A Bird Without Wings

by Roberta Pearce

  Glancing at her, though it was painful to do so, her half-drowned state finally hit him. She shivered now with cold, blowing into cupped and reddened hands to warm them, and he cursed softly under his breath the irony that discovering he loved her prevented helping her. Rousing himself, he got a towel from the bathroom and took it to her, rubbing it over her hair.

  “We’ll see,” he managed finally. He unbuttoned her sodden and muddy jeans and, crouching in front of her, peeled them down, taking her panties with them.

  As she kicked them away, her hand resting on his shoulder for balance, he leaned his forehead against the cold, wet shirt covering her belly; eyes closed, he inhaled her scent. At last, he looked up at her flushed face, meeting those gorgeous grey eyes that held all the answers to his world.

  Quizzical brows questioned him. “Lucius? What’s wrong?”

  Rising in a smooth motion, he caught the hem of the thin shirt in his fingers, drawing the wet material away from her silken skin, up and over her head. With a quick flick, her bra dropped to the floor, and he forced himself to ignore the beads of her nipples, standing so full and hard with cold. Snatching up a blanket, he wrapped her in it, lifted her, and carried her to the bed to lay her featherweight on the luxurious expanse. Wood added to the fire brought it back to cheery life, and he stripped off his clothes, watching his sexy little bundle of brilliance the entire time.

  She blushed charmingly, and gave him a shy little grin. “I’m awfully cold.”

  “Let me fix that for you,” he offered, and almost groaned aloud as she opened the blanket to accept him as he came down on her.

  “Everything okay?” she whispered, wrapping herself and the blanket around him. Her skin was icy, and he bit back an angry, self-directed curse. Why had he let her out of his sight?

  “I was worried about you, doll,” he said with admirable calm, considering his emotional state and the feel of her breasts against his chest. “You’d been gone a long time.”

  “I’m sorr—ah,” she moaned as he ran a trail of kisses down her throat. “S-sorry.”

  “Not to worry,” he assured huskily. “It gave me time to think.”

  ***

  The thumbnail was brutalised. “I’ve been bad.”

  Lounging against the pillows, cradling her in a half-sitting position against his torso, Lucius gave her a decadent smile. “I know. It was great.”

  Flushing (for his slow ravaging of her had gone to new levels of intensity today), she smacked his arm lightly. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Hm.” He shifted her more comfortably in his arms. “Confess this badness to me.”

  “I . . . kind of . . . swiped—borrowed—something . . . from Linchgate Hall.”

  “Oh, god, Callie,” he groaned.

  “It wasn’t deliberate,” she declared emphatically. “Just an accident. I was in the library—”

  “With the candlestick?”

  “Be serious! This is important. Mr. Crawford—Nathan—”

  “Nathan, hm?” he growled.

  “Sir Nathan, actually—was so nice! Told me I could drop the ‘Sir.’ He was—”

  “Nice like those letches I rescued you from awhile back?”

  “Well, they were nice, too! He was showing me some photographs and—”

  “How is he a Sir?”

  “Some minor baronet,” she said impatiently. “There were some things that had belonged to Neville, including a—”

  “How old is this Sir Nathan?”

  “About your age, I suppose. But there was a notebook—”

  “You spent the entire afternoon alone with a letch?”

  “He’s not a letch! He’s very intelligent and kind and quite . . . good looking,” she recalled pensively. “But there was a diary! And in the tangle of—”

  “How good looking?”

  “Oh, very. Stop interrupting. You’re acting very weird. I was packing up to go and I guess I picked up the diary with my notebook—”

  “How good looking?”

  She stared at him in surprise, taking in the playful scowl. A smile tugged at her mouth. “Devastatingly handsome.” She kissed him. “Couldn’t hold a candle to you,” she promised.

  “All right, then.”

  “May I continue?”

  “I suppose.”

  “You got the part where I accidentally stole the diary?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, so, on the way back, I stopped at the churchyard to make some notes and take pictures of the gravestones, and discovered that I had picked up the diary with my own notebook. It started to rain, and rather than return it right away, decided it would wait until tomorrow.”

  “It started raining hours ago.”

  “I stayed to make notes—it wasn’t that stormy to start with and I’m not made of sugar—”

  “Aren’t you? I was so sure . . .”

  “—and when it worsened, I thought I’d wait it out under the lychgate—though it’s kind of leaky. But then it was bad, and thought you might be worried, and hoofed it back. It’s a fair hike.”

  “I was a little worried.”

  “Sorry.” She kissed him again, and this time he deigned to kiss her back.

  “Didn’t being out in the storm scare you?”

  “Try a couple of high-summer prairie storms in a trailer,” she mused. “That either makes you terrified of them or indifferent to them. Can we look at the diary now?”

  The arms around her loosened to permit her escape. “Sure.” As she hopped eagerly from the bed to don his discarded dress shirt, “Is Leon indifferent to storms, too?”

  “No. They freak him out. Even a bit of distant thunder gets him edgy.” She paused. “You know, he’s changed his mind about needing money.”

  “That’s great, Cal.” And then, “Did he say why?”

  “Some garbled nonsense about some other scheme he was into. Naturally I didn’t want details.”

  “Naturally,” he chuckled. “So you can buy a home now, safe in the knowledge that he doesn’t need your money.”

  She snorted inelegantly. “Not right away, maybe, but he’ll come back for it eventually. He always does.”

  Finding Neville’s diary, her notebook, and glasses, she returned to the warmth of the bed and her companion, who opened his arms to receive her.

  Sliding under the shirt, his hands ran over her in thorough investigation. “Warm enough, doll?”

  “Oh, yes, thanks. Much better. You make a great hot-water bottle.”

  “Glad I have a use.”

  “One or two,” she giggled, riding the wave of the mood he was projecting. It was as if sudden deep contentment had found him; she had neither felt like that herself, nor felt it from him before. It was wonderful, and she would enjoy it while it lasted.

  “Before we start this,” he put his hand over hers, “I’ll call down for some dinner, hm?”

  He really was in some fantastic frame of mind, for his informal conversation (while lazily running his fingers through her hair) with room service (or the inn’s equivalent) amounted to a statement that they would like dinner, a long silence while he listened, a couple of comments regarding wine and timing, and his pleasantly impressed, “Sounds brilliant. Thank you.”

  But still he didn’t allow her to start in on Neville’s diary—which she was dying to do—but suggested they wait for dinner to arrive. Instead, he wanted to hear about Linchgate Hall. It thrilled her that he was finding interest in the project; from there, he might resolve whatever it was separated him from his family. So, spooned in his arms, she talked while they watched the rain fall, much more gently now, but still steady.

  Dinner was delivered with a knock on the door, but by the time Lucius tugged on jeans and crossed to open it, no one was there. Only a simply enormous picnic basket sat in the corridor. Carrying it to the bed, he grinned at her.

  “Picnic in bed on a rainy night,” he said, digging in and retrieving a bottle of wine. “How does that sound?” />
  Well, it sounded perfect, and her smile reflected that.

  ***

  The leather-bound diary was not a journal of Neville’s daily life, but a collection of notes and diagrams and sketches of things that had entertained or occupied him. The span of dates it covered was a disappointment, being from a period of half a dozen years or so in the 1860s, rather than the later period between Carlyle’s birth and Neville’s death. Nonetheless, it was a fantastic find.

  “Your uncle Charles will feel so vindicated that his journal theory proved out.”

  “Probably. Neville really was a hobbyist,” Lucius observed. “Ornithology, botany, architecture, engineering—Look at that,” he pointed. “These are all Brunel designs. The Brunel Museum is very near my flat.”

  “Is it? I’d love to see it.”

  “When we get back to London,” he promised.

  “Spectacular drawings. Do you think he travelled about to find all these tunnels and bridges?”

  “I assume so. Great excuse to hop on a train regularly—and as you said way back, he was obsessed with trains. What did you call him? A ferroequinologist? Did you invent that word?”

  “I wish! Dead clever.” She turned the page; more drawings, now of railroad semaphore signals. The next leaves were decorated in beautifully crafted miniature sketches of human figures holding flags in various positions, each labelled with a corresponding letter or meaning. “A new preoccupation for him. Full flag semaphore alphabet.”

  “Makes me think of those stupid Bird paintings.”

  Callie grudgingly agreed, sending him a smiling look.

  He met her gaze with matching humour. And then slowly, his smile faded as her eyes grew very round. “No.”

  “No, what?” she whispered.

  “There is no hidden message in those twisted animals!” he growled. “Stop.”

  “Of course not! But if we can get semaphore out of those birds, it’s the perfect counter-theory. A master theory that explains all, even if all we can get the Birds to say is ‘Go, Arsenal!’”

  He laughed, his head tilting back to thump on the headboard, and he passed a hand over his eyes. It was a good idea, he conceded, and wished he had thought of it himself. A little hard to think when she was so distracting, though.

  And her distracting self was off the bed, Medusa curls tumbling, her sexy figure a shadowy suggestion under the thin shirt, glass of wine in one hand while the other struggled getting the laptop out of its bag.

  He spoke to her, testing her awareness of him, and was amused when she merely grunted a monosyllabic response.

  She had already dismissed him.

  ***

  The dawn was touching fire to the heavy mist rising from the valley floor when he scooped her bodily from the chair where she had fallen asleep in the wee hours. A slight moan was the only acknowledgement of the disturbance, and she was instantly asleep again. Tucking her into bed with a kiss, fingers brushing against the ugly imprint the edge of the laptop had left on her cheek, he went to see if she had made any progress, hoping she wasn’t too disappointed by what must have been a complete failure. Though, it had been a cute idea.

  In a folder on the computer desktop, she had converted JPGs of the Birds to PDFs, each annotated with the semaphore letters she determined each bird represented; shockingly, each painting embodied birds that could be interpreted as a semaphore pause or space—both wings pointed straight down—and to these she had attributed the making of a word count. One ‘space,’ two words; two ‘spaces,’ three words; and so forth. The ravens, for instance, of which there were thirteen in the flock, represented eleven letters and, with two ‘pause’ birds, three words:

  AAEDDHORTTU

  The larks: Thirteen birds, ten letters, four words:

  DEHIILMOVY

  The nightingales: Fifteen birds, thirteen letters, three words:

  ABEEFLMMOORST

  The starlings: twenty-seven birds, twenty-two letters, six words:

  ADDDEEEELNNOOOSSSSTUVW

  The grouse: Ten birds, nine letters, two words:

  EFILORSTV

  And the rest . . .

  “Holy crap. She did it,” he muttered, smiling what was sure to be a gobsmacked grin. “But acronym-girl got stumped by anagrams.”

  Puzzles were not her strength; she had said that often. And they weren’t anagrams . . . just scrambles.

  Taking a seat, he worked out the next steps.

  Whether the scent or the clatter of porcelain caused it, the delivery of coffee much later had her stirring, whispering his name. Amazement shining on his face, he twisted around to her.

  “They’re love letters, doll. The bloody monstrous things are love letters.”

  ***

  “They’re bits of poems,” he stated with no further preamble as she emerged from the bathroom to take the coffee cup he handed her. “I didn’t realise it at first. The first one I worked out was the grouse, which was easy. They spell out first love. Then the starlings, which spell out love so sudden and so sweet. That’s a quote from a John Clare poem, First Love, as it happens.” He sank into the armchair, sipping from his cup, while Callie, dazed, sifted through his notes.

  “I hid my love,” she read of the larks. “Is that from the same poem?”

  “No, though it is Clare. But it gets creepy, Cal.”

  “How so?”

  “The ravens are Byron, as far as I can tell. Thou art dead. And the evil-looking nightingales declare O soft embalmer, which is Keats.”

  Giving a mocking little shudder, she sent him an interested glance. “You know all these poems?” she demanded, impressed.

  “No, doll. Google,” he assured with a grin that was tinged with mild self-deprecation. “Mostly. The goldfinches gave me some problem.”

  “How so?”

  “No apostrophe-bird,” he chuckled. “Woman’s love no fable.”

  “What poem is that?”

  “Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A Man’s Requirements.” Expression wolfish, he beckoned. “Come here, my brilliant doll. I require you.”

  “I wasn’t the one who made sense of it all!” she protested even as she went to him, curling up in his lap. She chewed her thumbnail. “Who are the love notes for, do you think?”

  “I assumed Elizabeth Venable. First love, and all that. They married young, right?”

  “Well, yes . . . but that doesn’t make sense exactly. I’d accept it if it weren’t for the bits about death. I don’t know for certain when the paintings were done, but—well, it must have taken significant time to devise them, find artists for them, and have them completed. Neville and Elizabeth died so closely together—he may have even died first for all we know. There couldn’t have been time for him to accomplish the task.”

  “If they were separated, then those twisted love letters . . . well, I can’t imagine him being deliberately separated from someone he obviously loved so much.” His lips pressed to her temple. “You think Neville had a twinkie in the city?”

  She laughed, snuggling against him, both hands going around his that held his coffee, sipping from his cup as she had left hers on the desk. “Maybe. I hid my love suggests a secret affair.”

  They were quiet with their own thoughts for some time.

  “This all presupposes that these were commissioned by Neville,” he said at last. “He might have bought some other man’s collection of love-and-death tributes.”

  “Don’t breathe a word of that in front of your family,” she said with amused warning.

  He hugged her tightly. “Thank you, Callie. I never dreamed it was possible.”

  “That what was possible?”

  “The solving of the HRF.”

  “Oh, it’s not solved,” she objected. “Not entirely. We need a good explanation of how the Birds’ secret got translated into a story of a hidden fortune. Especially since no one knew about it, and they are still essentially valueless.”

  “Carlyle might have known, and in his dementia, cal
led a secret a treasure.”

  “Mm. That makes sense. Maybe he and Lily knew about their father’s lover, and somehow that knowledge caused a falling out. Gordon said Carlyle was very easy-going about such things. Maybe that annoyed Lily. Remember the letter? Something about hurts that sting and shocks learned late?”

  “That’s good, Minutiae Girl!” He kissed her warmly. “We’ll work on it together,” he promised.

  What a magical turn of phrase.

  ***

  The diary—its pages carefully photographed first—was returned to Linchgate Hall, where Nathan Crawford demonstrated gracious understanding and acceptance of Callie’s accidental thievery.

  The elegant grand house suited its owner, and was not nearly as terrifying as Pike had depicted it. The estate grounds were well tended and lushly green under the West Sussex sun. The day turned quite hot as they toured the gardens, Callie thrilled by the complex hedge maze, getting completely lost in it as her ineptitude at puzzles trumped her rather good orienteering skills. Lucius had to finally fetch her out.

  An entertaining raconteur, Nathan told the story of the house, how the Venables had fallen on dire financial times and, as typical of the era, the marriage of the only daughter—Elizabeth—to the son—Neville—of wealthy merchant-class Ransomes, had saved the family home, though Elizabeth’s father had been the last of his line and there were no more Venables of the name to save the family home for. About the falling out between Lily and Carlyle, he could only say—with some amusement—it was Crawford Family tradition to despise Ransomes.

  Inside again, waiting for lunch to be served, Nathan walked them through the long gallery of family portraits. Neville was there, the portrait of a solemn—almost sad—young man; he was the only Ransome in the collection. The portrait of Elizabeth showed her blue eyes, but the artist had failed to capture the star-sapphire quality of the colour, rendering them a less impressive, harder and darker shade. There were many Venables, dating back to the mid-1700s, and then Crawfords from the late-nineteenth century on, starting with Lily’s husband, John.