Page 50 of The Spy Who Loved Her
Kit’s shoulders hunched. “We had to act quickly,” he said. “Sir Roger convinced us of it. He’d arrived mere minutes later—too late to change the outcome, but late enough not to…not to be so affected as were we. He kept his head, told us what we’d have to do. How to fix it.”
Fix it?Fixit! Emma’s fingers clenched in the folds of her skirt, the knuckles going white, aching with the strain of it.
“No one could know. It was crucial that the whole thing be hushed up. We had a network of smugglers and counterfeiters to dismantle, after all, and if they were to learn that Ambrose had been caught at his activities, they’d be in the wind. But worse—worse even than that, to me, was what would have happened to you.”
To her? “What do you mean?”
“What Ambrose was involved in was treason, Em. Traitorisn’t just aharsh word, it’s a hard fact. It was a damned lucky thing for you he died, because had he lived, he would have been convicted and hanged for it—and everything he owned would have been attainted. By extension, everything youowned would have been forfeit to the Crown. You would have been worse than ruined.” Kit blew out a rough breath, his lips pulling into a scowl. “He didn’t only betray his country, Em, he betrayedyou, and that is what I could never bring myself to forgive.”
“I—I don’t understand.” The words swirled about her head, incomprehensible. “What had I done to merit such a thing?”
“Nothing,” Kit said. “But we had the devil of a time convincing the Home Office of it. We were in your house that very evening, searching Ambrose’s things. Rafe removed everything of note from Ambrose’s study that he could get his hands on while you were being informed below. And still it took nearly a year for us to convince the proper authorities that you had no knowledge of any of it, that you were blameless. You were watched practically every moment until the Home Office was satisfied, while we negotiated our own terms with them. In the meantime, we proved our own usefulness by dismantling Ambrose’s network—a task that was possible onlybecausehe had not been publicly revealed for what he was.” He dropped his head into his hands. “But we could never be certain we had gotten them all,” he said, and there was a wealth of self-reproach in his voice. “Still, there was nothing for ten years. Not a whisper. Nothing even remotely suspicious. And then—and then you found Ambrose’s damned journal. Rafe missed it the first time around.”
“It was—it was tucked back behind some books in his study,” she said inanely, as if it might have some relevance. She hadn’t found it, either, until she’d finally worked up the will to clean the room out at last. She’d never even suspected that Ambrose had kept a journal.
“It was a damned mess,” Kit sighed. “But you spoke of it. In public, at a ball. And you were overheard.”
She shivered, an unconscious reaction to the sinister undertone lurking within his voice. “You don’t mean—”
“We weren’t certain until then,” Kit interjected. “We had hoped to be wrong, but we had resolved to watch over you as precautionary measure. But that very night, if you’ll recall, someone broke into your house. And we knew that we had failed. That there was someone out there who had been biding his time, likely hoping the same as us—that ten years of nothing meant therewasnothing. That he would never be discovered.”
“Am I in danger?” Were the children in danger?
“We don’t believe so,” Kit said. “Not at present. We know now who is behind it. It’s Sir Roger. It’s been Sir Roger all along, and we never suspected. He used us, Em, to round up anyone who might have incriminated him. He used us to bury his own misdeeds. We’ve let him think he’s winning at present, let him think he knows all that we do, that he’s under no suspicion. To buy us enough time to crack the cipher and prove his involvement. But the man is a master spy; he’s been careful to leave no other evidence, nothing yet provable. Imagine, if you will, playing a game of chess against a master. The very man who has taught you everything you know.”
As much as she knew that matters of national security—oftreason—ought to supersede her wounded feelings, still there was the burn of humiliation in her cheeks. The quaver of hurt in her voice. “You—you sent Rafe to me only to steal my husband’s journal.” And he had come for the same. Whatever a face he had tried to put upon it, it had been nothing but patronization and lies. She had been falling in love, and he—he had climbed into her bed out of necessity. Out of duty to his country.
He hadn’t had even enough respect for her to explain himself.
“To catch a traitor,” Kit said, his voice thrumming with desperation.
“You’ve lied to me. You’ve both lied to me—for years!” How many among the Home Office had known what she did not? That her comfortable life, the one she had cobbled together for herself after the death of the traitorous husband they had all let her mourn, was only at their benevolence? Had she been a pitiful figure? Or a shameful one—even when she hadn’t known she had had anything for which tobeashamed?
“To protectyou!” Kit argued. “Only to protect you, Em. We never would have told you—”
A sob choked her. How could he not understand how much worse that was? That they had at last condescendedto inform her of the reality of her situation? “Why tell me now, then?” she asked.
“Because—Rafe couldn’t stomach it any longer,” he said, a guilty flush spreading over his cheeks. “He knew what it would mean, and still he couldn’t do it.” He splayed his fingers out in entreaty. “Don’t hate him, Em, for doing what had to be done.”
“Don’t you dare to instruct me on how to feel.” She found it at last, the anger that had been smothered beneath the hurt and the humiliation and the shame of it all, and she snapped to her feet in a magnificent conflagration of it, her feet pounding across the floor that separated them. With one swipe,she snatched the journal from where it rested upon his knee, her fingernails carving gouges into the thick leather cover. “You are going to explain to me how to decipher this,” she said. “And then you are going to leave. I don’t want to see you—either of you—ever again.”
“It’s not that simple, Em. The cipher is one commonly referred to as theindecipherable cipher. It requires a key, and we don’t have it. Rafe thought Ambrose might have mentioned something to you in passing, something that would help—”
“He’s been interrogating me?” Her stomach roiled anew. She tasted bile in her mouth, felt the reflexive heave of her stomach.
“I only meant to say that we’ve had no luck thus far.”
“Then there is nothing to be lost in leaving it with me. So,” she said, “Tell me how I would use a key if I had one, and then kindly take your leave. Because if there is anything to come of this, for God’s sake, I will not be againthe last to know.”
Chapter Seventeen
God, it hurt. It hurt ever so much more than even Rafe had expected. His heart seemed to beat sluggishly, struggling through the pain of the slice that had been carved straight out of it. He had done it to himself, he knew, but that knowledge had not eased the terrible ache.
His pen, stilled for some moments and left hovering above the paper, at last loosed a drop of ink from the nib, which spread out first in feathery tendrils and then in thin, jagged lines reminiscent of the legs of a spider.
Another page ruined. A dozen times already he’d tried—and failed—to put his thoughts, his feelings, to paper. But the words had soured even as he’d penned them, and his lip had curled as if the rotten scent of them had wafted from the page to assault his nose.
Only excuses. It would never matter how noble his intentions, what the reasons behind his actions had been. There was no excuse for a betrayal such as this, no reason he might provide which would erase the hurt and the harm he had done. Emma had earned the right to every ounce of her hatred, and there existed no combination of words that could relieve it, or even to mitigate the enormity of his actions. He had only been wasting his effort on an impossible task, one which could never hope to earn him forgiveness, one which Emma would not even appreciate.
