Page 54 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“Christ, Em. Is this truly how it is to be?” Kit dragged the gloved fingers of his left hand through the scrupulously-combed and arranged locks of his hair, ruffling the order of it once more into chaos; a tiny descent from the façade he had donned back toward the man she had always known him to be.
“This isthe relationship you wish for us to have,” she said. One of no familiarity, no warmth. Perhaps they might nod at one another if theychanced to pass in the street. But it was only too easy to recall, now, that the overtures had always been hers. Perhaps he had only entertained himself with her desire for that familial connection that had been lacking in her childhood. Dangling the potential of it just out of her reach.
Perhaps she might merit as much attention as a potted fern in need of the occasional watering, or a darkened corner in need of dusting.
Kit ducked his head one more, his shoulders drooping—and still he made no effort to rise, toleave, as she had demanded. “It’s not,” he said, and scratched at the back of his neck uncomfortably. “I just…I always thought it would be best for you. If no one else knew.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t be obtuse, Em. It doesn’t suit you.”
Emma blinked, a bit taken aback by both the accusation and the way in which it had been tendered. Twice in recent days, Kit had made an effort to present himself as a gentleman, both in his affect and in his speech, and it was—disconcerting. She had grown accustomed to his brash, abrasive demeanor, the street cant which frequently peppered his speech and his intonation both.
“You’re my sister, Em. You always have been. But I couldn’t be your brother. Not publicly. And I didn’t want to make you cut me,” he admitted, his eyes—so very like their father’s–shying away from hers.
“I wouldn’t have cut you.”
“You would have had to. Our father would have made you, or else made you regretnotcutting me.” A rusty, ill-formed laugh fractured in the air. “I’m a bastard, Em. That’s all I’m ever going to be, however much you might wish me to be better. A known association with me could only have dragged you down into the mud alongside me.”
She managed a strange little sound, not a laugh—but rather a perversion of one, a sort of cynical, contemptuous sound that she had never heard herself make before. “And yet you dragged me down into it anyway,” she said, and folded her arms across her chest.
“Yes. I didn’t mean to.” He scraped one hand over his jaw, and his fingers trembled slightly. “It was my fault,” he said, “Ambrose, I mean. I set him after you. I just didn’t know what he was until it was too late.”
“What—what do you mean, yousethim after me?”
“I wasn’t like them, Em,” Kit sighed. “Rafe and Ambrose, I mean to say. I wasn’t born noble or wealthy. I didn’t come from a good family, from a respectable line. I was always a criminal, branded a thief from my youth. Literally.”He set his hat aside and tugged the glove off of his left hand, lifting his fingers for her inspection. There upon the pad of his thumb was a mass of scar tissue, forming the vague outline of a T.
Forthief.
“That’s—that’s barbaric,” she said, instantly horrified, nauseated at the very sight of it.
“It hasn’t hurt in a very long time, and it was only my thumb. For a while, the authorities branded offenders on the cheek, so the evidence would be visible to all. I consider it something of a mercy that at least I can conceal my brand with gloves. Thievery is the least of my crimes, Em.”
I’ve got blood enough on my hands already, he’d said. The words hadn’t been in the least metaphorical.
“But I was no one,” he said. “Not—not like theywere. I hadn’t even volunteered myself for the duty like they had; I had been pressed into it. We had nothing in common, so I used the one thing I did have to my credit. You. You were the only good thing I had ever known, and I was so damned proud of you. My sister, Lady Emma. I told them all about you—”
“You didn’t know anything of me.” How could he have? He had never wanted to know.
He spared her a chiding glance. “I have spies, Em, in half the noble households in London. I knew everything of you. I knew every ball you attended, how many sets you danced and with whom. I knew your favorite books, your favorite songs, how well you could play the pianoforte and how you despaired of ever mastering the harp. I knew that our father chastised you for the cost of your Season when he noticed how few gentlemen had come to call, and I knew that your dowry was not significant enough to attract the attention you ought to have received.”
Oughtto have received? By what measure? She had been only the daughter of a nearly-impoverished earl, one of no great consequence or even political power. One whose title would invariably fall to some distant cousin or other, since he had had no legitimate son to inherit it. “What are you saying?” she asked.
Kit clasped his hands before him, and his gaze dropped to the floor. In shame, she thought. “Those stories I told of you, they were the only connection I had to their worlds, the ones so far above my own. They hung upon my every word. We were young, Em, and none of us were seeking wives—or so I thought. But Ambrose…”
Emma’s breath hitched in her throat, and with one hand she grappledfor the arm of the couch, slowly lowering herself onto it. Ambrose had always wanted more. Better than he had had, better than he had been born to, as if he felt that Fate had cheated him of the consequence he had deserved. She hadn’t let herself realize until much too late—years wasted in mourning too late—that it had been simple avarice which had motivated him.
“He knew,” Kit said, “that you hadn’t any suitors. But you were still a lady, Em, a blueblood. He hadn’t a title, but he was wealthy beyond reason, and I—I thought you would be safe with him. Secure. He didn’t need your dowry, modest as it was. So when he asked my permission to court you, I thought him genuine in his regard.”
But he hadn’t been. She had been only another trinket to collect, a feather in his cap, a possession to prove the heights to which he could climb. He had traded upon that; she knew he had. She had given him an air of legitimacy amongst the aristocracy that he had lacked only by virtue of the status to which she had been born.
“I thought I had done well by you,” Kit said, “even if you would never know it. I’d gotten you out of our father’s house, into a home of your own, with a husband who would treasure you. And when we learned who Ambrose was, who hetrulywas, Em—” He made a caustic sound in his throat, his hands clenching upon one another. “You had loved him,” he said. “And we didn’t want to take that from you. To make more a wreck of your life than we already had. We thought it would be kinder if you never knew.”
We? Her stomach pitched into her throat. Of course Rafe had known. Of course. He’d been party to her humiliation years before she had known she might have aught to be humiliated by. “You will forgive me,” she said, in a choked little voice, “if I don’t find it much of a kindness to have wasted years of my life mourning a man who held so little honest regard for me that he would make me an unwitting party to treason.”
And that, she felt, was a concise summary of the bulk of her life. Unwitting. A witless, foolish woman so desperate for just a bit of kindness, a sliver of love, that she had swallowed up every sugary lie offered up to her, never tasting the bitterness beneath.
Would she even know honesty, now? Would she recognize it, if it were given to her?
