woman, to be sure.” He cleared his throat. “And when would you like the ceremony to take place?”
“Sometime this week, if possible.”
Moore nodded. “Thursday, shall we say? At eleven in the chapel here, at the palace. You may arrange the details with my secretary.” He stared down at the murky liquid in his cup, a strange smile curling the edges of his lips. “Well, well, well,” he said as if to himself. “How very interesting.”
This time he found Madame Champagne seated at a small round table placed so that it caught the sun streaming in through the oriel window overlooking the fashionable thoroughfare. She was an attractive woman somewhere in her late forties or fifties, petite and slender, with pale blond hair just beginning to fade gracefully to white. Her features were fine boned and elegant, their delicacy thrown into sharp relief when she turned her head and he saw she wore a black silk patch over her right eye.
She watched him cross the room toward her, a wry smile curving her full, generous mouth. “Viscount Devlin, I assume?” She gave the title its French inflection,
“May I?” he asked, drawing out the chair opposite her.
She spread her hands wide. “Please. I know why you are here.”
Sebastian sat. “You do?”
“Monsieur Poole and I had an interesting conversation.” She gave a barely perceptible nod to the burly, gray- bearded man behind the counter, who set to work preparing two coffees. “Alexander Ross was murdered; is this not so?”
“I never said that.”
“It was unnecessary.” She tilted her head to one side, her remaining eye narrowing as she assessed him. He noticed she tended to keep the right side of her face turned away. She said, “I trust you have a good reason for this assumption?”
“I have.”
She nodded. “Me, I suspected as much.”
“Why is that?”
She shrugged. “When a healthy young man who is involved with dangerous people dies suddenly ... Well, let us just say that if there’s one thing I have learned in this life, it is not to take anything at face value.”
Sebastian waited while the gray-bearded man placed the coffee on the table before them, then withdrew. “How long have you been in London?”
“Nearly ten years. I went first to Italy, then Majorca.” She leaned back in her chair, her fingers playing with her cup, an enigmatic smile touching her lips. “I was acquainted with your mother, you know. You are quite like her in many ways ... although not in all.”
Sebastian held himself very still. Some eighteen years before, on a hot, joyless summer day after the death of Sebastian’s two older brothers, the Countess of Hendon had staged her own death and disappeared to the Continent with her latest lover. He had mourned his mother for half his life before discovering that she was, in fact, alive.
It had been but the first of several unpleasant truths he had learned.
He’d tried in the months since that discovery to trace her fate. His agents had followed her to Venice and then to France, where they hit a wall built by war and an inexplicable, fearful silence.
Now he asked, his voice calm and casual and everything he was not, “You knew her in Venice?”
“Yes. She lived in a crumbling old palace on the Grand Canal with ...” Her voice trailed off.
“Her lover?” he supplied.
A sad, sympathetic smile touched her lips. “Yes. She used to give wonderful musical evenings—it’s how I came to know her. Her lover was a talented composer as well as a poet, you see. They were quite happy. But then, he died.”
Sebastian nodded. According to the last report he’d received, Lady Hendon had eventually taken up with one of Napoleon’s generals, but he had no way of knowing if that was still true.
Angelina Champagne reached out to touch her fingertips briefly, unexpectedly, to the back of his hand. “You need have no fear that I will speak of these things to others. The past is dead, and we who are left alive must go on, yes?”
She paused to take a slow sip of her coffee. There was a fragile, ethereal beauty to her features, a tautness that hinted at sadness and tragedy borne with a quiet stoicism and something else—something mysterious and well hidden. She said, “You know Ross was with the Foreign Office?”
“Are you saying you think his work at the Foreign Office had something to do with his death?”
“You doubt it? All of Europe has been at war for—what? More than two decades. Over the years, alliances have shifted and recombined, again and again. But it’s my belief that one day, historians will look back on this summer and see it as a pivotal moment in time.”
“You mean, because of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia?”
“Even without the successes of Wellington in Spain, it was most unwise. But as the situation currently stands?” She pursed her lips with contempt. “It goes beyond folly to madness. Tens of thousands will die. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. We have lost too many already—so many dead, so much of what once made France great, destroyed. And now this.”
He wondered how many relatives she still had in France, perhaps even serving in the legions that were marching on Moscow as they spoke. He said, “Napoleon claims the Czar left him no alternative.”
She let out her breath in an elegant sound of disgust. “There are always alternatives. The Swedes and Russians have ended their war with the Treaty of St. Petersburg, while the Treaty of Bucharest has ended the Russo-Turkish War. With their northern and southern flanks thus protected, the Russians will be able to throw all of their forces against the French.”
“Except they’re not facing just the French,” Sebastian reminded her. “Napoleon has succeeded in cementing a new alliance to bring the Prussians and Austrians with him against Russia.”
“Only because Prussia’s King Frederick William knew his choice was between a military alliance with Napoleon and the loss of his crown.”
“And Austria?”
“Austria has little to lose and much to gain from a war between France and Russia. Metternich knows this.”
She was an unusual woman, shrewd and well versed in current events and not the least hesitant to state her opinions. Sebastian studied the stark line of the tie for her eye patch, the sun-kissed skin of her cheek. In an age when most gentlewomen took excruciating pains to protect their delicate complexions from the sun, Madame Champagne obviously deliberately sought it out, and he found himself wondering why.
He said, “You take an interest in diplomatic affairs.”
“War tends to make us all students of diplomacy, does it not? There is a story that Napoleon once told the widow of the Marquis de Condorcet that he detested women who meddled in politics. Do you know her reply?”
Sebastian shook his head.
“She said, ‘You are right, of course, General. But in a country where one cuts off women’s heads, it is natural that they should wish to know the reason why.’”
Madame Condorcet had been a widow because the Revolution sent her husband, the famous
As if aware of the train of his thoughts, she said, “My husband was Baron Jean-Baptiste Champagne. He was killed in the September Massacres, in 1792.”
Sebastian had heard of Jean-Baptiste Champagne. Like the Comte de Virieu and Lally-Tollendal, Champagne
