Page 70 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“Then what are we to do?” Lydia asked.
“If you will permit,” Emma said, “I will tell you everything I know and give you every tool at my disposal. It is my hope that by our combined efforts, we might break the cipher in time to save them.”
“In time?” Marcus echoed, his voice lowered to a distraught rumble. “What do you mean,in time?”
“We—we have only three days,” Emma said haltingly.
“Three days!” Diana’s husband, Ben, jolted upright. “Could we not simply give the journal to the Home Office? Certainly they can decipher it?”
Emma shook her head. “Sir Roger works within the Home Office. Without evidence in hand, we cannot trust anyone within it.” Despite herself, she grimaced. “This particular cipher is terribly difficult. I—I fear that even if they were to manage to break it, it would be far too late. Which is why I have asked Neil to divide the journal up into separate entries.” Aliteraldivision of labor, separating the pages of it out into parts to be disseminated to any who chose to stay. “I cannot do this alone. Will you grant me just three days of your time? Just a few days to save the good, honorable men whose lives depend upon your aid?”
The answer was not so much ayesas it was a surfeit of unintelligible shouting and a mad scramble for the table at which Neil was occupied in carefully tearing pages free of the journal. Though she had expected that Rafe’s nearest and dearest would certainly be first in line, she had not expected the fervor with which every person within the room vied to be the first to offer assistance, the first to show support.
It was enough to move a woman to tears, had she the time for such an indulgence. Instead she took just a moment to collect herself, to gather her thoughts and every one of the notes that Rafe had carefully compiled for her, and prepared to give a ballroom full of people an impromptu lecture on cipher-breaking.
Chapter Twenty Four
Emma, you must sleep at some point,” Diana chided gently as she arrived at Emma’s side at the small table Emma had taken for her own use. “You have been at this for a day and a half.” With one hand, she set a plate near Emma’s elbow, filled with whatever Emma supposed had been served for dinner.
Emma had not set a menu with her cook, but the woman and her staff were accustomed to feeding twenty children three meals every day. An additional forty adults was an inconvenience, to be sure, but nothing she could not accomplish. Blearily, through the haze of more than two days without sleep, Emma groped for the fork and knife Diana offered. “Has everyone else eaten?”
“Hours ago,” Diana said. “It’s near to midnight already.”
Midnight. She supposed it must be. But the servants had kept the candles lit so that the room blazed with light at all hours, and it had altered her perception of the passing of time. “There will be time to sleep,” she said. “Later.” Two days from now, perhaps.
“Everyone else has,” Diana said. “At least a nap, Emma. You are the only one who has managed so frantic a pace.”
Emma supposed she had, however distantly, noted various people cycling through the ballroom, disappearing for a few hours at a time and reappearing later, when the undeniable need for sleep had been satiated. Probably the revolving groups of them had kept her staff quite busy with the constant changing of linens.
But for herself? “I can’t sleep.” With one hand, Emma wiped the weariness from her eyes. “That is to say, I couldn’t. Not even if I wished to.” Every time she closed her eyes for more than a few seconds, she saw the unnatural bend of Kit’s knee, the odd angle of Rafe’s fingers, wreathed in dark bruises. Somehow she cleared the images from her head and said, with a gentle pat to Diana’s shoulder, “Perhaps it is time for you to take your own advice. You are with child; it cannot be good for you to keep such a schedule yourself.”
“I will, shortly,” Diana said, with a wan smile. “Ben insisted I nap earlier in the afternoon. I don’t think either of us will manage much sleep either. And Hannah—”
Emma sucked in a breath. “How is she?”
“Worried,” Diana said. “We’ve kept it from her as much as possible, but she’s a clever child. She knows something is wrong. Thank God Marcus and Lydia’s son is still too young to understand.” Carefully, she sank into the chair beside Emma’s. “Dannyboy has been very kind to Hannah,” she said. “Of course we could not send her home again without us, so he came to fetch her this morning and took her to lessons with the rest of the children.”
A much different sort of education than Hannah was likely used to. But it had been a clever way to distract the girl, and for that she could be grateful.
The drone of conversation drifted around her, and she managed to carve a slice of something—chicken, she thought—from her plate and shove it into her mouth. It had long grown cold, but at least it would save her from hunger pangs. As she chewed she watched two of Phoebe’s sisters standing before the painting Neil had made upon the wall, consulting books their husbands held open, turning pages one at a time. “Has anyone…found anything?”
Gravely, Diana shook her head. “And we’ve run through most of the books,” she said. “It’s the numbers, you see. They don’t seem to correspond to anything. Not pages, not lines. I don’t suppose there were any more books?”
Ambrose had had hundredsof books in his office. These were just the ones Rafe had deemed most likely, based upon what of Ambrose’s interests she had told him. But it would serve her no purpose to lose hope. It would serve Rafe and Kit no purpose.
“I will have Neil gather what there is,” she said. From what remained, at least. She managed to force down one more bite, and it sat like lead within the sour pitch of her stomach. “Do get some sleep yourself,” she said. “I will work a while longer, I think.”
“All right,” Diana said as she rose to her feet. But before she turned back to her husband, she bent to embrace Emma. “Thank you,” she said fiercely. “I can’t imagine this has been easy for you. I just wanted you to know how very grateful I am. And I hope—I hope that when this is over—”
Emma pursed her lips against the bitter sob that wanted to escape, closed her eyes against the stinging burn of tears.
“I hope that you can forgive him,” Diana said in a rush, and her own dark eyes glittered behind the lenses of her spectacles. “Because I wouldvery much like for you to be my sister by marriage.”
The sob escaped anyway, muffled against Diana’s shoulder, and Emma breathed through the terrible pain of it, the awful truth that had hidden itself away within the wounded part of her heart—that she hadforgiven him already. But she could never forgive herself for letting him go to his grave without knowing it, with the certainty that he had secured only her hatred.
“Oh, Emma,” Diana sighed. “Please take care of yourself.”
With trembling hands Emma eased herself from Diana’s embrace. “Go,” she said, her lips forming the words in a mute whisper. “I will work just a while longer.” Valiantly she attempted a reassuring smile, but by the frown that creased Diana’s brow as she returned to her husband’s side, Emma suspected she had not been successful.
