Private Research: An Erotic Novella

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Private Research: An Erotic Novella Page 13

by Sabrina Darby


  As it was, we pulled up to a pretty, ivy-covered two-story house that was surrounded by big lavender bushes.

  “A cozy cottage,” Sebastian observed. Which made me laugh since, to me, four thousand square feet was nearly a mansion. But it was petite compared to the nearby manor house, and the size suggested that Paul’s nineteenth-century ancestor had been well-to-do in a “genteel” sort of way.

  “Phillip Randall,” the slim, fiftysomething man said as he led us through the house, “was a solicitor. Runs in the family,” he added with a laugh. “From what I understand, he was against the enclosure act as a young man, then an early champion of labor reform, education reform . . .”

  He brought us into the kitchen, which was bright with sunlight, and where, on a huge farmhouse table, he’d laid out several piles of letters.

  “I’ve been in the process of conducting an inventory of everything in the house,” Paul continued, gesticulating toward the table. “I doubt I ever would have known this existed otherwise, but I’m the last Randall at the moment. Someone needs to do this.”

  “This is fabulous,” I said, resting my hand on the back of one of the chairs. “May I?”

  “Go right ahead.” I sat down, reaching for one of the stacks, distantly aware that Sebastian sat as well. I was entranced by Anne Gracechurch’s writing on the outer fold of the letter. I’d seen quite a bit of her correspondence over the last year and a half, at the Huntington Library in California, at various other archives and literary collections, in the collection of her publisher. Every time, a thrill buoyed me, that here I was bridging the distance between history and the present, fiction and reality. That the mystery of this author previously relegated to obscurity was mine to explore.

  “Anne Gracechurch is an author, you say?” Paul asked as I unfolded the first letter carefully. He was leaning against the center island, watching. I had a pair of cotton gloves in my bag and I stopped for a moment to pull them out, to protect the paper from the oils of my skin. Not that the kitchen table was the cleanest of workspaces for archival work to begin with. But while I didn’t know what would happen to these letters after I’d left, I didn’t want to add to their decay. I hoped that someday a Gracechurch collection could be created and hosted at a university or a museum.

  “You haven’t read these?” Surely, the answer to his question was clear from her correspondence that she wrote. Every letter I had ever read of hers, other than the domestic ones at the Mallards’, had been rife with literary discussions.

  “A few only. Mostly political diatribes,” he answered with a shrug. That was interesting. I wondered what her relationship with Phillip Randall had been like. I looked at the date on the letter in my hand—1827. Two years before the first James Mead book was published, a morality tale about the dangers of corruption in pocket boroughs. Coincidence?

  Beyond excited, I pulled out a notebook and pen, as well as my camera, and slid them over to Sebastian. I filled Paul in on Anne’s life as I worked, first rearranging the piles by date. He was a lively man who asked insightful questions, and soon he was part of the team, taking over the notebook from Sebastian to copy down my dictation, while Seb took numerous photographs of each letter. Although I’d worked one summer for one of my English professors, I’d never had assistants before, and it was an enjoyable novelty to work in a team.

  We broke briefly for lunch, moving to an outside table in the garden for sandwiches before returning inside to finish.

  A narrative was developing as I read, and, while I’d have to go back through my notes to verify, I was fairly certain based on the timeline that this relationship with Phillip had been a huge inspiration for Anne’s social work and an instigator in the acrimony between her and her husband.

  “In these early letters, she keeps referring to Mary and the poor children,” I commented. “Is that his wife?”

  “Yes, she died in childbirth according to the family Bible,” Paul filled in. “Phillip had two surviving children.”

  “What year was that?” Sebastian asked. He had that thoughtful look on his face, the one where he looked like he was chewing the inside of his mouth. Paul went to get the Bible and check.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Seb turned the camera on me and snapped a quick shot even as I held up a hand in front of my face.

  “I’m thinking they were lovers.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Of course it would be about sex.”

  “No, think about it, Mina. Isn’t this just before the James Mead books? And weren’t those books at the same time as she was having marital troubles? So she’s friends with Phillip’s wife, who dies, and in comforting him and the children, they strike up a friendship, intellectual at first, then”—he shot me a hot look that made me squirm on the wooden seat—“as we know, intellectual attraction easily turns into physical.”

  I twisted my lips, ignoring the suggestion that it was my intelligence that had attracted him to my body when it had been very easy for him to ignore me when sex wasn’t on the table. The conjecture about Anne and Phillip was an interesting theory but one I wanted to reject. As I turned back to the last stack of letters, I examined why I felt that way. Was it because I had some idealistic view of the past? Like people from the nineteenth century didn’t commit adultery or sleep around or have premarital sex? I knew that wasn’t true. But emotionally, was that a false story I still bought into?

  Paul returned, and the date supported Sebastian’s theory.

  “Listen to this!” I exclaimed with excitement, forgetting Sebastian’s theory. “She writes, ‘I find it harder to write of Caroline and Mayberry’—those were the protagonists of At Michaelmas,” I inserted. “ ‘When I think of the poor who will never have such an education, will never know what it is to rise above brute labor.’ ”

  I looked at Paul and Sebastian. “Okay, it doesn’t quite prove that she wrote about education reform, but it shows she leaned toward it and certainly at the same time as James Mead was about to publish his book fictionalizing the plight of children.”

  But even as I said it, I knew that it was still not enough. Circumstantial. Considering the milieu of the time, many reformers felt the same, might have done the same. There might very well have been a James Mead who did. Or Randall might have been James Mead. I would have loved an example of Phillip’s writing to Anne, but unfortunately those letters were either lost to the past or still hiding somewhere out of my grasp.

  Several letters later, I read another snippet aloud: “ ‘I cannot visit again this summer. Mr. Gracechurch returns and wishes to reconcile. For the children’s sake.’ ”

  There had been great affection apparent in the other letters, but this was the first that said anything quite so bluntly.

  “Do you think they were having an affair?” Paul asked.

  I looked at Sebastian, who smirked. My lips twisted again I had to concede. “It’s definitely a possibility.”

  “IT’S NOT WHAT you hoped for, but it’s not a loss,” Sebastian said when we got in the car. I blinked and stared at him. He met my gaze. “I know you’re disappointed. It’s obvious. No, not to Paul, don’t worry, but to me. But this is one of those things that happen. You find useful information, not the information you hoped for. But still useful.”

  He turned his attention to the road, and so did I, staring at the outline of trees in the twilight. He was right. Not that it helped settle my emotions at all. This whole process was a roller coaster.

  “It’s like trading, or playing poker,” Seb continued. “There are the highs and the lows. Good thing is, there’s no real losing for you here. No millions down in a millisecond.”

  “I still think that’s ridiculous,” I said, fully distracted now. “That people make a career on gambling. Or on insuring someone’s gamble. On real things that other people make. See, that I understand. Manufacturing. Creating something.”

  “From the woman who wants to have a nice, tenured university job where she’s insulated f
rom the realities of the economy. Where you’ll spend, what? Maybe ten hours a week actually teaching and helping with education and the rest of your time writing grants for more money to help fund your writing about topics that don’t actually create anything useful for people.”

  “Wow, don’t hold back or anything.”

  “I’m exaggerating for effect, Mina,” he said with a laugh. “The point is that many jobs don’t actually create anything fundamentally necessary. We happen to be lucky enough to spend our time intellectually masturbating, so why shouldn’t we embrace it?”

  He had a point, even if I was certain I could poke holes in his case if I thought more deeply about it. Regardless, he’d successfully distracted me from a potential funk. Overall, for the dissertation as a whole, today had been a success. The letters added depth to understanding Anne Gracechurch and her milieu. Helped contextualize her seeming obsession with romantic stories, with heroes who were everyday men, not men with £10,000 a year.

  I slanted a glance at Sebastian. Not quite a Darcy, but certainly not an everyday man.

  And not my hero either.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE NEXT DAYS were an idyll. We didn’t talk about the fight we’d had, or about the silent reconciliation. We simply enjoyed each other. And we worked well together. The trips to Stanton Hall and to Bedfordshire had proven that.

  Even more, I didn’t want to be sad, or stressed, or worried about my nonexistent relationship. Much better to take it for what it was: hot sex and enjoyable companionship.

  He didn’t push me to reveal more of myself, and I didn’t push him. Yet, somehow, day by day, I did come to understand him, to recognize his moods and his desires.

  Research progressed at a faster pace than it had in the spring, and I was grateful that I’d been able to stay these extra months. I reanalyzed Anne’s writing in context of the new information I’d gleaned about her life and found that the rough draft of my planned six-chapter dissertation seemed to spill from my fingers. Perhaps I didn’t have the James Mead connection yet, but still—whereas last fall I was facing the possibility of having to extend to a sixth year, now I was nearly ahead of the game.

  And one week after the trip to Bedfordshire, I made major progress on the Harridan House project as well. I’d managed to narrow down the disparate entries between the two estate books to six, one of which was a payment to Venus & Satyr Art Brokerage, which, with a name like that, was either truly a firm that sold art or a front for Harridan House. Or perhaps both. I wanted to return to Stanton Hall to see how far back that company was mentioned and if there were other receipts. Then I stumbled upon The Memoirs of the Incomparable Penny Partridge.

  “I found her!” I crowed, slapping the photocopied version of my latest reading down on the coffee table. It was late morning on a Saturday, and I’d been lounging on the sofa reading a photocopy of a rare book I’d stumbled over partly out of my interest in the nineteenth century and partly because a memoir by a London courtesan of the era seemed like it might mention something about a secretive sex club.

  Sebastian stopped typing. Looked over at me from the kitchen table.

  “Jenny Smollett.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s the name of our Madame Rouge. Or rather, of the first named Madame Rouge. I suspect there was one before her because her age is far too young to have been around when the club first began.”

  “You’re saying Madame Rouge is a position.”

  “I believe so. Like the pope.”

  He laughed. “I doubt that the Catholic Church would appreciate that comparison.”

  “It’s only funny or vaguely appropriate because they used to call brothels nunneries.”

  “That changes everything then. I’m certain the pope would approve.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “So who was Jenny Smollett?”

  “From what I understand based on this courtesan’s memoirs, she was a mistress who was cast out of her protector’s home for participating in an orgy at Harridan House—or rather, as Penny Partridge puts it, ‘that mysterious house of every vice imaginable.’ She never actually mentions it by name. Then she showed up again a year later as ‘the turbaned madam known as Rouge.’ ”

  “But it’s never actually called Harridan House?”

  “Sebastian, this is a huge break. It’s far too much of an overlap to be coincidental. If I found this sort of connection between Gracechurch and Mead, I’d be set.”

  He nodded slowly. “How did you find this, Mina?”

  “Luck.” I shrugged. “When I came across her memoirs, I just thought . . . maybe she’d mention something of interest. After all Harriette Wilson let loose lots of brilliant gems about society when she wrote her exposé of England’s most powerful men.”

  He didn’t know who Harriette Wilson was, so our conversation turned into a little history lesson about the notorious Regency courtesan who’d counted the Duke of Wellington, prime ministers, and a whole slew of aristocrats and royals as her clients and then, to support herself in her old age, blackmailed those men with the threat of her memoirs. Wellington had famously said, “Publish and be damned.”

  Which, she did. Although maybe not damned, since people gobbled up those memoirs like gossip rags.

  “Brilliant,” Sebastian said, but I wasn’t certain if he was commenting on Wilson or on the fact that we’d made progress in understanding Harridan House.

  Despite his hesitancy, I was bolder than Sebastian in my research. Not so afraid that my inquiries would somehow reflect back on his family. After all, if I didn’t mention his grandfather, there was no logical reason anyone would connect Harridan House to the viscountcy at all.

  Now I had a name to research: Jenny Smollett. We still hadn’t gone to talk to his great-aunt Rose or the ninety-five-year-old childhood friend of his grandfather’s, but, because of his qualms, we were leaving that as a last resort.

  I wasn’t certain what Sebastian hoped to learn, how extensive a history of the club he desired, but nonetheless, we’d made progress.

  Which meant I got a much-deserved day of sightseeing. Days really. We spent the rest of the weekend going to museums and walking hand in hand in parks like the lovers we were. There was no tension, no underlying manipulative subtext on either of our parts.

  I refused to think about the future or the past and instead enjoyed the beautiful, endless present.

  ON TUESDAY, I dressed in shorts and a tank top with the intention of taking my laptop with me to St. James’s Park and lying out in the sun while I worked.

  As I was gathering papers to put in my backpack, my cell rang. The number was withheld.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Ms. Cavallari?”

  Excitement thrummed through me. I didn’t recognize the voice, but I had so many calls out to different people that this woman could be any number of people. If I had to make a guess, I’d say from the slight rasp, that she was fortysomething, or maybe fifty. I sat down on the couch and grabbed my spiral notebook and pen. Perhaps Roberta Small had turned into a dead end, but that didn’t mean every lead would.

  “I’d like to meet you.”

  “I’m sorry. Who did you say was calling?” I asked.

  “I didn’t. Meet me at The Silver Arms, at 12:30 P.M. today. In Camden.” The line clicked off.

  I stared at my phone, the excitement lessening to a nervous indecision. Why the secrecy? No one with whom I’d left my number should have any need to require anonymity. There was no logical reason for an action that reeked of sinister intention.

  It was 10 A.M. I had no idea where the pub was, but with the Internet, directions would be easy, and I knew where Camden was. Vaguely. I’d planned to go shopping at the markets there at some point, but I hadn’t yet found the time, even though I was living only two Tube stops away.

  A pub was a busy place, and lunch hour the busiest time of all. What harm could there be?

  Only all the dangers that tended to befa
ll people in novels and movies.

  But it wasn’t like she’d said to come alone.

  I opened my contacts list and pressed on Seb’s name. It went to voice mail.

  “It’s Mina. I just got a very strange call. Call me back, okay?”

  But what if he didn’t? What if I went and no one knew where I’d gone and something happened to me?

  I’d phone Sebastian again on my way over and tell him exactly where I was going and why. And I wouldn’t eat anything at the pub, in case . . .

  I shook my head. I’d entered full paranoia mode. This wasn’t some spy novel. I was a graduate student doing fairly innocuous research. But the whole private number, no name, quick phone call was decidedly odd. Anyone would think so.

  Still. At twelve, I left the flat and walked over to the King’s Cross Station, ringing Sebastian up again.

  “Mina, I just saw you called.” Relief flooded through me at the sound of his voice. I wasn’t alone.

  “I’m going to a pub two blocks from the Camden Town Tube stop. The Silver Arms. This woman called me from a blocked number and said to meet her there, and she wouldn’t say her name. It’s weird, right?”

  “Exceedingly. Where are you? I’ll take lunch now and meet you at the Tube.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  THERE WAS A different energy that I noticed the minute I stepped outside the Tube station at Camden. I waited on the sidewalk, watching the crowds of people go by.

  I slung my arm back at the touch of hands on my hips.

  “Easy.” At Sebastian’s voice, I relaxed and turned in his arms.

  “I thought you were a pickpocket.”

  He pulled me in close, lowering his head. “Maybe I am . . . and I’m going to steal a kiss.”

  The line was sort of cheesy, but the kiss was not. I didn’t care that it was lunch hour and we were standing on a busy street with people drifting around us as if we were a rock in a river. All that mattered was the delicious heat of his mouth, the way his lips and tongue could awaken every pore of my body so easily.

 

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