“Why? It seems to me that having my confidence would have made his utility to England the greater.”
“He would have been suspected of double dealing, would he not?”
“As a friend of England you would have let him be suspected?” he asked quietly. “Given evidence against a man whom you knew to be acting in England’s interests?”
“There were other—other—interests,” she faltered, “more important to me than England’s—Mr. Hammersley’s. You have a daughter, Excellenz. Perhaps you would try to think of me as you would think of her in a similar situation. When I read those papers at Ashwater Park I knew that the man to whom I was promised and of whom I had always thought as an Englishman was acting as a secret agent—a spy of Germany. He was pursued by agents of the English War Office. I knew that if his connection with Germany were discovered he would be shot. I was frightened. I did not know what to do. John Rizzio followed me to Scotland and tried to get the papers. I refused to give them to him. And then when—when Mr. Hammersley came I burned them. There was nothing left for me to do—for England—for him. If there were no papers there could be no evidence against him.”
She paused to get her breath, aware that her companion was listening intently, and fearfully afraid that she was saying too much.
“And then—?” he asked.
“And then,” she went on more slowly, “I found the other papers. When I wouldn’t give them to him, Mr. Hammersley took them away from me. We quarreled, Excellenz, and I gave him up.”
“And after that—”
“After that came Mr. Rizzio’s note asking me to go to Ben-a-Chielt and see the meeting between Cyr—between Mr. Hammersley and your messenger in the last hope that I could make Mr. Hammersley give up his plans to deliver the message to you. As you know I failed. It was there—after that—that Mr. Rizzio, who had overheard our conversation, tried to kill Mr. Hammersley, knowing that he had resolved to deliver the message.” She got up and paced the floor. “Oh, it is so clear, what Rizzio was, that I wonder that it should be necessary for me to tell it to you.”
“Yes, I see. And the other—the personal reasons you mentioned.”