Page 65 of The Spy Who Loved Her
What was she meant to do? She was no spy, no strategist. How was she meant to hold her own against a man who knew ever so much more than did she, who was not afraid to use such underhanded tactics to achieve his own ends?
She drew in a short breath, and it tasted like pain, like grief.
She could not lose them. She would not survive it.
“Neil,” she said, and the words sounded so very fragile; just thin glass vulnerable to shattering. “I shall need you to have a room made up for Dannyboy. Close to mine, if you please. He will be staying with us indefinitely.” She tempered this with a soothing stroke through Dannyboy’s dark hair, though her fingers trembled. “You’ll be safe here,” she said, and tried to inflect her voice with a confidence she did not feel. For the boy’s sake. “Perhaps you’d feel better if we sent a note to your mother?”
Dannyboy’s eyes slid away from hers. “She won’t even notice I’m gone,” he said in a small voice, as if that fact shamed him to admit.
As Neil backed out of the room to make up a bed for Dannyboy, Emma wrapped her arms around the child once more, taking comfort from the embrace of his thin arms. “We are going to find our way through this,” she said. “You and I. Together.”
And she found there within herself, beyond the pain and the bewildermentand the fear, the strength to believe it. She had too long been a pawn within someone else’s game, and that game had been one weighted against her from the beginning.
To win it, she would have to instead become thequeen.
Chapter Twenty Two
The confines of Rafe’s room measured six paces by four and he had marked them out again and again in the hours since he had been forcibly removed from his home and taken to Whitehall for confinement. There was no window, no way to gauge the time that had passed. He hadn’t been offered more than a crust of bread and a glass of water since he had been shoved within the little room, which had been cleared of any furnishings it might once have contained in preparation for his arrival.
He had not been provided so much as a cot upon which to sleep, and he did not fool himself that this meant that he would be released before he would require sleep. More likely it meant that no one had gone to the bother of one, since they expected him to swing from a rope in short order.
He hadn’t seen Chris. But he had damned wellheardhim.
Torture was always a possibility in this line of work, but before now he had never once suspected that it might be used against them by their own countrymen. Thus far he had been spared the worst of it—but Chris had not the protection of a noble name and lineage to make it an unpalatable option.
But even Rafe’s name would not protect him much longer. His time would come. And in the meantime there was a kind of torture in the echo of Chris’ distant screams of pain, the sort of agony a body could not contain, could not white-knuckle its way through.
Sir Roger had done a thorough job of discrediting them, but then he’d expected that much. Even those with whom he had once shared a certain camaraderie had turned from him, disgust etched into their faces.
Rafe had made his peace with the possibility of death long ago, had always known there might well come a time that he would be called to sacrifice his life in the service of his country. He had just always expected that death to be an honorable one. Noble, even.
Instead, he would be remembered as a traitor. A rough, hoarse laugh eked from his lips—remembered. Perhaps he would be that, he thought, for awhile. In the way that one remembers unpleasant things, with a wince and a grimace and a slow, rueful shake of the head.
The way one remembers things one would rather forget. And he wouldbe forgotten, eventually. Slipping moment by moment to the fringes of the minds through which he would occasionally traipse until at last he entered them not at all. The spare son. Invisible, and at last erased.
Even that much would be bearable, he thought, if it weren’t for the fact that he would leave Emma alone, unprotected against Sir Roger. Now, in what might well be his final hours, he had to contend with the reality that he had sacrificed her safety to appease his guilty conscience.
She had never been his. And now he could say, in the soul-bearing honesty found only at the end of one’s life, that it would have been better to have stayed in his place at the very periphery of her life. To love only from afar, knowing it would never be acknowledged—much less returned—than to have earned her hatred.
She would never know the truth of his feelings for her, and that, he thought, was an unexpected blessing. The last gift he would ever give her. The freedom to hate, so that his death would never trouble her, never give rise to conflicted feelings, never move her to sympathy.
She wouldn’t mourn him. Thank God at least for that small blessing.
∞∞∞
Sir Roger called at an obscenely early hour, well before the proper time to make morning calls. Emma had not slept—she couldn’t have done so if she had tried—and so she was awake and alert when Neil scratched upon her door to announce him, a strange note of concern in his voice.
But then, he had been awake through the night as well, despite the fact that she had tried time and time again to send him off to bed. Her disquiet had been his own, and he had graciously sent up a steady supply of tea and biscuits, new candles when hers had worn to nubs, fresh sheets of paper and nibs for her pen.
The children would be having breakfast just on the other side of the house. And she would be meeting with a traitor. But she had no other choice. At least, not one that immediately presented itself. This was Sir Roger’s next move, made before she had had the chance to make one of her own.
I am deeply, deeply sorry. She could still hear the menace behind the words, see the mocking tilt of the smile he had offered to her. The same mocking smile that he donned as she walked into the green salon, where he had been casually sipping a cup of tea.
He lounged upon her couch with the regal nonchalance of a king, offering no greeting, making no move to rise as a gentleman would do for a lady. She supposed a man in his position—towering above the chessboard, master of all that happened upon it—felt no need to offer these courtesies to a woman he considered beneath him. A mere pawn to be moved about at will.
“All over the city,” he said blithely as his teeth snapped into a crisp biscuit, “people are retrieving their newspapers. They are learning, my lady, that two men yesterday afternoon were apprehended to face charges of treason.” His eyes slid over her face, noting her lack of surprise. “I suppose you must have already known that, then.”
“Gossip travels faster than print, Sir Roger,” Emma said tightly. “What is done in daylight seldom remains secret before nightfall.” Though thewhyof it might have remained uncertain to most, of course she had known. He already knew she did. “Why have you come, sir? What is it you want of me?”
