Beauty and the Spy (31 page)

Here she was in a parlor filled with shining, stiff, glamorous furniture; alone with a giant painting featuring the Whitelaw family. Kit's pretty mother, his handsome father, a pair of little girls who fortunately looked more like their mother than their father, slightly demure, slightly mischievous. Kit's little face was sullen, poking up out of some sort of ruffled suit. It made her smile faintly.

Susannah reached up to touch that image of him, wishing she could have known him then. Wishing she could have known him always. Wishing she could have been the one over whom he'd shot his best friend, the one whose name he'd carved into a tree. Known him when he was just learning how to love, so she could be absolutely sure that he loved her.

He does love me
, she'd thought confidently only yesterday.
He must
. She'd thought it again, only an hour ago, as they'd kissed shamelessly in the rose garden.
He
must
love me
.

But what did she really know of the shades of love? That extraordinary-looking woman in the other room had been his first love. And she needed him now. Perhaps Kit would see an opportunity to redeem himself.

Well
, I
love him
. And that would have to do for now, she thought. Her love for him would have to suffice in place of certainty. Until he was ready to say it to her. If he ever did.

And she stared up at that big painting, and ordered her heart not to break.

He directed Caroline into a library chair and waited while Mrs. Davies, she of the spaniel-brown eyes, settled the tray of tea down with a rattle between them. Mrs. Davies wasn't nearly as gifted at inscrutability as Bullton was.

She slid her speaking eyes toward Kit as she left the room, and her disapproval was very nearly palpable.

He watched Caroline remove her gloves, finger by finger, and ball them into one fist. And then she unpinned her hat, a great black thing heavy with feathers and a veil, and sat it next to her on the settee, where it crouched like a familiar. Her hair was still black and glossy, she wore it coiled loosely against her long white neck. Soft hair, he remembered. It had been like smoke and silk in his fingers when he was seventeen.

"I
am
sorry, you know," Caroline said quietly.

And for a moment, the two of them were seventeen and eighteen years old, and Kit had just had his heart broken.

Had her heart broken even a little? Had she run off to punish him, or to save herself? He'd been so sick with misery then, with outrage, that it was a marvel now that he could regard her… aesthetically. Nothing at all moved in the vicinity of his heart.

"That night… you did leave with Morley?" How odd it would be to know for certain after all of these years.

Caroline hesitated. Then nodded slowly.

"Did he touch you or force you, or—" The old rage began swinging up.

"
I
suggested it to him, Kit."

Kit took this in. He remembered Morley's inscrutable face, the contempt floating just below the surface of it. That smile he'd sent toward Kit. Why
wouldn't
Morley have accepted Caroline's suggestion? Any sane man would have had difficulty denying it. Caroline at eighteen had been glorious.

"Perhaps you had no choice," he said gruffly. It was his pride speaking. His guilt.

"That
was
my choice." Caroline gazed back at him levelly.

Unspoken: It was her choice, because Kit couldn't, or wouldn't, marry her. Though he most certainly had been willing to touch her.

"And yes… yes, he did… touch me, Kit. That night. And many,
many
others, too. In many…
many
ways."

She drew the words out, drawling them, so that he could feel and picture each one thoroughly. And she smiled a little as she did it, enjoying his discomfiture. How very like her. Always wanting men to froth with jealousy over her. Never happy when the waters were calm, the skies blue. She had a talent for it, Caroline did, stirring those darker feelings.

He said nothing.

"I was very young then, Kit. And… I left Thaddeus two years ago."

"Thaddeus," Kit repeated flatly. It sounded downright wifely when she said it that way.

"Yes, that
is
his given name, Kit," she said ironically. "But… after I left him—"

"Why did you leave him?"

She shrugged lightly.

And somehow, that shrug seemed unspeakably cruel. He wondered if Morley had loved her, too. And whether that had anything to do with why he wanted to kill her. Kit could almost sympathize.

"You left because of a whim, Caroline?"

She looked up at him, puzzled. A look that said,
Well
,

you
have
met me, haven't you
? Caroline was all but comprised of whim. And devoted to self-preservation.

"After I left him, times became hard, Kit, for me. So… I wrote to Thaddeus asking for money, thinking perhaps he might help me. And now he wants to kill me."

"Really." It was Kit's turn to drawl ironically. "Just like that, Caroline? A simple request for money and a well-known politician becomes murder-bent? Odd, but Morley doesn't strike me as an irrational man. Quite the opposite, in fact. He has managed to remain a politician for many years, and has likely only methodically killed a few people in the process. Only a few that I'm
aware
of, that is. Perhaps you know of more?"

Caroline flinched at this; he saw her skin draw tight around her eyes, suppressing some emotion. Shock, perhaps, that he would respond so coolly. Then she looked down at her folded hands in her lap, like a chastened child.

"Perhaps you threatened him for money, Caroline?" Kit suggested with gentle irony. "Now would be the time to tell me."

She lifted her head up and smiled impishly. "Well, it seemed a good idea at the time. My judgment never
was
the soundest, and well you know."

He sighed. "What, precisely, did you threaten him
with
, Caroline? Do you know something incriminating?"

She was silent "He forced me to help him, Kit."

For some reason, Kit couldn't imagine anyone forcing Caroline to do anything she didn't want to do. Not even Morley. No doubt she'd gone into whatever it was thinking it would be a grand adventure. "Help him with what?"

She shook her head roughly.

"Help him with
what
, Caroline?" he repeated relentlessly. "And
how
, precisely, did he force you?"

He could almost see her mind working behind those mirrorlike dark eyes.

"Please don't make me tell you," she said finally, softly. "Kit… I'm just… I'm just so tired of running. I'm frightened. Please…" She leaned forward and placed her hand on his knee. "
Please
help me."

He looked down at the hand, and then into her face. The look he saw there promised things, and it would have buckled his knees if he'd been seventeen. At seventeen, he would have, in fact, had his trousers unfastened by now. He wasn't entirely immune to that look now; he
was
male, after all, and she'd had three decades to perfect it But beyond a fluttering of flattered masculinity, he didn't feel much beyond curiosity. He stared at her the way he might a puzzle made for children. The sort of complication she presented had lost all appeal, regardless of its package.

He lifted her hand from his knee, very gently. He handed it back to her as though handing back his entire past, everything he'd once felt for her.

And the look on her face then was pure shock: shock that anyone would refuse her. Then confusion and panic; she hadn't anything left to her besides her looks and wiles.

"I can't help you," he said gently. "If you don't tell me why you think he's trying to kill you, Caroline. And Caroline… even if he
made
you help him, you'll be implicated, too, in whatever he's done. Unless you tell me. And maybe then… maybe then there will be something I can do to protect you."

She tried again: lips parted, she fixed him with a gaze that would have had a priest rending his vestments and leaping upon her. She clearly knew that men were simpletons, for the most part, and that her powers were potent.

Kit waited it out. He was excellent at waiting, when strategy called for it.

Caroline frowned a little, and the gaze went away, like a curtain being drawn, and she looked uneasy. Ah, at last. She was beginning to realize, he thought, exactly how much trouble she was in, and beginning to understand that Kit wasn't a seventeen-year-old hothead ruled by what swung between his legs. He sighed. He tried for the element of surprise.

"Caroline, there's a rumor that Morley sold information to the French. Do you know anything of this?"

"Is he being investigated then?" she asked almost eagerly. "Have you any proof?"

Interesting eagerness. Interesting question.

And then, with a mental
click
, he felt another piece of the puzzle slide into place, and he had an interesting realization.

He took great pains to disguise this realization with a carefully concerned countenance.

"What were you doing in Gorringe, Caroline?" He asked it casually.

"Gorringe?" she looked startled.

"The letter. The '
I'm sorry'
letter. You sent it from Gorringe. Many years ago. A year or so after you left with Morley."

"Oh," she said faintly. "I'd forgotten."

To him, it was the verbal equivalent of her earlier shrug.
She'd forgotten
.

But Kit was now certain he knew precisely what she'd been doing in Gorringe all those years ago.
He forced me to help
, she'd said. He doubted much forcing of any kind had been involved. Caroline had always had a taste for mischief; no doubt she'd thought the whole business exciting.

Ironic to think that Caroline had been a spy, too, long before Kit ever was.

He stared at her, his face revealing nothing, because he was trained to reveal nothing. He watched Caroline desperately, silently trying to gain a purchase on his inscrutable mood, to know what he was thinking, or how he felt.

This was what he was thinking and feeling: Caroline had helped shatter the lives of happy people, and deprived Susannah of a family, and assisted a traitor. And pity, the strongest emotion he'd felt for Caroline since she'd arrived today, was beginning to give way to the conviction that she was, in a way, an accessory to murder. A murder almost two decades old.

Caroline's life had begun difficult, but her own decisions had ensured it remained so. And very likely, finally, he realized there had never been anything he could do to help her, no matter how desperately he'd wanted to.

She cleared her throat. "Perhaps I should leave now, Kit," she said, briskly. "I'm sorry to have troubled you."

"No," he said softly. Placed a gentle but restraining hand on her arm. "I should like you to stay. I shall do everything I can to help you, Caroline."

It was a lie. But he didn't intend to let her get away now.

Susannah didn't turn around when Kit came into the room almost an hour later, but he was certain she'd heard him; he could tell by how her spine stiffened.

He sat down quietly next to her on the settee, didn't speak for a moment. He followed her eyes to the painting.

"How do you like my portrait?" he asked conversationally.

She thought about that. "You don't look happy in it."

"The painting was my father's idea. I remember those sittings well…" His voice drifted, he smiled ruefully. "My father is forever making me do something I don't want to do. Something I don't want to do… and then later I'm glad of."
Like the damned folio
.

Kit realized, irritated and amused, that his father was probably smarter than he was.

Well, if somebody
had
to be smarter than he was, he supposed he was glad it was his father.

"You have two sisters, too," she said softly. "Are they alive?"

"Yes." He wasn't about to regale Susannah about the mixed blessings sisters presented. Hopefully they would find her sisters, and she would discover those blessings for herself.

"Perhaps we can write to find my sisters. Daisy Jones said Sylvie had gone to France. Sabrina might very well still be in England. And maybe my mother…" She trailed off.

"We'll do that right away," he promised her.

She smiled a little.

He reached for her hand, which was cold, but soft, unresisting now. He brought it to his lips and held it there for a long time, turned her palm up and placed a kiss in it, folded her hand over the kiss.

"I need to go somewhere, Susannah, and I meant to tell you earlier."

"With her?"

"No."

He saw the relief on her face; had she really thought he would leave her?

"Where will
she
be when you go?" she wanted to know.

"The two of you will come along with me." He'd decided this was the only way it could be.

"
Wonderful
. Just the three of us. How very cozy."

Kit smiled crookedly. But he didn't want to leave Susannah alone at all. And he wasn't about to allow Caroline to leave The Roses now that she was here. And he wasn't going to arm Bullton with a rifle and tell him to watch Caroline, nor did he think it fair to leave Bullton in charge of guarding Susannah.