Page 78 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“Tonight, then,” he said. “When I return.”
“Return? Where are you going?”
“I have a good many explanations to make to the Home Office. Sir Roger’s arrest has thrown it into chaos. But there’s just a handful of people who know the whole truth of it all, and so I have got to go and help them wrench some sort of order out of it all.”
A nasty pit of dread formed in Emma’s stomach. “Will I have to—”
“No. You’ve done enough already; no one could expect more of you. He’s going to hang anyway,” he said. “Nothing can save him from that. Your testimony is not required to achieve that end. This is merely…tying up loose ends.” He squeezed her fingers in his, a tiny bit of reassurance. “I promise you, this time I am coming home from Whitehall under my own power.”
Coming home, Emma thought. She rather liked the sound of it.
∞∞∞
Emma woke in the depths of the night to the mattress shifting beneath her. There was, in those few moments of disorientation where she was caught in that twilight state between waking and dreaming, an instinctive burst of panic. Her breath staggered in her throat, her fingers turned to claws, and every muscle pulled and tightened, readying to explode into motion.
It was only Rafe’s voice in the darkness which soothed her. “You’re safe,” he said somewhere near her ear. “It’s just me.” One warm hand slid down her side, curling over her hip. “It…takes a while,” he said, “for that to fade.”
The fear, he meant. The instinctive reaction, born of a visceral impulse toward self-preservation. “Has it, for you?” Her voice was raspy, tinged with the tightening of her throat that had yet to dissolve, even as she began to relax once more.
“No,” he said. “Probably it never will. It’s become too much a habit to sleep lightly; one I’ve had for too long a time to surrender, I think. But for you, it will. Eventually.”
Probably he was right. It would fade, sooner or later. So long as on those occasions she woke in the night, he was there to banish that instinctive fear. But already her heart was beginning to slow from its harried beat, and she muffled a yawn into the bend of her elbow. “Perhaps one of these days you’ll return in time for dinner,” she suggested.
“I will. I promise,” he said, and Emma found herself relaxing still further. It held the weight of a vow, an oath. Words he would not have spoken carelessly, even for such a minor thing as this. A few moments passed in a comfortable sort of silence. But, for perhaps the first time, Rafewas the one to break it. “I was twenty,” he said, “when Sir Roger recruited me.”
“So young?”
“Yes. And malleable,” he said, and his voice held a grim sort of resignation within it, as if in hindsight he could see so very clearly. “Impressionable. Ambrose had been with him the longest; a few years, at that point, and he was a valuable asset during the last years of the war. Chris and I were recruited within months of each other. We didn’t know, then, that he was using us to ferret out information. More for his benefit than for the benefit of the Home Office.”
Emma turned her cheek against his arm as he slipped it beneath her head. “That seems…ill-advised.”
“If you knew better the workings of espionage, you would not think so,” he said. “He had us doing his work for him—he used our reports to warnthose he counted among his cohorts, and had us apprehend those who were his competitors. We never questioned the few that slipped through our fingers when we caught so many others. Luckily,” he added, “Ambrose kept meticulous records.”
The journal. “I didn’t have a chance to read all of it,” she said. “There were more pressing concerns.” There had simply been no time to read through every entry. She had focused upon only those that had had mentioned Sir Roger explicitly. And as it had turned out, those had been quite enough to satisfy the King.
“Today, the Home Office went through it entry by entry. Your cleverness saved them a fair bit of work. Naturally, they verified the contents to an extent—that the keys worked exactly as you indicated—but it might’ve taken days to do it independently.”
She had known that. It was why she had split the work across so many people. Together, they had accomplished the work in a fraction of the time it would have taken otherwise.
“He is going to hang?” she asked.
“Oh, yes. And, regrettably, Lady Banfield is not quite so innocent in it as were you. Did you know she was Ambrose’s Godmother?”
“I did not.” But then, little to do with Ambrose surprised her anymore. She had never really known him. He had never wanted her to, had never wanted to be close with her in any appreciable way.
“She won’t hang,” Rafe said. “But she’ll not come out unscathed.” His fingertips drifted up and down her side in slow, soothing strokes. “With Ambrose, it was possible—desirable even, given the circumstances—to hush it all up, given that too many of his lackeys would have been in the wind if it had been known he had been accused of treason. It was best that no one outside the Home Office knew the truth of what had happened. But now, any number of eyes have seen the evidence against Sir Roger, and there is nothing to be gained through secrecy. Lady Banfield will soon become plain Mrs. Banfield, widow of a known traitor.”
How easily it might have been her instead, had circumstances been just a little different. If Sir Roger had not overextended himself and become tangled within the web he had cast out for her, they might not now be having this conversation.
“You would be within your rights to hate me,” Rafe said quietly. “I killed Ambrose. I made you a widow.”
Yes, he had, but he had also spent the better part of a decade in repentancefor it. It had not been an evil act, one committed out of jealousy or anger. It had been fear—for Kit; for her. He had taken a life, but he had saved her brother in the doing of it. He had saved her from the consequences of Ambrose’s treachery. “You saved Kit’s life,” she said. “And I—I would have done the same. I could never hate you for that.” And yet, she thought…he had hatedhimself. Even if he had had no other choice than the one he had made, still he had hated himself for making it. For taking an action that he had known would cause her pain.
“I heard you that night,” he said, and against her back she felt his chest shudder with the long, wretched sigh that was pulled from his lungs. “That sound you made. As if you hadn’t enough breath for a scream; only a wail, so full of grief and pain. It haunts me still.”
Beneath the counterpane, Emma settled her hand atop his and interlaced their fingers. “You cannot punish yourself for things outside of your control. Ambrose made his own choices. We are not responsible for the consequences of them,” she said, with a gentle squeeze to his fingers. “You were twenty,” she prompted, “when you began working for the Home Office.”
He drew in a soft breath. “Yes,” he said. “Chris and I were of an age. Ambrose was a few years older; we thought of him as something of a mentor, I suppose. And Chris—Chris spoke of nothing so much as you.”
