Page 51 of The Spy Who Loved Her
The only thing he had to offer her was his absence.
His hand slipped into the depths of his pocket and closed around the key she had given him all those weeks ago. He hadn’t meant to take it with him, had expected her to reclaim it after he and Chris had confessed what they had done. But she had surprised him from the first, and he—
He’d fled. Like a coward. He had faced down would-be assassins, apprehended criminals, danced along the precipice of disaster, weathered all manner of situations that could have had consequences most dire. And he had done it all with an unshakable serenity of spirit, without even the tiniest jangle of nerves or nervousness.
It was Emma alone whom he could not bring himself to face. Emma alone who had inspired a crisis of conscience so profound that he doubted the shame for it would ever leave him.
She would never again share her troubles with him, nor trust him with the keeping of her secrets. Possibly, he thought, he had ruined even her friendship with Diana. Would she keep her distance even from her closest friend, just on the chance that she might, at some point, encounter him?
I’m sorry. Such a pathetic phrase, too insipid, too insufficient to capture the truth of it. There weren’t words meaningful enough to express himself, words which carried the weight, the gravity, required.
And still they had been the burden he’d carried for a decade now, weighing more heavily upon his shoulders as the years stretched out. A remorse he could never have told her of, that she had not even known he’d borne. A burden that was now hers as well, though it had not lifted his with it.
With one hand he gathered up the ruined pages, forming a neat stack of them. One by one he fed them into the fire, turning every part and parcel of those thoughts he’d compiled upon the pages into what they were in truth. Nothing more than smoke. Insubstantial, without significance or meaning.
She wouldn’t have wanted them anyway.
∞∞∞
Emma awoke with a burning headache behind her eyes and a lingering exhaustion that stretched straight to her soul. Probably it hadn’t been helped by the fact that she’d snatched perhaps two hours of sleep before dawn had come pouring through the window, rousing her from an uneasy slumber.
However much she might have wished to draw the curtains around her bed and retreat from the world to nurse her wounds, she had not the time for such things. Despite the havoc Kit and Rafe had wreaked upon her life, still she had twenty children in her care and a cipher to break besides.
If such a thing were even possible. She had had to admit to herself, in the early morning hours before she had at last given up the ghost for the evening, that she would likely fare no better than they had. She hadn’t known the man she had married. Not even well enough to have suspected he had been keeping a secret of such magnitude. Three years of marriage, and they had been little better than strangers, despite how desperately she might havewished otherwise. And if he had not forced Rafe’s hand and precipitated his own demise, he might have dragged her down with him into ignominy.
She flicked aside the tiniest whisper that floated through her brain:If not for Kit. If not for Rafe.Perhaps there would come a day when she could acknowledge that, when she could gain a bit of distance from all that had occurred and—if notforgive, at least come to some acceptance of it. But it would not be today, when the humiliation still felt so fresh.
She paused outside the dining room, braced for the ruckus that would not doubt assault her ears the moment she threw open the door. Even the faint strains of it that floated through the heavy wood of the door pinged around her brain, ringing in her ears to the point of pain. With one hand she pressed upon her aching eyes and drew in a deep, cleansing breath.
“My lady?” Neil’s crisp, clear voice came from somewhere over her left shoulder. “Dannyboy to see you.”
Dannyboy. A strange sense of relief assailed her. In the weeks that had passed, she’d grown rather fond of the boy. It would have been one more awful lash to her heart never to see him again only because she had fallen out with his employer. As she turned to greet him, her fingers twitched with the effort to restrain herself from brushing the boy’s shaggy bangs away from his face. “Good morning,” she said. “Have you come for breakfast?”
“Aye,” he said, scrubbing at one dirty cheek with the cuff of his sleeve. “I hope ye got eggs. And bacon.”
Somehow his tactless yet enthusiastic tone warmed her heart. “Every day,” she said. “And you are always welcome.” She hesitated as her fingers brushed the door handle. “Have you—have you a message for me from your employer?” she asked. There was some strange pain in her chest at the very thought of it. As if her heart tore itself in two in a futile attempt to stretch itself across the vast gulf between anticipation and anxiety. Neither welcome; neither comfortable.
“Naw,” Dannyboy said, with a swift shake of his head. “’E said ye wouldn’t want one today. And I wasn’t to bother ye none about sendin’ one back, neither, since there weren’t no note ‘e sent wiv me.”
“So he sent you here only for breakfast?” she asked, flustered by the thought.
“Naw,” he said again. “It’s just ‘e didn’t send no note.” Dannyboy shoved one hand into his pocket and groped around within it, searching for something. At last he pulled free his clenched fist and extended it to her, and when she opened her palm, something cold and metallic dropped into herhand.
The key to her terrace door. Her fingers closed around it slowly, with a queer sense of finality. It hadn’t even occurred to her, in the chaos of last evening, to demand it back from him before he’d left. There had been too much else to contend with that she hadn’t given it even a sliver of her attention.
But Rafehad, even if he had sent no note along with it, nor even the smallest effort to explain himself. Would she have extended the grace required to read one, had he sent it? In her present humor, she could admit it to herself in all honesty—no. And she thought perhaps he had known that, too. That there was no rightstep to make when he’d made so many wrong ones already.
He had left last evening even before she would have demanded it of him, as if to spare her the unpleasantness of his company. Because he had known all along exactly how she would react. He had always known, and that, she thought—that made it all so much worse.
“I’ll put it back in its place, my lady,” Neil said softly, his voice nearly drowned out by the sudden rush of noise through the door as Dannyboy scampered into the dining room to breakfast with the rest of the children. Neil meant to relieve her of the burden of it, she knew, to relieve even her mind of having to think upon what it meant. What onceit had meant, but no longer.
“Thank you,” she said, “but I can manage.”
But it felt heavier than it ought to in her hand as she wound through the house, to the housekeeper’s quarters. And when she placed the key back onto its hook, it settled into the groove with a distinctsnickthat sounded too much like a lock falling into place.
An ending she had not anticipated, and a door bolted between them. She had been a fool to open it in the first place.
∞∞∞
