A Lily Among Thorns(16)

After he had gone, silence reigned in the office. Serena, still sizzling with furious energy, began creating and discarding ever more elaborate plots to destroy René. There was no point thinking of anything else, because she wasn’t going to lose the Arms.

“Can you really get him hanged?” Solomon asked.

“Nothing simpler.” Serena would never have imagined the words could be so easy to say. “He’s a French spy.”

Solomon gaped. “Wh—what?”

“This inn was only a front for him. I’m not sure why he thought I wouldn’t realize what was going on.”

Solomon stared at her in horror. “You knew he was a spy, and you did nothing?”

She shrugged. He didn’t need to know how she had agonized, weighing up the evidence of René’s guilt again and again, and the consequences if she were right. How she had imagined heroically informing on him, giving up the Arms, taking another protector. And how she couldn’t do it. “I needed the Arms,” she said flatly. “Besides, I didn’t know. It could all have been completely innocent.”

“But—” He looked in the direction René had gone. She had never seen his face so cold. “He could have passed the information that killed Elijah.”

Serena swallowed. He was right. Had she done that to him? Did she have that to answer for, too? She couldn’t think about it now. “Does that mean you’ll help me?”

“What? Serena—”

She gripped the underside of her desk tightly, where he couldn’t see, and tried not to raise her voice. “I’m sorry, Solomon, but I didn’t feel as if I owed it to English men to save them, after—at that point in my life, I didn’t feel I owed them anything. Besides . . .” She drew in a deep breath. “René was my friend.” It hurt to say it; if she went on, if she said enough to make him really understand, if she told him how René had taken care of her when she was nineteen and scared, she would vomit. So she didn’t go on, and the skepticism in Solomon’s eyes hurt almost as much.

She didn’t really expect him to let it go, but he did. “If you had no proof, then how are you going to have him hanged now?”

She wanted to sit down, but that would be one more show of weakness. “He’s right, that was an empty threat. If he’s hanged for treason, his property is forfeit to the Crown. He would have nothing more to lose; he’d produce those documents and I’d lose the Arms. I have to prove the marriage is a forgery first. Vengeance can come later.”

He looked disappointed. She wondered if he wanted to tell her that vengeance was unchristian, or if he simply didn’t want to wait for his own. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’ll help you.”

His voice sounded like safety. She had been stupid once; she couldn’t do it again. No matter how much she wanted to. “Thank you.” Pull yourself together. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone.”

He frowned, giving her that piercing hazel look. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

She nodded. For a moment she thought he wouldn’t listen to her, that he would refuse to go; the panicky, powerless feeling in her chest started to take up space she needed for her lungs. But he just looked at her for another moment, and then he nodded and left the room.

She let out her breath, shakily, and sat behind her desk. She ran her hand over the smooth mahogany. She loved that desk. It had been René’s, before Serena discovered that he had no head for money. Gradually she’d taken over nearly all the management of the inn, but it had still been René’s idea. It was René who had come to her bijou residence that she hated, and sat in her dressing room amid French lingerie and perfume bottles and vaginal sponges—he hadn’t even lifted an eyebrow—and offered her, not carte blanche, but a business proposition. He would put up three-quarters of the money, and she would put up the rest, plus her father’s name.

Serena pulled one of the heavy ledgers toward her and opened it. Candles, 15l., she read, written in her own neat script. Firewood, 26l. 6s. New register, 8s. 2p. This was her life now. How could she abandon it?

She had been staring blankly at the ledger for nearly a quarter of an hour when Sophy came in with a tea tray. “Mr. Hathaway said you wanted this.”

Serena looked up at Sophy. Familiar Sophy, who had been there from the beginning. “René wants to take the Arms away from me.” She hated how lost her voice sounded.