by Lauren Royal
Just the way he’d said her name, earnestly, like he cared, made her warm to her toes.
Rowan opened the door and poked his head in. His gaze sought out the book. “That looks very old,” he said soberly. “Is it the emerald secrets book?”
“It might be,” Ford said. “Everyone thought it was gone. I’m not certain I quite believed it had ever really existed.” Light streamed through the cabin’s two windows, illuminating the old pages, but they didn’t glow nearly as brightly as his eyes. “The book was supposed to have been small and bound in brown leather, and of course it would have been handwritten, as Gutenberg’s printing press hadn’t yet been invented. And here, look.” He flipped to the first page. “The alchemical symbol for gold. And five words in the title. But I cannot be sure. I wish I could read the thing.”
If Violet had never seen a gentleman blush before, she’d never seen one so excited, either. About anything. “The emerald secrets book?” she asked. “What’s that?”
Her brother smiled importantly. “It tells the lost secret of the Philosopher’s Rock. I’m going to tell Jewel.” He slammed the door, and she heard his footsteps pound across the wooden deck.
“The Philosopher’s Stone,” Ford corrected the empty space where Rowan had stood.
Violet gasped. “The formula to turn metals into gold?”
“The very same. Secrets of the Emerald Tablet has been missing for three hundred years, and if this is it…”
“Do you think it really is?”
“I don’t know. It could be. Everyone assumed it had been destroyed.” He turned a few pages and stared down at the ancient text. “I’m crossing my fingers—and I’m probably the least superstitious individual you’ll ever meet.”
Suspecting he was right, she smiled at that. “What is the Emerald Tablet?”
He shut the book. “It’s a long story.”
“It’s a long way down the river,” she pointed out.
“Very well, then,” he said, looking pleased. He stood up and began pacing in the skinny, cramped space around the bed, his hands clasped behind his back. “It all started back in Egypt, some twenty-five hundred years before Jesus Christ. Where the Divine Art first had its birth.”
“The Divine Art?”
“Alchemy. An Egyptian priest named Hermes Trismegistus was known to have great intellectual powers. The Art was kept secret and exclusive to the priesthood, but more than two thousand years later, when the tomb of Hermes was discovered by Alexander the Great in a cave near Hebron, they found a tablet of emerald stone. On it was inscribed, in Phoenician characters, the wisdom of the Great Master concerning the art of making gold.”
He paused, looking at her where she still sat perched at the foot of the bed. “You look uncomfortable there,” he said, reaching to scoop up one of the pillows. “Lean back against the wall.” He tossed it to her.
He’d told her it was a long story, so she scooted over to the wall and tucked the pillow behind her back, her legs stretched out on the bed. Noticing their outlines were visible beneath the drape of her peach gown, she fluffed her skirts a little. “Where is the Emerald Tablet now?”
He resumed pacing. ”We don’t know. But years later, in the thirteenth century, a man named Raymond Lully was born to a noble family in Majorca. He took up the study of alchemy and wandered the Continent to learn more of the science. Many stories have been told of Lully’s abilities to make gold, which he claimed to have learned from studying the Emerald Tablet.”
“What sorts of stories?”
His mouth curved in a faint smile. “You’re really listening, aren’t you?”
She cocked her head at him, baffled. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No reason.” Still smiling, he turned the book over in his hands, then opened it again absently. “It’s said that the Abbot of Westminster found Lully in Italy and persuaded him to come to London, where he worked in Westminster Abbey. A long time afterwards, a quantity of gold dust was discovered in the cell where he’d lived. Another story has it that Lully was assigned lodgings in the Tower of London. People claimed to see golden pieces he’d made, and they called them nobles of Raymond, or Rose nobles. It was during this period that he is said to have written Secrets of the Emerald Tablet, I believe around the year 1275.”
“Almost four hundred years ago.” Looking at the pages Ford was carefully turning, she could believe the book was that old. “What happened then?”
“Lully eventually left England to resume his travels, but it was thought he left the book behind. It was supposed to have been written in language that’s difficult to read.”
She held out a hand, and wordlessly, he passed her the open book. She removed her spectacles and peered at the spiky writing. She couldn’t read a word. Some of it didn’t even look like words, but more like symbols.
“Do you suppose it’s Phoenician, like the Tablet?” she asked.
“I have no idea. Legend has it that the book changed hands a few times and then disappeared in the fourteenth century, never to be seen again.”
“Until now.”
“Maybe.” His eyes appeared wistful. “It looks old enough, doesn’t it?”
“It would be priceless, wouldn’t it?” Imagine being able to produce gold. Caught up in his excitement, she handed back the book. “You could sell that for a fortune. An unbelievable fortune.”
“I’d never sell it.” He clutched the book to his chest. “If it’s the missing volume, I’ll never, ever sell it. Even should it turn out not to divulge a working formula.”
“You’d feel the same even if it couldn’t help you make gold?” Surprised, and yet somehow not, she slipped her spectacles back on to study his face. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a romantic,” she said softly.
“Who, me?” he murmured, holding her gaze for a long moment, a hint of a smile tugging at his lips.
Silently, he sat himself on the bed, stretched out his legs, and scooted over until he was right beside Violet, pressed against her from shoulder to hip.
Speechless, she looked down. Unwilling to meet his eyes, her own wandered the length of his legs. They looked lean and athletic, his ankles crossed in a relaxed manner.
With every nerve in her body humming, she wasn’t relaxed at all.
“Raymond Lully is the stuff of legends,” he continued calmly, as if oblivious to their improper proximity. “Any book he’d written would hold an immeasurable amount of historic and sentimental value. It would be an honor to own it, no matter what it said.”
When he fell silent again, she forced her gaze to his face, and the expression there told her he wasn’t oblivious at all.
He knew exactly how uncomfortable he was making her.
This was ridiculous.
And now that she’d met his eyes, she couldn’t seem to stop staring at them. She felt trapped in their infinite blue depths.
Faith, she was thinking like Rose. She’d never taken herself for a romantic—she was far too sensible!
But currently behaving very insensibly, indeed. The barge slowed and bumped against a dock, but it didn't jar her from the spell Ford seemed to have woven around her.
She licked her lips.
“And what of you?” he asked, his voice soft but his eyes dancing. “Are you a romantic?” Without waiting for an answer, he leaned forward, brushing a hand over her cheek, and—
Harry pulled open the door.
“Will this do, my lord?” He gestured at the scenery behind him, which included a respectable old riverside inn that boasted tables along the bank of the Thames.
To Harry’s credit, he didn’t blink when he saw them spring apart. And, thank the heavens above, Ford managed to lever himself into a standing position before the children arrived in the doorway.
“It will do very well,” he said. “Thank you.”
TWENTY-ONE
“LOOK!” JEWEL pointed to an enormous oak by the river. “There are swings!”
The children bounded off
the barge and ran shrieking along the grassy bank. Violet walked more carefully behind, teetering a bit on the unaccustomed high heels. She felt rather lightheaded.
Was it her imagination, or had Ford nearly kissed her again? She wished she could ask him what had happened in the cabin—and why. But the thought of actually voicing such questions aloud made her face burn hotter than the afternoon sun.
She sneaked a sidelong glance at him strolling casually beside her, still clutching his precious book. Struck by the silly thought that he might sleep with it tonight, she smiled to herself.
He put a hand at her back. “What do you find so amusing?”
“Nothing.” She could feel the pressure of his fingers through her thin satin gown. “Nothing at all.” When his hand dropped from her back, she could swear she still felt its imprint.
By the time the two of them caught up, the young ones had claimed the pair of rope-and-board swings that shared a thick branch on one side of the old tree. They were pumping into the air, racing to see who could get the highest, their laughing taunts floating out over the water.
“That looks like fun,” Violet said wistfully. Oh, to be six, flying into the sky on your birthday, instead of almost eighteen and dreading it.
Eighteen. Though plenty of girls remained unmarried by eighteen, to Violet it felt like the official start of her spinsterhood. Perhaps because Rose had been hinting as much for the past several months. Or because Mum had married at sixteen—after being caught in a compromising position with Father, as Grandpapa had always told it.
Not that Violet minded her fate as a spinster. She’d been resigned to it for years—planning happily for it, in fact. An unmarried woman enjoyed freedoms a wife never would.
But the word “spinster” sounded so very old and final.
Ford took her by the arm and marched her around the giant tree. A third swing there hung empty. “Sit,” he said.
She giggled, feeling silly. “You take it.”
“Sit.”
With a shrug, she did. It had been years since she’d been on a swing—since the last time her family had stayed at Tremayne Castle. The board was flat and hard beneath her skirts. She wrapped her fingers around the thick, scratchy ropes on either side of her head. When she felt a hand at her back, she gave a little shriek, then whooped as Ford pushed her swinging into the air.
He came around the side to watch her, holding up the book to shade his eyes. “It’s nice to hear you laugh.”
She laughed again. “I feel like a child.”
“Is that bad?” he wondered.
Pumping her legs to go higher still, she considered. The wind rushed by, freeing a fleet of unruly curls from their plait to tangle in the frames of her spectacles. When her peach skirts billowed, she clamped them between her legs. The sun sparkled on the water. Through her miraculous eyeglasses, the landscape looked clear and bright and beautiful all the way to the horizon.
“No,” she said at last. “Feeling like a child isn’t bad.” At nearly eighteen, feeling like a child was a wonderful respite.
Placing the book delicately on a clump of grass, Ford stepped behind her and gave her a shove. She leaned back, listening to the wind whistle through her ears as she went soaring into the air.
“I can go faster than you!” Jewel cried from the other side of the tree.
“No, I can go faster!” Rowan yelled, and the two of them pumped their hearts out, racing toward the sky.
Ford’s hands on Violet’s back felt solid and warm, his pushes rhythmic and reliable. Her lids slid closed. She didn’t want to go faster than anyone; she preferred to blank her mind and enjoy the motion.
With her eyes shut, she imagined she was flying. She imagined she was beautiful, and Ford was her handsome husband, not just an irredeemably flirtatious young uncle who wanted her help caring for his niece.
“Holy Hades,” Rowan complained, jarring her back into the real world.
Her eyes popped open. “I’ve told you not to say that!” she called toward the children’s side of the tree.
“No matter how high I get,” he panted, “I cannot seem to go faster than her. She swings three times and I swing only two.”
Jewel snorted. “Because you’re bigger, you goose.”
“I’m not a goose,” Rowan said, and Violet cringed, suspecting Jewel had learned that insult from Rose. But Rowan seemed to consider Jewel’s analysis. “Anyway, you’re a girl, so you’ll get tired,” he decided smugly. “And then I’ll go faster!”
“No,” Ford said, giving Violet another push, “you won’t.”
“He won’t?” Violet asked. Rowan’s theory made sense to her. Well, perhaps not the part about Jewel tiring—the girl was a bundle of energy if ever she’d seen one. “If Rowan pumps harder, he won’t go faster?”
“He won’t,” Ford repeated. “The swing is a pendulum—”
“Like in your laboratory?” Jewel interrupted loudly.
“Just like that.” He pushed again. “Only you are the weight at the bottom.”
Jewel’s dark hair streamed behind her, then flew forward to hide her face. “And he’s a heavier weight, so…”
“No, the amount of weight doesn’t matter.” When Violet swung back, Ford wasn’t there to push. She slowed down to listen. “The time a pendulum takes to go back and forth is called the period,” he said, walking over to push Jewel instead. “And the period depends on the length of the string. Or in a swing’s case, the ropes.” He reached to give Rowan a shove. “Jewel’s ropes are quite a bit shorter, so Jewel swings faster.”
“Are you sure?” Rowan asked dubiously.
“Positive. But test it yourself. Switch swings with Jewel. That’s what an experiment is all about.”
The children dragged their feet on the ground to stop the swings, and Ford came back to Violet.
Soon Rowan and Jewel had switched sides and were pumping again. And Rowan was going faster. “You’re right!” he yelled.
“Of course I’m right.” Ford gave Violet another little push. “But I didn’t figure it out myself. Galileo first made the observation.”
“I know all about Galileo,” Jewel told Rowan importantly. “Uncle Ford named his horse after him.” She swung back and forth, back and forth. “I want to go faster again!”
“I’ll swing a hundred times and then you can,” Rowan offered.
“Fifty times.”
“As you wish. But we’ll switch back after another fifty.” In his high young voice, he began counting.
Ford gave Violet a huge shove, and she soared out over the landscape, swinging back so hard one of her shoes flew off and landed on the grass with a plop.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, the word sounding breathless and giddy. “Stop!”
“Why?” He pushed her again, and when she rushed back, he plucked off her other shoe. She heard that one, too, plop somewhere behind her back. “There,” he called as she swung away again, “now you’ll really feel like a child.”
Laughing, she wiggled her toes, feeling free in only stockings. And he pushed her higher. And higher. And higher. “Stop!” she screamed, meaning it this time. “Or I think I might get sick!”
He grabbed the ropes and jerked her to a halt. “Better?”
“Much.” Still holding on tight, she gave a shaky laugh. “I guess I’m too old for this, after all.”
“No one’s too old for this,” she heard him say from behind her. And then she felt his warmth at her back, and an armed curved around her waist. He came around to her side.
Her hands clenched the ropes as a delicate shiver rippled through her. “Rowan and Jewel…” she whispered, turning her head, but as soon as her lips were in reach he covered them with his own. She heard the children’s chatter and hoped that meant they weren’t watching—and then promptly forgot all about them, along with everything else but for one hazy thought…
She was being kissed again!
And it felt just as strange and wonderful and exciting as
she remembered. He kept one arm securely around her middle, and when he raised his other hand to her face, skimming his thumb along her cheekbone, she thought she might expire from the incredible niceness of it all.
He drew away slightly, and she felt his fingers moving over her ears, unhooking the spectacles. He slid them off. When she opened her eyes, his face was so close she could see every detail with perfect clarity.
Without her spectacles, he was all she could see. He was all she wanted to see.
She kept her eyes open this time as he slowly lowered his mouth toward hers. But before their lips touched again, a girlish squeal pierced the air, and both their heads whirled toward the sound.
Jewel was fine. But the spell was broken.
Pulling a face, Ford straightened and made sure Violet was steady on the swing before handing over her spectacles. Her hands shaking, she put them back on. As his face swam into view, he flashed her a smile. A secretive smile. A smile she didn’t think she had the experience to comprehend.
She leaned her forehead against the swing’s rough rope, trying to catch her breath. She could hear Ford rummaging about, gathering the book and her shoes.
“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight,” Rowan chanted.
Once he’d collected their belongings, Ford paused for a moment to collect his wits. What on earth had possessed him to risk that in front of his young niece? He seemed to be growing more impulsive by the day.
Someone had left one of the inn’s benches near the tree—to sit and watch their children, no doubt—and he dragged it over by Violet’s swing and sat. He set her shoes on the grass and the book on his lap.
“Forty-eight, forty-nine…” On the opposite side of the tree, Rowan reached fifty, and the children traded places.
“You’re very good with them,” Violet said quietly from her swing.
Never, in ten lifetimes, had Ford thought anyone would tell him that. Of course, he’d never thought he’d kiss a girl like Violet Ashcroft, either. A shy country miss who spouted philosophy.
“It was only physics,” he said dismissively, gazing at her profile. Her lips were slightly parted. He remembered how they’d felt on his, silky and delicate as a flower petal. How appropriate. ”Science. I’m good at science.”