Page 87 of The Spy Who Loved Her
She gave a little huff of a laugh against his shoulder. “I think Danny might prove worse even than Kitty,” she admitted. Her fingers stroked the plane of his back, slid up through the short hairs at the nape of his neck. “We have perhaps a half an hour before we are expected down again,” she said, a silky note of suggestion in her voice. “Do you think—”
“God, yes.”
Their lips had hardly touched more than a moment before a scratch at the door sheared through the silence. “And there it goes,” Rafe said in a mournful voice against the corner of her mouth. “Our last bit of peace for perhaps the next twenty years.”
“I’m certain we’ll find a moment or two here and there,” Emma laughed. “You havevolunteered for this.”
“I have, haven’t I?” Lifting his voice, Rafe called, “Enter.”
The door cracked, and Neil’s voice sailed through. “Beg pardon, my lady. You have a visitor.”
A visitor? “Were you expecting someone else?” Rafe asked.
Emma shook her head. “I can’t imagine who it could be.” Turning toward the door, she inquired, “Was there a calling card?”
“No card, my lady. She said her name is Ruth.” Neil hesitated. “I’m given to understand that she is Daniel and Katherine’s mother.”
∞∞∞
“It’s going to be all right,” Rafe said, his hand squeezing hers as they paused for a moment outside the green salon, where Neil had placed the woman. Ruth. Her children’s birth mother.
“I know it will.” She appreciated the sentiment, the comfort he meant to give in service of easing the worry he thought she must have felt. But she had been through this dozens of times before. Perhaps the circumstances weren’t precisely the same, but she knew—far better than could he—what she might expect.
She opened the door at last, and the woman perched there upon the couch looked haggard, strained, and so young. She couldn’t have been more than perhaps five and twenty, her face already lined and creased with the stress of a hardscrabble existence eked out in a few coins at a time. Her dark eyes, so very like Danny’s, shied away from Emma’s gaze in shame. In embarrassment. So young, this woman, and her hair was flecked through with bits of grey already, frizzy little strands escaping the messy coil of hair she’d arranged atop her head.
“Ruth,” Emma said gently, beckoning Rafe to follow her in. “May I call you Ruth?”
Ruth’s hands trembled as she set her cup of tea back upon its saucer, a flush rising into her cheeks at the clatter of sound it made. “O’ course,” she said in a hoarse whisper.
“Thank you for coming,” Emma said as she settled into a chair across from Ruth. “I had hoped you would. Some parents don’t—or can’t—and it always makes me feel…a little sad, I think.” For the children who had been left behind.
Ruth’s shoulders hunched. “Probably I shouldn’t ‘ave done,” she said. “I just wanted—I ‘ad to know if—”
“He came this morning,” Emma said, and leaned forward to scoop a few biscuits onto a plate and pass it across the table. “A little past midnight, I think. They’re both here. You have nothing to worry for.”
A sigh tore through the air, and Ruth relaxed infinitesimally, the tight clench of her jaw softening. “I thought ‘e would. ‘E spoke o’ ye so often. I thoughtsurely‘e would. It ain’t that I don’t love ‘im,” she hastened to assure Emma.
“Do you know,” Emma said, “I’ve had a number of parents deliver their children to my doors, and there have been remarkably few times I have ever thought as much.”
“I dolove ‘im,” Ruth said. “But some women, I think, just ain’t suited to motherin’. I been ‘alf o’ one at best, all these years, and I just thought…I just thought they’d ‘ave a better chance—a better life—wiv a woman who was suited to it. The little ‘un—”
“Kitty,” Emma said, interlacing her fingers with Rafe’s. “Danny calls her Kitty. For Katherine.”
“Kitty.” Ruth muffled a sniffle behind the palm of her hand. “That’s lovely, that is.”
“Would you like to see her?”
There was a sudden startling glimmer in Ruth’s eyes, and she pressed her lips together. “Best not,” she said. “I thought if ye got ‘er young enough, maybe ye’d take her yerself. ‘Stead of bein’ just one o’ the other children.”
“Rafe, would you mind?” Emma asked in a whisper. “Both of them?” And as he absented himself, she rose from her chair to breach the boundary of the table that lay between the two of them, settling on the couch beside Ruth. Gently, she collected the woman’s hands in her own. “They’re all my children,” she said softly. “All of them. At least, I think of them as mine. But the truth is, there’s never before been a child brought to me so young that they did not already have cherished memories of their own families, their own mothers and fathers. They are not looking for a mother in me, much as I would have liked to be one.”
“But what ye must think o’ me,” Ruth said on a whimper.
“I think you are very brave,” Emma said, “and so strong. I think it is dreadfully difficult to be a woman alone in the world. I think you have given me the most precious gift I have ever been so privileged as to receive. And I hope that this won’t be the last I see of you. Thatwesee of you.”
“’Ow could I?” Ruth whispered. “After what I done?”
“I think you’ll find children are remarkably forgiving,” Emma said. “Ever so much more than adults. You are not the first woman to send your children to me, Ruth, and you will not be the last. Some of the children that come to me are orphans, it’s true, but many have parents in situations like yours. Mothers and fathers who wanted a better life for their children. Those ones that are able, they visit from time to time. You would be most welcome to do the same. Ah—and here we are now.”
