4
“G
ood evening, sir.” Malcolm drew aside the curtains and handed Suzanne through the window. “My apologies for the inopportune entrance.”
“Never mind about that. I’m used to them. We need—Good God! I thought you’d gone to Baroness Arnstein’s after the opera, Suzanne.”
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, Britain’s foreign secretary and representative at the Congress of Vienna, stood by a round table that held a single lit taper, the only illumination in the room other than the coals glowing in the porcelain stove in the corner. His fair hair gleamed smooth, and he wore a dark blue dressing gown beneath which his cravat was still impeccably tied.
“I
was
at Fanny von Arnstein’s.” Suzanne breathed in the sweet relief of level ground beneath her feet and warm air coming from the stove. “I was called away.”
Castlereagh stared at her in the dim light as though he could not make sense of what he was seeing. Suzanne looked down. Her gauze overskirt was in tatters, the satin beneath was torn to reveal her corset and chemise, and in addition to the gash on her arm, she had scrapes on both her hands.
“What in God’s name were you doing dragging your wife into this?” Castlereagh asked Malcolm.
“I wouldn’t precisely say I dragged her.” Malcolm pulled a handkerchief from his breeches pocket and wiped the dirt and blood from his hands, then walked through the shadows to a table with decanters. Suzanne heard the clink of crystal and the slosh of liquid. “Do you mind, sir? I think Suzanne and I are both in need of fortification. It’s a bit of a strain having someone try to kill you.”
“Someone—” Castlereagh’s finely arced brows drew together. “Who the devil tried to kill you?”
“I’m not sure. There were several of them. The man we tried to question was killed himself. After that the first imperative seemed to be to get out of there alive.” Malcolm crossed back to Suzanne and gave her one of the glasses. He squeezed her fingers as he put the crystal in her hand.
She took a sip. Cognac, of the best quality, available to the British without the need to resort to smugglers now the war with France had ended. It rushed to her head with welcome warmth. She looked down at the glass and saw blood smeared on the crystal from the cut on Malcolm’s hand.
Castlereagh struck a flint against steel. A lamp flared to life. “My dear Suzanne, you must be exhausted after your ordeal. I’m sure you are eager to go down to your room. I fear I need to speak with Malcolm before I can send him after you.”
Malcolm took a long drink from his own glass. “She needs to stay for this.”
“Rannoch—”
“She knows too much.”
Castlereagh fixed Malcolm with a hard gaze. “You’re invaluable, Malcolm. But not indispensable. You’d be wise to remember that.”
“Believe me, sir, I’m well aware of it. But at the moment we both need each other.”
Malcolm’s gaze clashed with the foreign secretary’s across the room. All the wellborn young men Castlereagh had brought to the Congress of Vienna as attachés were expected to have myriad talents. To make small talk in five languages, to dance the waltz into the small hours, and then return to the embassy and draft the third revision of a white paper before dawn. They were also expected to comb though diplomatic wastebaskets for discarded laundry lists and boot-maker’s bills that might be code for something much more serious, and to break those codes and pass them on to the foreign secretary. Every diplomat at the Congress was something of an intelligence agent. But Malcolm’s skills were more formidable than most. Though Malcolm and Lord Castlereagh frequently disagreed, Suzanne knew the foreign secretary had a great deal of respect for her husband. He gave him far more latitude than any of his other attachés.
Now Castlereagh inclined his head a fraction of an inch. “Start at the beginning.”
Malcolm drew a shield-back chair forward and handed Suzanne into it. Then he paced across the room and leaned against the drinks table. He took another deep swallow from his own glass. “Tatiana Kirsanova is dead.”
“I know,” Castlereagh said. “Why do you think I said we were in the devil of a fix?”
Malcolm’s head snapped up. “My compliments, sir. I didn’t realize your sources of information were quite so efficient.”
“You’re an excellent agent, Malcolm, but not the only one in my employ.” Castlereagh dropped into a wing-back chair. “Given Princess Tatiana’s role, I’d be remiss if I didn’t have a source among her staff. One of the kitchen maids sent the news an hour since. Deuced inconvenient.”
Malcolm slammed his glass down on the drinks table.
“She’s dead
.
”
“And I’m sorry for it. It’s still inconvenient.”
“God damn it, sir—”
“No time for personal feelings, Malcolm.” Castlereagh rested his fair head against the blue velvet of the chair. “How did you learn of it?”
Malcolm reached for his glass. The light bounced off his signet ring. Suzanne, used to reading the signs, knew her husband’s fingers were not quite steady. “I discovered the body.”
“Good God. The princess—”
“Sent for me tonight.” Malcolm stared at a bloodstain on his cuff that might be his own or Princess Tatiana’s. “At least the message seemed to come from her. I begin to question if it really did. She also seemingly sent for Tsar Alexander and Prince Metternich.”
“At the same time?”
“Quite. And she sent for Suzanne.”
Castlereagh’s gaze shot to Suzanne, then back to Malcolm. “You got there first?”
Malcolm nodded. “Her throat had been cut. Seemingly by someone she knew and trusted.”
He took another sip of cognac. For a moment, his gaze was raw as an open wound. Suzanne’s own glass nearly tumbled from her fingers at the naked pain in her husband’s eyes. “I saw a man in the street in front of the house a few minutes later,” she said, a little too quickly. “I couldn’t make out any more than that he wore a greatcoat and top hat. He looked up at the window of the room in which the princess died. Then he disappeared.”
Castlereagh regarded her, his fine-boned face set in harsh lines. “What did the princess write to get you to call on her?”
Suzanne fingered a fold of tattered gauze. “Just that she had something important to tell me.”
“All things considered,” Malcolm said, his gaze armored again, “we’d better tell Castlereagh the whole truth. We can trust him as far as we can trust anyone.”
“Thank you,” Castlereagh said in a dry voice.
Suzanne swallowed. “Princess Tatiana wrote that she had something to say to me concerning Malcolm.”
Castlereagh grimaced. His gaze moved to Malcolm. “It can’t be coincidence. This must be connected to her other activities.”
“Probably. The question is how.”
“I hate to seem inquisitive,” Suzanne said, “but if you want me in this discussion, it would help if I knew what was going on.”
Malcolm regarded her. The moment of vulnerability was so completely gone she might have imagined it. Wariness was written in the lean, elegant lines of his body. His white shirt, splotched with blood and soot, gleamed in the shadows. “Princess Tatiana has been supplying us with information.”
Suzanne stared at her husband. “Are you saying Princess Tatiana was a spy?”
“She dealt in information,” Malcolm said. “Most people at the Congress do, one way or another.”
Prince Talleyrand glanced at the porcelain clock on the mantel for the third time in the last five minutes. It went without saying that he wouldn’t sleep tonight. He had learned long since that betrayal was a fact of life. But that didn’t make it any easier to accept, in others or in himself. Some might consider that a vestige of conscience. He found it damned inconvenient.
He stared at his empty glass of calvados, considered pouring more, decided against it. He needed his wits about him. He drew the folds of his dressing gown closer round his throat. The coals still glowed in the stove, but the room seemed to have grown colder as the night dragged on.
The door opened as soundlessly as it had earlier in the evening. Talleyrand was on his feet before his visitor stepped into the room.
“Well?” The question came out more quickly than Talleyrand intended. “Is it done?”
“Not precisely.” His visitor closed the door. “I’m afraid someone else got there first.”
5
S
uzanne looked at her husband. “You were Princess Tatiana’s contact?”
Malcolm nodded.
It explained some of his relationship to the princess. It did not begin to explain how far his work as her contact had gone.
“For a long time?” Suzanne asked.
“Off and on for several years.” Malcolm turned his glass in his hand. The crystal sparked in the lamplight. “Tatiana spent some months in Spain during the Peninsular War. Before I met you.”
Suzanne took a sip of brandy. Her image of her husband’s life before she knew him shifted and changed before her eyes, fragments of mosaic forming a picture that remained tantalizingly unfinished. “Was the princess particularly loyal to Britain? Because given her connections to the Russian delegation, not to mention her past connection to Prince Metternich—”
“I think Tatiana decided we paid the best,” Malcolm said.
“Though I was under no illusions we were the only delegation at the Congress she was supplying with information.”
“A welcome admission,” Castlereagh said.
Malcolm met the foreign secretary’s gaze. “Believe me, sir, I saw Tatiana for what she was.”
Castlereagh got to his feet. “My dear boy, you’ve always been entirely too trusting where she was concerned. But”—his gaze slid briefly to Suzanne—“that’s neither here nor there for the moment. What matters is that she was an agent for us, and very likely others as well, and she may well have been killed because of what she knew. We have to learn the truth of what happened. You have to learn the truth, Malcolm.”
Malcolm took a sip of brandy. “Baron Hager will launch an official investigation into Tatiana’s murder.”
“This won’t be the first time we’ve run a parallel investigation. Or the last. Baron Hager is an able man. But I have every confidence in you, Malcolm.”
“Your confidence may be misplaced.”
“I doubt it. When you let me down it’s due to your ideas, not your abilities.” Castlereagh walked up to Malcolm and looked him directly in the eye. “I needn’t remind you what a dangerous pass we are at, need I? Tsar Alexander has unilaterally handed Saxony over to Prussia and wants to gobble up Poland, the German states can’t agree among themselves, no one can agree about the Italian situation. Metternich and Tsar Alexander have seemed ready to come to blows on more than one occasion. And not always about their women. Talleyrand’s doing his best to turn France back into a country powerful enough to cause problems for Britain. And if we aren’t careful, Tsar Alexander could be more dangerous than Bonaparte ever was. We’re one wrong decision away from plunging the Continent back into war. Any incident would be like putting a match to a powder keg. The truth behind Princess Tatiana’s death could turn into just such an incident if we don’t take appropriate measures. Besides, she was ours. We can’t let her death go unanswered. You should understand that better than anyone.”
Malcolm scraped a hand through his hair. “I’ll learn what I can. I make you no guarantees.”
Castlereagh gave a dry smile. “You won’t let the matter rest until you’ve learned the truth. I may not have been in Spain with you, but I know what you’re like when solving a problem.”
Malcolm tossed off the last of his brandy. “There seems little more to be said. If you’ll excuse us, sir? It’s been an exceedingly long day.”
He took two candles in silver holders from a side table, lit them from the burning taper, and handed one to Suzanne. They went downstairs to their bedchamber in silence. Malcolm set his candle on the chest of drawers. Suzanne eased open the door to the tiny adjoining dressing room. Her candle flickered over the cradle where their seventeen-month-old son, Colin, slept. His eyes were shut, one small fist curled beside his tousled dark hair, the other tucked beneath the blankets. In the shadows beyond, her maid, Blanca, slept on a narrow bed, nearby should Colin wake.
Suzanne pulled the door to and set her own candle on the dressing table. “Malcolm.”
He had washed his bloodstained hands in the basin on the dressing table and was drying them with a towel. He looked up at her, his gaze black and questioning. A bruise was rising on his cheekbone from the fight in the alley. The events of the evening must have left emotional bruises that went deeper. Her throat thickened with all the words that could not be spoken.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Finding her like that must have been brutal.”
A muscle tightened along his jaw. “Yes.” He glanced away for a moment, drew a harsh breath, then began to undo his frayed shirt cuffs, suppressed violence in the tugs of his fingers. “Though it’s hardly the worst sight I’ve seen. I suppose I should be grateful what I witnessed in Spain didn’t completely numb me to brutality.” His gaze shifted over her. “Do you need to bandage your hands?”
“I’ll be fine. Only minor scrapes.” She picked up the ewer, splashed water over her hands, and scrubbed them with rosewater soap, staring at the pinkish brown water in the basin. Her blood and Malcolm’s and very likely Princess Tatiana’s as well. “I can help you.” The words came out quickly, before she could consider a dozen other ways of framing the suggestion.
She turned to look at her husband. He’d pulled his shirt off and was wrapping himself in a wine-colored dressing gown. His fingers stilled on the braid-edged silk. “Suzanne—”
“I’ve helped you in the past.”
“On several occasions I’d have been lost without you. But—”
“You can’t claim that this will be more dangerous than what we went through in Spain.”
“My God, wasn’t tonight danger enough for you?”
“Tonight proves that if people are after you, I’ll be in danger in any case. I’ll be better able to protect myself if I know what’s going on.”
He grimaced. “To think I thought Vienna would be a safe assignment.”
“And I can be of more help here than I was in Spain. If you want to get at the truth of what’s going on in Vienna’s salons, you’ll have to get a number of ladies to reveal their secrets. They’re more likely to confide in me.”
He regarded her in silence for a long interval. Then he stepped forward, hesitated a moment, and as though yielding to a compulsion, brushed his fingers against her cheek. “You’re an extraordinarily generous woman. After tonight, your help is the last thing I have the right to ask for.”
She caught his hand and drew it away from her face, her fingers gripping his own. “Malcolm, there are a great many things we don’t know about each other. But whatever I may have blurted out in the moment, I can’t believe you killed Princess Tatiana.”
His fingers clenched round her own, then went still. “You were asking the obvious question. It’s what I’d have asked of you in the same circumstances.” For a moment she saw remembered horror smash through his eyes. The brutal shock of finding Princess Tatiana dead, the stark reality that she was gone. He released her hand. “You have the instincts of an investigator.”
“Well then. I’d rather be in the midst of the investigation helping you than on the sidelines imagining things.” About the dangers he was in. About Princess Tatiana and how deeply her death had shaken him and what she had been to him in life.
A twisted smile played about his lips, though his eyes were dark and raw. “I undoubtedly don’t deserve you. But I can’t deny this will be easier with your help.”
She released a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. “You never fail to surprise me, darling. Thank you.”
He shook his head. “You’re not the one who should be saying thank you.”
A dozen questions trembled on her lips. She bit them back, because she had no right to be that sort of wife. And perhaps because she was afraid of the answers. Instead she turned, putting her back to him. “Can you undo my gown? I don’t want to wake Blanca.”
His fingers shook slightly as he unfastened the tapes and pins that held her gown together, but his touch was as gentle as ever. The brush of his hands sent a current through her as it had from their wedding night, unexpected that first night, now familiar but no less strong. It was scarcely the first time he’d helped her undress, though usually it was the prelude to something they couldn’t indulge in tonight. Something he surely wouldn’t want to indulge in, though for a moment she knew an impulse to fling herself into his arms and blot out the events of the evening.
“Did Tatiana really send you a note?” he asked as he tugged the last tape loose.
An effective antidote to amorous impulse. She turned round, the tattered gauze and satin of her gown slipping down to her waist. “Asking me to call at three in the morning.”
“Do you still have it?”
She hesitated. Easy enough to claim she had lost the note, and deception had become a protective instinct with her. But any evidence might be of help in the investigation. She reached into her corset. She had tucked the note there when she stripped off her gloves during their escape over the roofs.
Malcolm took the much-creased note and stared at it, his face carefully blanked (a trick he only employed, she had learned, when he was being very careful not to reveal anything).
“Is it her handwriting?” Suzanne asked.
“I can’t swear to it, but I think so.” He folded the note and put it in his dressing-gown pocket. “My apologies. I don’t know why Tatiana summoned you, but I’m sorry you were pulled into the middle of this.”
Suzanne removed the brooch from the bodice of her gown and placed it carefully on her dressing table. “As things played out, I’m rather glad I was there.”
“It was certainly very fortunate for me.”
She stepped out of her gown and put it in the laundry basket beside the dressing table for Blanca to see what she could salvage. “We never did get our story straight.”
“No. You received Tatiana’s note at the opera?”
She was rather surprised he remembered where she was supposed to have been this evening. “From a footman in the midst of the third act.”
“Who was with you at the opera?”
“Fitz and Eithne and Aline.” She started on the laces that ran down the front of her corset.
“None of them should make too much trouble.” Lord Fitzwilliam Vaughn, one of Malcolm’s fellow attachés, and his wife, Eithne, were close friends. Malcolm’s cousin Aline was visiting them from England and fiercely loyal to Malcolm. “What did you tell them about the note?”
“That Colin had been fussing earlier, and Blanca had sent word he was safely asleep. We all went on to Fanny von Arnstein’s after the opera, but Eithne had a headache and Aline was tired, so Fitz took them home soon after we arrived. I said Tommy Belmont would escort me back to the Minoritenplatz later.”
“So we can say I returned from Pressburg and went to Baroness Arnstein’s because I knew you’d be there,” Malcolm said in a quick, expressionless voice, his gaze armored as though to staunch a welling of shock and pain. “With the press of guests, her footmen will never be able to say for certain if I was there or not. Tatiana’s note was delivered to me there. You insisted on accompanying me to call on Tatiana, as you explained to the tsar and Metternich. We came into the Palm Palace through the side entrance just before three to find Tatiana murdered.”
“That seems to account for everything.” She slipped the unlaced corset from her shoulders and added it to the pile of clothing. “Where
did
you receive Princess Tatiana’s note?”
“She sent it after me.”
“She knew where to find you?”
He nodded.
While his wife hadn’t had the least idea where he was. Of course fellow agents were in many ways more intimate than married couples. Suzanne glanced down at her chemise. Her nightdress was across the room, where Blanca would have left it tucked beneath her pillow. Why on earth should she suddenly feel awkward being naked in front of her husband?
She pulled her chemise over her head, tugging a little too hard. She heard a stitch give way. By the time she emerged from the folds of linen, Malcolm had crossed to the bed to retrieve her nightdress. She undid the string on her drawers with deliberate unconcern, stepped out of them, and took the nightdress from her husband. She could feel his gaze on her, but she couldn’t have said what he was thinking or feeling.
She dropped the folds of lawn over her head and did up the ties at the neck. The night air cut through the thin fabric. Or perhaps that was reality sinking in. Malcolm wasn’t the only one feeling the cold shock of the night’s events.
She sat at the dressing table, removed her pearl earrings and necklace, and began to pull from her hair the pins she hadn’t lost in their escape over the roofs. Malcolm draped her dressing gown over her shoulders, then retreated to perch on the edge of the bed.
“Tell me about Princess Tatiana,” she said.
She heard him draw a breath. She met his gaze in the looking glass. The barriers were up in his eyes as though what he felt was too raw even to contemplate himself, let alone to share with his wife.
“Darling, I’m sorry,” she said, spinning round to look at him directly. “You needn’t—”