Page 66 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“Oh, I imagine you know only too well what I want,” he said on a chortle. “I am sorry that it has turned out this way, but that is the way of things, I am afraid. Men in positions of power must be willing to make difficult choices.”
“So you have come to threaten me.”
“Threaten?” Sir Roger widened his eyes behind the lenses of his spectacles. “My dear lady, no. I have come to make you a promise. This is theleastof what I can do to you. There is so much more left to take. It is so difficult,” he said, “to be a woman alone in the world. And that is what I will make you, a piece at a time.”
Emma breathed through the painful tightness of her throat. Her palms began to sweat, and she clenched her fists, carving divots into them with the crescents of her nails. “You don’t have that sort of power,” she said.
Sir Roger gave a light laugh. “My dear, on a word I could have your home dismantled brick by brick until what I want is found. You have no idea the damage I could cause, how low you can fall with little more than a whisper.”
He was expecting her to quail from the suggestion of it, to buckle beneath the pressure heaped upon her shoulders. But she had learned—just as Kit had told her—that there was knowledge to be gained in inaction just asmuch as action.
Perhaps he did have that power. But he hadn’t wielded it, and that was worth something. It would require more hands than only his own to accomplish. “Do you wish to court the risk that someone else might get their hands on what you seek before you?” she asked. Could a man in his position ever truly trust his colleagues? Could he justify launching a crusade against a woman he had once championed to them?
His eyes flared with a sudden surge of wrath, and Emma knew she had scored a hit against his ego, treading too close for comfort to the truth. Just as quickly he banked it, retreating beneath the smooth placidity he had affected. “I would be remiss,” he said, “if I did not offer you some small shred of hope.” He gave a light, dismissive flutter of his fingers. “All of this can simply go away,” he said, “if you give me what I want.”
“Go away?”
“A dreadful misunderstanding,” he said in a simper, with a roll of his wrist. “Rafe and your brother will be released, their good names restored to them once more. Well,” he clarified, his mustache twitching with faux mirth, “For your brother, restored to the best he can expect for a man of his…dubious reputation. But suffice it to say that there will be no further ugliness between us necessary.”
So long as she handed over the only evidence that might convict him. So long as she let a traitor walk free. And yet she was tempted—but Sir Roger surely knew that. It was why he had made this move. Because she was not a spy, not an agent of the Crown duty-sworn to give life and limb, if necessary, in the service of her country. Because she might in factbe tempted with a promise to extract his claws from the throats of those she most loved, to return to the peaceful status quo that had once existed.
Even if it would be a lie.
But Kit wouldn’t want that. Rafe wouldn’t want that. She suspected that Kit, at least, had known this might have been a possibility. Rafe, too, had warned her in those last moments before his arrest to keep the journal hidden at all costs. They had been prepared to sacrifice all for this. How could she do any less?
She didn’t have a prayer of beating Sir Roger at the game he had devised for her. But perhaps she could modify the rules, claw back a bit of the power that had been stolen from her.
“I will see them first,” she said, lifting her chin in challenge. “I will not exchange the journal for bodies, you understand.”
Sir Roger lifted his brows. “You’re a distrustful woman.”
“And you are a damned traitor. So I see that we understand one another. Make it happen, or you’ll get nothing from me.” She turned toward the door, pausing for a moment at the threshold. “And, Sir Roger—if you set so much as a single foot within my home again, you had best prepare yourself to leave it as a corpse.”
∞∞∞
The summons arrived at midday, and before she left for the Palace of Whitehall, Emma had handed possession of the journal over to Dannyboy. He had promptly tucked it beneath his shirt and into the waist of his trousers and took himself off to attend lessons with the other children—safe and secure within the children’s wing. It was possible that Sir Roger would hedge his bets by sending in some sneak-thief in to search for it while she was out, but with servants now prowling the halls in full force, there would not be time or opportunity to recover it.
Sir Roger was waiting to greet her when she arrived, as she had thought he would. He seemed to her to have a chronic need to gloat, and she fancied that he was in possession of great festering pustule upon his soul, from which oozed a steady stream of malevolence.
If anyone present had given him more than half a glance in this moment, they might have seen it for themselves. So confident in his victory that he gave no more than a minor attempt at masking what he truly was.
“With me, my lady,” he said, with a courteous bow. “I feel it only polite to warn you in advance, they are not in the best of conditions.”
Emma’s stomach curdled, turning sour at the implication lurking within the saccharine sweetness of his voice. Her skin crawled as she fell into step beside him. It was a monumental effort to preserve the veneer of calm she had donned, and she would not let him peel it from her with only the sly twist of his tongue. “Don’t speak to me,” she instructed. “The very sound of your voice turns my stomach.”
The caustic tone of her voice offended him. “I could hold you here as well,” he said beneath his breath. “I could just as easily cast you into a cell, my lady, and keep you confined until what I desire is returned to me.”
“Spare me your threats,” Emma said, her voice clipped. He thought herweak, malleable—and perhaps as shortly as a week ago, he would have been correct. But she could see it now, the warp and weft of the deceit he would have woven round her. There was too great a chance that the journal would pass through too many other hands before it reached him, that someonewould understand its significance, and he would find himself once more outmaneuvered.
Perhaps it would come to that, eventually. When he had lost patience enough to warrant the risk of it. But this man dealt in duplicity, and wherever possible he would err on the side of concealing the journal’s very existence. The safest choice at present was to bully her into laying it into his hands herself.
There was a sort of power in that knowledge, and she held it tightly to her bosom as at last Sir Roger paused before a door, extracting a key from his pocket. He twisted it within the lock and favored her with a magnanimous smile a touch too sharp to appear genuine. “After you, my lady,” he said.
Emma turned a cold stare upon him. “Alone,” she said. “I will see them alone.”
Sir Roger drew back a scant few inches, surprised by the demand. Surprised, she thought, andinfuriated. “I think not,” he said, the sneer of his lips curling up toward his bulbous nose. “One does not allow traitors private audiences. I should be at a loss as to how to explain it.”
Emma placed one hand upon the door handle, taking command of it. “Perhaps you have misunderstood,” she said coolly. “I am not interested, Sir Roger, in whether my demands create problems for you. I do not care what explanations you will be obliged to make, nor to whom. I am telling you what will happen.”Hehad chosen this location, this stage for his nasty little performance.
