Elise stared at him. In her expression was shock, certainly, but also something else: the hurried calculation of a woman who had spent years learning which truths were dangerous and which were merely painful.
“Singleton was my brother,” Edmund finished quietly. “My name is Edmund Cholmely. Alastair—Lord Singleton—was my brother. My father is the Earl Ormond.”
Elise’s lips parted. She looked as if she might strike him, might turn away, or might simply collapse from the weight of it.
“You came here knowing who my husband was,” she said, each word controlled, “knowing what Charles had pursued and what Singleton had done.”
“Yes,” Edmund admitted. “I came because the ledger vanished, and because there were whispers of the cipher reappearing, and because—” He stopped, because the rest was too intimate to say aloud.
“And because you wished to see if I was complicit?”
The accusation landed cleanly because it was true. Edmund did not flinch. “It was a possibility.”
Elise’s chin lifted. “So you watched me… followed me… entered my house. You ate my bread and made me believe—” Her voice broke on that last, and she swallowed hard, as if furious with herself for allowing it.
Edmund stepped closer carefully, as if approaching a skittish horse. “Elise?—”
“Do not,” she snapped. “Do not use my name as if—” She stopped, her chest rising unevenly.
The unspoken words hung between them—as if he had the right.
For several moments Edmund let the silence stretch over the room in gentle balm. Then he said, quietly, “I did not lie about my intent. I meant to help you.”
Elise’s laugh was brittle. “How noble.”
He winced. “My feelings are not noble. I quickly realized you were no traitor.” Before she could decry him farther, he forced himself to speak what she deserved to hear, even if it tore him open. “I cannot undo what my brother did,” he said. “I cannot erase the fact that his treason stained everything near him—my family, my name, the men he harmed, and the men your husband died pursuing. But I can choose whether I spend the rest of my life running from it, or trying—however imperfectly—to make right what I can.”
He went on, because if he stopped he might never speak again. “Holt wanted the cipher to complete what Singleton began. The cipher to the ledger would have bought him power.It would have endangered men in London and soldiers abroad. It would have made your husband’s work meaningless—and it would have placed you in the path of men who do not hesitate to kill.”
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “You could have told me earlier.”
“I should have done,” Edmund admitted.
“Why did you not?” she demanded, and now she sounded less like a commander and more like a woman wounded by deception.
He hesitated, then told her the ugliest truth. “Because I wanted you to keep looking at me as if I were not a condemned man.”
Elise went very still.
He felt the floor shift beneath him. He had not meant to confess that—not in those words, at least. Once spoken, though, it could not be retrieved.
CHAPTER 20
Elise turned away, pacing a step and then stopping as if her legs no longer obeyed. The room felt suddenly too small for the truth that had been laid within it, as if the very walls had drawn closer to listen.
“You are not your brother,” she said at last, and even to her own ears the words sounded as though she had dragged them from some stubborn, ungenerous part of herself that would rather have remained silent.
She heard Edmund’s breath catch. He had expected condemnation the moment Holt’s taunt had landed, she knew. He had expected her own anger to rise like a tide and wash him out to sea, she thought fancifully. She would have expected to feel only revulsion at the name, at the connection, at the long chain of harm that had begun with Singleton and ended with Charles gone beneath the black water.
Instead, she stood in the centre of the room with a grief that had no proper place to go. Charles was dead; Singleton was dead; Holt was caught and the ledger recovered. The world, in its impertinent way, now behaved as if order had been restored, and yet Elise could not pretend that the past did not exist.
Elise faced him again. Her eyes were wet, but she did not allow her tears to fall. Tears were a luxury for women who were not responsible for a house, a school, a wounded man hidden behind a wall, and servants who depended upon her constancy.
“I can hardly hold it against you,” she said in a low, strained voice, “not when my own life has been a series of secrets and half-truths.”
Edmund took one step toward her. “Elise?—”
She lifted a hand, stopping him. “Do not come closer yet.”
