Kisses and Scandal (A Survivors Series Anthology ) - Shana Galen Page 0,49
to myself.”
She blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“There’s something I haven’t told you.”
Bridget shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “That’s no surprise. Why start confiding in me now?”
“Don’t be a child, Bridget. You know I would have told you if I could have. That was my only request before they sent me. I was denied, and now that I know the full circumstances, I understand the reasoning. I don’t like it, but I can’t go back and change it now. If I could do it all again, I would defy my orders and tell you everything. You must know that.”
She hadn’t known that, actually. She hadn’t considered that it must have been as hard for him to leave her as it was for her to be separated from him.
“What haven’t you told me?”
He sighed and sank onto her bed. Her first reaction was to tell him he couldn’t sit there. Not because it was improper; it was beyond improper. But because she didn’t want to look at the bed every day and imagine him on it. Imagine herself there with him.
“I’m not living in this boarding house by choice. The Foreign Office put me here.”
This made sense. She’d thought they would pay him enough that he could retire to the country if he wished. He could at least afford a decent flat. But if he was still working with the Foreign Office four years after Bonaparte’s surrender, something was not right.
“I never told you what I was training for before I left.”
“We weren’t allowed to talk of such things. I didn’t confide details of my work either.” No, they’d been too busy with other matters to discuss work overly much. Looking at him sitting on the bed reminded her of those other matters all too easily.
“I think I should tell you something of it now, so you understand my present circumstances and the risk you are taking—the risk I put you in—if we begin this search together.”
“I don’t care about the risks,” she argued. “I’ll take any risk necessary if it means I find James.”
“Little consolation it will be to find him if you’re dead.”
Bridget leveled a look at Caleb. “You’re right. I think I’d better understand your present circumstances better.”
“You must have suspected I was training to be a spy.”
She nodded. “Why else the secrecy?”
“You were correct. And when I left you, I infiltrated the ranks of the French. One of the French commanders had an aide-de-camp who died from illness. The commander sent back to France for another man who had been recommended to him. The Foreign Office had that man killed, and I went in his place.”
Bridget took a breath. She did not think she would have done anything but worry and fret for Caleb if she’d known these details all those years ago. It had been an incredible risk to take. So much could have gone wrong. “You were accepted?”
“I was able to avoid the few who knew the man I replaced. If I couldn’t avoid them, I took other measures.”
He’d killed them. The haunted look in his eyes as he remembered was proof enough that he hadn’t quite forgiven himself for the sins of war. “I can see you would have been in a unique position to send information back to the Foreign Office.”
“Exactly. But I was also in a dangerous position once Napoleon’s generals realized they had a spy in their midst. For months, they tried to discover who it was, and I was able to evade them. But no one can escape the noose forever.”
Caught up in the story now, Bridget crossed to him and sat on the bed beside him. “How did they catch you?”
“They had suspicions about three or four of us, including me. They held strategy meetings in which only one of the men under suspicion was present at a time. In each meeting, they gave different, false information. When the information I sent was intercepted, they knew who their spy was because they knew who was in the meeting when that false information was given.”
“Did they capture you?” Bridget stared into his blue eyes, bright and vivid like the color of a kingfisher’s feathers.
“They tried. I escaped and hid all over the Continent for several years. I think, during certain periods, the Foreign Office really did not know whether I was alive or dead. And then the war ended.”
She stiffened. This was where he should have come back, found her, saved her from prison, and reunited her with her son.