His mouth curved. “You are a wise woman.”
“So why hasn’t Jenks been more aggressive? Why hasn’t he made an arrest?”
“It can only be because he hasn’t found sufficient proof yet. But if he had a scrap of it, the wrongdoer would be shackled from neck to ankle.” He let the rest of the sand in his hand fall.
“Why are there no others around here looking for the stolen gold, do you think?” She nudged her boot into the yielding sand. “No other treasure hunters like us.”
“I wondered that too. I believe it’s a matter of timing.”
“In what way?”
He abandoned that square of sand and moved on to the next. “As soon as the gold sovereign was spent in Strawfield, everyone interested in finding treasure flocked there. With the exception of a young woman who needed the nudge of—”
“Familial neglect and eviction?”
“You make it sound so exciting,” he said drily. “But in a phrase, yes. Until there is no hope of finding the gold in Strawfield, I do not think most people will look elsewhere for it.”
“As you would not have, had I not forced your hand.”
“You don’t always have to force my hand, Georgette, to get what you want.” He held up a palmful of sand at eye level. “You could also employ more words and fewer blows with the elbow.”
“A woman must use whatever weapons she has to hand. Or to elbow.” She spoke lightly to disguise her confusion. What did he mean, she didn’t have to force his hand? What did he think she wanted?
Not even she knew the answer to that. She had long been in the habit of trying not to want anything at all.
“No gold yet, I see,” she said to interrupt her own thoughts.
“If I find anything of note, I will immediately jump to my feet and crow in triumph.” He held up something small, evaluating it, then extended it toward Georgette in his palm. “Littorina. A periwinkle shell. Common as dust, but pretty enough. Would you like it?”
She took it between thumb and forefinger. About an inch and a half in height, it was shaped like a dollop of cream, pointed at one end and otherwise fat and twirling. Georgette took off her gloves, testing the texture of it. Small as the shell was, it wasn’t fragile. Brown and gray bands ridged its outside. “So deliberate and so tiny,” she said. “A little animal made this.”
“Little and delicious. Have you ever eaten winkles?”
“Is that a euphemism?”
“Miss Frost, it is never a euphemism. Since you have lived in London, I presume you have not dined on winkles. They are a coastal food.”
“Your hypothesis is correct.” She traced the sleek inside of the shell, then put it into the pocket of her gown. “I’m glad we’ve been able to travel together.”
“Nonsense. You would never have come with me if I hadn’t caught you in a gold net.” He handed her another winkle shell.
“I don’t need all the shells you find. And the gold net, as you put it, was my idea. Perhaps we entrapped each other.”
He gave her another shell.
She dropped it on his head. “For a stubborn old scholar, you’re not so bad.”
“I am not old.” He took off his hat, shaking the shell and bits of sand off its crown, then laid it beside him.
“You told that Runner, Jenks, that you were thirty-two years old.”
“I did, and I am. You told him you were twenty-one.”
“Close enough to the truth. I will be, exactly one week from today.”
He stood, pressing another periwinkle shell into her hand. “An early birthday gift, then.”
She laughed, letting the shell fall to the ground.
Hugo smiled in return, but a bit sadly. “You are terribly young, you know.”
“Am I? I ought to be more terrible, then, if I’m to keep company with you.”
“That’s hardly fair. I wasn’t the one parading around London in men’s clothing.”
Georgette raised a brow.
Hugo cursed under his breath. “You know what I mean.”
“You are far more amusing than you realize,” Georgette said. “And don’t worry about your age, my dear. You wear the years well.”
“I wasn’t worrying about my—”
“Turn around. Don’t look.”
He looked at her oddly, then obeyed with reluctance. “How abrupt you are. Now I have to know what you are doing.”
“Taking off my boots and stockings, you meddling man. I want to walk on the sand. And look for gold.” She suited her actions to her words. The stockings were the trickiest bit, for she had to undo her garters and roll the fragile stockings over her knee, calf, and ankle. If Hugo had watched her do that . . .
It would have been exciting, to be honest. The idea of it made a flutter wake in her belly, then slip between her legs.
When she’d tucked the stockings into the boots and set them aside, she stood. “You may look. I’m decently attired again.” Her voice sounded breathless. Beneath her toes, the sand was gently rough, tickling tender skin.
He turned back toward her and glanced at her bare toes, amused. “Are you certain you don’t wish to see the castle up close? Barefoot, you look like Boadicea. Ready to tread upon anything and everything.”
“I ought to tread more lightly.” She hissed, hopping on one foot. “Those winkle shells are sharp. And wasn’t Boadicea from a different part of England?”
“She was, at that. This is practically Scottish territory, though you mustn’t tell the king I said that.”
“You sound as if you’ve been reading from Sir Frederic’s history books,” Georgette teased. “How can you stand to take something from his library? I saw it this morning. The bindings are dreadful. So much tooled gilt, but the leather is cheap as can be.”
“The nuances of binding escaped me. And you are correct that I went in search of a dull book last night. Without your snoring to soothe me, I couldn’t sleep.”
Gingerly, she set down her winkle-stabbed foot. “You chose a book over me. Ah well, I am used to it.”
“That’s not so,” said Hugo.
The tone in which he said it, as though the words were a heartfelt confession, made her not mind at all. Was she more important than a book, then? Had he missed her company? The possibility was intriguing. Unfamiliar.
She would not press him further, lest his admission fall apart. Instead, she took a step toward him, then another, admiring the footprints held in the sand. “I needn’t set a foot out of my way to go look at a grand structure. I’ve seen a lot of beautiful buildings since you kidnapped me in London.”
“I will let the grotesque inaccuracy of that statement pass, but please note that I note it. What buildings did you like?” He made a few prints of his own at the edge of the water. His boot was large, a stomp in the sand.
If she walked closer to the water, as he did, the sand crunched wetly under her foot, and the next wash of seawater filled each toe print with a tiny pool. “I liked all of them. The Swan with Two Necks, because I’ve never heard a better name than that. And it was where the journey began. Then I liked the first coaching inn I ever stayed in, and Raeburn Hall—except for the library, that is.” She made another footprint, then watched until the waves lapped it up. “Even Willingham House. That was part of the journey too. It is a beautiful home.”
“It might be beautiful, but it’s not a home.” Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
“You don’t think of it as your home?”
“I haven’t since my Eton days. But then, why should it hold special feeling? It is only one of eight houses, most with estates, that my father owns across England.”
Eight. Good God. “It must be lovely to be a duke.”
“You keep saying things like that. I don’t know if ‘lovely’ is the right word. Comfortable, yes. Privileged, undeniably. But lovely . . .” He nudged a boot out, then pulled his foot back before the water touched the leather. “Lovely is an hour or two with someone whose company delights you.”
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“That is not loveliness. That is a dream.”
“Is it only that?” He looked hard at her, and she didn’t know what to say.
He scuffed together a great pile of wet sand, saying, “Never mind that. What constitutes a home for you?”
She let out a caught breath. “He said ‘constitutes.’ My heart is thumping so hard right now.” He glared at her, and she added, “I hardly know the answer to that. I don’t have one.”
The glare turned to curiosity. “The bookshop was, surely?”
“Oh. That. I don’t think so. It was familiar enough for me to consider it a home while my parents were alive, but that was only due to habit.”
“I know it wasn’t ideal for you, but that is what sounds like a dream to me. I mean . . . it’s a bookshop.”
“You’d have done better growing up there than I,” she said. “Doubtless you spent your youth studying diligently while I was getting into mischief and going where I should not.”
“And what has changed since then?”
“I should have known you’d say that.” She kicked sand at him. “I wish you wouldn’t speak of me as if . . .” She cast about for words.
“Yes?”
“Give me a moment. I’m trying to think of something good.”
“I do think of you as something good,” he said simply. “You are an astonishing person. I didn’t realize that at first.”
Somehow, she kept her trembling legs beneath her. “You are terrible at giving a compliment. Or was that meant to be a compliment? I can’t even tell.”
“It wasn’t meant to be either a compliment or its opposite. It was merely an observation.”
So serious, he sounded. “In what way have I had the honor of astonishing you?”
He scuffed more sand into the pile with that beautiful, damnable focus. “You say things to people, and they are the right things. It’s not something I have been able to learn despite all my study.”
She walked from the wet sand out of reach of the sea, noting how dry grains clung to her feet. “And how are you to learn to say the right things if you study ancient Greek and mathematics and medicine? You’ll learn a great deal, but none of it has to do with people.”
“Medicine does. Or it should.”
“It should. That’s true. And I think today it did, don’t you?”
He tapped the heel of one boot against the sand pile, as though satisfied with it. “I think it served its purpose.”
“What is the purpose of it, for you?” Purpose, purpose. Well, it was his word. He ought to love having it thrown back at him.
When he didn’t answer, she thought she knew what he was thinking. “It’s to honor your brother Matthew, isn’t it? Would he have liked this? Travel, and medicine, and crushed toes and whatnot?”
He planted a boot solidly on the pile of sand, arms outstretched for balance. “Every year that separates us makes me less confident about the answer.”
“Tell me about him.”
“My personal history is not relevant at the moment.” He stood at a careful distance.
She found a smooth, dry patch of sand and sat down, pulling her knees to her chest. “When I was thirteen years old, I kissed the boy who brought the coal. Now, your turn.”
“I won’t tell you something important merely because you entrusted me with an unsolicited confidence. And what sort of kiss do you mean?”
“A real one.”
After the boy who brought the coal, there had been the fishmonger’s son. The groom who accompanied the heir to an earldom to the bookshop. Others over time. Scraps of affection, stolen in clandestine moments—not from those with power, but from the people next to them.
In away, they’d all been real kisses, and they had all been nothing. She took what passed for love in that moment, knowing it would not last. And so she never gave more than a kiss—though afterward, she always felt it had been too much.
“Not a real kiss,” she mumbled, but he did not seem to hear.
He frowned. “I don’t speak about Matthew often. People don’t know what to say when I do. I hardly know what to say myself.”
She pushed back her bonnet, letting it dangle down her back by its knotted strings. The fluffy clouds shielded her from the sun, and the air was mild. “Was he much like you?”
Had she asked too much of him? At first she thought he would not answer. Then he said, “I will only talk to you about him because you begged me.”
“I certainly did,” she agreed. “It was so undignified. A pitiful spectacle.”
A faint smile touched his lips. “No, we were not at all alike. He was a mirror of me. The charming one.”
“That I can well believe. Certainly if one of you was charming, it was not you.”
“I have never mentioned how much I love traveling with you,” he said. “It gladdens my heart to be put to so much trouble and mocked as well.”
“You do love it,” she said. “You’d have been so bored without me.”
“I am never bored.”
She began pushing together a pile of sand with her left hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Building a private hospital,” she said. “My sand will receive the finest sort of care.”
“It’ll never stay up.”
“Building a private rubble heap, then. I shall intentionally build sand castles that fall until you are overcome with horror and tell me something real.”
“How you bait me.” He walked to the wave-lapped sand a few feet away and caught up a double handful of it. Then he sat beside her, plumping the great handfuls between them. “Wet sand holds its shape far better than dry. Haven’t you ever built a structure in sand before?”
“I have not, in fact.”
She wanted to dig her fingers into the wet sand, but Hugo hadn’t relinquished it. He was shaping it, smoothing it. He made of it a perfect little dome.
“Matthew was the first person I ever knew,” he said quietly. “I knew him before I was born. I never knew myself without him until he died. And when he died, I wished I had been the one to die instead, because it’s easier to be the one leaving than the one left behind.” He brought his palm down flat, pressing the dome into shapelessness. “There, Georgette. Is that enough of a confession for you?”
“I want to hear whatever you want to tell me.” Rarely had she meant a sentence so sincerely. The feeling of it must have shone in her voice, for Hugo looked at her slantwise. It was a long, evaluating sort of look.
Then he started shaping another structure. “He had the best care money could buy, or so my father thought. But it wasn’t. It was an exorbitant fee from a puffed-up physician who never put his hands directly on a patient. A stillroom maid could have done better, with tinctures and poultices. A surgeon could have, with his willingness to do more than bleed the patient and order the fire to be built up higher as he took a fee.”
“You told your father all this, didn’t you?”
“I told everyone this. I couldn’t not say it.” Abandoning the sand structure, he folded his knees in an echo of Georgette’s posture. His hat still lay on the beach a few yards away, and the breeze off the sea ruffled his short hair. “My parents didn’t talk about him after that. They put away all his things, and all the portraits. But they still had me, with his face, reminding them. Reminding me, every time I looked in a glass.”
“Did you like that?”
“I did, and I hated it too. It’s become easier to look in a glass over time. As I age, my face is less like his was when he died.” He wrapped his arms around his knees, broad shoulders straining against his greatcoat. “After fourteen years without him, the loss is like the way soldiers describe their old injuries. They ache, all the time, but the ache is so constant that sometimes it can be forgotten.”
“Many such men turn to opium or spirits to ease the ache.”
“Yes, well, I turned to study. Medicine. Science. I attempted to learn everything. Even worse, wouldn’t yo
u say?”
She pursed her lips. “Well, I would. But you probably wouldn’t like it.”
His mouth tugged up at one side. “I’m getting used to the things you say.”
She smiled.
“I thought . . .” He unfolded, leaning back on his elbows and stretching out his legs. “I thought if I learned enough, maybe someday I would know how to keep someone else from feeling this kind of loss.”
Georgette stretched out her legs, regarding her bare toes. All ten of them, uncrushed. “That is heroic, to turn grief into good deeds.”
He made a sound of disgust. “Don’t be so eager to turn me into one of your bland storybook fellows.”
“There is nothing at all wrong with blandness, or it would not be part of the recovery from so many ailme—ah, you’re making that sound again. And well done. You almost made me forget what we were talking about.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want such an attachment again. It’s too difficult when the attachment is inevitably severed.”
Inevitably, he said? He might as well have cut out a piece of her heart. “No, that’s true.” She injected a little venom into her tone. “You should be alone all your life except for scientific books, and you should never love anyone again. That’s better. More logical.”
He remained perfectly calm, resting on his elbows and staring out to sea. “I wonder if you recall which of us didn’t want to walk closer to the castle. Which of us thought it was best to view it from a distance; better not to go close lest one’s idea of it be spoiled.”
The similarity had not struck her before. “You are a fiend to bring that up.”
“I thought I was a hero.”
“Maybe you’re both.”
No, she’d never really had a home. She had never been certain of anyone’s love. And she missed that love with a sharp pain to the heart: she missed what she wished her family had been, as she had missed the chance to become what they’d wanted.
She had become what she wanted instead, or so she thought. But what good was it, if she was still alone?
She dug her toes into the sand, watching them disappear. The sand was the color of her skin, which was the color of her hair. If she wore a dress of the same shade, she could vanish entirely.
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