry what they’d learned, omitting Rivère’s claims about Tatiana’s child. He trusted Harry Davenport implicitly after their time at Waterloo, but Tania’s secrets at once were too dangerous and too intimate to share.

Davenport frowned. “Difficult to sort truth out from bluff in Rivère’s claims.”

“There was enough truth that he thought his threats would work.”

“Have you searched his rooms?”

“Not yet.”

Davenport picked up a jade-handled penknife. “There’s nothing like being confined to a desk with a wound to give one a longing for adventure.”

“You only had to ask,” Malcolm said. “I’d love the company.”