by Emily Bow
“Okay.”
“Okay,” he mocked my tone. “What do you see?”
“Knights. Their ladies. Jousts. Castle builders.” There was a town only a few miles from here, but the castle was kept private, secluded, little used or appreciated. “What it was—a community hub.” What the castle could be again—a community hub. I’d been toying with that thought since week one rambling around inside the incredible but underutilized space.
“I’ll never have the public traipsing through my house.”
“There are at least ten people in there cleaning now.”
A raindrop plopped on my cheek. A gray cloud that hadn’t been there a moment ago covered the sun. How English. “Grab the hamper.” I pointed to a Victorian folly on the next hill, the closest structure other than the castle. We ran for the shelter. The dry grass was easy to race across, the little hill less so.
We reached the faux Roman ruin as the sprinkling rain became a persistent patter. I charged up the steps and through theCorinthian columns to get under the domed roof.
His ancestors may have liked their defenses, as he’d pointed out, but they also liked their conveniences. The rain came down harder. “We’re going to get soaked going back.” I didn’t mind the thought.
“This will pass. Give it a minute.” Thorn went to the center marble bench and sat down. He leaned back.
The falling rain, the lush pink roses climbing the columns, and the cool air gave the place a mystical atmosphere. I pulled out my phone and tried to capture the ambiance with video, including him in the shot. “One of your ancestors had a less practical heart than you. Everywhere you look is a piece of history.” I checked the replay and sighed. The video didn’t capture the blue misty world we were experiencing. The image looked like poor lighting. I’d have to remember this moment instead.
I joined him on the hard, cold marble and dug back into the hamper offering to share with him by holding out a cup.
Thorn hesitated and then took the drink from me.
We finished the thermos and the last triangle sandwiches in the folly sheltered from the storm. My mood eased with the food and the quietening patter. “I wonder if this place is like the true fairy world? We’ve eaten here, now we’re doomed to stay here forever.” I eyed an over-large pale pink climbing rose that popped against the greenery. “What a world. Roman columns in an English countryside left here from the Victorian age. Who thought this place up?”
“You do love history.” He referenced last night when I’d confessed that.
At least he wasn’t playing a weird “we never met” game. I appreciated that. We could definitely be friends, or friendly colleagues. I relaxed and rested my arm on the wicker hamper, which was warmer than the marble. “Don’t you love this? Blue mist. Pink roses. A castle in the distance separated from us by only a veil of raindrops.”
“Imogen.” Thorn turned to me and stared with an unreadable expression, blinked, and looked away, off in the distance, away from the castle, toward the driveway. “Being here is a means to an end. I will preserve the estate for the next generation. That’s my duty.” He drew in a breath and pointed west. “Hopewell Manor is there, that’s where my friend Sebastian and his sister Regina live. Allying with their family makes sense given this inheritance. Our properties are adjacent. Our backgrounds are similar.”
Regina. My dreamy thoughts blew away. Regina had to be the red-headed girl from last night. I hadn’t realized she was his friend Sebastian’s sister. “Ally?” It took a minute for the words to fully process. “You’re going to marry Regina?” The sandwich turned over in my stomach. We were young.
He looked twenty-one like me. Was he engaged? Had I kissed an engaged guy? Ew. There was only one reason to get engaged. My mind took wild, jagged, uncomfortable leaps. I frowned at how much this was stinging and pushed the words out, “Are you two…”
Chapter 7
“We’re not together. It’s a plan I’m considering. Regina doesn’t know it yet. But she will. You see where I stand. You see our homes’ proximities. The sensibility of my intentions.”
I closed my eyes. “Regina came to get you at the pub when she found out you were there.” My throat hurt to say the words. “I don’t think you’ll have to try hard to convince her of the plan. That is, if you stop picking up strangers over scotch.”
His mouth twisted. “Our…meeting at the local won’t ruin things.”
Our meeting. I hated him anew for minimizing our moment. I pressed my shoulders against the freezing marble backrest to chill my anger.
“Nothing is decided. But if not Regina, someone who brings to the table what she brings. A pedigree. Land. You understand?” The softness in his words told me he was being cruel to be kind as he explained his world to me.
The explanation softened me to him, probably the opposite of what he intended. My back eased, and I rubbed my forearms and broke out the sarcasm. “Sounds like a true, deep, and meaningful passion. I’m sure you’ll be very happy with your acreage. I mean lineage. I mean choice.”
“Happiness would be a foolish basis for an alliance.”
He was wrong. I pitied him. Thorn had ideas and a castle, but he had no clue how to plan his life or even to enjoy the present. I could help him. Why I should, I don’t know. Why my heart swelled at the thought, I couldn’t fathom. But I was doing it. “Forget the future for a moment. Listen to the rain pinging on the glass above us. Watch the droplets slide down into the pink petals. I’ve never seen a rose so large.” I got up and circled the goddess statue and then put my hands on her marble waist. “Feel her silk robes, carved by a Victorian sculptor. Ages ago. Lifetimes ago. A million dreams ago.”
“Only to be groped in this millennium.” His words mocked me, but he joined me, and he slid his hands over the chilled stone, his expression pensive. He stopped his fingers shy of mine. A fraction of an inch further and he’d be touching me. “Extraordinary work.” His voice took on its first hint of appreciation.
My heart skipped a century as he began to get it.
The rain quieted, leaving us as quickly as the clouds had arrived. Thorn blinked. “We should go back.” He went to the steps, leaving the hamper behind. “Send someone to retrieve that.”
Oh, yeah, because his kitchen staff were so accommodating. If I did as he suggested, I’d never get a sandwich again. I grabbed the handles and followed him over the damp grass back to the castle, letting the hamper thump against my leg.
We were so different. My father would never let my mother tote a hamper along behind him. Not that Dad wasn’t all about equality. He was. But having Mom do the lifting wasn’t in their dynamic. He’d have at least offered when he saw her heft it. “Thorn?”
He paused. “My name sounds odd in your accent.”
“I was thinking the same thing about how you say my name. But I like it.”
He smiled. “Good.” He shook his head. “You shouldn’t, but I am glad you do.”
My insides shimmered like the rain.
We paused there on the steps before the massive double doors, and there was a lingering connection. As if the ivy from the folly had twined its way into our shared memory, connecting us.
The front door opened. One of the maids pulled the brass handle inward and bowed her head, backing from the entry, holding the door open for us.
Her motions reminded me of walking up to a restaurant back home with a waiting hostess. Thorn’s staff were watching for him, expecting him. Their surveillance put a new spin on our private walk, on the privacy of the castle, on our new dynamic, on the pressures he faced.
Thorn stiffened and shifted away from me. “Thank you, Imogen. No need to show me around further. Go back to your tasks, I have separate business to attend.” He left me there on the steps with those words, a verbal shooing.
***
“No. No. Don’t let me interrupt.” The duchess, Thorn’s mother, who’d arrived the evening he did swept into our workroom. She sipped from her cinnamon tea and
paused in front of the long table where I sat. She took in Lily, my fellow volunteer, and shifted to face me.
This was our first official meeting. The duchess was tall, raven-haired with pale skin and green eyes. She’d dressed in sage silk accented with jade jewelry. Her perfume was floral and her manicure French.
Despite her words, there was no way she wasn’t interrupting. I closed the laptop and made my eyes big and innocent. A level of innocent that said, “I’ve never made out with your son, I’m simply a hard-working volunteer.” Like me. Be impressed with our efforts.
The duchess removed the cinnamon stick from her tea and opened her palm. “I’m hoping to understand the progress on my dear Robert’s project.” Robert was her deceased husband, Thorn’s father. “Don’t mind me. I only want a small update.” She looked at me pointedly, but not unkindly.
I let go of the computer mouse and pressed my cold hand to my cheek. I wanted to run for the professor rather than risk saying something wrong, but I didn’t. I wasn’t a student anymore. I could handle this. I dropped my palm to the table and sat up straighter. “We’re documenting the location of each artifact we find. We take photos and sort each object into secured cabinets. Like by like. Jewelry by jewelry. Spoons by spoons. Etcetera.”
The duchess’s sharp green eyes assessed me, and she took another sip of her cinnamon tea. “Isn’t it a risk to move the objects from their original locations? Couldn’t their very positions give us clues to their history?”
“If it’s an archeology find, yes, but not with this stuff,” Lily said, joining in the conversation. Lily rarely spoke up, though she was the professor’s daughter, so she had to know a ton about the process.
“Why not?” The duchess arched her thin dark eyebrows.
The motion struck me. That’s where her son got the habit. Though on him, it was masculine.
Lily shrugged as if regretting having spoken. History wasn’t Lily’s passion, and she wouldn’t want to argue about cataloguing. If the topic were computers, she’d jump into the challenge.
Lily hefted a box of figurines I’d finished. It was her job to tag them with barcodes, and then sort the objects into the secured cupboards we’d set up in the ballroom. She’d come up with the barcode idea and had told me how to scan them into the database. Usually, she labeled things here at the worktable with me. This time, she took the box to the corner and began working with her back to us.
I took the attention off Lily by answering. “The people who lived here had cheap figurines on tables beside priceless artifacts. The current locations aren’t really relevant, but we are documenting them with photos and video just in case. There is so much stuff and it’s so unorganized.” I held up an orange gemstone earring, a gawdy piece of mid-century costume jewelry. “By putting this earring with the other jewelry, we may find its match. Or we may not. There’s a purpose to our madness.”
“I understand.” The duchess moved around the room looking over the boxes stacked in front of the Victorian hutch. She lifted the lid and jiggled a blue crate and moved on to a cardboard box and removed its foam packing paper.
Don’t touch that. I just sorted it. I bit my tongue on the words, because these were in fact her things. At least she wasn’t messing with the hutch. I was saving the hutch for last. There was something significant about that piece being the only old furniture here in this room.
The duchess took two objects from a crate. An envelope and a small wooden box. She carried them to my table. Then she took the orange earring and laid it alongside them.
The envelope had the same cursive as the Elizabethan papers that the professor was transcribing. She’d be interested in that. I’d log that piece in next so Lily could take it to her.
The duchess turned to the doorway. “Regina, do come in and see these.”
Regina? Regina from the bar? My head snapped up and my brows drew together. Great. The one person in England I’d rather never meet again.
I hadn’t even realized Regina was here at the castle, much less standing within earshot.
Regina sauntered into the room. Her curly red hair was contained in a top knot, and she wore a green sweater with peach-colored slacks and tall camel-colored pumps. What was she doing here? Was she here for Thorn? Was she here to examine her future goods?
As she got closer, I could smell her peach-scented perfume. She color-coordinated her perfume with her slacks. Of course, she’d make a perfect duchess.
Regina gave me a cool look filled with fake non-recognition.
I didn’t like it, and my head pinged with an oncoming headache, but I didn’t blame her.
“Come, do look at these artifacts, dear,” the duchess said. “These objects are from this castle.”
Regina strode forward slowly. She paused in front of my laptop.
I kept my gaze on the objects. My eyes burned at keeping them steady.
Regina tapped on the top of the screen with one peach-painted index finger to draw my attention.
I had no choice. I lifted my gaze to her hazel eyes.
“I have a terrible thirst. Do show me a kindness, if you would please. Now, if you could.” Regina had a rounded English accent, and as pretty as she was, her voice didn’t match. It had a thinness that lacked charm. Regina was attempting a power move with a voice that would never get her on the radio.
Petty of me to notice, but I did. And if she thought her tone carried sufficient weight to command me, she’d never met anyone like Dad when he went into mission command mode. My sisters and I all fell in line. We couldn’t help it. He was that good, and clear, and reasonable.
I found Regina to be none of those things. The muscle in my jaw ticked. Transport me back to America if she liked, and I could tell she would like that, but serving her wasn’t happening. I gave her a slow smile. “Oh, I wouldn’t be comfortable asking the staff to bring you a drink.” They never did what I said anyway. “I’ll point you to the kitchens.” I kept my cadence slow in my own power move.
The duchess wrinkled her nose at Regina. “The history students aren’t staff, dear.” Her tone held mild reproof.
I liked that response because the duchess’s reaction could have gone the other way. Had the duchess wheedled at me to go get the drinks, I’d have been in an awkward position. Instead, she’d taken my side. Did she not like Regina? Or did the duchess believe in absolute boundaries between us and the household workers? Or was she setting a third boundary? Them, the staff, and the history students. A class triangle honed by centuries of rules that I didn’t know.
Tension built in the room between the three of us.
Lily popped up like she couldn’t take the mounting pressure. “I’ll get it.”
No one stopped her, and Lily scurried from the room like they’d lowered the drawbridge and freedom was just across the moat.
The duchess waved her palm at the door. “Dear. Dear. Come in here if you have a moment. I don’t want to be a bother, but you must see how things are going.” Her voice held legitimate affection which gave me a clue to who was nearby.
I didn’t have to look over to know her son had arrived. The duke. Thorn. He wore a cream-colored shirt, dark trousers, and loafers. His thick hair was slicked back and appeared damp as if he’d showered. I’d seen this guy in a towel. He’d seen me in a sheet. I pulled my mind away from that image.
The duchess waved her hand over the three objects she’d placed on the table.
Thorn strode forward like he owned the castle, looking neither at me nor Regina. He peered at the envelope, the box, and the earring. “These are what you’re finding?” His gaze flickered to me for an unreadable quick look, and then back down. “They look like rubbish. A waste of time.” He nudged the earring and lifted the box with a careless bare hand and then placed it back on the table. “There’s nothing of interest here.”
He was wrong. The castle was full of wonders. I lifted the earring with a cloth and centered it on a square of black velvet. He touched the cloth and his f
inger almost grazed mine. The electricity of that almost-contact made my skin prickle. I wanted to move my thumb over a tad, just a touch to see how much of last night’s reaction was over.
“Really,” Regina said. “Those are his, you know. Wanting it to be otherwise doesn’t make it fact. If my staff moved something of mine, well…”
I hadn’t taken anything from him. I had put the earring safely on a cloth, lessening the odds of the small piece slipping from the table. Her tone and words were out of proportion to my actions. But I couldn’t easily respond. She and I both knew what this was about.
“Imogen’s not staff, dear. She’s working on this project. She’s allowed to move the objects.” The duchess sounded impatient that she’d had to repeat herself. “Now.” She breathed out. “Regina, which of these three items do you believe has the most worth?”
Regina crossed her arms over her chest. “The jewelry, of course.” She waved her hand. “Though obviously, it’s costume. Not at all what you’d want to find in your coffers. But there you go. The earring is the obvious choice because the other option is paper, and the little box is wooden.”
“Thorn?” the duchess prompted.
I was curious about his opinion too.
“We need more information,” Thorn said.
“Exactly.” The duchess smiled as if he’d fallen into her trap. “Which is why we are having everything catalogued like your father wanted.”
Thorn made a huffing sound. “I choose the envelope then. That is the professor’s main objective and what she should be focusing on. Letters.”
That implied he didn’t want the other things catalogued. Cataloging was our main task as volunteer assistants. Sort the stuff and look for letters. Did he not want us here? I rubbed my temple. This was a totally new and unwelcome insight. Nothing the professor had hinted at. Not good. I breathed out. I was too attuned to him and reading way too much into his huffing sound.
The duchess pointed to me. “And what do you think? Which object would you choose? Which one has the most worth in your eyes?”