Authors: Teresa Grant
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Historical, #Romance, #Historical Romance, #Mystery & Suspense
Vienna Waltz (9 page)
Yet that didn’t change the fact that apparently Malcolm’s best friend among the British delegation was betraying his wife.
And had a motive to have murdered the princess.
9
M
alcolm pushed open the door of Café Hugel, where he had arranged to meet Suzanne at one o’clock. The smell of rich Viennese coffee and bittersweet chocolate wafted toward him. Café Hugel was a favorite haunt of Viennese intellectuals and students. Few members of the aristocracy were to be found within the confines of its faded rose-and-cream-papered walls and slightly tarnished chandeliers, which perhaps accounted for why it was also not a favorite rendezvous for the Congress attendees.
alcolm pushed open the door of Café Hugel, where he had arranged to meet Suzanne at one o’clock. The smell of rich Viennese coffee and bittersweet chocolate wafted toward him. Café Hugel was a favorite haunt of Viennese intellectuals and students. Few members of the aristocracy were to be found within the confines of its faded rose-and-cream-papered walls and slightly tarnished chandeliers, which perhaps accounted for why it was also not a favorite rendezvous for the Congress attendees.
A fair-haired young woman in a blue-sashed white frock was singing “Porgi, amor,” accompanied by a serious-faced young man playing the violin. Her voice was a bit thin but sweet, and it caught the song’s plaintive pain. A wave of loss and fury washed over him. For a moment the woman singing the song had red-gold hair and a richer voice. How long ago had he last heard Tatiana frame those notes?
He stood stock still for a moment, gaze fixed on a chip in the white-painted cornice, willing his mind back to the present. One step at a time and he could get through this. With a deliberate breath, he moved into the café’s quieter back room. Newspapers rustled and pens scratched against paper as he made his way between the tables. He caught the words “Schiller,” “Goethe,” and “Beethoven,” and once he was quite sure he heard Tatiana’s name. A name he was now braced to hear. Word of her murder had spread everywhere. Halfway across the room, he glimpsed his wife at a table in the shadows at the back.
His wife. For the longest time after they married, he’d had difficulty framing the words, even to himself. Up until the moment he’d realized the best protection he could offer Suzanne was marriage, he’d been convinced he would never marry anyone. Even now, he would wake to find her beside him, or walk into their rooms to be greeted by her cheerful call of “darling,” and be struck anew by the terrifying wonder of it.
Her hands were curled round a cup of
kaffee mit schlag,
her gaze focused on the table before her
.
She wore a spencer of a shiny rose-colored fabric. Her reticule lay on the table, the sort of frivolous little ribboned thing she loved, though it seemed so at odds with the woman she was beneath the surface. He studied the curve of her neck above the ruffled collar of her spencer, the strands of dark hair escaping her bonnet, the angle of her shoulders. He would know her anywhere. And yet he sometimes felt as though she were an alien creature. A selkie mated to a mortal, Persephone trapped in the underworld.
kaffee mit schlag,
her gaze focused on the table before her
.
She wore a spencer of a shiny rose-colored fabric. Her reticule lay on the table, the sort of frivolous little ribboned thing she loved, though it seemed so at odds with the woman she was beneath the surface. He studied the curve of her neck above the ruffled collar of her spencer, the strands of dark hair escaping her bonnet, the angle of her shoulders. He would know her anywhere. And yet he sometimes felt as though she were an alien creature. A selkie mated to a mortal, Persephone trapped in the underworld.
She looked up as he made his way between the tables. Beneath the white satin brim of her bonnet, her blue-green eyes were dark with disquiet.
He closed the distance between them in two strides and dropped into a chair beside her. “What? What is it?”
Suzanne’s fingers tightened round her coffee cup. “According to Dorothée, Fitzwilliam Vaughn was Princess Tatiana’s lover.”
“Good God.” Even in death Tania could take him by surprise.
“You didn’t know?” Her gaze moved over his face.
“No.” He pushed a hand through his hair. “If I had—” What would he have done? Ordered Tatiana to stop? She’d been an adult. As was Fitz. For some reason, he found himself hearing Fitz four nights ago, arguing passionately about the need to reform the debt laws as they shared a late glass of whisky in the attachés’ sitting room. “The damned fool.”
“I can’t quite believe—” Suzanne took a sip of coffee as though it would steady her.
Malcolm laid his hand over her own and squeezed her fingers. She gave a twisted smile. “After two months in Vienna, you wouldn’t think I’d be surprised by the news of any love affair.”
Fitz’s glowing face when he first announced his betrothal to Eithne flashed into Malcolm’s mind. Malcolm had been struck by amazement that anyone could feel that way. And at the same time he’d been conscious of a pang that was akin to jealousy. “It’s different when it’s your friends.”
Her gaze shifted away to focus on the faint remnants of a wine stain on the white tablecloth. “I like Fitz and Eithne. I suppose I liked believing two people could be so happy.”
“Scratch the surface of most marriages and one’s likely to be surprised by what one finds.”
Her hand went still beneath his own. “Sometimes your cynicism surprises me, Malcolm.”
“Realism.” Images of his mother on the arm of a lover and his father flirting with a mistress came to mind, too commonplace to be shocking. “I don’t assume anyone is what they appear to be.”
“Nor do I, in theory.” She withdrew her hand from his clasp and took a sip of coffee.
“Even in this very public life we lead, it’s difficult to really understand what goes on between any two people.”
A waiter brought him a cup of coffee. He took a sip that sat bitter on his tongue. “Annina told me Tatiana had begun seeing another lover recently. Someone she was secretive about, probably because of Tsar Alexander’s jealousy. It must have been Fitz.”
“Was he working with her for Castlereagh, too?” Suzanne spoke in the cool voice of an investigator.
“As far I know, I was the only one in the British delegation dealing with Tatiana.”
Her winged brows drew together, dark against her pale skin. “It gives Fitz—”
“A motive. Bloody hell.” Fitz, perhaps more than most husbands, would not want to lose his wife’s good favor. He cared for Eithne—Malcolm would swear to that. And his political ambitions rested on the influence of Eithne’s powerful father, who would not take kindly to his daughter being hurt. “Did you learn anything else from Dorothée?”
“Princess Tatiana and the Duchess of Sagan quarreled two days ago. Dorothée heard her sister say something about ‘exorbitant.’ Could Princess Tatiana have been blackmailing the duchess?”
Malcolm turned his cup between his hands. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“Meaning she’s blackmailed people before?”
“I suspect so.” Why, after all that had passed between them, did he feel this perverse loyalty to Tatiana’s good name? More loyalty than she’d felt herself, he’d dare swear.
“What did you learn from Annina?”
He briefly recounted their interview, omitting mention of the letters Annina had returned to him.
“Do you think the killer took this box in which the princess kept her secret papers?”
“Perhaps. But it’s also possible Tatiana decided to move the box away from her lodgings for safekeeping.”
“If Princess Tatiana was blackmailing the duchess, any material she had damaging to the duchess was probably in that box. Blackmail could account for Princess Tatiana acting as though she was making a high-stakes wager.”
“Perhaps. But the Duchess of Sagan isn’t precisely secretive about her love affairs. It’s difficult to imagine what Tatiana might have been blackmailing her about.”
Suzanne turned her head toward him. He caught a whiff of her perfume, roses and vanilla and some other scent that remained tantalizingly elusive. “Everyone has secrets,” his wife said.
“Especially in Vienna.” Malcolm took a sip of coffee. “The duchess should be at the Metternichs’ masked ball this evening. Can you contrive to talk to her?”
“I should be able to, though she won’t confide in me the way Dorothée does.”
“I need to talk to Fitz.” Malcolm grimaced at the prospect of the interview. “But I want to call on Talleyrand first.”
Suzanne tightened the ribbons on her bonnet. “I’ll have our things laid out for the Metternichs’ ball.”
He stretched a hand across the table but stilled it before his fingers met her own. “You were right last night. Dorothée Périgord would never have confided in me about Fitz and Tatiana’s affair.”
Suzanne nodded. “I’m trying to muster my wits and courage to face Eithne. I can’t imagine what she must—” She made rather too much of a show of tucking a strand of hair beneath the rose-colored velvet and white satin of her bonnet.
“Suzanne—”
She straightened her shoulders.
He knew it would be best not to speak. Far better for her to suspect what she did about his relationship with Tatiana than the truth. Besides, he doubted she’d believe even the most fervent denial. And yet—
“I happen to take vows rather seriously,” he said.
“Malcolm, you needn’t—”
“I worked with Tatiana. I was fond of her. But I wasn’t her lover.”
Suzanne’s gaze remained on his face, but he couldn’t read what she was thinking. Her defenses were as well constructed as his own. “You don’t owe me an explanation, darling.”
“Do you believe me?”
She took a sip of coffee. “Of course.”
He smiled with equal parts affection and regret. He wouldn’t have believed a similar denial. “Liar.”
She shook her head. “I know what our marriage is, Malcolm. And what it isn’t. I don’t want to turn into a clinging wife.”
He touched her hand, lightly, afraid it was an intrusion. “I don’t think you could if you tried.”
Her answering smile was sweet and bitter and cut straight to his heart.
“Herr Rannoch?”
The tentative voice came from a short distance away. A slight young man stood a few feet from the table, fingering the brim of the worn top hat he held in his hands. Dark hair curled in disorder about his face and wire-rimmed spectacles shielded his eyes.
Malcolm pushed back his chair. “You have the advantage of me.”
The spectacled man stepped closer. He was very young, Malcolm saw, probably still in his teens. “Can you tell me—are the rumors about Princess Tatiana true?”
Malcolm swallowed, his throat scorched. “I’m afraid so.”
A spasm of grief crossed the young man’s face. Malcolm touched his arm and pressed him into an empty chair. “Sit. It’s a shock to everyone.”
Tears welled behind the young man’s spectacles. He pulled off the spectacles and dashed an impatient hand across his face, then dug in his pocket and tugged out a handkerchief, covered with pencil scratches. Musical notes, Malcolm realized. He pulled out his own handkerchief and put it in the young man’s hand instead. “How did you know the princess?” Tatiana’s tastes hadn’t tended to run to schoolboys, though with Tania one never knew.
“She did me the kindness to take an interest in my music.” The young man dried his face with Malcolm’s handkerchief and hooked his spectacles back over his ears.
“Ah.” Malcolm glanced at the handkerchief with the musical notations, dropped forgotten on the table. “You play the pianoforte? Or the violin?” He signaled a waiter to bring a cup of coffee.
“The pianoforte.” The young man stared at the interwoven white threads of the tablecloth, as though looking into a reality he could not accept. “And I compose. When I’m not teaching in my father’s school.”
“Tatiana loved music.” For a moment, Malcolm could feel the warmth of Tania’s arm gliding across his own as they played a cross-hand duet.
The waiter brought the coffee. Malcolm stirred a generous amount of sugar into it and put it into the young musician’s hand. The boy stared into the steaming cup for a moment, then took a quick swallow. “Last month she attended the premiere of a mass I composed. My first.”
“Of course,” Malcolm said, the pieces falling into place in his head. “You must be Franz Schubert.”
The young man blinked. “How do you know?”
“Tatiana mentioned the mass. She was very moved.” Malcolm turned to Suzanne. “My wife, Suzanne.”
Schubert inclined his head. “Frau Rannoch.”
“Princess Tatiana spoke to you after the mass?” Suzanne asked.
Schubert nodded, flushing. “She said she had little interest in religion, but that the music—that it transported her.”
Malcolm smiled. “That sounds very like Tatiana.”
The young man looked up with a quick answering smile. “She could say the most outrageous things. And yet she always knew just how to put one at ease. She was one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.”
“Yes, she could be kind,” Malcolm said, though it wasn’t a word he’d often heard associated with Tania. He could feel Suzanne’s gaze on him.
“She asked me if I had any music of a more secular sort, and I brought her some of my songs.” Schubert took another fortifying sip of sugar-laced coffee.
Malcolm folded the handkerchief with the musical notes, careful not to smudge the pencil, and handed it back to Schubert. “How did you know I was acquainted with Tatiana?”
“She spoke of you, sir.” Schubert tucked the handkerchief into his pocket. “Frequently. She said you were the one man in Vienna she knew she could—” Schubert hesitated. Though he didn’t look at Suzanne, Malcolm knew he was wondering at the wisdom of speaking so freely before Tatiana’s friend’s wife. “The one man in Vienna she knew she could rely upon.”
Malcolm leaned back in his chair. “Princess Tatiana was an old friend.”
“Of course.” Schubert cast a quick glance round the café, then hunched forward. “The last time I saw her she was most anxious for you to return to Vienna, sir.”
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