Page 77 of The Spy Who Loved Her
He’d been instructed to remain with her until it was safe for him to leave. And now that it was, there was no reason for him to remain. She had hoped he would stay a little longer…but then, that was the way of such things. She supposed that even if he had, still she would have wanted longer even than that, and longer still.
But he wasn’t hers to keep. He had a mother of his own, and a new sibling soon to be born. And he had been looking forward to that occasion so cheerfully, saving up every bit of coin that he had earned from Rafe.
Rafe was waiting for her when she emerged from the dining hall, her gown dotted with splotches of spilled tea and greasy spots of butter, her cheek sticky from an overenthusiastic jam-encrusted kiss from little Susan, who had sat at her right side this morning.
Not many were those among her set who saw this part of her life, and fewer still were those who cared. But Rafe stood there, just beyond the threshold of the door as if the burst of sound that had she had carried out with her, produced by twenty children all shouting across the breakfast table, had not startled him in the slightest. As if it were a perfectly ordinary occurrence, neither remarkable nor objectionable.
He had given her this direction, when she had badly needed somethingto make of the life that had been left to her after she had been widowed. He couldn’t have known that she would take it quite so far as this, of course. But still it was a happiness he had given to her, in the absence of those children she had never been able to have. And it had started with the one who had conveyed him to her now—Neil, who had been the first of all of those many children she had thought of as hers.
And as Neil backed away in the manner of all good butlers, Rafe asked at last, “Henry is recovered from his cough?”
“Yes; for some time now.” It pleased her that he had remembered, that he had thought to ask.
“And Josiah’s interview?”
“A grand success. His feet have hardly touched the ground since.” Perhaps for some gentleman, questions such as these would have been a pleasantry only, the sort of thing one was obliged to ask after and to give at least some small appearance of caring about the answer. But not for Rafe. Not for the man who had spared his time to offer, in secret, a note to a young man desperately in need of advice to quell his fears over his future.
He listened. He cared. He loved. Far more than she had ever thought possible. Far more than she had ever dared to hope.
Emma took a step toward him, breaching the careful distance he had set between them. A line he would not venture to cross himself, she thought, since he had crossed so many others. She said, “I cannot give you children.”
His brows lifted, dark arches sweeping toward his hairline, distorting the bruise that wreathed his eye. “I’m a second son. I have only a courtesy title, and I haven’t an estate of my own that would require an heir of my blood to inherit,” he said. “I am…comfortable. Nothing more. Espionage does not pay so well as one might expect.”
If one had honor enough not to manipulate one’s knowledge for one’s own ends, yes, she suspected that might be the case. “Still, I wanted to be clear. Honest.” Honesty at last, now that the last decade and better of deception had been brought out into the open. “You—you would have to reconcile yourself to never having children of your own.”
“Emma, you have gottwentychildren at present. By any standard, that is more than enough. I don’t require children of my own blood to be happy.”
An odd, strangled little laugh rose in her throat. Once, she had thought that she did require such a thing—and it had weighed so heavily upon her heart, the inability to produce those children that she had so badly wanted. But her love had never been limited to those with whom she had sharedblood.
It wasn’t the sort of happiness she had thought she had wanted. But it was the happiness that she had needed, the one that she had found despite everything, and her life had been made so much the richer for it. Love multiplied upon itself again and again, with each child who had passed through her doors. “Soon to be nineteen,” she said. “Josiah leaves for Oxford in a few days. I thought perhaps you would see him off with me.”
“Will he mind?”
She shook her head. “You should tell him,” she said. “That you sent him that note. He appreciated it more than you could ever know. But really—really I am asking for myself.” Emma ducked her head, swiped at her eyes with her fingertips. “I hate to lose them,” she confessed. “Every one. I always hate it when they leave.”
“I expect every mother hates to see her children leave her,” he said.
And that was exactly it—but it was still lovely to hear it acknowledged, if only from him. This man who had made her the mother she had always wished to be. Even if only in her heart.
She took another step, and another, and it wasn’t just the floor she crossed, but the chasm of secrecy and half-truths that had once separated them. She reached out to take his hand in hers, the one that had been left mercifully unscathed by the time he had spent imprisoned, and thrilled to the instinctive grip of his fingers upon her own. And she said, “As angry as I was, as hurt and humiliated as I felt—when you and Kit were apprehended, all I could think, all I couldfeelwas desperation. I would have done anything to free you, taken on any risk.” Because she had loved him.
And he had done the same, for just the same reason. She had suffered the anxiety, the stress, and the sorrow of it all for just a handful of days. He had borne that burden for years. In the position of privilege that he had gone to such lengths to secure for her, she had never had to consider before how such things could scrape one’s very soul bare. She had had to learn it for herself, and it had been only the smallest fraction of what he had weathered alone.
“You never truly let me know you,” she said, and it was softened with the understanding between them that he could not have letit happen. Her free hand slipped into the pocket of her gown and withdrew a small object, which she pressed into his palm, flattening her hand over his. “But I would like to,” she said. “If you will allow me.” And at last she drew her hands away from his to reveal the terrace door key resting within the cradle of his hand.
Slowly his fingers closed around it, holding it as if it were a priceless, fragile thing. A hint of a smile touched just the corner of his lips. “Thank you,” he said. “I confess, after I returned it to you, I felt the loss of it.”
So had she. Not the loss of the key itself, but the loss of what it had represented. “I know it is only symbolic—”
“I like symbols.”
“—But I wanted you to have it back.” Lord, she was going to go all weepy and maudlin. “When next you use it, will you tell me—will you tell me—”
“Everything,” he said, and his voice had gone raspy. “Everything you want to know. Everything I am at liberty to tell you. Probably a great many things you’d rather not know.”
Despite herself, Emma laughed as she swiped the telling moisture from her eyes. Probably he was right, there. He was a spy; he’d no doubt been embroiled in a great many things to which he would rather not admit.
But she had had it right, all those weeks ago, with what she had said to Diana and Lydia and Phoebe. She knew his character. He was a complicated man with a complicated past, but still he was the most honorable man she had ever known. “I would like that.”
