Page 60 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“Why do you do it, then?” she asked, and he did not think she meant only lying.
“Because someone has got to,” he said. “And because I am goodat it. I have always been the invisible son. Only the spare, of no particular importance. I was always going to have to find a vocation for myself. I leveraged my strengths to serve my country better than I might have done as only a soldier. I am genial, but unobtrusive. Refined, but unremarkable. I can blend seamlessly with a crowd and avoid attention. I am not noticedin the way others would be. I was made for this role, born to it. Even youhave not noticed me.”
“That’s hardly fair,” Emma said sharply, her voice tight with offense. “You’ve gone out of your way to avoid me.”
“I’ve gone out of my way to avoid an introduction,” he corrected. “But really, it wasn’t so very difficult a thing to do. We’ve attended many of the same events over the years.” Though he had never risked getting close to her. “You might have recognized me that first evening, if you had ever truly looked at me before. But you never have.” Rafe gave a short sigh, his lips flattening into a grim line. “I don’t hold it against you,” he said. “You weren’t meant to notice me. No one else ever has.”
“I’m sorry for that,” Emma said, and there was a hint of fragility within the delicate tones. Not an overture, he didn’t think—he had trespassed too far for such a thing. But she was still a lady, with a lady’s sensibilities. Of course she would feel some manner of sympathy.
Selecting a few pages from the stack, he extended them to her. “Here’s what I’ve already attempted as possible keys. They yielded no intelligible results, so you need not waste your time on them. Names, titles of books—anything you’ve mentioned in passing that I thought might merit an attempt.”
Emma took possession of the papers, with a curious, inscrutable expression etched upon her features. “And the numbers?” she asked. “The ones shaded into the margins of the pages? What do they mean?”
“I haven’t the faintest. They’re out of order, and there’s numbers missing from them. My best guess,” he said, “is that they correspond to something as yet unknown. It’s my belief that Ambrose used multiple keys, and the numbers hidden in the margins were meant to remind himself of which keyhe had used for each entry.”
“He’d have needed a list of them, then, wouldn’t he?”
Rafe shrugged. “Possibly. But a list would be a dangerous thing to keep on hand, since it could not easily be explained if discovered. I think it a more likely possibility by far that it is something innocuous, something he could keep easily within reach, and which would not attract suspicion. Likely a page from a book, or lines upon a particular page. If he wrote down the numbers, it’s nearly a certainty that he had not committed the keys themselves to memory. Anything you can remember of him may prove useful there.” Ambrose’s study had been filled with books. There was no telling which of them might yield the key.
“I didn’t know him,” she said, in a stilted monotone. “I didn’t know him at all. I fear I shall fare no better than you.”
“Then we are no worse off than we already were.” It wasn’t her responsibility, though she had taken it on. The failure had been his. She had only been the one to suffer for it. “Emma–”
“I would have given it to you,” she said in a fragile little voice, bending her head as if the admission shamed her. “If you had asked. If Kit had asked. I would have given the journal to you.”
He heard the subtext within the brittle words:You never had to deceive me.You never had to break my heart. But still they would have had to tell her the whole of it. To shatter her illusions of what her husband had been, what her marriage had been. They would have had to reveal secrets of state, betray the oaths they had taken to king and country.
“We couldn’t tell you,” he said. “It is the nature of such things. In point of fact, we should not have told you what we have.”
“But you did.”
“Sir Roger’s involvement has changed things.” So had her feelings—and his own. “Emma, I never wanted to hurt you. I am so damned sorry for it. For all of it.” He had never thought there had been even the slightest chance of capturing her heart. Never imagined it would be within his power to break it.
“Please don’t,” she said softly, and the bleak devastation in her voice tore at his heart. “I have been humiliated quite enough for one lifetime. I do realize now how foolish I have been, how easily mislead. Kindly spare me the patronization of suggesting otherwise.”
His jaw ached with the effort to hold back the words she did not want to hear, words she would not believe did he dare to speak them. He could notmake her believe them, believehim. She had been deceived too often already ever to hear the truth of it.
He had killed whatever love she might once have held for him. His own would only be another burden to her now. This was the last kindness he could do for her: to refrain from uttering those words which she would not believe anything other than yet another deception.
“What do you want of me, Emma?” he asked, distantly aware of the raspy tenor of his voice.
Her sigh trembled in the air, heavy with the same melancholy that pressed her shoulders down into a dejected slump. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
He’d expected as much, but still the words cut deeper than any knife could have done. That much, at least, he could offer her. He’d been doing it for years already. “Then you shall have it,” he said as he turned for the door. His absence would, he hoped, restore the peace he’d stolen from her. “You’ll never have tosee me again.”
Chapter Twenty
Emma had known that she could not avoid Diana’s company forever, but it had been difficult beyond reason to come to terms with how intrinsically intertwined her social circle was with Rafe’s. In fact, there were no parts of her life that had not felt the touch of his unseen hand. She counted among her most intimate friends both his sister and his sister by marriage. Her brother—and even her late husband—had been amongst his colleagues. Even what she had come to think of as her life’s work, the children she had taken into her care, had been on his account.
So when at last she worked up the nerve to pay a call upon Diana, after having ducked and dodged far too many calls herself, it was with no small amount of trepidation. Diana would have questions, no doubt, and she—she did not know how she was meant to answer them. She had had a difficult enough time guarding her own secrets. How was she meant to be the custodian of secrets of national importance?
How much was toomuch to reveal? What could be said without arousing suspicion? What might lead to further questions, the answers to which she did not dare give? Would those same answers be writ across her face, since she had not the experience, the expertise, to erase them from her expressions?
It was a quandary that could not be solved with small sips of tea or a tiny plate of biscuits, and she was still mulling it over in her head when Diana appeared in the doorway of the drawing room.
“Emma,” Diana said, and one of her hands lifted toward her chest, as if to snatch at the breath that had plainly deserted her in her haste to arrive. “Are you—are you well?”
Emma’s teacup found the saucer with a nervous clatter, much too loud in the silent room. She did not wish to lieto Diana. The unsettling awareness that, in the interests of national security, she mighthaveto, led to another unpleasant realization.
