Page 1 of The Spy Who Loved Her
Chapter One
16thof January, 1829
Shortly before midnight
Nearly midnight, now. Rafe Beaumont lingered in the darkness that wreathed the quiet street in Marylebone, his cold hands shoved into his pockets and his gaze upon the grand house that sprawled out like a large and lazy cat, rising above the line of bare trees shading the walk. Only seven minutes left before a new day would begin. He hadn’t seen the telltale light of a lamp through the drawn curtains just yet, but he knew he would. This year was the latest she’d ever been, the closest to midnight it had ever come without sign of her.
The house was silent and dark; almost eerie in its quiet, given the madhouse that he knew the place must be in the daylight hours. His breath frosted the air in a misty puff of white, and he turned up the collar of his coat against the chill. At least it hadn’t rained today, as it had on this day last year. An umbrella made a man ever so much more conspicuous, and so he’d stood his interminable vigil in the thick of the freezing rain and had ended up with a wretched case of pneumonia for his troubles.
There. The sudden glow of a lamp there in the far corner of the house, glittering intermittently between the spindly, naked branches of trees as it moved past window after window, toward the sitting room she favored. Her presence revealed at last, within a quiet room far removed from the chaos that comprised the rest of the house. Probably it was one of the few places that she could slip away for a bit of privacy, some necessary silence to sit and think.
As she did now. Probably she did often, though he wasn’t fool enough to come frequently enough to make a certain judgment of it. Just this night.This onenight.
It had become a tradition at this juncture—though she couldn’t know it—which he observed on those years in which he found himself in London. Histradition, in point of fact, to quietly pay his respects to the woman whose life he had ruined. A sort of penance he had long observed, to share the darkness with her in just a few moments of quiet contemplation for what had been lost. All that he had stolen from her.
The light creeping through the drawn curtains revealed the silhouette of a man who had come to join her. Chris, he was certain. Chris, at least, had the right to join her there as they waited for the moment to arrive. A ritual all their own, and one upon which he could never intrude.
Rafe dug his watch once more from his pocket and turned the glass face to the scant moonlight just in time to watch the minute hand tick over as the day began anew. Midnight at last. January the seventeenth.
Ten years to the day since Lady Emmeline Prescott—Emma—had become a widow. Since hehadmadeher a widow.
And she didn’t even know it.
She didn’t even know he existed.
∞∞∞
“My lady?”
Emma rose from the large armchair in which she had settled only moments ago with a glass of brandy. “Neil,” she said, setting her glass aside upon the table near her chair. “It’s near to midnight. You ought to have retired hours ago.” It carried an inflection of mild rebuke, but then Neil had always been something more than just a butler to her.
“Don’t be a scold, Em. ‘E ‘ad to be up to let me in.” The unrefined speech seared her ears just as Kit stepped into the room, waving Neil away. “And don’t fuss, neither,” he said. “I came ‘round the back.”
“You didn’t have to keep my butler up to do it.” She ought to have expected him. He hadcome every year on this day for a decade now. But she had always thought that he considered it an obligation to which he tended out of duty alone. He had never wanted to beclose, in the way that siblings might be.
She rather suspected that, were he ever to claim a connection with herpublicly, he would be certain to stress the halfsiblings they were. But neither of them had had much love for their shared father to begin with, so she supposed she could not blame him for his refusal to acknowledge the connection.
“I’ll let m’self out,” Kit said to Neil, thrusting his gloved hand through his thick gold hair as he collapsed into the chair beside Emma’s. “Won’t even make off wiv the silver.”
Emma hid a reluctant smile behind her glass as she nodded to Neil, who silently quit the room. Probably Kit would steal a spoon or two just to be contrary. But she had more than enough silver and wouldn’t note the loss. “You’re dropping your aitches again,” she said. “Sometimes I think you do it only to irritate me.”
“Ain’t my fault they go wanderin’ off sometimes,” Kit said, with a gesture toward the decanter of brandy that sat upon the table. “Pour me a glass, Em.” And then, “Looks like your boy’s all grown up.”
“Neil? Yes, well, it’s been almost ten years.” He’d been the very first boy that Kit had brought to her, years ago, only a few months after she’d lost Ambrose. When her house had been so big, so empty, and so damned silent. When she had wandered through halls that had echoed with her grief. When she had waded through the very thick of it, like slogging through the murky waters of the Thames. So cold. Cold and silent as a grave.
She might have made the whole of the house into a mausoleum for herself and buried herself within it, if Kit had not appeared that night, holding a scrawny little boy by the collar of his shirt. The firstboy. The very first one.
A pickpocket, he’d said, employed by some kidsman or other, who’d tried clumsily to lift his pocket watch. Kit hadn’t wanted to turn the boy loose upon the streets, or to send him home to his employer with nothing to show for the day’s labors.
She could well remember the jut of the Neil’s ribs through his sallow skin, the dirt and grime that had caked him. She had wondered, just briefly, if the child might have been Kit’s get. If he had intended to foist the child off upon her to be rid of him himself.
But no—Kit had trulybelieved himself to be doing her some sort of favor. And he had thrust the child in her direction, eyes averted, as he had said in that appalling underclass accent, “Couldn’t have none o’ yer own, aye, Em? Then take this‘un.” And then he had taken himself off, content to leave the child in her care.
And she had taken Neil in. Because her heart had wrenched for thehalf-starved child, who had looked so fearful, so anxious. BecauseKithad brought him to her, and she suspected that he had done it because he knew something of Neil’s situation himself. She had thought to have him bathed and fed, to let him sleep in a comfortable bed for an evening, and then to send him on his way in the morning with a few coins. At least enough to buy his way back into his gang.
Only, once Neil had been bathed and fed, he’d recovered a more amiable disposition. And Emma had found herself diverted from the quiet, from the cold, from the emptiness that shadowed her every waking moment. A tiny thought had hovered within her mind, which she had tried to chase to the far reaches, certain that it wouldn’t matter. Certain that although she had tucked the boy into a bed, he would no doubt escape in the night and be gone come morning.
But he hadn’t. He hadn’t found a convenient window to let himself out of, or made off with as much silver as he could carry. He had been awake with the sun, waiting for her in the kitchens when she had at last roused herself, and they had…considered one another. And that thought—the one she had tried to shove away—had come back to the forefront of her mind.
