Chapter Eighteen

As much as Emma would have liked to believe that Kit had bullied his way past Neil—given the esteem in which she presently held him—in fact, she knew that it was only her own fault that he was now waiting for her within the green salon. She had not, after all, informed Neil that he was not to be admitted. He always had been before.

This was, however, the first time he'd risked a visit by light of day. Always he had constrained himself to the hours well after nightfall, when he was less likely to be noticed or recognized. Often she had felt like a secret he concealed from the world, as if he did not wish to be publicly associated with her. It offered the same sting as that wretched half, which he forced before sister, with a snide curl of his lip that she had taken as the incontrovertible proof that he thought of her as nothing but an obligation. His only living family, owed some manner of duty.

It was that thought in her head when she swept into the green salon, and said without any concession to even the most minor of pleasantries another visitor might have expected of her, "I believe I was quite clear upon our last meeting. You are no longer welcome in my home."

His hat dangled from the clasp of his fingers as he dropped his head, and for a moment she was struck only by how…presentable he appeared. For some unknowable reason, he had made the effort to come dressed appropriately, clean-shaven and neat, with a properly tied cravat and clothes that looked well-tailored instead of as if they might have been stripped and stolen from a recently-deceased cadaver.

"Christ, Em. Is this truly how it is to be?" Kit dragged the gloved fingers of his left hand through the scrupulously-combed and arranged locks of his hair, ruffling the order of it once more into chaos; a tiny descent from the fa?ade he had donned back toward the man she had always known him to be.

"This is the relationship you wish for us to have," she said. One of no familiarity, no warmth. Perhaps they might nod at one another if they chanced to pass in the street. But it was only too easy to recall, now, that the overtures had always been hers. Perhaps he had only entertained himself with her desire for that familial connection that had been lacking in her childhood. Dangling the potential of it just out of her reach.

Perhaps she might merit as much attention as a potted fern in need of the occasional watering, or a darkened corner in need of dusting.

Kit ducked his head one more, his shoulders drooping—and still he made no effort to rise, to leave, as she had demanded. "It's not," he said, and scratched at the back of his neck uncomfortably. "I just…I always thought it would be best for you. If no one else knew."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Don't be obtuse, Em. It doesn't suit you."

Emma blinked, a bit taken aback by both the accusation and the way in which it had been tendered. Twice in recent days, Kit had made an effort to present himself as a gentleman, both in his affect and in his speech, and it was—disconcerting. She had grown accustomed to his brash, abrasive demeanor, the street cant which frequently peppered his speech and his intonation both.

"You're my sister, Em. You always have been. But I couldn't be your brother. Not publicly. And I didn't want to make you cut me," he admitted, his eyes—so very like their father's–shying away from hers.

"I wouldn't have cut you."

"You would have had to. Our father would have made you, or else made you regret not cutting me." A rusty, ill-formed laugh fractured in the air. "I'm a bastard, Em. That's all I'm ever going to be, however much you might wish me to be better. A known association with me could only have dragged you down into the mud alongside me."

She managed a strange little sound, not a laugh—but rather a perversion of one, a sort of cynical, contemptuous sound that she had never heard herself make before. "And yet you dragged me down into it anyway," she said, and folded her arms across her chest.

"Yes. I didn't mean to." He scraped one hand over his jaw, and his fingers trembled slightly. "It was my fault," he said, "Ambrose, I mean. I set him after you. I just didn't know what he was until it was too late."

"What—what do you mean, you set him after me?"

"I wasn't like them, Em," Kit sighed. "Rafe and Ambrose, I mean to say. I wasn't born noble or wealthy. I didn't come from a good family, from a respectable line. I was always a criminal, branded a thief from my youth. Literally." He set his hat aside and tugged the glove off of his left hand, lifting his fingers for her inspection. There upon the pad of his thumb was a mass of scar tissue, forming the vague outline of a T.

For thief.

"That's—that's barbaric," she said, instantly horrified, nauseated at the very sight of it.

"It hasn't hurt in a very long time, and it was only my thumb. For a while, the authorities branded offenders on the cheek, so the evidence would be visible to all. I consider it something of a mercy that at least I can conceal my brand with gloves. Thievery is the least of my crimes, Em."

I've got blood enough on my hands already, he'd said. The words hadn't been in the least metaphorical.

"But I was no one," he said. "Not—not like they were. I hadn't even volunteered myself for the duty like they had; I had been pressed into it. We had nothing in common, so I used the one thing I did have to my credit. You. You were the only good thing I had ever known, and I was so damned proud of you. My sister, Lady Emma. I told them all about you—"

"You didn't know anything of me." How could he have? He had never wanted to know.

He spared her a chiding glance. "I have spies, Em, in half the noble households in London. I knew everything of you. I knew every ball you attended, how many sets you danced and with whom. I knew your favorite books, your favorite songs, how well you could play the pianoforte and how you despaired of ever mastering the harp. I knew that our father chastised you for the cost of your Season when he noticed how few gentlemen had come to call, and I knew that your dowry was not significant enough to attract the attention you ought to have received."

Ought to have received? By what measure? She had been only the daughter of a nearly-impoverished earl, one of no great consequence or even political power. One whose title would invariably fall to some distant cousin or other, since he had had no legitimate son to inherit it. "What are you saying?" she asked.

Kit clasped his hands before him, and his gaze dropped to the floor. In shame, she thought. "Those stories I told of you, they were the only connection I had to their worlds, the ones so far above my own. They hung upon my every word. We were young, Em, and none of us were seeking wives—or so I thought. But Ambrose…"

Emma's breath hitched in her throat, and with one hand she grappled for the arm of the couch, slowly lowering herself onto it. Ambrose had always wanted more. Better than he had had, better than he had been born to, as if he felt that Fate had cheated him of the consequence he had deserved. She hadn't let herself realize until much too late—years wasted in mourning too late—that it had been simple avarice which had motivated him.

"He knew," Kit said, "that you hadn't any suitors. But you were still a lady, Em, a blueblood. He hadn't a title, but he was wealthy beyond reason, and I—I thought you would be safe with him. Secure. He didn't need your dowry, modest as it was. So when he asked my permission to court you, I thought him genuine in his regard."

But he hadn't been. She had been only another trinket to collect, a feather in his cap, a possession to prove the heights to which he could climb. He had traded upon that; she knew he had. She had given him an air of legitimacy amongst the aristocracy that he had lacked only by virtue of the status to which she had been born.

"I thought I had done well by you," Kit said, "even if you would never know it. I'd gotten you out of our father's house, into a home of your own, with a husband who would treasure you. And when we learned who Ambrose was, who he truly was, Em—" He made a caustic sound in his throat, his hands clenching upon one another. "You had loved him," he said. "And we didn't want to take that from you. To make more a wreck of your life than we already had. We thought it would be kinder if you never knew."

We? Her stomach pitched into her throat. Of course Rafe had known. Of course. He'd been party to her humiliation years before she had known she might have aught to be humiliated by. "You will forgive me," she said, in a choked little voice, "if I don't find it much of a kindness to have wasted years of my life mourning a man who held so little honest regard for me that he would make me an unwitting party to treason."

And that, she felt, was a concise summary of the bulk of her life. Unwitting. A witless, foolish woman so desperate for just a bit of kindness, a sliver of love, that she had swallowed up every sugary lie offered up to her, never tasting the bitterness beneath.

Would she even know honesty, now? Would she recognize it, if it were given to her?

"It was wrong," Kit admitted. "I was wrong. We both were, Rafe and I. We wanted only to protect you—"

"That is not protection. It is condescension. It is patronization."

Kit winced, a flicker of guilt crossing his face—odd in and of itself, because she could not recall ever having seen it before. "You're…not wrong," he said in a low voice. "But you didn't deserve to suffer for what Ambrose had done. I'm not sorry, Em, for protecting you from the consequences of it. But I am sorry that I hurt you in the process. I know that must not mean a great deal to you now."

It didn't. "I'm not certain you understand," she said, "just how many decisions you have made for me without my consent. How very little of my life has been my own." He'd selected her husband, and then her lover, all while letting her believe the choices had been hers. A spider web of deceit that she had never known she had blundered into.

"I do know that, Em," he said. "And I wish…I wish I had behaved differently. I can't unmake the choices I've made, but I can begin making better ones. And so I thought I would start with this." He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a little silver case, from which he selected a small white card.

She took it as he extended it to her, looking down at the neatly-printed lettering upon it. A calling card. Kit had calling cards. "What is this?" she asked.

"My home address."

Another surge of anger, so sharp and bright that she bit her lower lip until she was certain she could speak again without letting it loose in a feral shout. "I have been writing to you for years. Where, exactly, have my letters been going?"

Kit scratched at the back of his neck, abashed. "We'll call it my office," he said. "I thought it…safer, for you, if none knew we corresponded personally. Those in my employ passed your notes along to me as needed." He heaved a sigh. "But I am your brother, and you—you should have the choice of it. To write. Or to pay a call, if you wish."

To pay a call. As if they were truly family. Her breath whistled through her teeth. "You never wanted that," she accused.

"You're my only family," he said fiercely. "My little sister. I never wanted the repercussions of a public association for you, Em. It can only lower you in the esteem of your peers. You might very well lose friends, find certain doors closed to you. Do you think I wish to be responsible for that?" He gestured to indicate the card held in her hand as he rose to his feet. "But it is your decision," he said. "How much of a brother you wish me to be."

Now he offered it to her, that long-coveted connection which she had tried to forge for years.

"I will go," he said, and started for the door. "And I will not fault you for it, whatever you decide. But my door is open to you, always."

Yes, she thought bitterly, as she stared down at the card in her hand. The door of his house in Mayfair. Just a few streets away, all this time. And she hadn't even known it.

∞∞∞

It seemed a difficult thing to believe that so innocuous an item as a journal could have been the cause of so much chaos in Emma's life. Already she had spent too many hours bent over it in the waning light of day or in the dim light of a lamp, struggling to force it to make some sort of sense.

It didn't. Whatever she tried, however much she had wracked her brain for possibilities, still it resisted her efforts. What had possessed her to take it? As if she might have held some sort of knowledge that two seasoned spies did not, some sort of long-latent acumen for deciphering the indecipherable.

Kit had, to his credit, explained the workings of the cipher as he understood them. It was just that she didn't think he held much more understanding of it than she did—by his own admission, he had left the work of it to Rafe, who had more of a natural proficiency for the task. Or at least he had the patience for it. And patience was a resource of which Emma had grown increasingly short in supply.

Worse yet, there was no one to whom she could speak of it. Those that knew already had betrayed her, and those that didn't—well, matters of national security necessitated a certain secrecy. As much as it had hurt to be sacrificed upon that altar, a pawn in a game of spies and traitors, she could not say that her tender feelings ought to have won out over matters of state. In whom could she have confided? Those who were, as she had been, blissfully ignorant of such affairs? Those without any reason to suspect that there lurked a traitor among their ranks? Those who had, absent any such knowledge, the security of sleeping peacefully in their beds whilst others managed the worry for them, routing out villains before their perfidy had a chance to bear fruit? No; she could not have burdened Diana with such knowledge, nor Phoebe, nor Lydia. What was there for them to do for it anyway, beyond senseless worrying?

An uncomfortable sort of dissonance roused there in the far reaches of her mind; a sort of begrudging acknowledgment of her present predicament contrasted with Rafe's. In whom had he confided all these years? No one, she suspected. There had been no one for him, no confidant besides Kit, who was every bit as embroiled in these intrigues as was he.

I am lonely when I leave you.

God, it hurt. Like a slow poison slipping through her veins, coloring every word he'd said to her in shades of duplicity. Even if he had not lied to her directly, still she had ascribed meaning to acts undertaken only to ferret out information. How much, exactly, had she read into the truths he'd told her? How much had been only words spoken to gain her confidence, to put her at ease, to pretend at an intimacy that had never truly existed between them?

And still—she was lonely without him. Somehow she had grown accustomed to his presence, had learned to miss him when he was gone. Her bed was so much colder without him, the nights longer, emptier. She missed the man she thought he had been.

But she had never truly known the man he was.

∞∞∞

"Sir Roger has been in high spirits lately," Chris said over his drink. "To all accounts, anyway."

"I suppose that's good news," Rafe replied. "I've begun receiving invitations again. Though largely to events that he wishes me to attend for the purpose of gathering information." Another subtle sign that Sir Roger had begun to relax his guard. It meant that the man wanted to accept the fiction they had sold him, to believe that he would remain undiscovered for what he truly was.

"A test of loyalty, do you think?" Chris asked.

"Most likely." For the foreseeable future, they would have to give a passable impression of it, because Sir Roger was too experienced, too damned canny not to be watching for a slip of some sort. "Probably he'll expect me to return with information already known to him. You should do the same, if asked."

"He doesn't expect me to attend Ton events," Chris said. "He never has."

"He might, now that you've taken to minding your speech with more care." In fact, Chris' diction had never been quite so clear. His natural accent and pattern of speech had served him well over the years, seen him in good standing within the low places he frequented, where more genteel speech would have marked him as an outsider and therefore unworthy of trust. Rafe thought he'd preferred it that way. That he had wanted to set himself apart, even in his speech.

Perhaps he no longer did.

Chris gave a little shrug of his shoulders. "Wouldn't reflect well on Em, now, would it, to have a brother who sounds like he was born in an alley."

Rafe didn't expect that she would mind a great deal. But for some reason, it mattered to Chris. He said, "I see."

A curious silence fell over the table. Chris was waiting for him to ask the question. He was going to be disappointed.

With a longsuffering sigh, Chris said, "I haven't seen Dannyboy this evening."

"You won't. His mum sent him off already." The woman had been in a poor humor, snappish and shrill. Dannyboy had appeared to take it in stride, but he suspected the lad had been more hurt than he had let on.

Chris slid one fingertip around the rim of his glass. "You're still sending him to Em's?" he pressed.

"Yes," he said. And nothing more.

"Christ," Chris snarled, with a fierce scowl. "You're not going to ask after her, are you?"

Rafe peered down into his glass of whisky, avoiding Chris' eyes. "No," he said. "I'm not."

"You don't want to know?"

"Not particularly." In fact, he was rather certain he knew all too well already. To hear it confirmed would make it all the worse. "I knew it would come to a bad end. I told you as much."

"You did." Chris hunched his shoulders, a wordless expression of remorse. "Would that I had listened. Things might've turned out differently for you both." He heaved a sigh, eloquent in its depth, its weight. "She's made no progress on Ambrose's journal, and finds it vexing in the extreme. She sent a note round to me—more demanding than friendly, so it's safe to say she's still furious and likely still to be for some time to come. But she doesn't want to waste her efforts on work that has already been done. Of course, I haven't any notes of my own to send to her—"

"I have." Though they would make sense only to him, those pages and pages of attempts he'd made already. He'd have to wrestle some sense out of them, somehow. "I'll put it all together. Send it along to her with Dannyboy."

"You truly aren't going to ask?"

"What purpose would it serve?" Rafe cast back the last of his whisky in one swallow. "I already know, Chris. I knew what the consequences would be from the beginning, and the fault is my own. I could have refused."

"You did," Chris said. "You did refuse."

"I could have meant it." In fact he had meant it—just not enough. Not enough to resist the temptation of that which had never before been within reach. He had latched onto the excuse that Chris had provided, his baser nature, his selfish nature rising to the fore. Anything to be close to her, even for just a handful of moments.

Better to be unknown to her than to be hated by her. He had known it even then. But he had allowed himself that one indiscretion, that one encounter nonetheless. Perhaps he had even convinced himself, after a fashion, that it was a forgivable sin. One night, he'd thought—just one, and he could content himself with only that.

He'd lied even to himself, and Emma had been the one to suffer for it. There was nothing he could do for it, but to do his damnedest to extricate her from the situation into which he had placed her. And then to let her find whatever measure of peace she could while he quietly exited her life. It was the least she was owed; no arguments, no fuss.

"I haven't got the damned right to ask, Chris," he said. "You, of all people, must understand that."

With any luck, he'd go back to being invisible. He'd grown accustomed to it, after all.