Chapter Sixteen

He didn't want to do it."

Emma blinked at the clear, precisely enunciated syllables, such a rarity from Kit that she could almost believe she was in the company of someone else entirely. Oddly, Rafe's sudden departure had left her feeling both bereft and furious all over again. He had earned the upbraiding she had meant to give him, and he had deprived her of the opportunity.

"He didn't want to do it," Kit repeated, more firmly this time. "So if you wish to place blame, it belongs to me."

Emma's stomach roiled. "He didn't want to bed me?" The very thought sickened her, that she might have been party to something far more sordid than she had ever imagined, even if unintentionally.

A hoarse bark of laughter eked from Kit's throat. "No, the poor bastard always wanted that," he said, as if it ought to have been somehow elucidating. "He didn't want to deceive you."

"Then why did he? Why did you? I had thought—" She cleared her throat to speak around the lump of pain that had risen in it. "I had thought you had at least a little more respect for me than that."

"To protect a different lie," he said. "That's the thing about lies. Keeping them straight is a dreadful business. The first one—the first lie was to protect you. And it happened ten years ago."

"I don't understand," she said, though that vaguely sick feeling within her stomach only grew.

Wordlessly, he set the book that Rafe had given him into her hands, and she stepped out of the shadows and into the thin sliver of moonlight that shone through the window, the better to see it. A fresh surge of fury coursed through her at the sight of it; the leather cover, stiff with age and disuse. "He—he stole this from me?" she asked, in a fragile little voice. "He stole my husband's journal?"

"I asked him to," Chris said. "Hell. I told him to."

"Why?" It was as if there was something hanging there in the air between them, a horrible thought dangling just above her head. Just waiting for her grasp it. "Why would you ever?"

"Open it," he said. "I know you haven't. But you need to understand."

With a sense of trepidation, she turned the leather cover, saw the familiar slant of Ambrose's handwriting. At first she thought it a trick of the lingering darkness, but even when she squinted and pulled the little book closer to her face, still she could not read it. "It's nonsense," she said, baffled. "It's—it's just gibberish. Why would he have written something so utterly unintelligible?"

"It's not nonsense," he said. "It's a cipher. One that has thus far resisted all of our efforts to break."

"But why would…" The words faded into the dead silence between them, trailing off as that horrible thought drew nearer and nearer. Until at last she had it there in the palm of her hand, wrapped within the clutch of her fingers. "Oh, lord. You're spies," she said. "You, and Rafe—and my husband?"

"Yes," he said. "But Ambrose was more than a spy, Em. He was a damned traitor."

Traitor.

It didn't sound like a word, really, so much as a death knell. It knocked about within Emma's mind; a cruel, noxious sound. Traitor. It felt like the stick of a knife through her ribs, the puncture of her lungs, until every breath she drew was flavored with pain, with shame.

"Em." The word pierced the strange fog that had clouded her mind. Distant, quiet. Struggling to reach her through her shock, which had enshrouded her like deeply piled layers of quilts. "Em. It's years past, now."

But it wasn't—it wasn't. Perhaps they had known for years, but for her it was now and it was fresh and horrifying.

The deep breath that slid down her throat and into lungs that felt collapsed beneath the weight of what she had learned was cold and heavy. "How?" she asked. "Why?" Such a frail-sounding thing, her voice. Weak and battered. A shrill whistle through the torn sails of a storm-tossed ship.

Kit did not answer directly, and Emma wasn't even certain what it was, exactly, she had asked. She felt the pressure of his arm at her back, leading her deeper into the house. There was the soft whisk of a door opening in the darkness, the press of his hands on her shoulders as he urged her to sit. Then, at last, the lighting of a fire, and a strong, swift flare of light beating back the gloom.

He lit a lamp and set it on the low table, taking up a seat opposite her, the journal balanced upon his knee. A few moments passed in a strange silence that was filled only with the secrets he had let pile up between them. And at last he said, "When we met—Rafe, Ambrose, and I—I was all of twenty years of age and facing down the distinct possibility of transportation."

"What?" Transportation? "What did you do? Why did you never tell me? I could have—"

"No, you damned well could not have. What would you have done?" Kit splayed out his fingers, as if he were offering up the truth to her at last. "Let's just say that a man whom some would call a gentleman was less than gentlemanly with a woman I considered to be beneath my protection. I gave him the consequences he was due, and the man's family took offense to it."

"Did you—did you kill him?"

"No," he said, and there was a thread of regret in his voice for it. "Death would have been too swift and too kind. He lives on as a broken man, and I have the pleasure of knowing that his sins will haunt him for the remainder of his miserable, pathetic life." He clasped his hands before him, his shoulders sinking. "But I was caught," he said. "I was caught, and I would have been transported for life, if Sir Roger had not interceded on my behalf."

Sir Roger. Another breath, settling into lungs that struggled to contain it. "Sir Roger? Sir Roger Banfield?"

Kit's face changed minutely. "You know him?"

"Yes, I—well, not well," she said. "He was an acquaintance of Ambrose's. I was given to understand that they were business partners, that they shared some mutual investments."

"He was our superior," Rafe said. "Our contact at the Home Office. He placed us together, knowing that together we could source information from every echelon of society, from the lowest rungs to the highest heights."

Emma released a shaky breath, and it felt like she wilted as it escaped her lungs. She had never suspected—not once. Probably no one else had noticed, either. Her husband had been a spy, years before she had even met him, and she had never known. Had never given it a moment's thought.

"Rafe and Ambrose," Kit said, "they didn't have to do it. Not like I did. I was forced into it. Five years of service in exchange for my freedom. But I had already developed a reputation for harvesting information, and so I was useful. Too useful to throw away on transportation. Rafe came from a good family, and Ambrose was wealthy outright. I assumed they did it for love of their country." His eyes sheared away from hers as a muscle jumped in his jaw. "As it turned out, only one of them did."

Her heart lurched in her chest. "You're certain?" she asked. "You're certain Ambrose was a—a—" But she couldn't force herself to say the word.

"I caught him at it," Kit said. "We trusted him implicitly, you see. You have to, when you're in that position. You have to trust your partners." He heaved a great sigh, rubbed at his forehead. "You must understand," he said. "We relied upon him for years. Rafe spent much of his time abroad, I stayed within England, and Ambrose frequently traveled between us to carry our messages and orders, to keep secret matters of national importance. And there wasn't even a moment we held even the slightest sliver of suspicion for him. Not until…that night."

Somehow, instinctively, she knew exactly the night he meant. The one Ambrose had died. The night she had become a widow. Every bit of her rebelled at the thought, every tiny muscle stringing itself tight and aching. "No," she whispered defensively. "No, he—he was attacked. It was a robbery gone awry."

Gravely, Kit shook his head. "It was…convenient," he said, "to let that be the story that got out. To conceal the depths of Ambrose's treachery, in light of what we had learned of him. But that isn't what happened, Em."

Something like a sob clawed at her throat, scratched with razor-sharp talons to escape. She pressed her palm to her mouth, felt the hot beat of her breaths against it until she had forced it down once more. "How did it happen?" she asked, in a voice torn by the lies she had been fed, the ones she had swallowed down all these long years.

Kit shoved one hand through his hair, blowing out a harsh breath. He cast his gaze toward the table between them, as if he could not quite look her in the eye. "Rafe had returned home from France," he said, "probably a fortnight before. We had resumed our weekly meetings, but only just."

Thursdays, she thought absently, with a rising sense of hysteria. They had been Ambrose's Thursday appointments. Kit was Rafe's standing Thursday appointment.

"Probably," Kit said, "he'd grown complacent. Convinced he'd pulled the wool so firmly over our eyes that there was no great need for caution. And, largely, he was right. Until the night I caught him. He used the same damned tavern, Em, the same one at which we met. I only meant to pop in for pint, but I saw him there, at our table—with the subject of one of my investigations. A man I'd been surveilling for some time, a man long suspected to be one amongst a network of smugglers and counterfeiters who had been active during the war." He swallowed audibly, his brows lowering over his eyes. "He was passing the man information," he said. "Everything I'd shared with him a few days before. Everything I knew already, and everything I only suspected."

"Why?" Emma croaked. "What purpose would it serve?"

"I can only assume he meant to help the man evade the authorities. To keep the details of his own involvement—his family's activities during the war—from coming to light." Briefly his eyes closed. "He paid the man off, Em, to continue to keep his secrets. And he passed along what I had compiled to prevent the man from getting caught up in the net the Home Office had cast for him. He didn't see me. But I—I had seen enough. I knew he would have to be taken into custody, but it wasn't possible in the middle of a crowded pub. It would have to be done with more subtlety, or I'd risk my own security, my own secrets coming to light. So I slipped out of the tavern, found a stranger willing to carry a carefully-worded message to Rafe, and another to Sir Roger, and I waited outside for Ambrose to emerge. I waited for Rafe to arrive. And I hoped—I hoped—that there would be some reasonable explanation."

By the tightness of his mouth, by the clench of his fingers into fists, Emma knew that there had been no such explanation. "You killed him," she said, and felt the blood leave her face in a rush that left her woozy.

"Wish to God I had. I've got blood enough on my hands already, and you—you'd have forgiven me for it."

Him. She would forgive him. But not—not Rafe. Her stomach heaved, and she clapped her hand over her mouth as she retched reflexively. "Rafe killed Ambrose. Rafe killed my husband." It didn't sound real. She couldn't make the words make sense in her head, as if some part of her staunchly refused to accept the reality of them.

"Rafe had a split second, Em, to make the decision. And if he had done differently, I'd likely be dead."

"What?" Still the nausea had not faded, and the conflict between her heart and her head raged on. She heard the words only distantly, as if they had been spoken to someone else.

"He arrived only moments before Ambrose emerged, and I—I was too damned angry to think clearly. I dragged Ambrose into the alley behind the pub to detain him, made some rather indelicate accusations. Which Ambrose denied, naturally."

Naturally. As if anything about any of this was natural.

"Ambrose tried to pit Rafe against me. To suggest that I was mistaken, that I had misunderstood. And he wanted to believe it. Hell, I wanted to believe it. But I knew what I had seen, what I had heard. I was resolute, Rafe was bewildered, and Ambrose—Ambrose was desperate. ‘Think of Emma,' he said. As if it were a damned threat."

That sick feeling slid up her throat, and her tongue tasted the sourness of bile.

"I planted him a facer for that," Kit said in a dull voice. "For using you as leverage. But he'd meant to provoke me into getting closer, and it gave him the opportunity to get hold of my pistol. We struggled for it, Ambrose and I, and Rafe—Rafe had to make a choice. A split-second decision, whose word to trust. I like to think he chose rightly. It is because of that choice that I was only grazed when Ambrose managed to get his finger on the trigger. I'm certain Rafe didn't intend to kill him, but it was dark. So damned dark. The ball pierced Ambrose's back, entered his heart. He was dead nearly instantly."

Her husband had gone out one evening and had not returned. Then the authorities had called upon her, to tell her that he never would.

And still—she would have made the same choice. Emma sucked in a breath, shocked by the instinctive, horrific thought, but it remained steadfast and undeniable there at the back of her brain. Rafe had chosen the right life to save. But, oh, how she had suffered for it then. How she suffered for it now, for this new knowledge inflicted upon her. Did it make her just as bad, to condemn the man she had married so easily?

Kit's shoulders hunched. "We had to act quickly," he said. "Sir Roger convinced us of it. He'd arrived mere minutes later—too late to change the outcome, but late enough not to…not to be so affected as were we. He kept his head, told us what we'd have to do. How to fix it."

Fix it? Fix it! Emma's fingers clenched in the folds of her skirt, the knuckles going white, aching with the strain of it.

"No one could know. It was crucial that the whole thing be hushed up. We had a network of smugglers and counterfeiters to dismantle, after all, and if they were to learn that Ambrose had been caught at his activities, they'd be in the wind. But worse—worse even than that, to me, was what would have happened to you."

To her? "What do you mean?"

"What Ambrose was involved in was treason, Em. Traitor isn't just a harsh word, it's a hard fact. It was a damned lucky thing for you he died, because had he lived, he would have been convicted and hanged for it—and everything he owned would have been attainted. By extension, everything you owned would have been forfeit to the Crown. You would have been worse than ruined." Kit blew out a rough breath, his lips pulling into a scowl. "He didn't only betray his country, Em, he betrayed you, and that is what I could never bring myself to forgive."

"I—I don't understand." The words swirled about her head, incomprehensible. "What had I done to merit such a thing?"

"Nothing," Kit said. "But we had the devil of a time convincing the Home Office of it. We were in your house that very evening, searching Ambrose's things. Rafe removed everything of note from Ambrose's study that he could get his hands on while you were being informed below. And still it took nearly a year for us to convince the proper authorities that you had no knowledge of any of it, that you were blameless. You were watched practically every moment until the Home Office was satisfied, while we negotiated our own terms with them. In the meantime, we proved our own usefulness by dismantling Ambrose's network—a task that was possible only because he had not been publicly revealed for what he was." He dropped his head into his hands. "But we could never be certain we had gotten them all," he said, and there was a wealth of self-reproach in his voice. "Still, there was nothing for ten years. Not a whisper. Nothing even remotely suspicious. And then—and then you found Ambrose's damned journal. Rafe missed it the first time around."

"It was—it was tucked back behind some books in his study," she said inanely, as if it might have some relevance. She hadn't found it, either, until she'd finally worked up the will to clean the room out at last. She'd never even suspected that Ambrose had kept a journal.

"It was a damned mess," Kit sighed. "But you spoke of it. In public, at a ball. And you were overheard."

She shivered, an unconscious reaction to the sinister undertone lurking within his voice. "You don't mean—"

"We weren't certain until then," Kit interjected. "We had hoped to be wrong, but we had resolved to watch over you as precautionary measure. But that very night, if you'll recall, someone broke into your house. And we knew that we had failed. That there was someone out there who had been biding his time, likely hoping the same as us—that ten years of nothing meant there was nothing. That he would never be discovered."

"Am I in danger?" Were the children in danger?

"We don't believe so," Kit said. "Not at present. We know now who is behind it. It's Sir Roger. It's been Sir Roger all along, and we never suspected. He used us, Em, to round up anyone who might have incriminated him. He used us to bury his own misdeeds. We've let him think he's winning at present, let him think he knows all that we do, that he's under no suspicion. To buy us enough time to crack the cipher and prove his involvement. But the man is a master spy; he's been careful to leave no other evidence, nothing yet provable. Imagine, if you will, playing a game of chess against a master. The very man who has taught you everything you know."

As much as she knew that matters of national security—of treason—ought to supersede her wounded feelings, still there was the burn of humiliation in her cheeks. The quaver of hurt in her voice. "You—you sent Rafe to me only to steal my husband's journal." And he had come for the same. Whatever a face he had tried to put upon it, it had been nothing but patronization and lies. She had been falling in love, and he—he had climbed into her bed out of necessity. Out of duty to his country.

He hadn't had even enough respect for her to explain himself.

"To catch a traitor," Kit said, his voice thrumming with desperation.

"You've lied to me. You've both lied to me—for years!" How many among the Home Office had known what she did not? That her comfortable life, the one she had cobbled together for herself after the death of the traitorous husband they had all let her mourn, was only at their benevolence? Had she been a pitiful figure? Or a shameful one—even when she hadn't known she had had anything for which to be ashamed?

"To protect you!" Kit argued. "Only to protect you, Em. We never would have told you—"

A sob choked her. How could he not understand how much worse that was? That they had at last condescended to inform her of the reality of her situation? "Why tell me now, then?" she asked.

"Because—Rafe couldn't stomach it any longer," he said, a guilty flush spreading over his cheeks. "He knew what it would mean, and still he couldn't do it." He splayed his fingers out in entreaty. "Don't hate him, Em, for doing what had to be done."

"Don't you dare to instruct me on how to feel." She found it at last, the anger that had been smothered beneath the hurt and the humiliation and the shame of it all, and she snapped to her feet in a magnificent conflagration of it, her feet pounding across the floor that separated them. With one swipe, she snatched the journal from where it rested upon his knee, her fingernails carving gouges into the thick leather cover. "You are going to explain to me how to decipher this," she said. "And then you are going to leave. I don't want to see you—either of you—ever again."

"It's not that simple, Em. The cipher is one commonly referred to as the indecipherable cipher. It requires a key, and we don't have it. Rafe thought Ambrose might have mentioned something to you in passing, something that would help—"

"He's been interrogating me?" Her stomach roiled anew. She tasted bile in her mouth, felt the reflexive heave of her stomach.

"I only meant to say that we've had no luck thus far."

"Then there is nothing to be lost in leaving it with me. So," she said, "Tell me how I would use a key if I had one, and then kindly take your leave. Because if there is anything to come of this, for God's sake, I will not be again the last to know."