“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.”
Slade gave me a bitter smile; he perceived my ambivalence. “The blood of those men is still on my hands. And they aren’t the only ones I’ve betrayed.”
A cadence of foreboding drummed inside me. “The British agents? But you told me you weren’t a traitor.”
“I didn’t give their names to the secret police, but I might as well have signed their death warrants.” Slade described how he’d worked as an informant for the Third Section while spying on the Russian government. He told me the story of the men and the firing squad in Butyrka Prison. “I used to meet with them on occasion, to share news. Wilhelm Stieber must have followed me to a meeting, although I never saw him-I swear, the scoundrel has a cloak of invisibility. He must have caught one of our agents, then tortured him into admitting he was a British spy and exposing the rest of us. I didn’t know what had happened until it was too late to save them. All I could do was run for my own life.”
I hope my retelling of his story has conveyed what Slade had experienced. When he described the wild chase through the Kremlin and living as a fugitive in Moscow, I felt as harrowed as if I’d gone through it all myself. “How did you escape?”
“By an accident of fate.” He told me how he’d been ambushed on his way out of Moscow and the four men who’d tried to murder him had been killed by the secret police. “They were British agents, my comrades, disguised as Russians. I figured that my superiors had discovered that my fellow spies had been caught. They blamed me, and they’d sent the agents to deliver me to justice. But I didn’t know for sure until you told me what Lord Eastbourne said.”
“Why did you let your superiors think you were dead?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell your side of the story?”
“I did,” Slade said, “after I came back to England. A friend in Russia smuggled me into Poland. The Polish people don’t like Russia, which has taken over their country. Some were glad to give me food and shelter and money and teach me their language. I went on to Amsterdam, then stowed away on a ship and landed in England this past April. I wrote to Lord Palmerston at the Foreign Office, explaining what had happened. I warned him about Stieber, Kavanagh, and the invention. But I didn’t trust Palmerston enough to meet him face to face or tell him where to send a reply to my letter. So I don’t know whether he received it.”
“I’m certain he didn’t,” I said, recalling our conversation at Osborne House.
“At any rate, I doubted that I could walk into the Foreign Office, turn myself in, and expect my problems to be straightened out,” Slade said. “All I could do was proceed with my plan to search for Niall Kavanagh. And I wanted revenge on Wilhelm Stieber.”
I’d known that Slade was a man of strong passions, but I’d never seen the full power of his hatred until now. Stieber had better pray to God that he and Slade never met again.
“My quest led me to Katerina.” Slade spoke with such sorrow that I felt a stab of jealousy. “While I was in Whitechapel, looking for Stieber, I learned that she was his informant. I struck up an acquaintance with her and persuaded her to work for me.”
I envisioned him using his charms on her, engaging her affections. I couldn’t bear the images that my mind conjured up.
“I knew it was dangerous for her. I knew what Stieber would do to her if he found out. But I was like a speeding train that can only go in the direction that its track is laid. I killed her as surely as if I’d plunged a knife into her heart.” Slade clenched his hand and pantomimed stabbing. The rage in his voice underscored the violence of his words. “Katerina’s murder is another death I’m responsible for. And my actions have also put you in trouble with the law.”