Page 49 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“Did you—did you kill him?”
“No,” he said, and there was a thread of regret in his voice for it. “Death would have been too swift and too kind. He lives on as a broken man, and I have the pleasure of knowing that his sins will haunt him for the remainder of his miserable, pathetic life.” He clasped his hands before him, his shoulders sinking. “But I was caught,” he said. “I was caught, and I would have been transported for life, if Sir Roger had not interceded on my behalf.”
Sir Roger. Another breath, settling into lungs that struggled to contain it. “Sir Roger? Sir Roger Banfield?”
Kit’s face changed minutely. “You know him?”
“Yes, I—well, not well,” she said. “He was an acquaintance of Ambrose’s. I was given to understand that they were business partners, that they shared some mutual investments.”
“He was our superior,” Rafe said. “Our contact at the Home Office. He placed us together, knowing that together we could source information from every echelon of society, from the lowest rungs to the highest heights.”
Emma released a shaky breath, and it felt like she wilted as it escaped her lungs. She had never suspected—not once. Probably no one else had noticed, either. Her husband had been aspy, years before she had even met him, and she had never known. Had never given it a moment’s thought.
“Rafe and Ambrose,” Kit said, “they didn’t haveto do it. Not like I did. I was forced into it. Five years of service in exchange for my freedom. But I had already developed a reputation for harvesting information, and so I was useful. Toouseful to throw away on transportation. Rafecame from a good family, and Ambrose was wealthy outright. I assumed they did it for love of their country.” His eyes sheared away from hers as a muscle jumped in his jaw. “As it turned out, only one of them did.”
Her heart lurched in her chest. “You’re certain?” she asked. “You’re certain Ambrose was a—a—” But she couldn’t force herself to say the word.
“I caught him at it,” Kit said. “We trusted him implicitly, you see. You have to, when you’re in that position. You have to trust your partners.” He heaved a great sigh, rubbed at his forehead. “You must understand,” he said. “We relied upon him for years. Rafe spent much of his time abroad, I stayed within England, and Ambrose frequently traveled between us to carry our messages and orders, to keep secret matters of national importance. And there wasn’t even a moment we held even the slightest sliver of suspicion for him. Not until…that night.”
Somehow, instinctively, she knew exactly the night he meant. The one Ambrose had died. The night she had become a widow. Every bit of her rebelled at the thought, every tiny muscle stringing itself tight and aching. “No,” she whispered defensively. “No, he—he was attacked. It was a robbery gone awry.”
Gravely, Kit shook his head. “It was…convenient,” he said, “to let that be the story that got out. To conceal the depths of Ambrose’s treachery, in light of what we had learned of him. But that isn’t what happened, Em.”
Something like a sob clawed at her throat, scratched with razor-sharp talons to escape. She pressed her palm to her mouth, felt the hot beat of her breaths against it until she had forced it down once more. “How did it happen?” she asked, in a voice torn by the lies she had been fed, the ones she had swallowed down all these long years.
Kit shoved one hand through his hair, blowing out a harsh breath. He cast his gaze toward the table between them, as if he could not quite look her in the eye. “Rafe had returned home from France,” he said, “probably a fortnight before. We had resumed our weekly meetings, but only just.”
Thursdays, she thought absently, with a rising sense of hysteria.Theyhad been Ambrose’s Thursday appointments.KitwasRafe’sstanding Thursday appointment.
“Probably,” Kit said, “he’d grown complacent. Convinced he’d pulled the wool so firmly over our eyes that there was no great need for caution. And, largely, he was right. Until the night I caught him. He used the same damned tavern, Em, the same oneat which we met. I only meant to pop in for pint, but I saw him there, atourtable—with the subject of one of myinvestigations. A man I’d been surveilling for some time, a man long suspected to be one amongst a network of smugglers and counterfeiters who had been active during the war.” He swallowed audibly, his brows lowering over his eyes. “He was passing the man information,” he said. “Everything I’d shared with him a few days before. Everything I knew already, and everything I only suspected.”
“Why?” Emma croaked. “What purpose would it serve?”
“I can only assume he meant to help the man evade the authorities. To keep the details of his own involvement—his family’s activities during the war—from coming to light.” Briefly his eyes closed. “He paid the man off, Em, to continue to keep his secrets. And he passed along what I had compiled to prevent the man from getting caught up in the net the Home Office had cast for him. He didn’t see me. But I—I had seen enough. I knew he would have to be taken into custody, but it wasn’t possible in the middle of a crowded pub. It would have to be done with more subtlety, or I’d risk my own security, my own secrets coming to light. So I slipped out of the tavern, found a stranger willing to carry a carefully-worded message to Rafe, and another to Sir Roger, and I waited outside for Ambrose to emerge. I waited for Rafe to arrive. And I hoped—Ihoped—that there would be some reasonable explanation.”
By the tightness of his mouth, by the clench of his fingers into fists, Emma knew that there had been no such explanation. “You killed him,” she said, and felt the blood leave her face in a rush that left her woozy.
“Wish to God I had. I’ve got blood enough on my hands already, and you—you’d have forgiven me for it.”
Him. She would forgivehim. But not—not Rafe. Her stomach heaved, and she clapped her hand over her mouth as she retched reflexively. “Rafe killed Ambrose. Rafe killed my husband.” It didn’t sound real. She couldn’t make the words make sense in her head, as if some part of her staunchly refused to accept the reality of them.
“Rafe had a split second, Em, to make the decision. And if he had done differently, I’d likely be dead.”
“What?” Still the nausea had not faded, and the conflict between her heart and her head raged on. She heard the words only distantly, as if they had been spoken to someone else.
“He arrived only moments before Ambrose emerged, and I—I was too damned angry to think clearly. I dragged Ambrose into the alley behind the pub to detain him, made some rather indelicate accusations. Which Ambrosedenied, naturally.”
Naturally. As if anything about any of this wasnatural.
“Ambrose tried to pit Rafe against me. To suggest that I was mistaken, that I had misunderstood. And he wanted to believe it. Hell,Iwanted to believe it. But I knew what I had seen, what I had heard. I was resolute, Rafe was bewildered, and Ambrose—Ambrose was desperate. ‘Think of Emma,’ he said. As if it were a damned threat.”
That sick feeling slid up her throat, and her tongue tasted the sourness of bile.
“I planted him a facer for that,” Kit said in a dull voice. “For using you as leverage. But he’d meant to provoke me into getting closer, and it gave him the opportunity to get hold of my pistol. We struggled for it, Ambrose and I, and Rafe—Rafe had to make a choice. A split-second decision, whose word to trust. I like to think he chose rightly. It is because of that choice that I was only grazed when Ambrose managed to get his finger on the trigger. I’m certain Rafe didn’t intend to kill him, but it was dark. So damned dark. The ball pierced Ambrose’s back, entered his heart. He was dead nearly instantly.”
Her husband had gone out one evening and had not returned. Then the authorities had called upon her, to tell her that he never would.
And still—she would have made the same choice. Emma sucked in a breath, shocked by the instinctive, horrific thought, but it remained steadfast and undeniable there at the back of her brain. Rafe had chosen the right life to save. But, oh, how she had suffered for it then. How she suffered for it now, for this new knowledge inflicted upon her. Did it make her just as bad, to condemn the man she had married so easily?
