Authors: Imperial Scandal

Teresa Grant (37 page)

BOOK: Teresa Grant

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A Congreve rocket, set off by Major Whinyates’s troop, exploded in the distance with a hiss. It had probably fallen wide of its mark, as rockets usually did. Hopefully at least it had scared the French and hadn’t fallen on any of the Allies. George adjusted his grip on the reins. “I suppose you could put it that way. Carfax suggested the arrangement when I bought my commission.”

“You knew David before I did. And his sisters. And Amelia Beckwith.”

“Carfax’s ward?” Through the leafy shadows, George’s face betrayed remembered sadness but no present fear. “Yes, of course. Terrible what happened to her.”

“And I suppose your brother knew her as well.”

“We were all invited to Carfax House entertainments.” Malcolm kept his gaze steady on George’s face. For all his open, friendly demeanor, George, like him, was trained to deception. “Do you think there’s any possibility Amelia was more than an acquaintance to your brother?”

Seemingly genuine bewilderment shot through George’s gaze. “What are you suggesting?”

“It seems Amelia may have had a lover just before she died.”

George drew a breath. “What on earth does that have to do with Julia’s death?”

“I’m not entirely sure yet. But Amelia and Julia were friends. Julia might have known the lover’s identity.”

The horror of hitherto-unforeseen possibilities filled George’s eyes. “And you think this lover—”

“It’s too early to think anything.”

A crack of lightning cut the sky, followed by the roar of thunder. George stared through the trees at the blur of red that was the slowly moving Allied column. “If Amelia had a lover it wasn’t Tony.”

“You sound very sure.”

George shot a look at Malcolm. “It wasn’t me, either.”

“Who was it?”

“I never said—”

“You didn’t need to.”

George tugged at his high-standing collar. “Look, Rannoch—”

“Was it John Ashton?”

“Johnny?” George gave a harsh laugh, louder than anything he had said. “Rather reassuring that even you can bark up the wrong tree.”

“Who then? If you want me to find Julia’s killer, you don’t want me wasting my time.”

George stared at him for a moment. Another pistol fired in the distance. Three shots answered it. “I’m actually surprised you didn’t know. He’s more your friend than mine. He used to visit Carfax Court when he was at school in England.”

“Who?”

George hesitated a moment, as though he still feared to put it into words. In the column, someone was singing “Ahé Marmont,” a favorite song from the Peninsula. “His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange.”

S
uzanne slammed shut the door to the room in the alley off the Rue d’Isabelle. “Damn it, Raoul, we’re in trouble. I should have known this would happen. We should have had a plan—”

“Querida.”
He caught her wrists in both hands. “Calm down. Things always go wrong. We can always fix them. What’s happened?”

“Carfax figured out there’s an information leak.”

He released his breath. “For God’s sake,
querida,
Carfax is a spymaster. He has to know he probably has a dozen information leaks.”

“It was the raid on the Comte de Lisle’s group in London. I knew warning them was dangerous.”

“Are you saying you wish we hadn’t?”

“No, of course not. But Carfax figured out we must have intercepted his communications to be able to warn them, and now Malcolm thinks George Chase is the leak—”

“Well, then.”

Suzanne jerked her hands free of his grip. “He thinks an innocent man is a double agent.”

Raoul folded his arms across his chest. “Malcolm is a sensible man. He’ll sort it out. And I imagine Major Chase can take care of himself.”

“It’s playing merry hell with the investigation into Julia Ashton’s death. And I’m lying to Malcolm.”

Raoul regarded her in silence.

It was several seconds before she realized the full idiocy of what she’d said. She put her hands to her face. “Oh, my God.”

“When you’re playing a role for a long time it can seem real,” Raoul said, his voice gentle. “Or perhaps in this case it would be more accurate to say it becomes real.”

“I’ve lied to Malcolm every day of our marriage. I lie to him by omission every moment we spend together. I don’t know why lying about the investigation should seem worse.”

“Perhaps because it feels more personal.”

“When we investigated Princess Tatiana’s murder in Vienna we worked as a team. It was—” She rubbed her arms. “Rather wonderful.”

“You obviously complement each other well.”

“But this is different. Julia Ashton was a French spy; her death is mired in intelligence operations.” She pressed her fingers to her forehead. Her temples were throbbing. “I committed a great sin against Malcolm when I married him. Before I married him. Before I properly knew him. Knowing him—loving him—doesn’t change the sin.”

“Not in theory. But it makes it damnably more difficult in practice.”

She groaned and dropped into the ladder-back chair. “I didn’t come here to wallow in my guilt. What do we do?”

Raoul moved to the cot. “I expect George Chase will be able to convince Malcolm he isn’t a double agent.”

“Which will force Malcolm to look for the leak elsewhere.”

“He has a lot to distract him now. And a wide field when he does look.” Raoul dropped down on the edge of the cot. “You’re the last person in the world he’d suspect,
querida
.”

Her fingers dug into the muslin of her skirt. “I know. That’s what makes it so awful.” She swallowed hard, forcing down everything roiling inside her. She’d done it for two and a half years; she could go on doing it.

“Suzanne—” Raoul leaned toward her, then winced, his hand going to his side.

She sprang to her feet. “You’re hurt.”

“Only a scratch.” He put out a hand to forestall her. “I was li-aisoning with some Belgians who’d made overtures about deserting, and I ran into a British patrol.”

“Let me see.” She reached for his arm.

He caught her wrist. “A competent doctor cleaned it thoroughly and put a nice bandage on it.”

“Which doesn’t mean it isn’t festering.” She dropped down beside him on the cot. “Take off your shirt. Don’t turn prim; it isn’t anything I haven’t seen before. And I’ve seen countless British and Belgian soldiers in worse states of undress today.”

He grimaced and tugged at his cravat. “I thought you’d have been nursing the wounded.”

She drew an uneven breath, seeing the men lying in the street, thinking of the French who’d put them there. Whom she’d helped put them there.

“It’s war,” Raoul said, unbuttoning his waistcoat. “People are going to be killed and wounded. Once they’re wounded one helps where one can.”

“And sends them back to fight against one’s own side.”

“And holds on to one’s humanity.” He dragged his shirt over his head. “Besides, I think this is all going to be decided one way or another before the wounded heal.”

“Have you got any lint?”

He didn’t, but she found a bottle of brandy and an old shirt. This room wasn’t Raoul’s official residence in Brussels, but he kept it stocked with supplies. She tore the shirt into strips. When he protested, she said, “You can get another shirt. We can’t get another you if you develop wound fever.”

Raoul gave a wry grimace that changed to a gasp as she peeled back the dressing. The wound was long but not very deep. It was oozing, but the blood was clean red, with no sign of infection. She gave another sigh of relief, her mind filled with vivid memories of a week when he’d lain feverish in a mud hut in the Spanish mountains.

“You got Philippe’s message?” she asked, dousing a strip of shirt with brandy.

“Yes. That was adroitly done. I got to Headquarters early on the sixteenth. Bonaparte was asleep, but I spoke to Flahaut. He promised to deliver the message.”

“And then?”

Raoul grimaced again and not, she thought, because she was pressing the brandy-soaked cloth to his wound. “God knows. If the message had been heeded properly, Ney could have taken Quatre Bras before the Allies were able to reinforce it, and then we could have marched on to Brussels.”

“I kept thinking of that yesterday whenever a fresh rumor spread.”

“Instead Ney delayed and delayed, waiting for orders that were unconscionably late and damnably unclear when they finally arrived. It was three o’clock before he finally hurled Reille’s corps at Quatre Bras. Late enough the Allies could hold out for reinforcements.”

Raoul’s voice shook with rage. Suzanne touched his shoulder.

“Ney thought Napoleon’s reserves would reinforce his attack, but instead Bonaparte decided to concentrate his troops assisting Grouchy with the Prussians to the east.”

“When did he let Ney know?”

“He didn’t.”

She pulled a fragment of matted dressing from Raoul’s wound. Raoul, brooding on the idiocies of yesterday, scarcely seemed to notice. “I heard d’Erlon’s corps spent yesterday riding back and forth,” she said.

“On top of everything else. D’Erlon kept getting contradictory orders from Napoleon and Ney.” More than anything else, Raoul hated stupidity.

Suzanne touched his shoulder again. He gave her a brief smile. “There’s nothing to be gained repining on it now.”

Another of Raoul’s maxims that she’d learned was vital to holding on to one’s sanity. “Do we have a chance?” she asked.

“If Bonaparte can keep the Allied army and the Prussians separated—yes. Not everything’s gone our way, but not everything’s gone theirs, either.”

“How’s Flahaut?” She pictured the handsome comte whom she’d met when she assisted his mistress, Hortense Bonaparte, in concealing her pregnancy and the birth of her child three and a half years ago. She’d admired his loyalty to Hortense throughout the ordeal.

“Exhausted. Worried Talleyrand will never forgive him.”

Suzanne smiled at the thought of the French foreign minister whom she’d last seen in Vienna. “He will. Talleyrand’s a number of things, but he doesn’t forget he’s a father. And if anyone understands about changing sides he should.” She pressed a pad of clean cloth over the wound.

Raoul winced. “I’m not sure how much weight the pull of loyalty and ideals holds with Prince Talleyrand.”

“No, but after our time in Vienna, I think he understands the pull of love rather better than I’d have guessed.”

Raoul raised his brows.

“Dorothée,” Suzanne said, seeing her friend, Talleyrand’s niece-by-marriage, who had been his hostess in Vienna. She used a long strip cut from the shirt to secure the fresh dressing.

“Poor devil.”

“He’ll live.” She went to the chest of drawers for another clean shirt.

Raoul looked up at her. “Did you learn anything more about Truxhillo?”

Her fingers stilled on the shirt. Anthony Chase was a French agent and therefore properly Raoul’s loyalties should lie with him.

“You don’t trust me,” Raoul said. It wasn’t an accusation or a reproach, merely a statement of fact.

She clenched the folds of linen. “It’s not—”

“That simple?” He gave a faint, self-mocking smile. “No, it never is.”

She held out the shirt, scanning his face as though she could read clues there to how much she could trust him. Which was absurd. As well as she knew him, she knew full well she didn’t have the key to who he was. He knew her equally well, and that probably gave him an edge in deception.

But as Prince Adam Czartoryski had said to Malcolm last autumn in the midst of the treachery of the Congress of Vienna, one had to trust someone. She gave Raoul the shirt and her trust. “Captain Anthony Chase was a French agent.”

Raoul’s brows rose. “Interesting. He was running Julia Ashton?”

She helped him pull the shirt over his head. “He thought he was.”

“Thought?” Raoul’s head emerged from folds of linen.

“Julia was a double.”

“Good God.” For the second time in the past three days she had the rare experience of seeing genuine surprise on Raoul’s face.

She told him about Tony and Truxhillo and about George running Julia. “So George was getting information from Julia,” she concluded. “And Julia was feeding false information to Tony.”

“Typical. All that fuss to set up Anthony Chase as a hero so he’d make a good agent and they didn’t pick someone with a keener understanding.”

Suzanne leaned forward, resting her chin on her hands. “According to his sister, Anthony Chase had blood on his coat the night of Stuart’s ball. He has the perfect motive to have set up the ambush. He wanted Malcolm gone, and Julia was threatening to stop working for him.”

“Have you discovered why?”

“Why what?”

“Why Lady Julia suddenly wanted to stop working for Captain Chase. And more importantly for his brother.”

“I can only assume her self-disgust got the better of her. It’s ugly work being a double agent. She may not have been betraying her husband through treason, but she was betraying him with other men.” The one betrayal Suzanne had managed not to commit.

“All of which she’d been doing for some time. As you should know better than anyone, one can go along as one is for an amazing amount of time. It takes some sort of shock to change things.”

Suzanne’s nails curled into her palms. She’d had a shock of that sort the previous summer, when she’d looked at Malcolm on a stretch of Perthshire beach and realized she loved him. But in the end even that hadn’t been enough to shake her from her purpose. What would it have taken to jolt Lady Julia out of her course of action?

“You identify with her,” Raoul said.

Suzanne bit back an instinctive protest. “I suppose I can’t help but do so in a way. A woman close to my age, playing the intelligence game. Lying to her husband.” She sat back on the cot. “Her little boy is staying with us. He’s adorable. Just about Colin’s age. His father is off risking his life, and he’s going to grow up without a mother.” She met Raoul’s gaze. “It changes one, having children.”

He was silent for the length of a heartbeat. “So I would think.”

“I hate what was done to her. I hate that she was a pawn.”

“You’re a lot of things, but you’ll never be a pawn,
querida
.”

A mirthless laugh escaped her lips. “Can’t we all be pawns in the right circumstances? It depends on who controls the board.” She pushed herself to her feet. “Carfax also sent Malcolm a personal message about his ward’s death. A message that disappeared entirely. Malcolm naturally thinks the same person who warned the Comte de Lisle intercepted Carfax’s message, but I know I didn’t take it. There’s no chance George Chase really is a double agent, is there?”

“I’ve heard nothing to suggest it, but anything’s possible. I didn’t know about his brother, or Lady Julia.”

“Will you—”

“I’ll make inquiries. Of course.”

“Thank you.” Suzanne twisted her wedding band round her finger, feeling the marks of the date engraved on the inside. “Philippe told me he was going to join the army.”

“He told me as well. I’m not surprised.”

“He’s a boy.”

“A number of boys will die tomorrow on both sides. As they did in the Peninsula.”

Suzanne hugged her arms round herself. “Perhaps I see it differently now I have a son.”

BOOK: Teresa Grant

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