Authors: Teresa Grant
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Historical, #Romance, #Historical Romance, #Mystery & Suspense
Vienna Waltz (38 page)
“Rannoch. Thank God.” Adam Czartoryski sprang up from his chair in a private parlor at Café Hugel. He gripped Malcolm’s arms. “I confess I didn’t think Wilhelmine of Sagan could do it.”
“The duchess is not a woman to underestimate. Nor is my wife.”
Czartoryski smiled at Suzanne, who stood beside the door. “That I already knew.” He looked between them. “Metternich believed the story?”
“I wouldn’t quite say that,” Malcolm said. “But he had enough doubts to let me out of prison for the moment.”
“And Otronsky?”
“Metternich claims he and Hager have the matter in hand and will be on their guard at the opera gala.”
Czartoryski grimaced. “We can’t let it wait until then. Or trust them with it.”
“My thoughts exactly. Do you think you could help me break into Otronsky’s rooms in the Hofburg?”
“If necessary. But it may not come to that.” Czartoryski reached inside his coat. “I received this today.”
He drew out a sheet of plain writing paper, folded in four and sealed with a pin. The writing was in French.
If you want to know more about Otronsky’s plans, be in the library at the Zichys’ tonight, at eleven-thirty. Be sure you’re there in time to take cover. Remember to trust no one.
“It could be a trap,” Suzanne said, reading over Malcolm’s shoulder.
“Possibly,” Malcolm said. “But the last bit sounds as though it’s from our friend who spoke to me at the opera.”
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t a trap.”
“If so, he’s taking his time about springing it.”
“But you’ll be careful.”
The urgency in her voice startled him. “When am I not, sweetheart?”
“Surely you don’t expect me to take that seriously.” Her hands tightened on his shoulders. “Look after him for me, Prince Czartoryski.”
“I’ll do my best, madame.”
Suzanne curled her fingers round the superfine of her husband’s sleeve as they stepped out of the café. It was a ridiculous relief to be able to touch him.
Malcolm paused for a moment. A gust of wind had come up, rattling the sign of the café on its iron chains. He looked down at her, his breath warm on her face. “I haven’t said thank you yet. It seems quite inadequate.”
“I only did what you’d have done.”
“And perhaps not pulled off.”
She smoothed his cravat, crumpled from his night in prison, aware that her fingers were not quite steady. “False modesty doesn’t become you, darling.”
He lifted a hand and brushed his fingers against her cheek. “I don’t know how I ever managed to muddle through without you.”
“Very handily.” Her throat had turned thick.
“No. I was just too blind to realize how lost I was.”
Something in his gaze made her look quickly away. Because in that moment something she wanted desperately seemed so close she could feel its warmth, while at the same time she knew with a pang of certainty that it would always be out of reach. “We should get back to the Minoritenplatz and reassure Aline. And you must want to see Colin.”
Blanca nearly woke the sleeping Colin with her cry of excitement when Malcolm stepped into their dressing room. Malcolm squeezed her hand and bent to kiss his son. Then he and Suzanne went to the ladies’ sitting room, where they found Aline hunched over the escritoire.
She sprang to her feet and threw her arms round her cousin in an uncharacteristic display of affection. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more glad to see you.”
“Well, there was the time I helped you get the ink and Bordeaux out of the drawing room carpet just before Aunt Frances got home.”
“There is that.” She stepped back and studied his face. “Is everything all right now?”
“For the moment.”
“Not precisely reassuring. I know the sort of life you lead.” Aline glanced at the escritoire. “I decoded the paper. It was much more complicated than Aunt Arabella’s code. Pages of tables. I finally turned it into plain text, but I’m not sure what it means.”
Malcolm and Suzanne moved to the escritoire and stared down at the words copied in Aline’s quick, scrawling script.
A map of the route is attached. My emissary will go with you to make sure all goes according to plan. You’ll deliver the items in question to him after the operation, and we’ll go our separate ways.
A rough map of a section of northern Spain was sketched below.
“The coordinates and place names were in code,” Aline said. “Very clever. But I think I’ve got it right.”
Malcolm drew a sharp breath. “Good God—”
“I think I know who sent it,” Suzanne said. “He’ll be at the Zichys’ ball tonight. You aren’t the only one with work to do, darling.”
38
T
he buzz of conversation and clinking glasses in the Zichys’ salon stilled to silence as the British delegation entered the room. “I see what you mean,” Malcolm murmured to his wife. Her accounts of the attention she had drawn while he was in prison were nothing compared to the attention he himself drew, now that he had been released without being officially cleared of involvement in Princess Tatiana’s murder.
he buzz of conversation and clinking glasses in the Zichys’ salon stilled to silence as the British delegation entered the room. “I see what you mean,” Malcolm murmured to his wife. Her accounts of the attention she had drawn while he was in prison were nothing compared to the attention he himself drew, now that he had been released without being officially cleared of involvement in Princess Tatiana’s murder.
Castlereagh advanced into the room with an air of complete unconcern. Lady Castlereagh began chattering to Julie Zichy about tomorrow’s Beethoven concert. Malcolm had never thought to be so grateful for the good-natured prattle of his chief’s wife.
“Monsieur Rannoch.” Dorothée Périgord swept toward them in a cloud of gauzy draperies and pale pink satin. “It is so good to see you. You’ve been missed.”
“Thank you, Madame la Comtesse.” Malcolm bowed over her hand. “I have cause to be very grateful to you and your sister.”
Dorothée grinned, turning from woman of the world to schoolgirl in an instant. “One should always help one’s friends.”
“Diplomacy would be so much easier if everyone followed that maxim.”
Fitz and Eithne joined them, having exchanged greetings with the Zichys. “It’s like stepping into a play,” Fitz said. “I swear I don’t think I’ve had so many people looking at me since I ran the wrong way on the cricket field at Eton.”
“Poor Castlereagh.” Malcolm glanced at the foreign secretary, in earnest conversation with Count Nesselrode. “No one thought to find the staid British the center of such attention.”
“One simply has to brazen it out.” Eithne tucked her arm through her husband’s own. “Like Mary Feversham sweeping into Almack’s in scarlet silk after the business with Phillip Stanhope.”
Suzanne and Dorothée were claimed by Marie Metternich, who had been asked to play the pianoforte and wanted help choosing music. Fitz and Eithne drifted into conversation about tomorrow’s concert with Beethoven’s patron, Count Razumovsky, and Malcolm found himself standing beside Talleyrand.
The French foreign minister surveyed Malcolm with a shrewd gaze. “I thought you wouldn’t remain in prison long.”
“I’d say I was touched by your faith in my innocence if I didn’t think you meant something else entirely.”
“I have faith in your ingenuity, my boy, which is far more important. And in your wife’s. You’re to be congratulated. I caught a glimpse of her mettle while you were behind bars.”
Malcolm glanced across the room. Suzanne’s gown, the color of a midnight sky, stood out in the crowd. She had moved to a knot of people by the windows. As he watched, she lifted a white-gloved arm, circled by a gleaming pearl bracelet, and touched Frederick Radley on the shoulder. An unaccountable chill ran through him. “Yes,” he said, “I know it full well.”
“Drink some champagne and stop frowning.” Geoffrey Blackwell put a glass into Aline’s hand.
Aline’s fingers closed automatically round the chilled crystal. “You seem to be telling me to drink a lot lately. I wonder if Mama would approve.”
“Fanny?” Geoffrey laughed and touched his glass to hers. “She’d probably say you ought to drink more. You aren’t a child any longer, Allie.”
“Thank goodness you’re finally beginning to notice,” Aline said. Oh dear, had her single sip of champagne gone right to her head?
Instead of glancing away as she expected him to, Geoffrey regarded her for a moment, his gaze unreadable. “I’m not as blind as you may think me, Aline.”
“I never thought—” Aline took a sip of champagne, a rather bigger sip than she intended, and choked it down.
“I saw you frowning,” Geoffrey said. “While I grant there’s still more than enough worry to go round, matters aren’t quite so dire as they were a day ago.”
“I’m happier than I can say that Malcolm is out of prison. But nothing’s resolved.”
“Not yet.”
“Malcolm won’t let up until he learns the truth. But I can’t see the truth making anyone very happy.”
The light faded from Geoffrey’s keen gaze. “No. But it will at least end the questions.”
“And perhaps open a whole new set of them.”
“You’re a scientist, Allie. You understand about the need to keep pursuing the truth.”
“But people aren’t equations, as you pointed out. So much harder to predict. And so much more vulnerable.” She rubbed her arms, bare between her puffed sleeves and the top of her evening gloves. “Part of me wants to run home to London and bury myself in my books. And part of me thinks I’ll never be able to bear being safe and solitary again. So much that’s happened here has been unpleasant, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt more alive.” She thought of her mother’s house and the familiar comfort of her study. Why did it suddenly seem so desolate? “I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself after Vienna.”
Geoffrey turned his head and watched her for a moment, his gaze even more intent than usual. “You could marry me.”
The candlelight and clink of crystal and strains of a ländler faded away about her. The candle-warmed air pressed against her skin. “Are you that sorry for me?” she said, tightening her grip on her glass before she could drop it.
“Sorry for you? Haven’t I told you I’m not so altruistic, Allie? I’m not in the least sorry for you. I have no doubt you’ll make a splendid life for yourself under any circumstances. Perhaps a better life than I can offer you. In scrupulous fairness, I should advise you to consider your answer carefully.”
His voice was even more brisk than usual, but she had the oddest sense he was holding his breath. Her own breath seemed to have got bottled up in her throat. “You still haven’t told me why you made the offer.”
His gaze moved over her face. She felt it like the brush of fingertips. “Do you remember when I came home on leave last Christmas?” he asked.
“Of course. We put Christmas riddles into codes that could only be read under the microscope.”
“We spent a day locked in your mother’s yellow parlor and drank three pots of coffee. And I looked at you across those stacks of paper and twists of red ribbon and realized I was in love with you.”
Her heart, which had gone still, now seemed to be hammering in her throat. “You never—”
“And I’ve spent the last year telling myself it’s ridiculous and would never work, that I’m much too old for you, and I couldn’t give you the life you deserve. Or perhaps that’s merely been an excuse for my own cowardice.” His gaze lingered on her own. “Sometimes we have to take a risk, Allie.”
Aline leaned forward and let herself curl her fingers round his arm. “A year is nothing.” She lifted her face to his, close enough that she could feel his breath on her skin. “I think I fell in love with you when I was twelve years old.”
Malcolm slid his hand into his breeches pocket and eased his pistol into his palm as he and Adam Czartoryski took up positions behind the long velvet curtains in the Zichy library. The heavy fabric tickled his nose and cold air leaked round the glazing, but as hiding places went it ranked considerably higher than prickly underbrush in the Cantabrian Mountains, icy water in a cave off the Douro River, or precarious oak branches in a forest north of Toulouse.
Beside him, Czartoryski controlled even his breathing. He was a man bred up in intrigue.
The mantel clock struck half-past eleven with delicate chimes. After an interval that was probably less than a minute, though it dragged at his nerves, the barest creak of well-oiled hinges indicated the opening of the door. Soft-soled evening shoes brushed over the Aubusson carpet. The clink of crystal indicated a glass being poured.
The door eased open again.
“You’re late.” The voice, speaking slightly accented French, belonged to Otronsky. Malcolm had paid careful attention to his tones in recent days.
“Only a few minutes,” the second man said. “Wouldn’t do for us both to disappear from the ballroom at the same instant.”
“This isn’t a game.”
“Lord, everything in Vienna’s a game. This just happens to be one that could get us killed. Pour me one of those, will you?”
The second voice was lighter than Otronsky’s, with an edge of mockery. It tugged at Malcolm’s memory, but he couldn’t identify the speaker.
Crystal clinked again and liquid sloshed. “They’ve released Malcolm Rannoch from prison,” Otronsky said.
“So I heard.” Footfalls indicated the second man crossing the room. “A surprise move on Metternich’s part.”
“He’ll start investigating again. Which makes it all the more imperative we recover the papers.”
“Rannoch hasn’t been able to find them, either.”
“Yet,” Otronsky said.
“We could try following him and bash him over the head when he finds them.”
Something in the ironic tones tugged at Malcolm’s memory. Foils clashing. A glass of beer on a scarred tabletop. Sunlight shooting through the amber liquid. Gregory Lindorff, Tatiana’s former lover. And, it seemed, Otronsky’s fellow conspirator.
“It isn’t funny,” Otronsky said.
Lindorff was silent for a moment. The footfalls and the change in the direction of his voice indicated he’d moved across the room. “If we could recover the papers Princess Tatiana took, would it change anything?”
“No.” Otronsky’s voice was sharp. “We proceed with the plan one way or another. Not turning squeamish, are you?”
“The risks—”
“The risks are far greater if we don’t act.”
“Greater than treason?” Lindorff’s voice turned harsh.
“There are worse things than treason.”
“That’s all very well to say over a glass of brandy, but if we’re caught—”
“We have no choice,” Otronsky said. “She’s become too much of a liability.”
Malcolm frowned at the folds of bronze damask.
She?
She?
Suzanne studied Frederick Radley across the polished rectangular table in one of the Zichys’ salons. His face was flushed with one too many glasses of champagne. Or brandy. Or both. His eyes glittered with overconfidence. Difficult to believe that face had once genuinely fascinated her.
“So,” he said. “We’re back where we were when you did me the honor of calling on me.”
“Not quite. More information is on the table. I know you saw me going into Princess Tatiana’s room alone on the night of the murder. And that you saw the letter Princess Tatiana wrote to Malcolm but never sent. And Malcolm knows about my past association with you.”
He raised his brows. “You told him?”
“You left me little choice.”
Radley’s gaze darted over her face. “And?”
She smiled, though her lips trembled. “I owe you my thanks.”
“For?”
“Making me realize my husband is less a prisoner of the rules of his world and upbringing than I had thought.”
Radley folded his arms across his chest. The gold braid on his dress uniform shimmered in the candlelight. “You went to great lengths to get him out of prison. It begins to appear your marriage is less bloodless than I thought. Or was it gratitude?”
“My marriage is no concern of yours.”
“Your happiness will always be my concern, my darling.”
Suzanne let herself indulge in a deep laugh. “It’s a bit late for that, Freddy. Much easier to fight with the gloves off.” She walked round the side of the table and paused where the candlelight fell full on her face. “I know why Tatiana was blackmailing you.”
Radley controlled his shock of surprise to only a faint flash in his eyes. “Really? Then you know more than I do.”
“To achieve her objectives, Tatiana needed the support of the chief players at the Congress.” Suzanne moved toward Radley. “She thought she had ways to get Prince Metternich and Tsar Alexander to go along with her. But Castlereagh was more of a challenge. She was trying to force Malcolm to intercede with Castlereagh on her behalf. But though Castlereagh values Malcolm’s abilities, Malcolm can’t even persuade him to show more consideration for the self-determination rights of the Poles and the Saxons, let alone to accede to Princess Tatiana’s demands. So she needed other ways to reach Castlereagh. And who better than a man who is both a war hero and a crony of Castlereagh’s beloved half brother?”
Radley hitched himself up on the edge of the table. “You flatter me. But Princess Tatiana and I never had the sort of relationship for her to have that type of influence over me.” He lifted a hand and brushed it against her side curls. “I’ve always preferred brunettes to redheads.”
“That wasn’t the type of influence she wielded.” Suzanne rested her fingertips on the table edge and looked sideways at him. “Tatiana knew about what you’d done in Spain.”
This time the flash of fear in Radley’s eyes was more pronounced. “You intrigue me. Do, pray, enlighten me about these mysterious actions of mine.”
“In the summer of 1812, Malcolm and Tatiana were working together in the Peninsula.”
Radley gave a rough laugh. “If you’re gullible enough to believe that’s all—”
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