The baby opened her mouth and howled.
“She’s wanting feeding,” said the nurse, plucking her neatly out of Imogen’s arms. Imogen raised a hand to protest, but the nurse firmly drew the sheet up around her, saying, not unkindly, “And you’ll be needing your rest, won’t you?”
Imogen must have dozed, because when she woke the room was dim with twilight, the fire had burned down, and Gavin was standing by the bed, waiting for her.
At first she thought it was just a dream, like a hundred others she had had before. But the bed was damp still with sweat and blood; if this were a dream, surely her hair wouldn’t be lying lank around her face, her nightdress matted to her chest. There was a sour smell to the room, the reek of her own sweat and the milk leaking from her breasts.
And Gavin stood there, sure as day, between the bed and the mantelpiece. She could see the window open behind him, the summerhouse pale in the twilight, the branches of the leaves waving invitingly in the breeze.
He looked just as she had seen him last, his cravat tied loosely around his neck, his dark hair cropped short, the same familiar lines around his eyes and lips.
“Gavin,” she said weakly. She tried to sit up, but her body wouldn’t obey her. Her limbs were weak as water.
He took a step towards her, his hand outstretched. “I told you I’d come for you, didn’t I?”
“But you—but I—” Imogen struggled for words. She could feel the dampness of tears on her cheeks. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“Hush, my love. No tears.” She felt his hand against her cheek only as a cool breeze, like the flutter of a bird’s wing. “We’ll be together now. There’s no power on heaven or earth can part us.”
She reached for him, but her hand seemed to go through air. “Our daughter—” she began.
“Will always have us close by,” he said. “But now it’s time to go.”
He held out a hand to her, and this time she felt the clasp of his hand, the lean strength of his fingers twining through hers. His grasp was warm and firm and she drew strength from it, strength enough to rise from the bed and wrap her arms around him as she had dreamed of doing all these months and months. His hair was soft beneath his hand, his cheek faintly stubbled. He smelled of summer and growing things, of open fields and fruit-rich orchards.
She felt his lips brush against her hair and his arm firm around her waist.
“Let’s away, my love,” he said, and over her shoulder she saw that it wasn’t twilight at all but glorious day.
The sun streamed over the meadows and the birds sang madrigals in the trees and far down by the summerhouse a path unrolled, bathed in sunlight and lined in flowers.
“Away,” she echoed, and, hand in hand, they walked together into the sunlight.
* * *
In the darkened hall, the nurse shut the door of the room gently behind her.
“What news?” Jane asked. She held the baby, clean now and dressed in one of the long white gowns that Jane had sewn for her. It was no use expecting Imogen to take care of such things.
The nurse shook her head, making the lappets on her cap wag. “Poor, motherless mite,” she said solemnly.
“Nonsense,” said Jane. “She has a good home and a loving papa. See that the wet nurse is brought.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the nurse sullenly. There was nothing more disappointing than being balked of a good wallow.
Holding the sleeping baby firmly to her chest, Jane made her way carefully down the stairs. Arthur was in his study. He would have to be told.
She looked down at the child in her arms. It was a pity the child was dark rather than fair, but they did say the early growth of hair had a way of falling out. It might grow in lighter by and by. And, besides, the child had nice, large eyes and a rather pretty mouth.
Olivia, Jane thought. She rather liked the sound of “Olivia.”
Holding the baby in one arm, she rapped smartly at the door of Arthur’s study with the other.
It was time Arthur met their daughter.
Herne Hill, 2009
The next day, Julia braved the old garden shed, unearthing flowered gardening gloves and a pair of slightly rusted pruning shears.
As a lifetime apartment dweller, what she knew about gardening was limited to the sorts of potted plants that would fit on the windowsill, but there was nothing like hard manual labor to distract the mind. The wilderness behind the house would have to be tidied before she could sell. Cleaning up the area around the summerhouse was one of the tasks she’d been putting off.
For some reason, without consciously acknowledging it, she’d been avoiding the outer reaches of the garden in general and the summerhouse in particular. She thought of that picture in the attic, twirling and twirling, her pigtails whipping in the breeze. Vaguely, she remembered tea parties, the sort with acorn teacups and pretend sips of invisible beverages.
Following the cracked stones of the path down the slope, she felt as though an invisible weight had been lifted off her. The idea of encountering those sorts of memories didn’t bring with it fear anymore; she knew what had happened. And that her mother had loved her. The locked room in the back of her mind was open, the demons that had hounded her for so long banished.
It was just a pity she couldn’t have gotten rid of them in time to stop herself from trampling all over whatever it was that was developing with Nick, she thought as she yanked doggedly at the creepers that had grown up around the pillars of the summerhouse.
It didn’t matter how often she told herself it could only be temporary, anyway, that she was going back to New York once the house was sold; the idea of going away and never seeing him again brought with it an incredible sense of loss. She’d tossed and turned last night, alternately coming up with excuses and torturing herself with memories and might have beens.
There had been one positive by-product to her sleeplessness. She’d finally figured out what was bothering her about his notes. On his time line, Nick had Gavin Thorne buying tickets for two to New York on a ship that departed in January of 1850. But, according to Aunt Regina’s family tree, Imogen Grantham had given birth to a daughter at the house in Herne Hill in the spring of 1850, months after the ship had left.
Had Thorne gone off without her? Julia wrapped a particularly knotty vine around her hand and tugged. It just didn’t seem right. Perhaps the dates of the ship were wrong? Or their entire theory was. Just because Thorne had painted Imogen in as his Iseult didn’t necessarily mean that he was her Tristan.
But Julia couldn’t quite let go of the idea.
That would provide an excuse to contact Nick. Nothing needy. Just a professional query. Plausible deniability, Lexie used to call it in college.
Julia staggered as the vine gave way. The ancient floorboards protested as she stepped back heavily, windmilling her arms to avoid landing on her ass. No. No more plausible deniability. No more running away.
The sun was shining in her eyes. The temperature had dropped over the last few days, shifting imperceptibly towards autumn, but, for a moment, the sun seemed to burn down on her, and she could have sworn she smelled roses in the air, the roses that had bloomed and died by the end of July. Through the heat haze, she could see a man coming down the hill, a man in an old-fashioned black coat with a canvas satchel slung over one arm.
Sweat dripped down her forehead into Julia’s eyes. Using the back of her arm, she swiped it away. For a moment the scent of roses was strong in her nose, and then she blinked and smelled only sweat and dirt and the sharp green tang of the vines that lay scattered in pieces on the warped floor.
Julia squinted into the sun. There was someone coming down the hill, but he was wearing a pale button-down shirt, not a black coat, and his hair shone golden in the late August sun. He wasn’t carrying anything that she could see. He was just … Nick.
He paused in front of the summerhouse, looking up at her, his hands in his pockets.
“You need a strimmer,” he said
.
Slowly, Julia stripped off Aunt Regina’s gardening gloves, playing for time, veering between hope and wariness. “I need a bulldozer.”
Nick contemplated the denuded rosebushes. “It’s a little late for gardening.”
“I know.” He had planted himself firmly in front of the steps, neither here nor there. Julia didn’t know whether to go down to him or stay where she was. Was this a clearing-the-air visit? An I want my file back visit? Nothing in his posture said one way or another. “But I should probably do something about it before I put the house on the market.”
Nick glanced quickly up at her. “You do intend to sell, then?”
Julia held up her hands in defeat. “I can’t afford not to.”
She leaned her palms flat against the ancient railing, looking down at Nick. From her vantage point above she could see that his shoulders were slightly hunched, as though braced for a blow.
He was, she realized with surprise, just as defensive as she was.
She thought about all the Nicks she’d seen over the past two months. She’d thought him arrogant at first, dismissive and rude. Then almost a little too nice, too smooth. Then there had been those articles, and he had morphed in her head into the stereotype of the trader on the make, all pin-striped suit and slicked-back hair à la Gordon Gekko.
But this, in front of her. This was Nick. Not Natalie’s image of the lost viscount, not Gordon Gekko, not the mastermind of an underground antiques ring. Just a man who was as lost as she was.
“I thought about renting it out,” Julia said diffidently, “but it just seems like a half measure. And I’m not really sure I’m cut out to be a landlord.”
Nick folded his arms across his chest. “It might be a bit difficult to manage from the other side of the Atlantic.”
The mottled paint on the railings was scratchy against her palms. “Just because I’m selling doesn’t mean I’m going.” Even to her own ears, that sounded garbled. “I mean, it will take a while to sell, and even once I do—I don’t really know what my plans are yet.”
Nick leaned a palm against one of the pillars by the stairs. She could feel the charge between them like a current in the air, but all he said was, “You won’t be sorry to see the house go?”
“It’s just a house when all is said and done. It belongs to the past, and while I’m glad I’ve gotten to know that past, I don’t have to live with it to take it with me.” Julia drifted to a halt, feeling like a fool. “If that makes any sense.”
Nick held up a hand to shield his eyes. He wore a battered signet ring on one finger, the crest so worn with time as to be nearly indistinguishable. “My aunt said something similar to me once. Aunt Edith.”
“The one who walked off with all the furniture?” Julia’s chest felt tight with the effort of trying to listen past what was being said. Surely the fact that he was still here, talking about his family, had to be a good thing?
“The very one.” Nick looked out over the tangle of berry brambles and trees run to seed. Standing there, at the base of the steps, Julia was struck by how alone he seemed. She curled her fingers against the rail to keep herself from going down to him. “It was years ago, when I was fourteen. I’d just come back from California—for the last time, as it turned out.”
Julia remembered what he told her, long ago, about the visits to his mother being terminated by mutual consent. From the expression on his face she wondered if it had been quite so mutual after all.
Nick acknowledged her quizzical look with a quick twist of the lips. “It wasn’t the easiest time. I was feeling a bit rough and looking for something to hold on to. So I fastened on to the idea of the old family home. I even took one of those National Trust tours, trying to find portraits that looked like me, and sulking all the way about being done out of my patrimony. When I tried to complain to Aunt Edith about the injustice of it all, she turned to me and said, in that brisk way of hers, ‘Nicholas, it’s not places that count, it’s people.’”
Something about the way he said it made Julia’s throat feel tight. She nodded, wordlessly.
The skin around Nick’s eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Of course, this was from the woman who walked off with a marble bust of Charles the Second because she claimed it had sentimental value.”
“We’ll never know exactly what her relationship was with Charles,” said Julia in mock seriousness. In a different tone she added, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was such a jerk about the whole Dietrich Bank thing and Natalie’s treasure stories and—well, everything.”
The words were entirely inadequate to convey how she felt, but it was a start.
Nick shrugged. “Anyone would have thought the same.” He angled a quick look up at her. “If you want to know what really happened—”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Julia fiercely, and realized that she meant it. “Natalie could have said anything at that point and I would have believed her. She could have said that you were—an intergalactic alien from the planet Zog.” That surprised a chuckle out of Nick, but Julia powered on, her hands twisting together at her waist. “You were right. I condemned you out of hand. I was looking to condemn you. All because I was terrified by how much I—by how much I liked you.”
Nick braced one foot against the bottom step, looking up at her with a wry smile that made her heart twist. “Pot, meet kettle.” When she narrowed her eyes at him, he said, “I did come to the wine bar last night. I saw you through the window. And—” He spread his hands out in a gesture of helplessness. “I turned around and walked away.”
Julia thought of him, standing outside the window, looking into the red and black interior of the wine bar. And she’d been right on the other side of the glass, never knowing.
“It was probably a wise move,” said Julia in a voice that wasn’t entirely steady. “I was getting pretty soused. I might even have made a pass at you.”
Nick moved up one step, then another. “In that case,” he said, “I was doubly an idiot to walk away.”
The air in the summerhouse suddenly felt very close. Julia’s throat was tight; she could feel the beating of her pulse in her throat, in her wrists. Every nerve tingled with awareness.
She wet her lips. “Nick—”
“I’m rubbish at this,” he said, his voice low, urgent. The old floor creaked beneath his weight, but it held. “At relationships.”
Julia gave a choked laugh. “Join the club. My normal impulse is to run screaming.”
Nick’s eyes met hers. “It’s terrifying. Relying on someone.”
Julia nodded. At least, she thought she nodded. She rested her palms lightly on Nick’s chest, feeling his heart beating under the thin linen of his shirt. “We’re a mess, aren’t we? Both of us.”
Nick gently slid a sweaty strand of hair back behind her ear. “Like calls to like.”
Julia looked up at him, at the now familiar planes of his face, the laugh lines next to his eyes, the mobile line of his lips. “I’d rather be a mess with you than without you,” she said huskily. “I’m willing to take the chance—if you are?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Herne Hill, 2009
Nick’s kiss was nothing like the one in the attic over a month ago.
There was nothing tentative about this kiss; it was hot and demanding, filled with all the frustration of the past three weeks of waiting. Nick’s shirt was damp with sweat beneath Julia’s fingers, the fabric molded to his skin. She could feel the heat of his fingers through the thin fabric of her dress, his hands splayed open against her back, holding her close as his lips devoured hers.
When they parted, Julia felt as though she’d just come up from a long dive underwater. She blinked at him, her breath coming fast.
Nick looked to be in a similar state. His hair was sticking up on one side, his cheeks flushed, his chest rising and falling rapidly.
He took a step back, his eyes never leaving Julia’s. “If we—”
Whatever it was he had meant to say was los
t as a horrible cracking noise filled the air.
It all happened in the space of a moment; Nick’s eyes opened very wide and his arms flailed for balance as the floor opened beneath him, sending him lurching sideways, one leg suddenly considerably shorter than the other.
“Bugger!” he cursed. “Bugger, bugger, bugger.”
Julia hurried towards him. It would have been comical if it weren’t for the look of very real pain on Nick’s face. One of his legs was wedged in a new gap in the boards. “Oh, God, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, tight-lipped. “Just a little scratched up. Stupid. Bloody. Floor.”
Lending him a hand, Julia helped him out of the hole. It wasn’t deep. There was little more than a foot between the platform and the floor, but it was an awkward position for a man with one leg in and one leg out, particularly when a jagged bit of wood had caught on the back of his jeans.
Of all the ludicrous, farcical, ill-timed … She would have thought the ghosts of old lovers would have been more amenable to sharing their trysting place.
“If it’s any consolation,” Julia said, caught somewhere between laughter and annoyance, “you hurt it more than it hurt you.”
Nick pulled a wry face. Leaning over, he shook the splinters from his pant leg, wincing a bit as he did. “You might say that. There was something under there. It cracked when I landed.”
“Buried treasure?” suggested Julia.
“I doubt it,” Nick said, but he hunkered down by the hole all the same, moving a little stiffly. He landed heavily on his knees. “More likely just the sound of my shattered pride.”
“The timing was not ideal,” Julia agreed, trying to gently shift the conversation back to whatever it was he had been about to say before he went flying.
It was no use. His attention was absorbed by whatever it was he had seen down there in the dirt. He looked like a little boy, his hair sticking up, leaning over to poke at something down in the gap between the boards.
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