that he’d seen: he aimed a rifle at Slade.
“Come down,” he said, “or I’ll shoot.”
I hadn’t come this far to have Slade killed before he could answer a few questions. I stepped off the path, angled through the shrubbery, and stole up behind the man with the rifle. I could see Slade clinging to the tree, staring at the weapon leveled on his heart. His face was set in hard lines that betrayed no emotion, but I read his mind: he was thinking that he’d escaped death at the hands of mighty villains all over the world, and now he was about to be brought down by a country caretaker in an English village. He couldn’t bear the stupidity of it, and neither could I.
I turned my furled umbrella in my hands, grasping it near the pointed end. I crept up to the caretaker and brought the sturdy wooden handle down on the back of his head as hard as I could. He grunted, lurched, and dropped the rifle. I swung my umbrella and hit him behind his knees. He fell flat on his face. As he struggled to rise, something in me snapped. The passions and impulses I had controlled heretofore now overflowed like water over a crumbled dam. I lost all common sense, all self-restraint. I hit the caretaker again and again while he screamed. Slade jumped down from the tree and hurried toward us.
“Charlotte, stop! You’ll kill him!”
I didn’t care. Glorying in unholy wrath, I beat the caretaker until he lay still and moaning. Slade tore the umbrella out of my hands and flung it away. “Have you gone mad?”
Laughter burbled from me, even though I was shocked and horrified that I had attacked a man who’d never done me any wrong. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black! You’re the criminal lunatic from Bedlam!” Now I was furious. “You thought you could avoid me, but you were wrong!”
He shook his head, astounded and exasperated. “You never give up, do you? I suppose you came looking for Niall Kavanagh in an attempt to track me down, and you found his laboratory. I underestimated you.” Grudging respect crept into his tone; but then he said sternly, “You should go.”
“I’m not going anywhere!” I snatched up the rifle and aimed it at Slade. “Neither are you, until you’ve explained everything to my satisfaction!”
His hands went up. “Put the gun down. You’re not going to shoot me. You don’t even know how to fire a gun.”
“Is that what you think?” I had gone shooting on the moors in Haworth, although I’d never managed to hit anything. How furious I was that Slade would patronize me after I had just saved his miserable life! I pulled the trigger.
The gun fired with an ear-splitting roar. The barrel jerked upward. Slade dropped to the ground. I screamed in horror because I thought I’d shot him, which I hadn’t really meant to do. But the bullet hit the foliage high in the trees. Twigs and leaves rained down on him. He cautiously raised his head. We stared at each other, and the shock on his face was no greater than the shock I felt.
That we had come to this! That I had almost killed the man I loved!
I lowered the gun. When Slade jumped up and took it from me, I didn’t resist. He threw the gun into the bushes. I said, “I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” But his manner was more impatient than conciliatory. “I can’t tell you any more than I already have. Because it’s not your concern.”
My anger resurged. “After what I’ve gone through because of you, it certainly is my concern.” I played a card I thought he didn’t know I held. “Katerina has been killed.”
“What?” Even more stunned than when I’d almost shot him, Slade demanded, “How?”
I explained that I’d gone to Katerina’s house in search of him and found her tied to her bed, stabbed multiple times and bleeding to death.
“Good God!” Slade was visibly shaken.
I wondered if it was because he loved Katerina and her death grieved him. The thought fueled my rage. I told Slade I’d been caught by the police. “They think I murdered her. They sent me to Newgate Prison.” I related the indignities and terrors I’d suffered there. “So don’t tell me that your business is none of mine!”
Dismay appeared in his expression. “I never wanted you to be hurt.”
“You have an odd way of showing it.” Close to tears, I said, “That’s not the worst of what happened.” I described how Wilhelm Stieber had brought me to Bedlam and interrogated me. “He would have had me killed, if not for Lord Palmerston and the Queen.” I told Slade they’d rescued me and granted me a limited amount of time to prove my innocence and his. “Palmerston believed you were a traitor, but I defended you, and he’s giving you the benefit of doubt. Don’t you think I have a right to know what’s going on?”
Slade inhaled a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. “I suppose I do owe you an explanation.” He looked around to see whether anyone was coming to investigate the gunfire, then moved under the shadow of the tree I’d shot, where we wouldn’t be seen from the road; he beckoned me to follow him. “Whatever you want to know, just ask.”
Here was my chance to learn the truth. Perhaps it was my last because I would never see Slade again. Now was not the time to beat around the bush, to hesitate because of modesty, pride, or fear that the truth would hurt.
“Do you remember that we were once in love?” I said. “Do you remember asking me to marry you?”
The speed with which Slade turned away told me that he would prefer to discuss any other topic than this. “I do.” His voice was barely audible.
“Then why have you been acting as if you’d forgotten? Why have you pretended we were strangers?”
Slade shook his head, appearing helpless and ashamed, the way men often do when confronted with matters of the heart.
I whispered the question that I was most timid to ask, whose answer I was most afraid to hear. “Have your feelings toward me changed?”
He abruptly faced me and spoke with vehement passion: “My feelings for you remain exactly the same as when I proposed to you in that dreary, remote village where you live. I loved you then. I’ve loved you these three years. I love you now. If you think I’m so faithless that I would change my mind, then God damn you, Charlotte Bronte!”
29
I was too thunderstruck to speak, as alarmed by his language as overjoyed to hear that Slade was still in love with me.
“For three years, I’ve missed you and longed for you, even though I tried to put you out of my mind,” he said. “One lapse of attention can be the death of a spy. Still, I kept wondering whether your feelings toward me had changed. I couldn’t write to you and ask-it was dangerous to smuggle letters out of or into Russia. I decided that I would finish this one last assignment, be done with spying, then go back to England and propose to you again.”
This was a more ardent affirmation of love than I’d dreamed of hearing.
“But when the time came, I couldn’t just waltz back into your life. I’m not the man you loved three years ago.” Slade’s features hardened into stoicism. “I’ve done terrible things since then.”
A cold shadow of dread encroached upon me. I didn’t want to hear what Slade was going to say, but I’d forced him into a confession, and I must listen to it all.
“While I was in Moscow, I befriended three Russian intellectuals.” Slade told me the story of Peter, Fyodor, and Alexander, which I have recorded in my tale of his adventures. “I betrayed them. I bought my way into the Tsar’s court with their deaths.”
I felt a revulsion so strong that I took a step backward from Slade, down the path that led away from the workhouse. His gaze showed disgust at himself and pity for me. “I tried to warn you. Now do you wish you’d stayed away from me?”
What I wished was that Slade had never gone to Russia. I hurried to defend him, even though I deplored his exploitation of harmless men who would have been content to talk about revolution rather than take action if not for him. “You were doing your duty.”
