The Paris Plot (2 page)

“S
it down, Malcolm.” Sir Charles Stuart leaned back in his chair in his study in what had once been the villa of Napoleon’s sister, Pauline Borghese, and was now the British embassy. “Pacing about won’t resolve this.”

Malcolm spun round and strode to the British ambassador’s desk. “Suzanne is going to have a baby any day now.”

“I’m well aware of that. She looked charming last night at Talleyrand’s ball, by the way. It really is true what they say about the glow of impending maternity. I’ve noticed it with Elizabeth as well.” He shook his head, a bemused look on his face. Stuart, an inveterate flirt, had married Lady Elizabeth Yorke the previous February, and she was expecting their first child in the spring. Even the cheerful, easygoing Stuart seemed not to be immune to the wonder and terrors of incipient fatherhood. The ambassador leaned forwards, hands flat on the desktop, gaze uncharacteristically grave. “I do understand what you’re going through, Malcolm. More now than ever.”

“A few inches over and that rock would have struck Suzette in the head.”

“I’m not insensible of that. But stalking about my office and muttering imprecations on your past won’t protect her.”

Malcolm dropped into a straight-backed chair before the ambassador’s desk. “You sound like my wife.”

Stuart’s mouth curved in a smile. “Suzanne is a sensible woman.”

Malcolm scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’m sorry. My family are at risk thanks to my past behavior. I’m finding it difficult to think clearly. Which isn’t improving the situation.”

Stuart picked up a jade-handled penknife and tossed it from hand to hand. “Just what is this terrible thing you think you’ve done?”

Malcolm gave a mental jerk against the memories clustering behind his eyes. “I’m an Intelligence Agent. You’ve seen enough to know what that means.”

“You’re the most ethical man I know, Rannoch. What—”

“If I knew, I could find whoever it is and protect Suzanne and Colin and the baby.”

“You have better investigative skills than anyone in Paris, Malcolm. I have no doubt you’ll get to the bottom of this.”

“No warnings about what this could mean for the delicate state of British and French relations?”

Stuart tossed down the penknife and stared at the litter of papers on his desktop. “British and French relations are perpetually in a delicate state. It’s not always easy to be a victor.”

“Especially given a settlement that treats France more as an enemy to be controlled than an ally?”

“You didn’t hear it from me. But—” Stuart returned an errant paper to one of the stacks. “One way or another, we’re going to be dealing with the consequences of the war for a long time.”

That was undeniable. And Malcolm very much feared last night’s attack was one of those consequences.

 

 

Blanca Mendoza stared at Suzanne across the yellow chintz length of the sofa in the salon that had become the day nursery in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. “You can’t know that.”

Suzanne smiled at her friend who had been her lady’s maid and companion since her marriage. “When it comes to crimes, there’s really no contest between Malcolm and me,” she said, voice pitched low. Colin was playing with his lead knights and wooden castle on the hearth rug.

Blanca jabbed an ebony ringlet behind her ear. “Mr. Rannoch has been a spy for more than a decade. One can’t do that without committing all sorts of acts that might be called crimes.”

“Mr. Rannoch didn’t marry a fellow agent under false pretenses to spy on the opposite side.” Suzanne thought back to the night in Lisbon four years ago when Malcolm Rannoch, the man she had met under a false identity while she was on a mission for the Bonapartist French, had stunned her by asking her to marry him. So much had changed since then. She had fallen in love with Malcolm. She had stopped spying for the French. But she was still not the woman her husband believed her to be. She had still married him under false pretenses. She had still given his secrets to his enemy.

“And you can’t forgive yourself.” Blanca fixed Suzanne with a hard stare.

Suzanne looked at Colin, who seemed to be negotiating a parley between one of the knights from the castle and another group encamped outside its gates. His father’s son. She put a hand on her stomach and the warm promise within. “I’ve been married to Malcolm for four years. Much of the time I’m far happier than I deserve to be.”

“You see,” Blanca said, and practically bounced on the sofa cushions. “It’s the baby. You don’t think as ruthlessly as you used to.”

“Thank you, Blanca.” Suzanne smoothed the corded silk of her morning gown as the baby kicked. “That’s just the sort of talk to make me forgive myself.”

Blanca drummed her fingers on the fluted sofa back. “I’ve been afraid of this. Afraid you’ll do something foolish.”

“I have no intention of doing anything foolish,” Suzanne said, her gaze on Colin, encased in the warm glow of firelight. “But I’m afraid this warning means I have an unseen enemy who knows the truth.”

“Who?” Blanca’s eyes narrowed. She was always good at focusing on a task. “Who could it be?”

Suzanne folded her arms above the warmth of the baby and gripped her elbows. “Fouché knows.” The mere mention of the former minister of police was enough to send a chill through her.

An echoing fear shot through Blanca’s eyes, but she said, “Fouché isn’t in power anymore. He’s all the way in Saxony, and if he did want to move against you he’d take stronger action than throwing rocks. Besides, Prince Talleyrand has him in check.”

“I’m not sure Fouché can ever safely be held in check. But you’re right that the rock and note seem a bit crude and overdramatic for him.”

“You see?”

Suzanne shifted her position against the cushions in an attempt to ease the pull on her back. “Which doesn’t mean there aren’t myriad other possibilities.”

“Myriad people don’t know you were a French agent. You’re better than that.”

Suzanne pulled a face at Blanca, which perhaps had been Blanca’s intention. “Don’t be clever.”

“It’s a statement of fact. You’re the one who’s exaggerating.”

Suzanne gripped the sofa arm and clambered to her feet. “You’re right. I shouldn’t be self-indulgent. But objectively there is a risk.” She glanced at Colin. He had the parley knight and one of the rebel knights going inside the castle walls together. “Instead of wallowing in guilt, I need to figure out what to do about it.”

 

 

Malcolm took a turn about Prince Talleyrand’s dressing room in the Rue Saint-Florentin. “The note said I’d pay for my crimes.”

“And you immediately thought of me.” Talleyrand took a sip of chamomile tea and returned the gilt-rimmed cup to its saucer. It was not unusual for him to receive visitors while engaged in his morning toilet, though when Malcolm burst into the room the prince had made the rarer concession of dismissing his trio of valets.

Malcolm stared at the prince across the Aubusson carpet. “Between us Tania and I destroyed a village. Suzanne’s village.” The images hung in his memory. A cold decision to misdirect French troops about a shipment of British gold. Which had led to the enraged French commander taking out his anger on the village and the local landowners who had been Suzanne’s parents. Malcolm hadn’t realized it until he met Suzanne in the Cantabrian Mountains, but he had been responsible for the deaths of her parents. He and his late half-sister and fellow agent, Tatiana Kirsanova.

Talleyrand, who had been Tatiana’s spymaster, accepted this without a blink. “The main person who would have cause to seek vengeance on you for that is Suzanne. And she’s forgiven you. Even if that was pretense, she would hardly have had a rock thrown at herself.”

“Quite. So that’s one mission we can rule out.”

Talleyrand lifted his feet from the basin of
eau de Barèges
in which they had been soaking and rested them on the pristine towel one of his valets had spread on the floor. “Lord Dewhurst was hardly in charity with you after the business a year and a half ago.”

Malcolm frowned. “Dewhurst did threaten my family. But that was when he was trying to get me to stop the investigation.”

Talleyrand wriggled his toes on the white towel. “A petty man, Dewhurst. And not subtle. He might just be stupid enough to indulge in melodramatic revenge. And he has wit enough to know that threatening your pregnant wife is the surest way to get to you.”

“Especially when he blames me for the ruin of his relationship with his own son.”

“Precisely.”

“He’s in England, but he has a network of contacts in France.”

Talleyrand tugged at the lace ribbons that held his cambric nightcap in place. “Difficult to tell allies from enemies these days. One has a way of melting into the other. I imagine a number of my former colleagues in the French government now consider me an enemy.”

“But could become allies again.”

“Perhaps.” Talleyrand dropped the nightcap on the floor, where no doubt one of the valets would retrieve it. “When I threatened to resign last year, I never thought the king would call my bluff, you know.”

“So I suspected.”

“Still, there are compensations. Like not being blamed for a peace in which France seems to be treated as a perpetual threat to be hemmed in.”

“Perhaps if you’d still been in power the final terms of the peace would have been different.”

“Perhaps. One can’t go back and undo a move. And loath as I am to admit it, there’s a limit to what even I can accomplish single-handed.”

Malcolm recalled certain conversations with the Duke of Wellington and Lord Castlereagh during the peace negotiations. “It’s not easy, arguing positions one doesn’t agree with.”

“Particularly for a man with views as strong as yours.” Talleyrand reached for his tea and took another sip. “I know you’re thinking about leaving. I know you’re kicking yourself for not having done so already. But even if you had, you’ll never really get out, you know.”

“All too well.”

Talleyrand studied him for a moment. “I’m not privileged to have children—”

Malcolm shot a look at him.

“That I can acknowledge,” Talleyrand said. He had gone to considerable pains after Waterloo, Malcolm knew, to protect his illegitimate son, the Comte de Flahaut, who had been Napoleon’s aide-de-camp. And Flahaut was most likely not the only child Talleyrand had sired. “But I can imagine there is no greater fear. Your Francis Bacon was apt when he talked about ‘hostages to fortune.’ ”

Malcolm had known Talleyrand since he was a boy. The prince never failed to surprise him. And Malcolm never failed to wonder at what lay behind Talleyrand’s seemingly simplest pronouncement. “I thought your attention was occupied by games played on a larger board, sir.”

“And yet I sometimes think all my failures of the past year are nothing beside the fact that Flahaut is safe. And for all I may miss playing a larger role, my life now has certain compensations I never thought to find.”

Malcolm met the prince’s gaze. “I saw Dorothée on my way in. She was just back from a ride.”

“She enjoys her morning rides.” The smile that accompanied the words was as close as Talleyrand came to an admission about his feelings for his nephew’s wife, save for one rare occasion a year and a half ago when Dorothée had been injured and the prince had spoken to Malcolm with unwonted freedom. Talleyrand hesitated, then took a sip of tea. “Let’s just say that I’m surprised how content I am. One’s priorities can shift, even at my age.” He watched Malcolm a moment longer from beneath heavy-lidded eyes. “What are you really afraid of?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Harm coming to my wife and children.”

“Beyond that. What are you afraid is really behind this? What are you afraid of having to admit to Suzanne?”

Damn the man. He sees far too much.
“I don’t have secrets from Suzanne.”

Talleyrand set down his teacup. “My dear boy. Everyone has secrets.”

T
he Jardin du Luxembourg was deserted on a December morning, the orange trees bare, the water of the fountain dusted with fallen leaves. Raoul O’Roarke’s gray eyes darkened like the sky overhead as Suzanne recounted the events of the night before. She could feel the tension that ran through him, like the gathering force of damp in the air that told of a coming storm. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice taut with control. “This is the last thing you should have to face now of all times.”

She shrugged, gaze fixed on a leaf drifting down from a bare branch. “I rather let myself in for it when I became a spy and married Malcolm.”

“You don’t know that the message was meant for you.”

“That’s what Blanca tried to say. But it’s much more likely it was meant for me than for Malcolm.”

“And you can’t stop berating yourself. You and Malcolm have that in common.”

The tightening of the muscles in Raoul’s right arm told her he had checked the impulse to touch her. He had left off being her lover when she married Malcolm. He had gone on being her spymaster until after the battle of Waterloo, but even before that he’d been careful to avoid echoes of their old relationship once she was Malcolm’s wife. Raoul had seemed to grasp the seriousness of the marriage even before she did. He was a hardened veteran of the intelligence game, but sometimes his delicacy was surprising.

Suzanne drew the chestnut wool of her cloak about her to steady her fingers. “I’m trying to think rationally and logically. It would have to be someone who knows both what I’ve done and where I am now. Someone who didn’t take action until now. So it makes more sense for it to be something recent. The last thing of note I was involved in was Manon Caret’s escape.”

Raoul’s eyes narrowed. Manon Caret was an actress and former Bonapartist agent whom they had helped escape Paris one step ahead of Fouché’s agents in the wake of Waterloo. Raoul hadn’t wanted Suzanne involved, but she had insisted. Manon was a good friend, and Suzanne owed the other woman her life. “No one should be able to connect Suzanne Rannoch to Manon’s escape,” Raoul said.

“But Manon’s lover saw me that night. In Manon’s house.” Suzanne had gone into the house disguised as Manon to draw off pursuit while Raoul and Manon made for the coast. “He broke into the house and planted himself outside her door. He was most importunate. I had to disguise myself as a new housemaid to get past him.”

Raoul’s brows drew together. “Thank God for the aristocratic tendency not to look closely at servants.”

“So I thought. But if he saw me again, out of disguise, he might have made the connection.”

Raoul’s gaze darted over her face. “Did he see you?”

“Not that I know of. But he could have glimpsed me walking or driving or at a score of entertainments.” A gust of wind cut through the garden, heavy with damp. The silk lining of her cloak felt cold against her skin. “He seemed the sort of man who moves in court and diplomatic circles.”

“Helping Manon escape would hardly be a crime to a man who loved her.”

Suzanne heard again the man’s pleas echoing through the closed door of Manon’s bedchamber. “He was distraught. I can still hear the sound of his voice. If he thought I took her away from him—”

“Do you know his name?”

Suzanne shook her head. “Manon hasn’t mentioned him in her letters, but then she seems determined to forge a new life in England, and we have to be careful about what we commit to paper.” Thanks to Suzanne and Malcolm’s playwright friend Simon Tanner, Manon had joined the company at the Tavistock Theatre in London.

“I’ll make inquiries,” Raoul said. “Can you think of anyone else?”

She drew a breath. “Hortense—”

Five years ago Suzanne had helped the Empress Josephine’s daughter, Hortense, when she went on a secret journey to give birth to the child of her lover, the Comte de Flahaut, and then hid the boy away.

“Anyone who knew about that would use the information against Hortense, not you,” Raoul said.

“No, you’re right, I’m not thinking clearly.” She touched her hand to her stomach, pushing back the folds of her cloak. “Hortense has been on my mind. I don’t think I had the least understanding at the time of what it cost her to give up her child.” She saw the anguish in Hortense’s eyes when the carriage rolled away from the inn with her son in the care of Flahaut’s mother. And the emptiness in Hortense’s gaze afterwards, as though something had been ripped from her.

Raoul watched Suzanne in silence for a moment. She felt something shift in the air between them. “Other than this disturbance your health is good?” he asked in a neutral voice.

She nodded. “Doro tells me it’s indecent how well I feel during pregnancy. Just like with Colin.” The words were out before she could consider their wisdom. Because while Malcolm was Colin’s father in every way that mattered, Raoul was Colin’s biological parent, and in general they were both scrupulously careful in speaking of him.

“I’m glad.” Raoul touched his fingers to her arm, once, lightly. “I know you’ll fly up in the boughs if I tell you to be careful. But I also know you’re too sensible to run unnecessary risks. And that you’ll have a care for the safety of your children. Both of them.”

A smile curved her mouth despite the tightness in her throat. “Damn you. You always know just what to say.”

His fingers tightened round her arm for a moment. “Hardly. But I try.”

 

 

Harry Davenport fixed Malcolm with a hard stare. “It’s not your fault. You do know that, don’t you?”

Malcolm turned up the collar of his greatcoat. “Yes. No. We all make choices. There’s no denying that choices I’ve made have put my family at risk.”

“You made the choice to become an Intelligence Agent long before you met Suzanne.”

“And I knew it was dangerous for a spy to marry.” Malcolm stared at the leafless trees that lined the path. They were walking in the Bois de Boulogne. He had felt the need for exercise and sometimes it seemed outdoors was the safest place to talk. “That’s why I never thought to do so.”

“Really?” Harry’s keen gaze cut through the cold damp of the air. “I thought it was because you were chary of emotional entanglements.”

Malcolm grinned despite himself. “You really are a bastard, Davenport.”

“Takes one to know one.” Harry kicked aside a fallen branch. “No one seeing you with Suzanne could possibly think she’s anything but happy to be your wife.”

Malcolm stared at the damp, leaf-strewn ground ahead. “I could have left once I married her.”

Harry snorted. “I think sometimes about resigning from military intelligence, going back to England, being a scholar again. It’s an appealing life. But I know even if I did so I couldn’t really leave the intelligence game. We none of us can.”

“I could have at least tried to distance myself.”

“We were in the midst of a war. Your sense of honor or conscience or whatever you choose to call it wouldn’t have let you walk away. And that same sense of honor bombards you with guilt for the things you’ve done.” Harry’s voice was even and surprisingly stripped of the usual mockery.

“You see too damn much, Davenport.”

“Legacy of years spent trying to avoid human entanglements. I’ve become an observer.” Harry jammed his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat and fixed his gaze on the muddy ground ahead, churned up by horse hooves. “You need to forgive yourself, Rannoch. For the things you’ve done. And for the part of you that doesn’t want to give it up at all.”

Malcolm shot a look at him.

“Because for all the moral compromises and mind-numbing frustrations, there’s a part of you that relishes the adventure. Don’t deny it. I’ve worked with you enough to see it for a fact.”

Malcolm couldn’t deny it. He’d even felt it in the midst of his fear last night, chasing the rock thrower down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Angry, terrified, yes, but he’d also felt alive. So much preferable to the soul-destroying frustration of enforcing diplomatic policies he didn’t agree with. “With you, there’s no point in denying it.”

“Then stop beating yourself up. Suzanne loves adventure as much as you do.”

“Possibly more so.” His wife’s frustration at not being able to run after him last night had been palpable. “But this only goes to prove—”

“Nothing.” Harry’s voice was flat and hard as a hammer blow. “Save perhaps that you couldn’t walk away from it if you tried.”

Malcolm frowned. “This child Suzette and I are about to have will be born into luxury and security. And of course I want that for him or her. I want everything imaginable.”

Harry, being Harry, didn’t question the change of subject, which wasn’t really a change at all. “One always does for one’s children.”

“Quite. But I can’t ignore the fact that nine-tenths of the children in the world don’t have anything approaching what our children do. Babies die of starvation. We can’t walk down the streets in Paris or London without seeing boys and girls Colin’s age begging. Children little older lose their fingers in factories. I want everything for my children. Including a world that’s a better place.”

“Cogently put. You should be in Parliament.”

Malcolm gave a faint smile. “That’s what David says.” David Mallinson, Malcolm’s best friend from their days at Harrow, had gone into Parliament when they came down from Oxford, advocating positions that horrified his staunchly Tory father.

“He still wants you to stand for a seat?”

“In his last letter he said he’d found one.”

“Speaking for myself, I’d give a great deal to have you helping shape the world my children will grow up in. What’s stopping you?”

“The fear that I wouldn’t be able to make a difference.” Malcolm drew a breath of the crisp air. He could say things to Harry he could say to few people. “The fear of facing Britain and my family’s ghosts. The fear of living on the same island as my father.”

“Having met Alistair Rannoch, I can understand your trepidation. Though I’d say you’re more than a match for him.”

Malcolm shot a look at his friend. “You can say that, having met Alistair?”

“I’ve also met you. But I think your damned loyalty is holding you back as well.”

“My loyalty to what?”

“I know you, Rannoch. You took on a job. You may not like it, but you feel compelled to see it through. It’s the same loyalty that had you risking your life at Waterloo in a fight you didn’t agree with.”

Malcolm frowned. “Wellington and Castlereagh are hon—” He bit the words back.

“Honorable men?” Harry finished for him. “Like Brutus and Cassius? I hardly think either is driven by concern for children begging in the street or losing their fingers in factories.”

“No. They’d both like to turn the clock back to before the Revolution. The peace they helped orchestrate attempts to do that.”

“And they’d like nothing better than to get rid of reforms of Napoleon’s that you and I would both like to keep. Quite. I don’t envy you as a diplomat having to argue a case you don’t agree with across the council chamber.”

“There has to be some sort of coherence in policy. At-tachés can’t simply forge off in their own direction, I understand that.”

Harry snorted. “Speak for yourself.”

“And they’ve always been courteous about listening to my points. But the illusion that I could make any sort of difference is rapidly fading.”

Harry kicked aside a fallen branch. “In Parliament you could at least speak your own mind.”

“I’ll own that has an appeal. But you’re right about one thing. For now I have to focus on who may be behind this.”

“That should serve as distraction.”

“Quite.”

Harry shot a look at him. “Oh, Christ, is that it? The real reason for all the guilt? You’re afraid it’s because of the business after Waterloo?”

Malcolm fixed his gaze on the rough gray bark of a gnarled tree while uncomfortable memories swirled in his brain. “The thought couldn’t but cross my mind.”

“You didn’t have a choice.”

“One always has a choice. Though Talleyrand thinks it could be Dewhurst. I suppose it’s possible his reach could extend from England.”

Harry stopped walking and swung round to face Malcolm. “You hadn’t heard?”

“What?”

“Dewhurst is back in Paris.”

 

 

“How frightening.” Cordelia Davenport surveyed Suzanne with wide blue eyes. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Thanks to Valentin I didn’t even fall. But Malcolm is making a ridiculous fuss of course.”

“I expect he blames himself. It’s what Harry would do.”

“And we don’t even know the rock thrower meant his message for Malcolm.”

Cordelia looked at Suzanne for a moment, as though on the verge of asking a question that would step across a line in their friendship. Being the sensible woman she was, she drew back from the verge. “It’s an obvious assumption, given his past.”

“Of course he wants to investigate. I’ve agreed to restrict myself to the intellectual side of the investigation. Reluctantly. Malcolm was already nervous about me giving birth. This was enough to set him over the edge.” Suzanne touched her fingers to her stomach and glanced at the cradle where Cordelia’s three-month-old daughter slept. “Hard to believe the baby will be here in a few days.”

Cordelia twitched her daughter’s blanket smooth. “I swear I feel I’ve forgot everything from when Livia was a baby. Save that I do realize they aren’t as breakable as I feared the first time round.”

Suzanne watched the even rise and fall of little Drusilla’s chest. Across the floor, Livia Davenport was building a block tower with Colin. “I suspect it will be much the same for me. Colin’s babyhood is a blur of the war, Malcolm going off on missions at the drop of a hat, and then traveling with the army.”

Cordelia reached for her teacup. “I don’t know how you did it.”