Chapter Twenty Two

The confines of Rafe's room measured six paces by four and he had marked them out again and again in the hours since he had been forcibly removed from his home and taken to Whitehall for confinement. There was no window, no way to gauge the time that had passed. He hadn't been offered more than a crust of bread and a glass of water since he had been shoved within the little room, which had been cleared of any furnishings it might once have contained in preparation for his arrival.

He had not been provided so much as a cot upon which to sleep, and he did not fool himself that this meant that he would be released before he would require sleep. More likely it meant that no one had gone to the bother of one, since they expected him to swing from a rope in short order.

He hadn't seen Chris. But he had damned well heard him.

Torture was always a possibility in this line of work, but before now he had never once suspected that it might be used against them by their own countrymen. Thus far he had been spared the worst of it—but Chris had not the protection of a noble name and lineage to make it an unpalatable option.

But even Rafe's name would not protect him much longer. His time would come. And in the meantime there was a kind of torture in the echo of Chris' distant screams of pain, the sort of agony a body could not contain, could not white-knuckle its way through.

Sir Roger had done a thorough job of discrediting them, but then he'd expected that much. Even those with whom he had once shared a certain camaraderie had turned from him, disgust etched into their faces.

Rafe had made his peace with the possibility of death long ago, had always known there might well come a time that he would be called to sacrifice his life in the service of his country. He had just always expected that death to be an honorable one. Noble, even.

Instead, he would be remembered as a traitor. A rough, hoarse laugh eked from his lips—remembered. Perhaps he would be that, he thought, for a while. In the way that one remembers unpleasant things, with a wince and a grimace and a slow, rueful shake of the head.

The way one remembers things one would rather forget. And he would be forgotten, eventually. Slipping moment by moment to the fringes of the minds through which he would occasionally traipse until at last he entered them not at all. The spare son. Invisible, and at last erased.

Even that much would be bearable, he thought, if it weren't for the fact that he would leave Emma alone, unprotected against Sir Roger. Now, in what might well be his final hours, he had to contend with the reality that he had sacrificed her safety to appease his guilty conscience.

She had never been his. And now he could say, in the soul-bearing honesty found only at the end of one's life, that it would have been better to have stayed in his place at the very periphery of her life. To love only from afar, knowing it would never be acknowledged—much less returned—than to have earned her hatred.

She would never know the truth of his feelings for her, and that, he thought, was an unexpected blessing. The last gift he would ever give her. The freedom to hate, so that his death would never trouble her, never give rise to conflicted feelings, never move her to sympathy.

She wouldn't mourn him. Thank God at least for that small blessing.

∞∞∞

Sir Roger called at an obscenely early hour, well before the proper time to make morning calls. Emma had not slept—she couldn't have done so if she had tried—and so she was awake and alert when Neil scratched upon her door to announce him, a strange note of concern in his voice.

But then, he had been awake through the night as well, despite the fact that she had tried time and time again to send him off to bed. Her disquiet had been his own, and he had graciously sent up a steady supply of tea and biscuits, new candles when hers had worn to nubs, fresh sheets of paper and nibs for her pen.

The children would be having breakfast just on the other side of the house. And she would be meeting with a traitor. But she had no other choice. At least, not one that immediately presented itself. This was Sir Roger's next move, made before she had had the chance to make one of her own.

I am deeply, deeply sorry. She could still hear the menace behind the words, see the mocking tilt of the smile he had offered to her. The same mocking smile that he donned as she walked into the green salon, where he had been casually sipping a cup of tea.

He lounged upon her couch with the regal nonchalance of a king, offering no greeting, making no move to rise as a gentleman would do for a lady. She supposed a man in his position—towering above the chessboard, master of all that happened upon it—felt no need to offer these courtesies to a woman he considered beneath him. A mere pawn to be moved about at will.

"All over the city," he said blithely as his teeth snapped into a crisp biscuit, "people are retrieving their newspapers. They are learning, my lady, that two men yesterday afternoon were apprehended to face charges of treason." His eyes slid over her face, noting her lack of surprise. "I suppose you must have already known that, then."

"Gossip travels faster than print, Sir Roger," Emma said tightly. "What is done in daylight seldom remains secret before nightfall." Though the why of it might have remained uncertain to most, of course she had known. He already knew she did. "Why have you come, sir? What is it you want of me?"

"Oh, I imagine you know only too well what I want," he said on a chortle. "I am sorry that it has turned out this way, but that is the way of things, I am afraid. Men in positions of power must be willing to make difficult choices."

"So you have come to threaten me."

"Threaten?" Sir Roger widened his eyes behind the lenses of his spectacles. "My dear lady, no. I have come to make you a promise. This is the least of what I can do to you. There is so much more left to take. It is so difficult," he said, "to be a woman alone in the world. And that is what I will make you, a piece at a time."

Emma breathed through the painful tightness of her throat. Her palms began to sweat, and she clenched her fists, carving divots into them with the crescents of her nails. "You don't have that sort of power," she said.

Sir Roger gave a light laugh. "My dear, on a word I could have your home dismantled brick by brick until what I want is found. You have no idea the damage I could cause, how low you can fall with little more than a whisper."

He was expecting her to quail from the suggestion of it, to buckle beneath the pressure heaped upon her shoulders. But she had learned—just as Kit had told her—that there was knowledge to be gained in inaction just as much as action.

Perhaps he did have that power. But he hadn't wielded it, and that was worth something. It would require more hands than only his own to accomplish. "Do you wish to court the risk that someone else might get their hands on what you seek before you?" she asked. Could a man in his position ever truly trust his colleagues? Could he justify launching a crusade against a woman he had once championed to them?

His eyes flared with a sudden surge of wrath, and Emma knew she had scored a hit against his ego, treading too close for comfort to the truth. Just as quickly he banked it, retreating beneath the smooth placidity he had affected. "I would be remiss," he said, "if I did not offer you some small shred of hope." He gave a light, dismissive flutter of his fingers. "All of this can simply go away," he said, "if you give me what I want."

"Go away?"

"A dreadful misunderstanding," he said in a simper, with a roll of his wrist. "Rafe and your brother will be released, their good names restored to them once more. Well," he clarified, his mustache twitching with faux mirth, "For your brother, restored to the best he can expect for a man of his…dubious reputation. But suffice it to say that there will be no further ugliness between us necessary."

So long as she handed over the only evidence that might convict him. So long as she let a traitor walk free. And yet she was tempted—but Sir Roger surely knew that. It was why he had made this move. Because she was not a spy, not an agent of the Crown duty-sworn to give life and limb, if necessary, in the service of her country. Because she might in fact be tempted with a promise to extract his claws from the throats of those she most loved, to return to the peaceful status quo that had once existed.

Even if it would be a lie.

But Kit wouldn't want that. Rafe wouldn't want that. She suspected that Kit, at least, had known this might have been a possibility. Rafe, too, had warned her in those last moments before his arrest to keep the journal hidden at all costs. They had been prepared to sacrifice all for this. How could she do any less?

She didn't have a prayer of beating Sir Roger at the game he had devised for her. But perhaps she could modify the rules, claw back a bit of the power that had been stolen from her.

"I will see them first," she said, lifting her chin in challenge. "I will not exchange the journal for bodies, you understand."

Sir Roger lifted his brows. "You're a distrustful woman."

"And you are a damned traitor. So I see that we understand one another. Make it happen, or you'll get nothing from me." She turned toward the door, pausing for a moment at the threshold. "And, Sir Roger—if you set so much as a single foot within my home again, you had best prepare yourself to leave it as a corpse."

∞∞∞

The summons arrived at midday, and before she left for the Palace of Whitehall, Emma had handed possession of the journal over to Dannyboy. He had promptly tucked it beneath his shirt and into the waist of his trousers and took himself off to attend lessons with the other children—safe and secure within the children's wing. It was possible that Sir Roger would hedge his bets by sending in some sneak-thief in to search for it while she was out, but with servants now prowling the halls in full force, there would not be time or opportunity to recover it.

Sir Roger was waiting to greet her when she arrived, as she had thought he would. He seemed to her to have a chronic need to gloat, and she fancied that he was in possession of great festering pustule upon his soul, from which oozed a steady stream of malevolence.

If anyone present had given him more than half a glance in this moment, they might have seen it for themselves. So confident in his victory that he gave no more than a minor attempt at masking what he truly was.

"With me, my lady," he said, with a courteous bow. "I feel it only polite to warn you in advance, they are not in the best of conditions."

Emma's stomach curdled, turning sour at the implication lurking within the saccharine sweetness of his voice. Her skin crawled as she fell into step beside him. It was a monumental effort to preserve the veneer of calm she had donned, and she would not let him peel it from her with only the sly twist of his tongue. "Don't speak to me," she instructed. "The very sound of your voice turns my stomach."

The caustic tone of her voice offended him. "I could hold you here as well," he said beneath his breath. "I could just as easily cast you into a cell, my lady, and keep you confined until what I desire is returned to me."

"Spare me your threats," Emma said, her voice clipped. He thought her weak, malleable—and perhaps as shortly as a week ago, he would have been correct. But she could see it now, the warp and weft of the deceit he would have woven round her. There was too great a chance that the journal would pass through too many other hands before it reached him, that someone would understand its significance, and he would find himself once more outmaneuvered.

Perhaps it would come to that, eventually. When he had lost patience enough to warrant the risk of it. But this man dealt in duplicity, and wherever possible he would err on the side of concealing the journal's very existence. The safest choice at present was to bully her into laying it into his hands herself.

There was a sort of power in that knowledge, and she held it tightly to her bosom as at last Sir Roger paused before a door, extracting a key from his pocket. He twisted it within the lock and favored her with a magnanimous smile a touch too sharp to appear genuine. "After you, my lady," he said.

Emma turned a cold stare upon him. "Alone," she said. "I will see them alone."

Sir Roger drew back a scant few inches, surprised by the demand. Surprised, she thought, and infuriated. "I think not," he said, the sneer of his lips curling up toward his bulbous nose. "One does not allow traitors private audiences. I should be at a loss as to how to explain it."

Emma placed one hand upon the door handle, taking command of it. "Perhaps you have misunderstood," she said coolly. "I am not interested, Sir Roger, in whether my demands create problems for you. I do not care what explanations you will be obliged to make, nor to whom. I am telling you what will happen." He had chosen this location, this stage for his nasty little performance.

She knew by the dull flush of fury that rose into his cheeks that she had scored a minor victory. With one hand she wrenched the door open and sailed into the room, closing the door behind her and thereby putting paid to any further arguments he might have made.

"Em?" It was a hoarse croak—Kit's voice.

Her stomach turned upon itself again at the sight that met her eyes. "My God," she whispered in horror, wilting backward until only the solid wood of the door kept her standing. "What has happened to you?"

The question wasn't truly in earnest. It was merely a reflex born of outrage, of fear, of revulsion. The answer was self-evident, scrawled in the tense lines of faces full of scrapes and bruises; Kit's lower lip split, Rafe's right eye blackened and swollen. Beneath the table at which they sat, one of Kit's knees was wrenched awkwardly to one side, as if he could not force himself to straighten it. Upon the surface of the table, the smallest two fingers of Rafe's left hand were unnaturally bent, nails bloodied and skin marred with deep purple bruises.

Torture. This was why Kit had insisted she keep the journal's location secret even from him. So that it could not be forced out of him.

What can I do? Emma pressed her palm to her mouth to stifle the horrible little sound that wanted to escape, unaware that she had spoken the words aloud until Rafe responded to them.

"There is nothing you can do." The words were even, without inflection. A fact, and not even a sad one. Just a simple one, expressed as though he had grown indifferent to it. "There is nothing you can do, Emma. You should not have come."

"How could I not?" Somehow she peeled herself from the door, her feet crossing the scant distance to the table. "All of London believes you to be traitors. Sir Roger has made certain of it." Her hand found the back of the empty chair that had been set out for her there, and she sank down into it in a puff of lavender skirts. "He came to bargain for your release," she admitted.

"No." Rafe tried to rise, but the pressure of his injured fingers upon the surface of the table pained him enough to weaken his knees, and with a grimace and a foul word he sank back into his chair. "There are more important things than this," he said, in a rough hiss through his teeth.

"He will hang you," she whispered, and the reality of it, the certainty of it, sent a shiver careening down her spine. "He will hang you, and I—I cannot stop it otherwise."

But she had told them nothing new to them. Nothing they had not already understood. Nothing they had not already accepted as an inevitability.

"Em," Kit said, and there was a telling gruffness in his voice. "You cannot stop it at all. It is a done thing. You cannot rely upon a man without honor to act with it. Whatever he has told you, you must assume it to be a lie."

A keening sob rushed from her lungs, the words puncturing the very last tiny bubble of hope that had lived within her. Probably a part of her had known it, had suspected it to be only one more layer of deceit.

She had simply not been able to acknowledge, even to herself, that she had in all likelihood come here to say her farewells to the two men she had loved best in the world.

"Don't, Em," Kit said wearily. "You are going to have to be very brave and very strong. Bringing Sir Roger to justice is in your hands now."

"What can I possibly do?" Emma said in a plaintive whisper. "I am hopelessly outmatched in this." It wasn't even a fair game. Sir Roger had made certain of it.

"A traitor within the Home Office could wreak untold damage. At all costs, you must keep the journal from him." Kit said, and he lifted his hand to swipe away a smear of blood that had begun to drip from his split lip. "You're cleverer than you know. I have every faith that you will decipher it. And when you do, you must reveal him for what he is."

"That could take months," Emma said, with a wild little gesticulation of her hands. "Years!"

"Yes." It was a grim acknowledgment, rife with the certainty that he would not be around to see it. That he would die a traitor's death, and that vindication might be a distant thing indeed, if it ever arrived. "I am so sorry, Em, to leave you alone."

"Don't say that." Burning tears gathered in her eyes, turning the edges of her vision blurry. "Please don't say such things."

"I will not have another opportunity," he said. "I must say them now, while I can. Christ, Em, I wish—I wish I had been a better brother to you."

Had been. Because now—now he never would be. Any potential the future might have held had been snatched away from both of them. She reached across the table, her trembling fingers seizing upon his own. They were cold within the clasp of hers, as if the grave had half-swallowed him already. He squeezed her fingers in his, and it felt like a last embrace before a walk to the gallows. And then, casting a surly look to his left, Kit snarled, "Damn it all, Rafe. Say something."

Emma startled at the fierce insistence in Kit's voice, her gaze jerking toward Rafe, who had had little enough to say thus far. But then, the last words she had spoken to him had been bitter ones. Reproachful ones.

He recalled them still. For the fraction of a second he allowed his eyes to meet hers, she could see it there within them. And then his gaze dropped away, as if he had not the right even to look upon her. Like he thought himself a lowly thing, both villain and vermin, unworthy of even the smallest shred of her notice.

That was shame there, in the muscle that flexed in his jaw. Guilt in the bend of his head, the slump of his shoulders. Perhaps it had been there all along, only she had been too hurt to see it. But now, at the end of his life, when he had been beaten—broken—she saw him at last.

She saw him. Not the second son, the spy, but Rafe. Just Rafe. The man she had loved. The man he had always been. The man who had borne every burden upon his strong shoulders to protect those weaker and more vulnerable than himself. A good man, a kind man, so wracked with remorse that it had permeated every part of him. Humbled him, ever so much more than the beating he had received could have done.

Her voice cracked, trembled. The sharp splinters of it pierced her heart. "Rafe, I—"

"I beg you, do not waste your sympathy upon me," Rafe said, and there was a wealth of exhaustion within his voice. He shoved himself to his feet once more, irrespective of the pain it must have caused him to brace his hands to the table. His gait was unsteady as he approached the door, his back turned upon her. But he paused just before it, his shoulders dropping. A queer, rough sound rumbled up from his throat. "Don't come," he said thickly. "When they hang us, I mean to say. Don't come. I don't want you there."

And then he kicked the door with the toe of his boot. A moment later, Sir Roger threw it open and dragged him out—and he was gone.

For the last time.