Chapter Twenty Seven

Emma had hoped that, under the strict supervision of the staff and within the privacy of the wing dedicated to their use, the children would have had little cause to be bothered by the furor that had been ongoing at the other end of the house these last few days.

And largely, they hadn't been. But they had noticed her absence, and had been relying upon Dannyboy to carry news of what had transpired within it. He had been down early to gobble up a bit of breakfast and to bask in the praise of his peers for having been entrusted with such a weighty task as Emma had given him for their audience with the King—but he had slipped out of the house again even before Emma had made it down to breakfast.

He'd been instructed to remain with her until it was safe for him to leave. And now that it was, there was no reason for him to remain. She had hoped he would stay a little longer…but then, that was the way of such things. She supposed that even if he had, still she would have wanted longer even than that, and longer still.

But he wasn't hers to keep. He had a mother of his own, and a new sibling soon to be born. And he had been looking forward to that occasion so cheerfully, saving up every bit of coin that he had earned from Rafe.

Rafe was waiting for her when she emerged from the dining hall, her gown dotted with splotches of spilled tea and greasy spots of butter, her cheek sticky from an overenthusiastic jam-encrusted kiss from little Susan, who had sat at her right side this morning.

Not many were those among her set who saw this part of her life, and fewer still were those who cared. But Rafe stood there, just beyond the threshold of the door as if the burst of sound that had she had carried out with her, produced by twenty children all shouting across the breakfast table, had not startled him in the slightest. As if it were a perfectly ordinary occurrence, neither remarkable nor objectionable.

He had given her this direction, when she had badly needed something to make of the life that had been left to her after she had been widowed. He couldn't have known that she would take it quite so far as this, of course. But still it was a happiness he had given to her, in the absence of those children she had never been able to have. And it had started with the one who had conveyed him to her now—Neil, who had been the first of all of those many children she had thought of as hers.

And as Neil backed away in the manner of all good butlers, Rafe asked at last, "Henry is recovered from his cough?"

"Yes; for some time now." It pleased her that he had remembered, that he had thought to ask.

"And Josiah's interview?"

"A grand success. His feet have hardly touched the ground since." Perhaps for some gentleman, questions such as these would have been a pleasantry only, the sort of thing one was obliged to ask after and to give at least some small appearance of caring about the answer. But not for Rafe. Not for the man who had spared his time to offer, in secret, a note to a young man desperately in need of advice to quell his fears over his future.

He listened. He cared. He loved. Far more than she had ever thought possible. Far more than she had ever dared to hope.

Emma took a step toward him, breaching the careful distance he had set between them. A line he would not venture to cross himself, she thought, since he had crossed so many others. She said, "I cannot give you children."

His brows lifted, dark arches sweeping toward his hairline, distorting the bruise that wreathed his eye. "I'm a second son. I have only a courtesy title, and I haven't an estate of my own that would require an heir of my blood to inherit," he said. "I am…comfortable. Nothing more. Espionage does not pay so well as one might expect."

If one had honor enough not to manipulate one's knowledge for one's own ends, yes, she suspected that might be the case. "Still, I wanted to be clear. Honest." Honesty at last, now that the last decade and better of deception had been brought out into the open. "You—you would have to reconcile yourself to never having children of your own."

"Emma, you have got twenty children at present. By any standard, that is more than enough. I don't require children of my own blood to be happy."

An odd, strangled little laugh rose in her throat. Once, she had thought that she did require such a thing—and it had weighed so heavily upon her heart, the inability to produce those children that she had so badly wanted. But her love had never been limited to those with whom she had shared blood.

It wasn't the sort of happiness she had thought she had wanted. But it was the happiness that she had needed, the one that she had found despite everything, and her life had been made so much the richer for it. Love multiplied upon itself again and again, with each child who had passed through her doors. "Soon to be nineteen," she said. "Josiah leaves for Oxford in a few days. I thought perhaps you would see him off with me."

"Will he mind?"

She shook her head. "You should tell him," she said. "That you sent him that note. He appreciated it more than you could ever know. But really—really I am asking for myself." Emma ducked her head, swiped at her eyes with her fingertips. "I hate to lose them," she confessed. "Every one. I always hate it when they leave."

"I expect every mother hates to see her children leave her," he said.

And that was exactly it—but it was still lovely to hear it acknowledged, if only from him. This man who had made her the mother she had always wished to be. Even if only in her heart.

She took another step, and another, and it wasn't just the floor she crossed, but the chasm of secrecy and half-truths that had once separated them. She reached out to take his hand in hers, the one that had been left mercifully unscathed by the time he had spent imprisoned, and thrilled to the instinctive grip of his fingers upon her own. And she said, "As angry as I was, as hurt and humiliated as I felt—when you and Kit were apprehended, all I could think, all I could feel was desperation. I would have done anything to free you, taken on any risk." Because she had loved him.

And he had done the same, for just the same reason. She had suffered the anxiety, the stress, and the sorrow of it all for just a handful of days. He had borne that burden for years. In the position of privilege that he had gone to such lengths to secure for her, she had never had to consider before how such things could scrape one's very soul bare. She had had to learn it for herself, and it had been only the smallest fraction of what he had weathered alone.

"You never truly let me know you," she said, and it was softened with the understanding between them that he could not have let it happen. Her free hand slipped into the pocket of her gown and withdrew a small object, which she pressed into his palm, flattening her hand over his. "But I would like to," she said. "If you will allow me." And at last she drew her hands away from his to reveal the terrace door key resting within the cradle of his hand.

Slowly his fingers closed around it, holding it as if it were a priceless, fragile thing. A hint of a smile touched just the corner of his lips. "Thank you," he said. "I confess, after I returned it to you, I felt the loss of it."

So had she. Not the loss of the key itself, but the loss of what it had represented. "I know it is only symbolic—"

"I like symbols."

"—But I wanted you to have it back." Lord, she was going to go all weepy and maudlin. "When next you use it, will you tell me—will you tell me—"

"Everything," he said, and his voice had gone raspy. "Everything you want to know. Everything I am at liberty to tell you. Probably a great many things you'd rather not know."

Despite herself, Emma laughed as she swiped the telling moisture from her eyes. Probably he was right, there. He was a spy; he'd no doubt been embroiled in a great many things to which he would rather not admit.

But she had had it right, all those weeks ago, with what she had said to Diana and Lydia and Phoebe. She knew his character. He was a complicated man with a complicated past, but still he was the most honorable man she had ever known. "I would like that."

"Tonight, then," he said. "When I return."

"Return? Where are you going?"

"I have a good many explanations to make to the Home Office. Sir Roger's arrest has thrown it into chaos. But there's just a handful of people who know the whole truth of it all, and so I have got to go and help them wrench some sort of order out of it all."

A nasty pit of dread formed in Emma's stomach. "Will I have to—"

"No. You've done enough already; no one could expect more of you. He's going to hang anyway," he said. "Nothing can save him from that. Your testimony is not required to achieve that end. This is merely…tying up loose ends." He squeezed her fingers in his, a tiny bit of reassurance. "I promise you, this time I am coming home from Whitehall under my own power."

Coming home, Emma thought. She rather liked the sound of it.

∞∞∞

Emma woke in the depths of the night to the mattress shifting beneath her. There was, in those few moments of disorientation where she was caught in that twilight state between waking and dreaming, an instinctive burst of panic. Her breath staggered in her throat, her fingers turned to claws, and every muscle pulled and tightened, readying to explode into motion.

It was only Rafe's voice in the darkness which soothed her. "You're safe," he said somewhere near her ear. "It's just me." One warm hand slid down her side, curling over her hip. "It…takes a while," he said, "for that to fade."

The fear, he meant. The instinctive reaction, born of a visceral impulse toward self-preservation. "Has it, for you?" Her voice was raspy, tinged with the tightening of her throat that had yet to dissolve, even as she began to relax once more.

"No," he said. "Probably it never will. It's become too much a habit to sleep lightly; one I've had for too long a time to surrender, I think. But for you, it will. Eventually."

Probably he was right. It would fade, sooner or later. So long as on those occasions she woke in the night, he was there to banish that instinctive fear. But already her heart was beginning to slow from its harried beat, and she muffled a yawn into the bend of her elbow. "Perhaps one of these days you'll return in time for dinner," she suggested.

"I will. I promise," he said, and Emma found herself relaxing still further. It held the weight of a vow, an oath. Words he would not have spoken carelessly, even for such a minor thing as this. A few moments passed in a comfortable sort of silence. But, for perhaps the first time, Rafe was the one to break it. "I was twenty," he said, "when Sir Roger recruited me."

"So young?"

"Yes. And malleable," he said, and his voice held a grim sort of resignation within it, as if in hindsight he could see so very clearly. "Impressionable. Ambrose had been with him the longest; a few years, at that point, and he was a valuable asset during the last years of the war. Chris and I were recruited within months of each other. We didn't know, then, that he was using us to ferret out information. More for his benefit than for the benefit of the Home Office."

Emma turned her cheek against his arm as he slipped it beneath her head. "That seems…ill-advised."

"If you knew better the workings of espionage, you would not think so," he said. "He had us doing his work for him—he used our reports to warn those he counted among his cohorts, and had us apprehend those who were his competitors. We never questioned the few that slipped through our fingers when we caught so many others. Luckily," he added, "Ambrose kept meticulous records."

The journal. "I didn't have a chance to read all of it," she said. "There were more pressing concerns." There had simply been no time to read through every entry. She had focused upon only those that had had mentioned Sir Roger explicitly. And as it had turned out, those had been quite enough to satisfy the King.

"Today, the Home Office went through it entry by entry. Your cleverness saved them a fair bit of work. Naturally, they verified the contents to an extent—that the keys worked exactly as you indicated—but it might've taken days to do it independently."

She had known that. It was why she had split the work across so many people. Together, they had accomplished the work in a fraction of the time it would have taken otherwise.

"He is going to hang?" she asked.

"Oh, yes. And, regrettably, Lady Banfield is not quite so innocent in it as were you. Did you know she was Ambrose's Godmother?"

"I did not." But then, little to do with Ambrose surprised her anymore. She had never really known him. He had never wanted her to, had never wanted to be close with her in any appreciable way.

"She won't hang," Rafe said. "But she'll not come out unscathed." His fingertips drifted up and down her side in slow, soothing strokes. "With Ambrose, it was possible—desirable even, given the circumstances—to hush it all up, given that too many of his lackeys would have been in the wind if it had been known he had been accused of treason. It was best that no one outside the Home Office knew the truth of what had happened. But now, any number of eyes have seen the evidence against Sir Roger, and there is nothing to be gained through secrecy. Lady Banfield will soon become plain Mrs. Banfield, widow of a known traitor."

How easily it might have been her instead, had circumstances been just a little different. If Sir Roger had not overextended himself and become tangled within the web he had cast out for her, they might not now be having this conversation.

"You would be within your rights to hate me," Rafe said quietly. "I killed Ambrose. I made you a widow."

Yes, he had, but he had also spent the better part of a decade in repentance for it. It had not been an evil act, one committed out of jealousy or anger. It had been fear—for Kit; for her. He had taken a life, but he had saved her brother in the doing of it. He had saved her from the consequences of Ambrose's treachery. "You saved Kit's life," she said. "And I—I would have done the same. I could never hate you for that." And yet, she thought…he had hated himself. Even if he had had no other choice than the one he had made, still he had hated himself for making it. For taking an action that he had known would cause her pain.

"I heard you that night," he said, and against her back she felt his chest shudder with the long, wretched sigh that was pulled from his lungs. "That sound you made. As if you hadn't enough breath for a scream; only a wail, so full of grief and pain. It haunts me still."

Beneath the counterpane, Emma settled her hand atop his and interlaced their fingers. "You cannot punish yourself for things outside of your control. Ambrose made his own choices. We are not responsible for the consequences of them," she said, with a gentle squeeze to his fingers. "You were twenty," she prompted, "when you began working for the Home Office."

He drew in a soft breath. "Yes," he said. "Chris and I were of an age. Ambrose was a few years older; we thought of him as something of a mentor, I suppose. And Chris—Chris spoke of nothing so much as you."

Still she found it hard to imagine. But then, he had put on such a good show of distance, of perhaps an absent affection at best.

"It is possible," Rafe said, "to fall in love sight unseen. I know because I have done it. Every week Chris had something new to relate, some new interest you had acquired or minor foible in which you had been involved. I hung upon his every word, always wanting one more story, one more tiny glimpse into your life.

"In that first year, you were not yet out in society, and still I felt—I felt as though I would know you on sight. And then finally you were out, and I did." A soft sigh. "I attended a ball. Not to dance, but to gather information for Sir Roger. But I saw you, and I knew you at once. You were wearing a blue silk gown, with silver ribbon at the waist and pearl-tipped pins in your hair, standing near the refreshment table with a woman I assumed must have been your mother. You danced three sets. I thought about requesting an introduction and asking you to dance."

"I wish you had." But it hadn't been his purpose. "I remember that ball. I was devastated to have spent so many hours up against the wall, waiting to be asked." She had not had any grand expectations; she had been disabused of any long before then. Her dowry had been modest at best. Still, to have so few gentlemen bother with even so little as a single dance had been a blow to her fragile self-esteem.

But Rafe's attraction had not been to a moderately pretty face, or what monies she might have brought to a marriage. He had loved her before he had ever seen her—for what he had learned of her through the stories Kit had told him.

"I might have worked up the nerve," he said. "But I was young; younger than most men would consider to be a marriageable age, and I had nothing to offer. And Ambrose got there first. He was older, wealthy, settled. He was of an age to take a wife, and he had decided upon a noble lady. At the time, he was the better match. Kit and I thought he would be good to you, that he would make you happy. Instead, he meant to use you."

"What do you mean?"

"It was in his journal. You were meant to be his security," he said. "A safeguard against discovery of his treason. He chose you for your lineage, for your relationship with Kit. He knew how I felt about you. And he did try," he said, "to wield you against the both of us. Your security for our silence, if we had ever discovered what he was involved with."

Because she would have been ruined alongside him. It hurt less than she thought it would have done. But then, she had had weeks now to come to terms with the reality of all that Ambrose had been. Years to grow to learn that she had given her love to a man who had never truly earned it.

"Would you ever have told me?" she asked. "If it hadn't come out anyway, would you ever have approached me?"

"No," he said, so quietly, and she could hear the weight of a guilty conscience within the words. A raw admission, aching with the truth he had hidden all these years. "Not when I had already cost you so much." A harsh exhale stirred the hair near her ear. "It was my burden to bear, and I—I never wanted to lie to you. And I would have had to, Emma," he said. "I owed you everything, but nothing quite so much as peace. How could I have done anything other than to stay away? It would have been unthinkable to so selfishly risk your peace."

Instead he had sacrificed years of his life and his own chance at happiness to protect hers. Shouldering the monumental weight of that burden to spare her from it. A guardian angel she had never known she had had, silent and steadfast and unobtrusive, content to love only from afar, without hope of it ever being returned.

Invisible once, but no longer.

"Emma," he said heavily. "For what I imagined were the right reasons, I have done a great many wrong things. I should have stayed to explain myself—"

"Yes," she said. "You should have done."

"—But I couldn't bring myself to face you," he said in a rush. "I would have rather taken a bullet than to see your love die in your eyes. I knew already that I could never have deserved it, but to see it die—" A rough sound, dredged up from the depths of his soul. "But you deserved to know," he said. "What manner of man you had taken into your bed. Your heart."

"Kit said you couldn't stomach it any longer," she said reflectively. "I thought he meant your ruse; that you had tired of the pretense of it."

"It was never pretense. Not for me." There was the gentle brush of his lips at the tender skin behind her ear. "I never thought you would wish to see me again after that first night," he said. "But you did. And then, when I began to suspect that you might desire more of me—" He sighed. "I had trespassed too far already. I couldn't let you go on believing I was someone other than I am."

But he hadn't, really. He might have concealed his surname, his vocation, the connections they shared—but those things were what he was, not who he was at heart, when all else was stripped away. And there had been so much heart in him, for so much longer than she had ever known. Even when she had been at her lowest, still he had tried only to give her what she had asked for. His absence, when his presence had been too painful to endure. However much it might have pained him.

Now he squeezed her fingers in his as if he might infuse her with his love through that simple touch. Waiting patiently, as always, for her to render judgment, whatever it happened to be.

She said, "In future, I will always prefer the truth."

"In future, you will always have it." And it was uttered with such fervent sincerity that she believed it unequivocally.

"I think we have both lived too much within the past," she said. She had been no less guilty of it than he; a sort of stagnation they had both suffered. "I would like to look to the future instead."

"Have we got one?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, and turned in the circle of his arms to face him. "But it must begin with a proper introduction." One that had been a long time coming, and which had they had never truly gotten.

Even in the darkness, she could see the flex of a muscle in his jaw, hear the swallow he gave. The tips of his fingers touched her cheek, her chin, the hollow of her throat in silent reverence. "My name is Rafe Beaumont," he said. "And I have loved you for years."

∞∞∞

Rafe supposed he ought to have been grateful for the few days of respite he had had before the whole of London had descended upon him after his vindication. He suspected that Mrs. Morris had had a great deal to do with managing the influx of callers, but even that estimable woman was no match whatsoever for Diana, who had barged in along with her husband shortly before Mrs. Morris had taken her leave for the day.

And she had not much cared for the news he had imparted to her. "You promised you would come to breakfast on Saturdays," she exclaimed, "and you've already missed last week!"

Rafe might have rolled his eyes if only there hadn't been a plaintive note lingering within her voice that threatened the advent of tears. "I hardly had a choice in the matter," he said. "I was, if you'll recall, imprisoned. Rarely is one permitted to reschedule an appointment with the gallows in order to keep a prior engagement."

Diana turned on him, her lower lip quivering with distress, her dark eyes glittering with tears. "Don't jest about such things, I beg you," she said in a pitiful little voice.

"Ah, hell." Diana's husband, Ben, patted at his pockets, and eventually produced a crumpled ball of fabric that might once have been a handkerchief, in its cleaner days. Several straggly bits of multi-colored thread wove through it, frayed from overuse. He tucked it into Diana's hand, and she gingerly removed her spectacles to mop at her damp eyes. "For the love of God, Rafe, don't make her cry," Ben warned. "She's with child. It takes ages to get her to stop once she's gotten going."

"I am aware." And so would everyone else be soon enough, did Diana's waistline continue to expand at its present rate. Still, he suspected that the reminder of his brief stint as an alleged traitor was not the only thing to occupy Diana's mind at present. They hadn't spoken of it yet, because there had been more pressing concerns to contend with, but the last two Saturdays before he'd been apprehend, he'd been turned away at Diana's door.

The last time he'd seen her before his arrest, she'd been castigating him within the study of his own home. He had not held it against her, since to his mind he'd richly deserved it—but he rather thought that Diana had held it against herself. That had he been hanged, her last words to him would have been ones of anger.

And so he wrapped one arm about her shoulders and said gently, "I have other obligations this Saturday. Josiah will be on his way to Oxford to settle in before the next term, and I promised Emma I would be with her to see him off. But next Saturday I can manage, so long as you don't intend to turn me away at the door."

The faint hitches of her breath turned to full-blown sobs. Ben scowled at him even as he offered his wife a few consoling pats upon the back, which she hardly appeared even to notice. "I am—so sorry," she said between wheezes. "I should never have done it."

But she had been angry and confused and righteously indignant on Emma's behalf. He had lied to them all, in one fashion or another, for well over a decade. Necessary did not soothe injured feelings, nor ease a well-earned sense of betrayal. "I forgave you at once," he said. "You're my baby sister. You're always forgiven. Immediately, without reservation."

"Not so much a baby any longer," she sniffled.

"You'll always be my baby sister. Even when you're old and grey."

"Rafe." She had meant it to be chiding, but a shred of a laugh had slipped through the tones of annoyance, through even the lingering remnants of tears.

He pitched his voice to a simpering coo. "Even as a hunchbacked, wizened old crone."

"Oh, stop."

"Truly. Even when you've lost all your teeth and can only gum at your supper."

"Rafe!" She ground her heel into the toe of his boot.

Rafe winced, gingerly extracting his foot from beneath the pressure of hers. "I'm hobbled enough already, Diana, I'll thank you."

"Are you? Your tongue seems to have suffered no injury—though your manners have clearly been beaten to match your face." Her fractious expression wavered. "You really do look dreadful, you know."

"A fine thing for a loving sister to say of her brother," he grumbled. "I'll have you know that Mrs. Morris is a firm believer in the curative powers of beef. I've taken to locking myself within my study while she's about her business, else I'm liable to find myself with a slab of it slapped across my face."

"Just on the dreadful half, I'd imagine," Diana said.

"One would think, but either Mrs. Morris' eyesight is going, or she doesn't particularly care which part of me is so adorned, so long as it's found a mark somewhere upon my person." Rafe gave a rueful sigh and cast his gaze toward the ceiling. "I suppose it could be worse. At least she's not so cruel as to feed it to me afterward."

"Yes, well, I suppose that might have something to do with you having spent remarkably little time at your own home just lately," Diana said. And then, "Oh, do not look so shocked—I only mean to say that people will remark upon it, eventually."

Ah. Diana was fishing. "That, dear sister, is none of your business. Nor anyone else's. Ben, would you kindly take your wife and her extraordinarily long nose and be on your way? I have a dinner engagement."

"Oh, no." Ben lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender as he took a large step away. "Admittedly my tenure within your family has not been a long one, but I have learned to keep well clear of your squabbles. If you want my opinion—"

"I don't, thank you."

"—It's a damn sight easier to let her have her own way. For all involved."

Rafe pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose and let out a heavy sigh. "Is a nice, quiet dinner so much to ask? Truly."

"Well, you are to miss breakfast on Saturday," Diana said. "Surely you can afford to spare one dinner. And how quiet was it really going to be, Rafe? Kit is still in residence, is he not?"

Yes, and he was damned surly about it, too. "He won't mince his words just because he's in the company of a countess," he warned. And then, at the pleading look she cast him, he gave in with a groan, knowing well enough that Emma would have no complaints of it. "Very well," he sighed. "I suppose you're invited."

"Oh, wonderful!" Diana exclaimed in delight, but he caught the flash of a guilty expression just as she leaned in to embrace him.

"Hannah's coming, too, isn't she?" he asked, and Diana had the good grace to flush.

"She's in the carriage," she said. "With Lydia. And Marcus."

"And little Edward," Ben added.

He'd been had. So much for a quiet evening. "How the hell did you all fit?"

"With a great deal of flying elbows shoved into soft places," Ben said. "Incidentally, if you might take a few of our number with you, it would make the ride much more pleasant."

"You have already got dinner out of me, and I've no sympathy left to spare for either of you. I'm damned well walking," Rafe said, shuffling the both of them toward the door and pausing only to reach for his hat to jam it upon his head. "But do enjoy the trip."