Stuart leaned against the closed door panels, while Malcolm and Davenport watched from the sidelines.
Billy straightened his thin shoulders, reverting to the young aide-de-camp before his admired superior. “What is it, sir?”
“I didn’t realize Your Royal Highness had an engagement that would take you away from the ball this evening.”
Malcolm saw the color flare in Billy’s cheeks—he’d never been good at lying. “An engage—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Wellington reached inside his coat and held out the note Malcolm had found in Lady Julia’s reticule.
The prince’s face turned as white as his starched shirt points. “Oh, Lord. It isn’t—”
“It’s no concern of mine whom you choose to take to bed,” Wellington said. “Though I must say, it isn’t good for morale if it gets about that you’re bedding the wife of one of my officers.”
“I never meant—”
“For it to become public knowledge. So I should hope. Had you met Lady Julia at the Château de Vere before?”
The prince dug the polished toe of his shoe into the Brussels weave of the carpet. “Edouard de Vere is a friend of mine. I knew the château was empty. It seemed discreet—”
“And tonight?”
“I never left the ball. Julia sent me a note saying we’d best not meet after all.”
“When did you receive it?”
“Just after I arrived here. One of the footmen gave it me.”
“Do you still have it?”
Billy reached inside his shirt cuff. Malcolm flicked a glance at Davenport and knew they were thinking the same thing. An intelligence agent would have burned it at once.
The prince held a scrap of paper out to Wellington, who regarded it with a closed face, then handed it to Malcolm and Davenport. A torn piece of notepaper to which a faint odor of jasmine clung.
H.R.H. the Prince of Orange
was written on one side in a flowing hand with loops and flourishes. Malcolm turned the paper over. On the other side, in the same hand, the words:
Not tonight. I’ll explain later.
J.
“Interesting,” Wellington said. “Because the thing is, Lady Julia did go to the rendezvous.”
“Why the devil would she do that?”
“I don’t know. But I’m afraid she had the misfortune to stumble into a French attack on an agent in our service.” Wellington drew a breath. “I’m very sorry to tell you this, Your Royal Highness, but I’m afraid Lady Julia was killed this evening.”
For a moment, Billy stared at the duke in blank incomprehension. Then the prince swayed on his feet. Malcolm pulled a chair forward and pushed Billy into it. Davenport crossed to a table with decanters, poured a glass of brandy, and put it in Billy’s hand. The glass slipped from the prince’s nerveless fingers, spattering cognac on his dancing shoes. Davenport caught the glass before it could fall to the floor and held it to Billy’s lips.
The prince gulped down some brandy and coughed, his shoulders shaking. “But she can’t be—”
“I’m afraid she most definitely is,” Malcolm said. “Davenport and I saw her. A terrible tragedy.”
Billy stared up at him with numb eyes. “If I’d gone to meet her—”
Malcolm gripped the prince’s shoulder. “She told you not to. Something went terribly awry.”
“Who else knew you and Lady Julia planned to meet at the château this evening?” Wellington asked.
“No one.” Billy gulped down some more brandy.
“You’re sure? You didn’t mention it to any of your friends over port—”
“What sort of an idiot do you take me for? I wouldn’t put Julia’s reputation at risk.”
Davenport’s head snapped up, but he bit back whatever he had been going to say.
“How long had the affair been going on?” the duke said, in the same measured voice.
The prince stared at the splashes of brandy on the toes of his shoes, as though wondering how they had got there. “A month. Since early May. It was at the opera. She was so lovely. I never thought—”
“One doesn’t usually in such situations,” Wellington said.
“It didn’t seem—It’s the way marriages are conducted in the English ton.”
Davenport didn’t so much as draw a breath, but Malcolm felt the tension radiating off him like waves of heat from a smoldering fire.
Wellington, whose wife was home in London and who was himself engaged in what was at the very least an agreeable flirtation in Brussels with the very-much-married Lady Frances Webster, regarded the prince with drawn brows. “Not all English husbands are complacent. I don’t pay much heed to such things, but from what I’ve observed, John Ashton gave the impression of being very much in love with his wife.”
Billy blinked. “Julia said they had an understanding. She—” He looked up at Malcolm with the confused gaze Malcolm remembered from boyhood. “Are you sure it was Julia? Perhaps you made a mistake—”
“It was quite definitely Julia,” Davenport said.
“She’s your wife’s sister, isn’t she?” Stuart said on a note of surprise. “I forgot—”
“That I’m married?” Davenport asked. “I do the same myself much of the time.”
Wellington stared at the prince for a long moment, flicked a glance at the brandy glass, looked pointedly at Davenport. Davenport refilled the glass and returned it to Billy.
“Drink that down,” Wellington said, “and pull yourself together. You need to return to the ballroom as though nothing has happened.”
“But I can’t—”
“I assume you would not wish any scandal to attach to Lady Julia’s memory. Nor would you wish for any ill feeling between yourself and her husband and his fellow officers. Difficult, I know, but I have no doubt Your Highness is equal to the task.”
Billy’s shoulders straightened perceptibly at this compliment from the mentor he admired. He swallowed the second brandy and got to his feet.
Wellington gave an approving nod and clapped the prince on the shoulder. “You’ll do, lad. Stuart, you’d best go with him.”
Stuart inclined his head and took Billy’s arm. “Your Royal Highness.”
Wellington watched the door close behind the two men. Then his gaze snapped to Malcolm and Davenport. “What you just heard stays within these walls.”
“Sir—” Malcolm said.
“There’s enough tension between the Dutch-Belgian forces and our lads as it is.”
“Billy’s popular among our officers,” Malcolm pointed out. “One of their own.”
“Even so. We don’t need a damned scandal distracting everyone.” Wellington crossed to a table that held a brace of candles and held Billy’s note to Lady Julia to one of the candle flames. “You never saw this,” he said as the paper dissolved to black ash on the cherrywood tabletop. “Ideally Lady Julia was never at the château.”
“And Julia’s husband?” Davenport asked.
“He’ll have to be told something.” Wellington swept the crumbs of ash into his hand and tossed them into the cold grate. “But I don’t think he’ll want a scandal any more than we do.”
Davenport had crossed to a pier table that held a single candle. He was holding Julia’s note to the prince to the light. Not to burn it, to study. He stared at it with drawn brows.
“Best burn that as well,” Wellington said.
“Not just yet I think.” Davenport looked up from the paper. “It appears to be a forgery.”
5
“
W
hat?”
Wellington said. “You hadn’t seen Lady Julia in four years. How the devil can you recognize her handwriting?”
“I can’t. But I know a forgery when I see it.” Davenport carried the note over to the duke. “See the breaks in the line? As though the writer wrote with painstaking care. Here he or she even traced back over. We don’t do that when we write ourselves. We scrawl the words without thinking.”
Malcolm studied the note, remembering Davenport giving him a similar lecture three years ago over an intercepted French dispatch. “He’s right,” Malcolm said. The breaks in the lines were obvious now Davenport had pointed them out. “Davenport usually is.”
Wellington looked from Malcolm to Davenport, as though he’d just glimpsed an extra regiment of enemy troops lying in wait right before a battle. “That would mean—”
“That someone knew of the rendezvous and went to great lengths to ensure the prince wouldn’t arrive for it,” Malcolm said.
“And that Julia would be there alone,” Davenport added.
The implications hung in the air like smoke after a cannon blast. “No one could have known the French would ambush you,” Wellington said.
“Unless it wasn’t the French shooting at us,” Davenport said.
Wellington swung his gaze to the colonel. “You think someone who knew Malcolm was meeting La Fleur tonight lured Lady Julia to the château, shot at all of you, and killed La Fleur, just to get rid of Lady Julia?”
“I admit it’s far-fetched. But it’s not impossible. It’s also possible that someone who knew nothing about Rannoch’s meeting with La Fleur planned to confront Julia at the château and then hung back because of the gunfire.”
“Was Johnny Ashton in the ballroom all evening?” Malcolm asked.
“I—” Wellington bit back the words. “I can’t swear to it.” His gaze was like ice. “But one way or another, Lady Julia’s husband is the next person we need to talk to.”
“Mrs. Rannoch?”
Suzanne turned to find herself looking into the bright eyes of Lady Caroline Lamb. Lord Byron’s erstwhile mistress, the estranged wife of Malcolm’s friend William Lamb, one of the most scandalous women in Britain. Suzanne smiled at her. She liked Lady Caroline despite—or perhaps because of—the stories of her outrageous behavior. Unlike many, Caro Lamb had never raised her brows at Malcolm Rannoch’s foreign-born war bride.
“I don’t believe you’ve met Lady Cordelia Davenport,” Lady Caroline said, indicating the woman who stood beside her. “She’s just this afternoon arrived in Brussels and is staying with me.”
Suzanne exchanged greetings with Harry Davenport’s wife. Close up, Lady Cordelia was not as tall as she had appeared when she entered the ballroom. Her presence lent her the illusion of height. The smile that had dazzled the ballroom was warm and direct, but Suzanne saw lines of strain behind Lady Cordelia’s artfully applied eye blacking, and her face was pale beneath her wash of rouge.
“Caro says you’re one of the most sensible women in Brussels, Mrs. Rannoch,” Cordelia said. She had a low-pitched, musical voice. “And one of the best dressed. The second of which is quite obvious.”
“She’s half-French,” Lady Caroline said. “She was born with an advantage.”
“And that you’ve had all sorts of adventures in Spain with your intrepid husband.”
Suzanne smiled. “No more than anyone else caught up in the midst of a war.”
“And I daresay most of the arrangements for tonight’s entertainment were yours,” Lady Caroline said. “Stuart is fortunate to have you. Mrs. Rannoch, we need your help. You have a wonderful knack for knowing what is going on and to all intents and purposes you’re the evening’s hostess. Have you seen Julia—Lady Julia Ashton, that is?”
“She’s my sister, you see,” Cordelia Davenport said. “She doesn’t know I’ve arrived in Brussels, and I’ve been looking everywhere for her.”
Perfectly natural for Lady Cordelia to be looking for her sister, yet there was a tension in her voice that implied something more urgent than a sibling reunion. Suzanne cast a glance round the ballroom and then thought back through the evening. “I think the last time I saw Lady Julia was at supper. But there’s such a press of people I don’t think I’ve seen half the guests in the course of the evening.”
“Of course,” said Lady Cordelia. “I’m sure we’ll find her eventually.” But the tension seemed to tighten between her perfectly groomed brows.
The Honorable John Ashton, third son of the Earl of Langdon, had been in Malcolm’s year at Harrow, though he’d bought a commission when he left rather than going on to Oxford as Malcolm had done. Malcolm remembered Ashton as an agreeable fellow, good at sports, a bruising rider, popular but not arrogant with those less well favored. Malcolm had helped him with Latin translations once or twice and Ashton had seemed genuinely grateful.
Ashton came into the salon to which Wellington had summoned him with a quick step, the light of the chase in his eyes. For him, like the Prince of Orange, secret councils implied Bonaparte was finally on the move. “Sir—” he said, then came up short at the sight of Malcolm. “Good God, Rannoch, what happened to you?” His gaze slid to Davenport and froze in confusion.
“Colonel Davenport,” Wellington supplied. “One of my aides-de-camp, seconded to Colonel Grant.”
“Pleased to meet you, we’re relying on you lot.” Ashton extended his hand, then frowned. “You’re—”
“Cordelia’s husband.” Davenport shook Ashton’s proffered hand. “I’m afraid we aren’t meeting under the best of circumstances.”
“Sit down, Ashton.” Wellington put a hand on the captain’s shoulder and pressed him into the same chair the Prince of Orange had earlier occupied. “Did you know your wife had left the ball?”
“Julia? Don’t be absurd, she’s been on the dance floor all evening. I just saw her at supper—” Ashton broke off, as though realizing how long ago that had been.
“Rannoch and Davenport had a meeting with a French contact at the Château de Vere tonight,” Wellington said in brisk tones. “They were ambushed, and their contact was killed in the exchange. Unbeknownst to them, your wife was inside the château. She came out on the balcony and was struck by a musket ball. I’m very sorry to say that she is dead.”
Brisk as a bucketful of cold water, a soldier’s way of breaking bad news and probably the best choice in these circumstances.
Ashton stared up at his superior, a man who has had a knife plunged in his guts but is in too much shock to yet feel the pain. “But she couldn’t—There has to be some mistake,” he said, echoing the Prince of Orange.
“I’m afraid not.” This time it was Davenport who addressed the question. “It was undoubtedly Julia. I knew her well at one time.”
Ashton turned his gaze to the brother-in-law he had just met. “But if she was called away, why wouldn’t she have told me?” He caught himself up short as he said this last, the obvious, painful explanation showing clearly in his heretofore-unshadowed blue-gray eyes. “No,” he said. “Julia wouldn’t—I won’t let you slander her.”
“No one,” Wellington said, “would dream of slandering your unfortunate wife. But I think you may have to accept, Ashton, that we often know less than we think we do about those closest to us.”
Davenport dropped a hand on Ashton’s shoulder. For a moment, behind the colonel’s controlled gaze, Malcolm glimpsed wounds that had lain festering for years.
Wellington was regarding Ashton, weighing his options. Tell Ashton the truth and risk a confrontation between the young captain and the Prince of Orange. Withhold the truth from Ashton and risk the outraged husband stumbling upon it himself to infinitely worse effect.
Perhaps Ashton’s solid, confused gaze convinced him. This was a man bred up to put his country first.
“Ashton.” Wellington seemed to measure his words even as he spoke. “We have reason to believe your wife had an assignation with the Prince of Orange at the château this evening.”
“With the—”Ashton surged out of his chair. “That’s a damned lie.”
“I’m afraid the prince has admitted it.”
“Then he’s—” Ashton broke off, unable to come up with a logical reason why a man would falsely claim to be having an affair with another man’s wife.
“The prince says your wife sent him a note canceling the rendezvous. Ashton, can you tell us if this is your wife’s hand?”
Davenport held out Julia Ashton’s supposed note. Ashton frowned at it. “It’s like her hand.” He traced the letters, as though seeking an echo of his wife’s presence. Then he frowned. “But there’s something a bit odd. The lines don’t flow properly.”
Davenport nodded. “It was forged.”
Ashton shook his head. “First you tell me my wife had a rendezvous with the Prince of Orange, then you say someone forged a note so the prince wouldn’t go to the rendezvous—In God’s name why?”
“It’s difficult to make sense of it,” Malcolm said. “Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to meet with your wife secretly at the château?”
“Of course not. I didn’t even know she’d—I still can’t believe—” Ashton pressed his hands over his face, his fingers shaking. Then he dropped his hands and looked from Malcolm to Davenport to Wellington, his gaze hardening. “Are you accusing me of setting this up? So I could confront her about her... her indiscretion? Of which I knew nothing—”
“No one’s accusing you of anything, Ashton.” Wellington rested a hand on the captain’s shoulder. “You’ve suffered a great shock and a terrible loss. Unfortunately, this comes at a time when we can none of us dwell on personal matters. I think I need hardly tell you how disastrous any tension between our troops and the Dutch-Belgians would be just now.”
Ashton’s mouth drew into a tight line. “You’re telling me not to plant the Prince of Orange a facer,” he said in a tone that indicated he wouldn’t soil his hands with the other man. “Or call him out.”
“Among other things. Believe me, I can understand the temptation, but it could do incalculable harm. As well as casting scandal upon your wife’s memory. Which, despite everything, I don’t believe you would wish to do.”
“No,” Ashton said. The single word held a raw grief, just beginning to break through the shock. “But I want to understand—”
“So do we all,” Wellington told him. “Your wife wasn’t the only one to lose her life tonight. We lost one of our most valued agents. We need to discover precisely what happened to both of them.”
“How—”
Wellington jerked his head at Malcolm. “Rannoch investigated a murder in Vienna.”
“Murder?” Ashton said. “No one’s suggesting Julia was—”
“No, of course not. But Rannoch’s good at unraveling puzzles and putting the pieces back together. Malcolm?”
Malcolm had already seen where the conversation was leading. In truth, he wouldn’t have been best pleased to have the matter put in someone else’s hands. “I’ll do my best, sir.”
“You’ll tell me what you discover?” Ashton said. “At least whatever relates to Julia?”
Malcolm looked into Ashton’s pleading eyes and found himself saying, “Yes, of course,” though he knew even as he framed the words that it might be a difficult promise to keep.
“Do you want someone to see you home?” Wellington asked. “I can understand you’re not—”
“No, I’ll manage. I just—Oh, Lord.” Ashton grimaced. “Cordelia. She’s here. In the ballroom. Just arrived in Brussels. She’s been looking for Julia. We’ll have to tell her—”
“I’ll do it,” Davenport said.
Ashton looked at him for a moment, blinking through his own distress. “Are you sure—?”
“No.” Davenport gave a twisted half smile. “But when it comes to Cordelia I don’t think it’s possible for me to make matters any worse.”