by Anna Butler
“A dozen Cleopatras will attend the ball, Nell.” I rose to take my leave and stooped to kiss her cheek. “Remember what’s owed to your House and choose something more imaginative and creative.”
“But of course. May we take a horse with us? I’ve always admired Godiva’s pluck.”
It made me laugh all the way down the stairs. Nell was a Stravaigor to the backbone. Whoever married her would be a lucky man.
Just don’t ask me if the luck in question was good or bad. I wasn’t certain she was joking about the horse.
I descended the wide marble staircase at Stravaigor House at a fast clip, eager to find Ned and kiss him into insensibility as a means of restoring my own equanimity. Which suffered another blow before I managed to escape to the outside world.
Albert Tatlock lounged at the foot of the stairs, waiting for me. That choked off any amusement Nell had inspired.
I did not like my father’s chief guard. No. Let me be honest. Tatlock had been my father’s chief assassin, back in the heady days before old Queen Victoria banned outright warfare between the Houses. In Tatlock’s particular case, his job title was all that changed. He still removed those my father deemed a threat to the House. I hesitate to repeat myself, but if you require proof, do find that spiritualist medium I mentioned earlier and discuss the matter with John.
“Trust you to put the Guv’nor in a pelter.” Tatlock had shed his usual bowler hat, being indoors, and his flies’-skating-rink of a bald pate was on unashamed full view. “Heard the shouting all over the house, we did. Seeing like it’s you, I thought I’d let it pass.”
Ruddy magnanimous of him. At least he hadn’t deemed me a threat and burst in, guns blazing, otherwise the House might have been short its second Heir in as many years. Gratitude for my deliverance reduced my inclination to sneer and kept my response to a nod.
Tatlock’s expression was aiming to show his sympathy, I fancy, but his eyes betrayed him. They glinted at me, cold and measuring as usual. And by measuring, I mean he always appeared to be estimating heights and weights and considering, as a result of his computations, how best to construct the coffin. “He isn’t used to being thwarted.”
I pulled my watch from my waistcoat pocket. “I must be on my way, Tatlock. Is there anything in particular?”
“Thing is, sir, you’re on your way without a guard with you. All it takes is an accident and your poor papa won’t have anyone to shout at.” His round head, in its baldness, was not unlike a billiard ball with a face etched upon it—a face falling into the same lugubrious lines as Harper’s earlier. Perhaps my father found himself drawn to the bloodhound type in his servants. “You should let me deal with it. Comes with the wage packet, keeping an eye on the Heir. Otherwise, I’ll have to speak to the Guv’nor, and he’s in no mood for another disappointment, I’m sure.”
That old chestnut. Tatlock had been trying to inch his way into my favour since he’d disposed of John the previous year. I did not want a House guard with me at all times. I most assuredly did not want Tatlock. The thought of him overlooking me every time I turned around gave me the shudders. No, thank you. My life was circumscribed enough without being trammelled further by a House guard always at my shoulder. Worse still, by a House guard who was Tatlock.
I smiled. “Speak away.” A brisk nod, and I pushed past him and was out the door and hailing a passing autocab before he could register any further objections. His gaze, fervid and unhappy, burned a hole between my shoulder blades as I went.
At least it was only his gaze and not his aether pistol.
I put it out of my mind and sent the cab scurrying across town in search of the one man who could stop me worrying over my troubles. More fool me, eh? In my current crisis, Ned turned out to be no blooming help at all.
Ned was at home, in the sumptuous house in Grosvenor Terrace against which my poor coffeehouse looked positively down-at-heel. He had plastered the walls of his study with photographs, enhanced to large scale by the Herschel process of enlarging and fixing photographic images. He was walking from one to the next, staring at them through a magnifying glass, when the butler showed me in. I’d hoped for kisses to soothe me. Instead, Ned gave me a distracted nod and continued his scholarly perambulations.
I am not a vain man, but I did rate my attractions higher than photographs of rusty metal discs and gears. I was a little décontenancé to find Ned was not of the same opinion. Had I been younger, I would have pouted, but it’s a ridiculous expression on the more mature specimen. Instead, I trailed along behind him, trying to see what was so fascinating.
“I give up. What is this, Ned?”
“Mmmn?”
I waved a hand in front of his nose until he started and looked at me as if seeing me for the first time that day. “What are you doing?”
“Rafe!” He gave me the delighted full smile that would melt volcanic rock and always succeeded in turning my bones to water. We were alone, his butler having retired after announcing me, and he took a step forward to give me the greeting I’d been hoping for earlier. When I came to myself and unfisted my hands from the shoulders of his jacket after regaining my sense of balance—Ned’s kisses have a terrifically weakening effect upon my knees—he smiled again. “Oh, dear, was I remiss when you arrived?”
“Horridly so. I will continue to demand osculatory restitution for your neglect. What are you doing?”
“Valerios Stais sent me the photographs. Aren’t they wonderful?”
I cocked my head to one side, regarded him with the warmth in the chest Ned always generated in me, and waited.
“Stais is the director of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and he’s consulting with me and one or two others over this find. It’s from a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera. Stais isn’t certain when the ship went down, but sometime in the first century BC.”
“Oh,” was all I said, in an attempt to stem the sudden flow of words. It didn’t work.
“The shipwreck was found the year before last, and divers brought up the machine itself last summer. Stais says it was logged as a lump of metal, but he was astonished at what he found when he separated this piece from the mass. So he sent the photographs to see what I think.”
“He wants to know what you think about a lump of rusted metal cogs and gears from a Greek shipwreck? I take it he doesn’t know of your disdain for—and I am quoting you directly—‘all that Hellenic rubbish’?”
Ned waved this away. “I don’t know it is Greek. Or wholly Greek at least.” He shepherded me over to one of the photographs and pushed the magnifying glass into my hand. “Look at this. Here. Look at the marks incised around the edge. What do you see?”
I forbore to retort “Rust, you madman!” and bent my neck to Ned’s yoke. A four-spoked wheel a little under six inches across, the fragment was, Ned said, the largest gear in the machine. The marks around the perimeter were unmistakably made by the hand of man. Greek script, too. “Koine Greek, I think. Pachon, I can see. And next to that, possibly Payni?”
Ned beamed. “Yes. They’re the names of Aegyptian months. Not the names of antiquity, but of the later Hellenistic period. You see why I don’t think this is entirely Greek.”
I smiled back and nodded. Then raised both hands in a helpless gesture. “No.”
“Why would a Greek machine show Aegyptian months?”
“What you’re saying is it’s a mishmash of Greek and Aegyptian. But Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean in that period. It’s the Greek of the New Testament, after all. This machine, whatever it is, would have been made to be understood across the region.”
“Ah, but look.” Ned tapped on the photograph, a little farther inside the outer ring of Greek symbols. “See this?”
I leaned in, raised the magnifying glass, and stared at the photograph until my eyes watered. “Hieroglyphs?”
“Yes!” Ned’s delight made me feel like the idiot child unexpectedly and perfectly declaiming Shakespeare. �
�I can make out one for certain. Tp, that is day 8 of the lunar month.” He gave me an encouraging, expectant smile that faded at my lack of reaction. “The true ancient Aegyptian calendar, Rafe. Not the Hellenistic version.” He tapped the photograph once more. “Can you see the tiny ibis head here? That’s Djehuty. The god Thoth, to give him the Greek name by which we all know him today. The great artificer. The Reckoner of Time and of Seasons. He invented writing and scientific measurement. He measured and calculated everything to enable the gods to establish the stars, the heavens, Earth, and the 365 day calendar—”
“Busy sort of chap, then?”
Ned remained impervious. “Yes. This mechanism isn’t Greek. It has to be a Hellenistic Greek copy of something older, because this is Aegyptian in origin. And it’s tied up with Thoth.” Ned sighed the sigh of a truly happy man. His face wore the vague dreamy expression of a man lost in love. His first love, which, I am sad to say, wasn’t me. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
Ah, the unexpected perils of loving an archaeologist.
“Yes. Wonderful.” Still, I knew how to get his attention. “I had an engrossing discussion with my father today.”
“Mmmn?” Ned was gazing at the photographs again, his right hand raised to allow him to follow the edge of the disc’s image with a fingertip. He caressed it as a man would caress a lover.
“He wants me to marry.”
“Mmmn—” Ned broke off, and his head snapped around. He stared at me.
“In fact, he wants me to marry your sister.”
You know, sometimes I’m more of a Stravaigor than I’m strictly comfortable with. But that got his attention all right.
CHAPTER FOUR
When the power of speech was restored to him, Ned replaced uncouth gobbling noises with a forceful “You will not pursue Sofie!”
I raised an eyebrow. I was no more inclined to be dictated to by Ned than I was by my father. Ned had far more potent means of persuasion available to him than did the Stravaigor, mind you, but the principle remained. I do not take instruction well, as my former commanding officers in the Imperial Aero Corps will testify.
Ned had enough grace to redden around the ears. “You can’t. You know you can’t.”
I gave him a magisterial nod. “Miss Sofia is a charming girl, but—”
“Quite.” He was as dry as the Aegyptian desert. “Besides,” he added, after a moment’s staring and, I have to say, pouting, “my father would never allow it.”
“Quite.” I matched my tone to his.
He flung himself into the leather sofa set beneath the windows and folded his arms over his chest. I pressed my lips together to stop them curving and hence fanning flames much better doused. When it came to petulance, for the first time I was seeing a strong resemblance between Ned and his younger son, four-year-old Jack, who could produce some quite splendid tantrums when denied his own way over something he’d set his heart on. I decided it would not be politic to point this out. Instead, I took the small area of sofa left by Ned’s peevish sprawling, squirming in beside him.
He shifted over enough to make room for me. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You need an heir.”
“My father’s point.”
He sighed out billows of unhappy air. “It’s a First Heir’s greatest duty to provide for his House’s future, which is why I allowed myself to be thrust into marriage with Laeticia. I don’t at all know why I’m so discomposed to find you’re facing the same dilemma.”
“Because you fear I would be faithful to my vows.”
He jerked himself more upright with an energy many a jack-in-the-box might envy. The face he turned to me was lamentably white and drawn. If I had harboured any small niggling doubts about Ned’s feelings for me, his horrified, scared expression exploded them into nothing.
“Ned.”
He shook his head.
“Ned, love. No. I have a different plan. I will never marry. I will never put a wife between you and me. I promise you.” I took his hands. They shook in mine as if palsied. “I promise.”
“How? Your House needs an heir. You can’t deny that.”
“I don’t. But I do deny it has to be an heir direct of my body. When I’m Princeps, I can choose my heir from among my sisters’ sons. I’d prefer not to rely on Emily, since she’s busy providing for House Plumassier and she’s ambitious enough. Besides, I like Nell a great deal better. If I’m to name a child as my heir, I’d prefer it to be hers.”
Ned looked less as if his necktie had taken it upon itself to strangle him. “You’d do that?”
“Rather than cozen some poor woman into a loveless marriage? Of course.”
“I wish I’d thought of it.” Ned’s grimace was one of pain and guilt. “I was too young, I think. I came back from my first trip to Aegypt, from an expedition headed by Flinders Petrie.” He looked at me askance. “Daniel Meredith was Petrie’s second-in-command. That’s how we met.”
Ah. Daniel. The less said about the late Daniel Meredith, the better: Ned’s first lover, an old lover of mine, and a bitter man whose resentments and betrayal had almost cost Ned his life two years ago. Daniel had stirred up a veritable wasps’ nest of troubles for us, but despite all his efforts to destroy us—indeed, because of them—Ned and I had come together, and stayed together ever since. I didn’t think of Daniel often, but it was always with a reluctant gratitude mixed with a blazing fury.
Perhaps the gratitude softened my tone. “Tell me.”
We never spoke much of Ned’s marriage. He had been widowed in ’98, before I met him, and it hadn’t been relevant; he was impediment free. But now I faced the same challenges, it had more significance.
After the clear air of Aegypt, Ned said, breathing the London smog had been like inhaling black treacle, thick and sticky. It had rained every day from an iron-grey sky, cold and relentless. “I don’t think it had stopped raining since the day I’d left for Cairo the previous November. I missed Aegypt like fury.”
Worse than not seeing the sun since his return, Ned had been forced back into the formal clothes expected of a gentleman: tailored coats and trousers of superfine wool, a top hat, and thrice-damnable cravats. And more than worse, the demands of his House had embraced him tighter than the serpent held Laocoön.
“I was choking. But it was more than the foul air or being closed in by the cloth prison of formal clothes. I wanted so much to stay in Aegypt, Rafe. I’d been free. Normal. Not First Heir, not a Gallowglass, just one more archaeologist learning his trade. Back in London, I was caught again, trammelled, set about with requirements and expectations and duty. It closed around me like a steel trap.” Ned’s hands in mine twisted so he could return my grip. “I’d been back two months, perhaps a little more, when my father told me the Huissher had approached him and my grandfather with a marriage offer and they’d decided to accept.”
“He didn’t give you a choice?” It didn’t sound like the Gallowglass, who might be every inch the greatest of House Principes but was also a reasonable man. What’s more, a man who loved his son dearly.
“The choice that was no choice. If not Laeticia, then some other House daughter. I always knew I had to put Gallowglass first. Always. My father seldom comes over all paterfamilias, but he is Princeps, after all. Don’t mistake me, Rafe. He’s done everything he can to indulge me, and given me as much time as possible away from House demands. But they can’t be denied in the end. We both know it. And at least he is always kind when reminding me of my responsibilities, that I’m First Heir and Aegyptology can only be a hobby in the long run. Not that I need the reminder. I’ve known since I could walk and talk where my duty lies.”
“They corrupted you young, didn’t they?”
His mouth didn’t appear to know whether he wanted it to turn up or turn down. He contorted it into an odd half-smile, half-grimace. “You escaped it all, and you’re far more independent as a result. You’d have had a different life if the Stravaigor had claimed you when your mother died.
”
“Perish the thought. I might have turned out like the late unlamented John.”
“No. You could never be like him. But you too would have had your wife arranged for you.” Ned sighed. “Laeticia herself was my saving grace. If I couldn’t rule my own life, I could at least temper the disappointment with someone sweet and affectionate. I love our sons and honour her as their mother, and I was sincere in mourning her when she died. She deserved more than I was able to give her. I regret that.”
“I’d share those regrets. I’d rather evade them.” I let the smile through at last. “I’m not on the marriage mart, Ned.”
He managed a watery smile in return. “Will the Stravaigor accept your plan for providing an heir?”
“He has some old-fashioned ideas about the rightful place of women in society, but yes, he accepted it. With reluctance.”
His smile widened. “I can imagine. And Miss Eleanor? Have you someone in mind for her?”
“I won’t force her into a marriage, any more than I’ll be forced. I don’t know if she has a serious favourite for the position. I hope she’ll find someone I can respect and whose progeny won’t shame the House, but that’s in the lap of the gods. Some younger son somewhere would be ideal.” I laughed. “My father is fond of lists, given the one he thrust at me this morning. I should ask him to prepare one of every unattached House male in the Imperium, a stud book for Nell to look over and make her choice.”
“How like you to come up with something like this. I do wish I’d thought of it. Or of telling my father to hand over to Theo and be done with it. Theo’s the one who likes figures and finance.” Ned always professed bewilderment at his younger brother’s aptitude for financial affairs, but at least he’d have Theo to rely upon when he took up the Gallowglass’s mantle. Then he shook his head. “No. No, I don’t wish it. I regret a lot of things about marrying Laeticia, but not our sons. I wouldn’t be without them for the entire Imperium’s fortune.” He let out a sigh. “At least he’s not making noises about my remarrying.”