Chapter Twenty

Emma had known that she could not avoid Diana's company forever, but it had been difficult beyond reason to come to terms with how intrinsically intertwined her social circle was with Rafe's. In fact, there were no parts of her life that had not felt the touch of his unseen hand. She counted among her most intimate friends both his sister and his sister by marriage. Her brother—and even her late husband—had been amongst his colleagues. Even what she had come to think of as her life's work, the children she had taken into her care, had been on his account.

So when at last she worked up the nerve to pay a call upon Diana, after having ducked and dodged far too many calls herself, it was with no small amount of trepidation. Diana would have questions, no doubt, and she—she did not know how she was meant to answer them. She had had a difficult enough time guarding her own secrets. How was she meant to be the custodian of secrets of national importance?

How much was too much to reveal? What could be said without arousing suspicion? What might lead to further questions, the answers to which she did not dare give? Would those same answers be writ across her face, since she had not the experience, the expertise, to erase them from her expressions?

It was a quandary that could not be solved with small sips of tea or a tiny plate of biscuits, and she was still mulling it over in her head when Diana appeared in the doorway of the drawing room.

"Emma," Diana said, and one of her hands lifted toward her chest, as if to snatch at the breath that had plainly deserted her in her haste to arrive. "Are you—are you well?"

Emma's teacup found the saucer with a nervous clatter, much too loud in the silent room. She did not wish to lie to Diana. The unsettling awareness that, in the interests of national security, she might have to, led to another unpleasant realization.

She had judged Rafe too harshly. The prospect of lying to preserve state secrets might be an onerous and distasteful task, but it was a necessary one, and he could not have liked it any better than she. She had been incensed by the lies, humiliated—but the truth was even more difficult to bear. A burden, just as he had said. One that had placed the weight of the world upon her shoulders.

She said, quietly, "No. But I will be." Eventually.

Diana's expression fractured in sympathy, and she pressed one hand to her mouth to disguise the minute tremble of her lips. "I am so afraid," she said, "that I am going to lose you as a friend. That because of my fool of a brother—"

Emma winced despite herself. "That will not happen," she said as she rose to her feet and took a hesitant step forward. "I'm so sorry I couldn't face you before. I just needed...a bit of time to myself." Time to lick her wounds. Time to sort through the mess of her feelings and determine how she ought to go on.

The snarled web of those connections she shared with Rafe was a devious one, and the threads of one aspect invariably led back to some other part that must needs be concealed from common knowledge. And now she had developed the worrying certainty that this was the sort of thing with which Rafe wrestled every day. A delicate dance of words in the constant attempt to avert suspicion.

Diana made a wretched little sound in her throat. "Oh, please don't apologize. I'm just so glad you've come." And then she was rushing across the floor, and Emma found herself swept into her embrace, comforting in its familiarity.

Whatever else had happened, this remained the same. "I am, as well. I have missed you so."

"I gave Rafe quite a piece of my mind," Diana confessed. "It was clear enough that he had deceived you in some fashion. I can't believe he would do such a thing. Have you any idea why?"

Emma squeezed her eyes shut against a sudden surge of tears. "Please, I truly wish only to put it behind me. It's quite embarrassing, you understand, to—to have formed so mistaken an impression."

"Whatever do you mean?"

A strangled sob crept up her throat, and Emma swallowed it back down with no small amount of effort. Nothing had changed, really. She had not changed. She was always going to be the one who loved more, the one who made herself more vulnerable. "I don't wish to be the cause of a rift between you," she said. "In reality, I convinced myself that there was more between us than there truly was." Really, it was her own fault. To be always so desperate to be loved. Cursed to seek that ever-elusive love from men incapable of giving it.

Diana drew back slowly, the tiniest hint of a frown pleated between her dark brows. "Emma," she said gently, "I could not possibly guess what has transpired between the two of you, and it is hardly my place to interfere…but I would be remiss if I did not tell you that I do not believe Rafe has fared much better than you."

"What do you mean by that?" Emma asked.

"He looked just dreadful when last I saw him last," Diana said. "Like death. I might have managed to drum up some sympathy for him if I hadn't been so very angry with him." She hesitated a moment, and her voice dropped to a murmur as if she feared she might be overstepping. "However it was that the two of you parted company, I think it must have hurt him terribly as well."

"I don't see how it could have done," Emma said, and softened it with a smile. Or as much of one as she could manage. "Really, Diana, I should never have expected it to last. It's just that it has all come out a bit messier than I might have hoped. But now it is done, and I would very much like to put it behind me."

Diana took a deep breath and pushed her spectacles back up the bridge of her nose. "Of course," she said. "I understand."

But she didn't. And Emma hoped she never would.

∞∞∞

That hope followed Emma home, into yet another long night of trying her damnedest to manipulate the workings of an indecipherable cipher, and it stayed with her long after she'd given up on the attempt to seek out her bed instead.

This wretched situation had thrust her straight into an unexpected moral dilemma. She had not, in point of fact, lied to Diana. But she had done just as Rafe had: deflecting and dodging. Concealing the truth from her closest friend, the person she ought to have trusted with it above all others.

Rafe had claimed that he had not lied to her, and in retrospect, probably he had not. He had instead done a great deal of obfuscation, and of letting her believe things she now knew were untrue. He had even made a point of his refusal to answer certain questions she had posed of him.

But to what benefit? He could just as easily have told her pretty lies, which she, in her eternal foolishness, would have wholeheartedly believed. Instead he had straddled the truth as closely as possible. But why should he have bothered with sticking so closely to the truth, when it had been only a ruse undertaken out of necessity?

And why had he given Diana cause to suspect him of conflicted emotions, when that last dreadful evening, he had simply walked away from her, from the consequences of his actions?

She hadn't even questioned it. What reason would there have been for her to have done? He had proved himself a scoundrel and a liar—

But he wasn't. Or at least he hadn't been.

A paltry I'm sorry could never have offered solace to the woman he had wounded to her very core. But perhaps…perhaps he had known that. Perhaps he had known that there had been nothing he could have said to mitigate the hurt he had caused.

Emma flopped onto her back, casting one arm over her eyes even as she squeezed them shut in consternation. This was the wreckage left in the wake of such duplicity; she did not know which version of him to believe in. The lover who had brought her the companionship and passion that she had long lacked? The cool, calculating spy who had toyed with her emotions in the service of his own ends? The ruined man Diana had claimed to have seen?

He donned these contradictory behaviors like some men might a hat or a coat. Which was real? Or were they false faces all, worn either for convenience or necessity? Like the cipher over which they had both labored without success, Rafe, too, was an unsolvable enigma. A man so enshrouded in mystery and deception that she could not reconcile the disparate parts of him she knew. But then, she never had truly known him.

Perhaps, she thought, to know a spy, one had to think like a spy. To sort through all of those opposing bits and place them where they belonged, separating actions taken in service of his duties from those which could not be so explained. Like separating wheat from chaff—when the veneer of duty had been stripped away from his actions, whatever was left would be only the man himself. Whoever it was that he happened to be.

A sigh drifted from her lungs, given to the empty darkness of her room, to the pervasive quiet that was again her closest companion. It hummed in her ears with the rush of her blood, and there was a part of her buried not too very deeply down that would have sacrificed a great number of things only to hear the soft, even cadence of his breaths in the darkness instead. Her feelings, at least, had been real. Even now, despite the hurt he had caused, she missed him.

She had been content in her ignorance, until she had known better. And then she had been discontent in her knowledge, because she had known better. But she could not judge the lie while resenting the truth. Her wounded pride had been born of a life lived in a world of stark contrasts, of black and white and nothing else in between. But that world had been only another lie, one which she had swallowed down herself. This was the truth; the world painted in countless shades of grey.

A decade of lies woven round her—to preserve her reputation, her security. An illicit liaison undertaken—to spare her the lingering effects of Ambrose's duplicity. A life taken—her husband's life taken—to save another. She had wrestled with that for some days now. Struggled with the knowledge that she would have made the same choice; the very choice she had so easily condemned Rafe for making. She had waded through a current of guilt, of shame, only at the thought of it. How much deeper had Rafe's guilt run, for wielding the pistol?

It was so easy to judge those actions when removed from their context. From her place of monumental privilege, in a world of convenience and safety that had been secured for her by those willing to live within the darkness of the world, she had never before had to acknowledge it. For better or worse, this world was hers now, too.

Now she had to find her footing within it.

∞∞∞

Emma flexed her aching fingers in a vain effort to alleviate the cramps that had afflicted them. She had been working for hours, since just after breakfast with the children, and still without a hint of success to show for her efforts. Scraps of discarded paper littered the desk before her, and her inkwell had nearly run dry; a consequence of scratching out line after dreadful line of absolute nonsense.

She had hoped to find some meaning in the numbers that had been etched in the margins of the pages, but thus far it had eluded her. Rafe had provided a full accounting of them, neatly compiled in an ordered list, but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to them. And there were simply too many books, too many pages to account for. She was only one woman—how was she meant to conquer such a task?

Emma rested her elbows upon her desk, settled her face in the cup of her hands, and sighed. It was not enough to have been a fool for the duration of her marriage; Ambrose had made a fool of her even from the grave. He taunted her even now with the chaos into which he had cast her.

A scratch at the door pulled her from the dark cloud of her thoughts, and she scrambled to gather up the assortment of papers and the journal, stuffing the jumbled mass of it all into the drawer of the desk. "Enter," she called.

Neil stepped through the door. "My lady, you have a caller," he said. "Sir—"

A chortle interrupted him. "Now, now, my boy, I can announce myself."

Emma stiffened at the jovial tone, one she had not heard in quite a long time. On spindly legs she rose from her chair, her heart leaping into her throat. "Sir Roger," she said as the man walked through the door, and could have cursed herself for the odd, fractured little catch in her voice.

"It has been an age, my dear," Sir Roger said, the apples of his cheeks rounding above the neatly-trimmed grey of his beard, and though his voice was gentle and pleasant, she could only hear treachery within it. The sibilant hiss of the snake she knew him to be.

How was she meant to conceal her anger from this man who searched her face with sharp, cunning eyes? God help her, she was not a proficient enough liar to manage a situation such as this. What would Rafe do? What would Kit do?

Chess, Kit had said. Like playing a game against a master. If she could not quite mask her anger, perhaps she could twist it to her advantage. "It has indeed," she said, and turned her face away from him, in what any reasonable person would interpret as a cut. "Do forgive me, Sir Roger. I have long been under the impression that your friendship—such as it was—expired with my late husband. I cannot imagine what has brought you to my door after so many years."

"Ten years, isn't it? I thought to offer comfort to an old friend's widow during what certainly must be a difficult time. Especially," he added, "given that gossip suggests she has recently had a falling out of some sort with her closest friend."

Emma felt her breath back up into her lungs. He couldn't know the why of it, she assured herself. He couldn't. Diana did not even know, really. Not the whole, dreadful truth of it.

But he suspected. Whatever his sources had been, whatever they had told him, it had been enough to send him here. To her. And she was not nearly so accomplished a liar as she needed to be to quell whichever suspicions he had acquired.

"Curiously, that same friend has had a falling out with her brother as well," Sir Roger remarked idly. "I have it on good authority that he was turned away at her door on two successive Saturdays. One does wonder what precipitated it."

One could wonder all one wished. She would say nothing.

Sir Roger's eyes strayed to her desk, to the scant evidence she had left behind, and there was something terrible and speculative about his gaze. "I have also heard just recently," he said, his voice inflected with curiosity, "that you have discovered a journal that Ambrose left behind."

Emma swallowed hard, struggling to maintain her composure. "He left all things behind. But I do wonder where you heard that," she said.

"Oh, just gossip. You know how it is." He produced a sigh that had all the right hints of melancholia and yet still fell flat in her ears. "I do miss him," he said. "Do tell me—did he write of me? It would be a balm to my soul to know that I occupied some small place in his thoughts."

A searching question, deliberately light. Emma lifted her chin. "Not to my recollection, Sir Roger."

"Pity," Sir Roger said, though the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile too sharp to be genuine. "Still, I would dearly love to see for myself. What is the harm in sharing just a bit with an old friend who loved him as well?"

She knew she was being lead into a trap but she couldn't see it closing around her, couldn't determine where to place her feet to avoid it. She had never been much of a chess player. "Sir Roger, you are asking me to share my late husband's private thoughts. It's quite a sensitive subject, and not one I care to discuss any further at the moment. Perhaps in the future, when—when it is not quite so painful."

"Oh, come," Sir Roger chuckled. "If ten years has not blunted the pain, then surely nothing will." His voice pitched to a wheedling tone. "One brief passage is all I ask."

"I won't." The refusal tripped out of her mouth on instinct alone, and she knew even as the words left her tongue that they had been a mistake.

For but a fraction of a moment, Sir Roger's mouth tightened into a sneer. "Well, now," he said, on a feigned laugh of surprise. "I suppose that puts me in my place, then. I do apologize if I have offered offense. Perhaps in the future you'll be more of a mind to share those treasured memories. If you can."

If you can. Emma suppressed a violent shiver at the strange inflection of suggestion that lingered within the words. Her nerves sizzled with the sensation of that trap springing closed around her.

Sir Roger offered a cordial bow as a gentleman was meant to do for a lady. "I'll call again soon," he said as he turned for the door, and she did not think she had imagined the subtle threat lurking there within the even tenor of his voice. "And, Lady Emma—I am deeply, deeply sorry."

Emma managed to still the trembling of her knees until Sir Roger's footsteps faded from the hall. As much as she would have liked to wilt with the relief his absence had created in her, she knew she did not have the luxury of it. She had to tell Kit what had transpired. Immediately.