“I did,” he said succinctly. “Don’t you believe me?”
“What I don’t credit is that no one else did!”
His features softened at the unwavering trust for him in her voice. “You should have been working in the Foreign Office.” He touched her hand beneath the table, squeezing her fingers, and explained to the others. “I overheard the plans for the escape some seven weeks before the event. Oh, the Foreign Office had every right to be suspicious. I couldn’t even present the case myself and I had none of the names of the perpetrators. They dragged their feet too long making a decision, and then, well, you know what happened.” He shrugged. “It scarcely can be changed now. Wellington will have to defeat him in battle.”
Tanner and Alexis sympathized with his frustration at being unable to have made a difference but Rhys could not fail to notice that Kenna had become withdrawn. During the remainder of the evening her laughter alternated between being brittle and too bright and she drank rather more wine than she was used to. The carriage ride home was taut with silence and Kenna held herself so stiffly that Rhys finally withdrew the arm he had around her shoulders.
Immediately upon returning home she went upstairs. Rhys would have followed her but Alcott drew him to one side.
“There are four gentlemen waiting for you in the drawing room, Mr. Canning,” he said, looking more flustered than usual.
“I don’t want to see anyone. Tell them to leave.”
“They refused, sir, when I asked them before. I doubt they will go now, especially since you’re here.”
“Very well.” Rhys sighed. He would handle them rather than risk causing a disruption which was certain to bring Kenna. “I’ll see them. But don’t bother bringing refreshments. They won’t be staying long.”
Rhys was as good as his word. Britt had brought three of his friends, men Rhys had not yet met but who were due to make his acquaintance on Monday. Rhys showed them that at least in one way he was very much his father’s son: he refused to be moved from his position. He listened politely to their arguments and protests and then repeated his dissolution with Britt and the increase in his shipping rates. Then he showed them the door.
When they were gone he went to his bedchamber, having forgotten Kenna’s strange mood until she failed to respond to his presence.
“I know you’re not sleeping,” he said as he stripped of his clothes, taking note of her stiff form beneath the bedcovers. He sighed heavily as she turned on her side and gave him her back. Rhys put on a nightshirt and walked around the four-poster, slipping between the cold sheets. He lay on his back, staring at the play of shadows on the ceiling made by the fire in the grate. “I’m of no mind to tease you from this mood, Kenna. I wish you would tell me what has upset you and be done with it.” She was silent so long that Rhys thought she had no intention of answering him, then he heard her muffled sob and realized she could not speak.
His impatience faded and when he spoke it was with gentleness. “Why are you weeping, Kenna?”
“Why did you n-never tell m-me?” she choked out, lifting a corner of the sheet to wipe her eyes.
A thread of impatience returned to his tone. “Tell you what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Tears spilled through her lashes again. “N-Napoleon. You n-never said a w-word.”
“It never came up before tonight. I put it all behind me once we sailed for America. Why should it bother you?”
Kenna’s fist hit her pillow in frustration and she sat up, drawing a deep breath. “B-because the conversation you heard happened at Dunnelly!” Even through her tears she could see Rhys’s surprise as his mind worked furiously to discover how she knew.
“I never said it did,” he said slowly.
“Seven weeks! You said you heard it seven weeks before the event. You were at Dunnelly then!”
“Kenna! Calm yourself!”
She came very close to raising her hand against him then. Instead her fingers curled into bloodless fists. “Oooh! I willnotcalm myself! Who spoke of the plans for escape, Rhys? Was it one of the servants? Mayhap you think it was Nicholas. Is that why you came to Dunnelly? To spy on my family, listen at keyholes, and poke your nose into my brother’s private papers?” She gave him no time to respond as anger fired her senses, “You lied to me, Rhys. Not once, but twice. You first said you came to Dunnelly to get away from your father in London. Then you told me, oh, so sweetly, that you were there because of Yvonne’s letters. To protect me, you said!”
“Those were not lies, Kenna,” Rhys denied, sitting up himself. “They were but two parts of the truth.”
Kenna’s eyes darkened and widened. Her brows lifted disdainfully and her laughter was mocking. “Two parts of the truth? Since when is the truth divided like a recipe ingredient? What do I add? One part confidence? Equal portions of faith? A dash of deceit?” She knuckled a tear that dripped from her eye. “Tell me, Rhys. How many parts make up the whole? Three? Four? How many, damn you?”
Rhys got up from the bed and poured himself a measure of brandy from the cabinet beside the window. He gulped it back quickly, poured another, and stood at the window, watching the moon scatter its white light on the edge of the clouds.
“Do you think what I had to do at Dunnelly is the sort of thing I could talk about?” he asked quietly, turning slowly in her direction. “The Foreign Office frowns on that kind of sharing.”
“So youweresent to Dunnelly.”
His expression was bleak and pale in the moonlight. “I thought you didn’t have any doubts.”
“I didn’ t…I don’t.” Her eyes pleaded with him. “Please, Rhys, tell me what your purpose there was. I cannot bear these half-truths and you knowing things about Dunnelly that affect me, too. Don’t let there be any more secrets between us.”
“The secrets had to be there, Kenna,” he said slowly, putting down his drink. “I could only tell you what you could bear to hear.”
