Dangerous 01 - Dangerous Works

by Caroline Warfield

  Georgiana continued long after he left, until a light scratch at the door interrupted her.

  “Come in, come in. Stop that infernal scratching.”

  Chambers gestured two footmen into the room. They lit candles rapidly and silently. Georgiana paid them no attention.

  “Will my lady wish for dinner?”

  “No, I—” she began. Several hours had passed since Andrew left. She realized it had gotten dark when she saw the footmen waiting for her nod before closing the window covers. “Yes, Chambers, I think I will have dinner. Apologize to Henri for the delay.” It is the people above stairs who are at the mercy of the staff, not the other way around. Chambers expects dinner to be on time, and so it is.

  “Very good, my lady. At half past the hour then.”

  Her work had already claimed her attention. The page baffled her. Her meager knowledge of mythology enabled her to recognize the story of Kronos’s attempts to kill the infant Zeus, which seemed to be the gist of the story, but the rest of the poem confused her. It talked about “Cithaeron” and “Helicon.”

  The names weren’t familiar to her in the slightest, nor were they included in any of her books of mythology. Georgiana had no idea where to find the information. She wondered whether her brother or any man with a decent education would know. She couldn’t translate the fragment if she didn’t identify Cithaeron and Helicon. Frustration boiled up inside her.

  “What are you saying to me?” Korinna, dead these thousands of years, didn’t answer. No one did. She suspected Andrew didn’t recognize the names either. He left her to her struggles in silence most of the afternoon.

  Drat the man, he acts like a teacher. Andrew had shed the forced intimacy of his illness and put on a manner even more formal than before. He refused further discussion about their past. Their confrontation over it had, at least, overshadowed his pitiable proposal. He made no attempt to repeat that bit of nonsense. She didn’t need his pity.

  Since then he firmly enforced a tutor-pupil relationship. He set a new, very strict schedule for their studies. They would meet every other day for two hours at Helsington Cottage. On the off days, Georgiana would read material related to the particular elegies, fragments, or verses they were studying in order to further expand her knowledge and the depth of her translations and interpretations.

  All his conversation centered on the work. She reminded herself that the work alone mattered, nothing else. She quashed all other thoughts.

  Today he had explained that the fragment in her hand was most likely a choral work between two competing voices, a device used for public performances. Georgiana hadn’t known about public choral recitals, and that knowledge expanded her understanding considerably. But she wanted to know who Cithaeron and Helicon were and why they were competing.

  She dropped the paper in irritation. Chambers wouldn’t be happy if she failed to dress for dinner. Like most of her dinners, it would be eaten in splendid solitude. Chambers never forgot what was due a Duke’s household, however remote from the seat of power it might be. His mistress cared less every year.

  A footman approached her on her way to the stairs, bowed, and handed her a parcel wrapped in brown paper secured with twine. It resembled a book.

  “This came to the tradesman’s door, my lady.”

  “Thank you, William.” She opened it to find a note.

  Lady Georgiana,

  Please review this work before our next session two days hence.

  Yours respectfully,

  A. Mallet

  She turned the book over in her hands to discover a contemporary travel book. That seemed odd to her. Puzzled, she read and reread the title: The Geography of Greece and Its Islands for Those Who Explore by Foot. A slow smile came over her face; at least she wouldn’t be bored tonight.

  “Mountains? The voices belong to mountains?” Laughter bubbled up in Georgiana’s incredulous face, spilled over, and engulfed Andrew. Laughter of his own drummed in his chest.

  “Mountains don’t have voices!” Incredulity contended with her laughter.

  “Are you sure?”

  Rising eyebrows gave her the expression of a very wise owl. She didn’t speak.

  “Yes. Mountains,” he said. “I recognized the choral form Monday, but the identity of the competing voices eluded me as much as it did you. It took me two hours in the Wren Library to find the information after I left you.”

  “Only two?”

  He ignored her sarcasm. “I thought I recognized Helicon, but the other was new to me. Look here.” He unrolled a map of Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean onto the table.

  “See here, above the Gulf of Corinth? Helicon is in the center and Cithaeron to the East below Thebes.”

  “Personification of mountains isn’t a device I would have expected, but yes, it makes some sense.” She didn’t sound convinced.

  “Remember this is choral poetry, meant for public performances. Let’s try reading it that way.”

  Georgiana looked dubious. He tried for his best commanding officer voice. It worked with soldiers. “Read it. I will read the competing voice.”

  She picked up her copy. They spent a few moments expounding in Greek. Andrew tried for dramatic effect. Georgiana didn’t.

  “Lines are missing in this fragment. It doesn’t all scan,” she suggested after she read a particularly bland sounding passage.

  He suggested they try it in English. “This first part would be a narrator’s voice, perhaps the main chorus. It tells us that the baby is in danger. Remember, Kronos wishes to kill his own son, the infant Zeus.” He cleared his throat and read, “‘The Korybantes hid the infant.’ Do you remember who they were?”

  “Dancers. Male. In armor.”

  Most likely naked. Their “armor” would be a shield. Damn but there were traps on every side. He would fall into one yet. He didn’t think she needed to know about the armor.

  He recited again, “‘The Korybantes hid the infant.’” He strode across the room while he recited and spread his arm toward Georgiana at the end of the line.

  “‘When Rhea took him and took great honor.’” Her voice hesitated.

  “Took? Is that the best we can do? She seized, grabbed, snatched, or wrenched him.”

  “She uses that same word a number of times in the Greek.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to, and it doesn’t mean you have to choose the weakest English word. I can’t believe Korinna meant for it to be dull.”

  She raised her chin and tried again. “‘When Rhea seized the—the divine baby and grabbed honor.’”

  “Better. I’m not so sure about grabbing honor.”

  “Back to ‘took’?”

  “Perhaps. You can decide at the end.”

  “‘Gained,’ perhaps?”

  “Better.”

  Georgiana began to get into the spirit. “So. They decide to hide it in a cave. Ah! But what cave? The gods are ordered to vote.” She glanced up at him for approval. He nodded, not wanting to tamp down her enthusiasm. He loved watching her face light up with new knowledge. “It appears Cithaeron won the election. He took it by force,” she went on without noticing.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Her choice of words.”

  “So, how would you translate it?”

  “‘Great Cithaeron shouted that he had captured the beautiful victory.’ Maybe not by force. It isn’t explicit.”

  “Good. ‘Captured’ is good, or ‘taken’ perhaps.” He intoned the line again in deep voice, “‘Great Cithaeron shouted that he had captured the glorious victory.’” He gestured to her to continue.

  “‘Helicon was taken with a dreadful pain.’” She moaned dramatically. “It is certainly passive voice in the original. Something mighty seized him. No, wait, ‘Helicon was grabbed by a dreadful pain.’“

  Andrew watched her with delight. He gripped his chest melodramatically and took his turn, “‘The victor received the crown, his heart overflowed with happ
iness.’”

  Georgiana leapt in without hesitation. “‘Helicon groaned and tore a large rock from his own side, hurling it down.’” She demonstrated the poor loser’s angry response and peeped up at him. “No wonder he groaned. He tore out a piece of himself. That must have hurt.”

  Andrew felt a wide grin split his face. Georgiana laughed out loud.

  “It begins to make sense when you put it like that!” she said. “Of course! The infant Zeus, father of us all—we being the pagan Greeks, of course—is to be hidden in a cave on a mountain, rescued from foul infanticide. The mountains compete for the privilege, campaigning loudly. The winner crows with delight. The loser is a very poor loser indeed. Oh Andrew, you are a miracle worker. I would never have understood the very point of the fragment without your help.”

  The gray of her eyes shifted to brilliant blue in her excitement. The color grabbed him by the throat and held him prisoner, helpless to let go. To give her this thing—the sense of her own ability, the ecstasy of sudden understanding where there had been merely puzzlement before—filled him with joy. Her face, flushed with laughter, held him; the intensity of her triumph crushed his very bones.

  He wanted to seize her like Rhea seized the infant Zeus. He ought to leave and never return. He should go far, far away from Georgiana and her blasted family. His good sense told him to break off this sham of tutor and student, but he couldn’t.

  “Very good, my lady,” he rasped. “Very well done. You have this passage exactly. Shall we go over it line by line?”

  “I think I would like to try that tomorrow by myself. Can we go back to Asopos’s daughters?”

  Why not? It was mostly about capture and offspring. Some of the elegies of the other poets would be worse, much worse.

  Andrew behaves like a pompous—She groped for a conclusion —male. At least he agreed to finish the poem about Asopos and the mothers of the heroes. She tried to be patient.

  “I’m not a girl right out of the school room, you know. I do know the basics of reproduction. If the ancients didn’t worry about the niceties of marriage … well, they were the pagans, weren’t they?”

  “They certainly were. Your mother would be shocked,” he insisted.

  “Don’t mention her.” She glared at him. “Don’t ever mention her in this place!”

  When they read the mountain chorus, the very air had vibrated with his laughter, as rich and warm as it was unexpected. It caused reverberations in her chest that emptied her lungs of air, but when his laughter stopped and he withdrew behind those spectacles of his, the sun fled. The teacher returned.

  “Very well, Lady Georgiana, let us begin with a review of the Olympian family tree.”

  That family tree twisted and turned in knots, fraught with infighting, violence, and incest. Andrew didn’t shrink from the facts of the stories. He made sure she understood which mother bore which hero and the circumstances (usually violent) of his conception. Unlike his explanation about the singing mountains, however, he didn’t seem eager to volunteer information or to speculate beyond the obvious.

  “How can I do this if I don’t understand what is actually going on? What are they feeling? What is it they want?”

  “That knowledge, my lady, won’t come from a book.” He wouldn’t look her in the eye. “Some knowledge comes from life.” He began to rearrange his notes.

  What would Lawrence Watterson make of my questions? She understood, with sudden clarity, those pompous fools who found Greek translation dangerous to a well-bred woman. Those same folks would be apoplectic over the direction her work took today.

  “You’re leaving?” She watched his graceful hands straighten the papers.

  “We’ve done enough for one day,” he said without meeting her eyes. “You did well. Rewrite the mountain lyric. I will look forward to your final word choices. Perhaps the hero’s fragment doesn’t give us enough to go on. Some poetry is simply dry.”

  She doubted it but didn’t say.

  “The day after tomorrow then?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He left her alone with her poems and her thoughts.

  Chapter 14

  It sang. One of Georgiana’s translations seemed to sing to her when she read it out loud. She rewrote the lines of the mountain lyric one final time early the following day. The musical flow of the lyric delighted her.

  Her best work lay on the paper; she could do no more. She should be satisfied. She wasn’t. Odd restlessness, the unexpected agitation she had begun to feel in Andrew’s absence, overcame her.

  She put the poem away and began reorganizing some of her older work boxes. When she repacked the same one twice, she put a fluttering hand to her hair and bit her lip. Not one box needed her attention. The steady tick of the ormolu clock sounded louder in her silent house than it deserved. She couldn’t concentrate a moment longer.

  Georgiana wandered to the window and looked out at the wide expanse of lawn as if she might find purpose in the green and gold reflections of the sun.

  It was early afternoon of a day too fine for the dark thoughts that crowded in on her. Andrew hadn’t fled from her eleven years ago after all. That knowledge had proven to be cold comfort. He hadn’t stayed either. Now he came, but only for brief interludes, and then he left her to work alone.

  Georgiana sympathized with the boy Andrew had been. Only a heartless woman could blame him for running from her family’s long reach and iron grip. She could find no sympathy, however, for the way he and Richard had neatly arranged her life without her consent. They gave her no choice. That, in the end, she couldn’t forget.

  He proposed marriage when he found her tumbling from his bed; she ought to have accepted. Her behavior had been unforgivable, but she would be damned before she let him think she trapped him into marriage. After his revelations about Richard, she’d be damned before she would let a man order her life for her again.

  Georgiana shook her head against the gathering shadows in her mind and focused on the sun. A walk might settle her nerves, or at least shed light on the dark recesses of her thoughts.

  An hour later, a deep blue cloak billowed behind Georgiana’s long figure while she strode along the Cam. She found it oddly pleasurable to walk thus along the river without conveyance; she couldn’t have done it a year ago. Mr. Peabody’s odd regime worked. She had more energy every week. She would live to finish her work at least. That gave her some comfort.

  John Footman, who followed at a discrete distance, struggled to keep up. She hiked almost as far as Cambridge, on the river path, detouring occasionally over fences and through fields.

  The sight of the spires of Cambridge sobered her, however, and she turned back. No welcome waited for her there. Briefly, Andrew had welcomed her into his home, but now that door had closed. She wondered if other doors were closed. Edwina Potter continued to visit, but she was the only one.

  “My goodness, Lady Georgiana. I am surprised to see you, dear!” Molly Harding, one of the few Cambridge wives that had once welcomed Georgiana’s futile attempts to join their circle, came puffing toward her. “I thought to walk as far as the bend in the river. The cinquefoil is always so colorful there this time of year. Isn’t it glorious?” She bobbed a belated acknowledgment of the younger woman’s rank.

  “Good day to you, Mrs. Harding. It is a most excellent day, and you are quite correct about the bend in the river. The banks there are lush with flowers. I had to skirt the undergrowth.”

  Georgiana tried to leave, but the older woman moved to keep step with her.

  “May I say you look well, dear. I haven’t seen you in three months, and you have positively bloomed in the meantime.”

  “Ah, well, you can attribute that to modern science, Mrs. Harding. Mr. Peabody, the physician who keeps premises over by Magdalene, prescribed a regime to strengthen my blood, to enormously beneficial effect.” She increased her speed as if to demonstrate how robust she had become.

  Molly Harding breathed heavily, but she kept pace.

>   “I’ve missed you at the Cambridge Wives’ Tea. Mrs. Potter expressed great disappointment when you didn’t return.”

  “You are very kind. I believe Mrs. Clarke and her ilk made it quite clear my presence was unnecessary.”

  “Abigail Clark? She can be, well, that is, perhaps it is for the best with what has happened and all.”

  “And what would that be, Mrs. Harding?” Georgiana asked.

  “Mr. Mallet has been quite ill. I understand that, dear. Mrs. Potter, who knew him as a boy, has been quite adamant that we are to be grateful for your assistance. One can understand he might be grateful. It is just that—”

  “Abigail Clarke and the others disagree?”

  The older woman’s discomfort showed on her face, but she blundered on. “It wasn’t proper, you must know. People do talk. Even someone of elevated rank as yourself can–”

  “Make herself untouchable?”

  “You needn’t assume everyone thinks that way. Oh my. I am an old lady, am I not?” Molly’s face turned a vivid shade of red. “How does your work go on, dear? I know when last we spoke you were seeking a man—a sponsor, I believe—to vet your work.

  “How is it possible she keeps getting redder?

  “Tutor, Mrs. Harding. Someone to assist with my research and to help me flesh out the work.”

  “And so it appears you have. How does Mr. Mallet get on, dear? Old Mr. Mallet was such a good man. Well-loved in Cambridge. I understand the son is—”

  “Better.” No point in pretending she didn’t know. “He sought treatment from a surgeon for his wounds, and he is better. He is able to walk without pain.”

  Mrs. Harding’s eyes were avidly attentive now. She didn’t interrupt.