by Лорен Уиллиг
Robert looked down at her thoughtfully. “Since I spoiled your plan to follow me, what would you say to going away with me?”
“To India?” The Outer Hebrides also sounded interesting. As Robert had said, Charlotte didn’t care much where they went, so long as they went together.
“We could visit your Penelope. And I’d like to show you where I lived. Parts of it, at least,” he corrected himself. “There are rambling palaces with stonework fine as lace and hidden courtyards filled with flowers and temples grander than our cathedrals, with shrines to gods whose names I could never quite get right.”
“And festivals and elephants and princes wearing rubies as big as your fist?”
“All of that. I can show you India, and when we get back, I’ll need you to show me how to get on at Girdings. You’ll have to teach me how to be a duke.”
“I don’t believe you’ll find it that hard,” said Charlotte.
“Only because I have you as duchess. Someone very wise once told me that the trick of land management is to find a clever wife.”
Remembering the scene outside the Queen’s rooms, Charlotte made a face. “Grandmama is going to be far too pleased. Did you know that she was scheming all this while to catch you for me?”
Robert blinked. “I thought I was the blot on the family escutcheon.”
“Yes, but you’re a ducal blot,” said Charlotte serenely, “and that makes all the difference.”
“I didn’t notice her flinging me at you,” protested Robert, once the ducal blot had firmly blotted the opprobrious words with kisses. “Except for the seating at Twelfth Night.”
“Oh, no,” said Charlotte, eyes shining. In the joy of their reconciliation, the pain of it had leached away, leaving only amusement. “She did you one better than that. She paid Sir Francis Medmenham to court me in the hopes of spurring your interest!”
Robert’s brows drew together. “No,” he said flatly. “I can’t believe — ”
“Oh, yes,” said Charlotte, enjoying herself hugely. “Five thousand pounds’ worth of pretend flirting!”
“That interfering old harpy!”
“That does about sum it up,” Charlotte agreed, with a brisk nod.
“That interfering, ineffectual old harpy!” Robert choked out, sputtering so hard with laughter, he could hardly speak. “If she hadn’t set Medmenham on you, I would have declared myself far sooner! If it hadn’t been so deuced awful, it would be funny. I was so concerned with keeping Medmenham away from you — ”
“That you thought if you stayed away yourself, he would stay away, too?” Charlotte finished hopefully.
Robert nodded, making a mock-comical face.
Later, she might be indignant about the wasted time. Right now, she was too busy basking in the lovely, warm feeling of knowing that her grandmother’s snares had nothing to do with Robert’s feelings for her. Not that she had really thought they did, but it was nice to be told, just the same.
“It must be the first time I’ve ever seen one of Grandmama’s schemes go so badly awry,” said Charlotte happily. “We must be quite, quite sure to tell her. Eventually.”
“We can send her a letter from the ship. Once we’re well out of range of her stick.” Looking thoroughly dazed, he shook his head. “I still can’t believe she paid Medmenham.”
“I’m sure he used the money to good effect,” Charlotte said cheerfully, “paying for your orgies.”
“Not my orgies,” Robert was quick to say, tightening his hold on her waist. “I count myself well rid of the whole lot of them.”
“What do you think will happen to Medmenham now?” asked Charlotte, curling comfortably into the curve of Robert’s arm and tucking her feet up beneath her on the bench. “Did the King punish him for his part in the king-napping?”
“No. There was nothing to prove that he had any involvement in the matter. And given his close relationship to the Prince of Wales, no one wanted to pursue the question.”
“I can see how that would be embarrassing for the King,” said Charlotte thoughtfully. “It would be tantamount to admitting that his own son might have been plotting to depose him.”
“Let them plot all they like so long as they leave us in peace,” said Robert firmly. “No more running around after the King in the middle of the night.”
“And you a Gentleman of the Bedchamber!” chided Charlotte.
Robert grinned a pirate’s grin. “His is not the bedchamber in which I have an interest,” he said.
Blushing a deep, pleased pink, Charlotte wiggled off his lap and held out a hand. “Shall we?” she said breathlessly. “If we ask the vicar nicely, he can start crying the banns this Sunday.”
Robert took her hand, twining their fingers together in a lover’s knot. “No special license?” he teased. “I thought they were all the rage.”
“I like this way better,” said Charlotte, as they strolled through the goose droppings to the little footbridge. As the sun slowly burned through the mist, the air seemed infused with a celestial quality, a golden glaze that blessed the greening fields and the tangled brush of the home woods. “Our banns, called in our church, for our tenants. It shows that we belong to them.”
Charlotte had spoken matter-of-factly, but something about her words seemed to strike Robert. “It has a nice ring, doesn’t it?” he said slowly. “Belonging.”
Charlotte looked out from the footbridge, across the fields where their tenants would graze their sheep in summer, the tangled woods where their children would play, the formal gardens where their daughters would lay trails of tarts to hunt for unicorns. Along the paths lay the bird-pecked remains of the tarts Robert had set for her. It seemed terribly appropriate that the pies that he set out for her should nourish their squirrels and sparrows and swans, all the lovely living things that ran through their land.
And in that moment of magic, as the spring sun slipped through the clouds to dapple the lake with diamonds, Charlotte could have sworn she saw a silvery horn bending to explore the broken bits of jam tart where she and Robert had been sitting only moment before.
On an impulse, she waved.
“What is it?” asked Robert, his fingers twined securely through hers.
“Nothing,” said Charlotte, smiling up at him. “Just a unicorn.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
In our modern age, we tell tales not of mythical beasts but of machines, those massive contraptions beloved by villains on The Avengers , replete with gratuitous knobs and bristling with levers, any one of which could send a deadly ray barreling towards Earth via the moon and a few random planets. They’re the griffins and unicorns of the twenty-first-century lexicon. We’ve all grown up on them. But I had never expected to see one.
I gawked into the dim interior of the ancient tower, straining against the rainy-day gloom. A huge shape loomed up against the side of the tower, stretching practically the length of the room, bristling with levers, spikes, wheels, and goodness only knew what other protuberances. A constellation of smaller machinery clustered around it, an arsenal of ominous equipment.
I was so absorbed that I never heard the sound of footsteps behind me until a tall form blotted out even such small gray light that the cloudy sky allowed.
“Eloise?” it said, in tones of great incredulity and not a little displeasure.
In my surprise, I lost my precarious hold on the door, which would have banged closed, whapping me soundly in the butt if Colin hadn’t grabbed hold of it just in the nick of time.
“The door was unlocked,” I blurted out, sidling around to face him.
“That’s not good,” he said, gesturing me out of the doorway. He frowned at the padlock. “We keep this locked for a reason.”
“I can see why!” I said emphatically. One pull on one of those levers and Mars might be hurtling towards Earth.
“Most of those old mowers have gone rusty,” agreed Colin. “It’s automatic tetanus just from looking at them. And I wouldn’t want a child
trying to climb into that old harvester.”
“Mowers?” I repeated, craning to peer through the rapidly narrowing slice of door as he prudently closed it behind him. “Lawn mowers?”
“Scythes, too,” said Colin, fiddling with the lock. “Rusty and bent out of shape. The odd strimmer. There’s even an old Victorian harvester back there. That’s the big beast in the back.”
Victorian harvester, indeed! I wanted to scoff at it. But that lump on the side had looked awfully like a lawn mower, hadn’t it?
“That’s what that was? Garden equipment?”
“Among other rubbish.” Colin’s attention was absorbed by the lock, in that classic man-with-tool way. He jiggled the curved bit in and out of the hole, trying to get the clasp to catch. “There’s a graveyard of old bicycles in the far corner where the garderobe used to be. We Selwicks never throw anything out. Ha!”
Colin tugged at the lock with a satisfied air. The fiddly bit had given up the fight and decided to hold, securing the ancient stronghold of the Selwicks for another day.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked, thinking of that damning bit of paper beneath his desk. “Not throwing things away?”
“I should think you would be pleased,” he said, trying the door one last time to satisfy himself that it had really closed. When I looked blank, he specified, “Your research.”
“True,” I admitted. Without the Selwick pack-rat tendencies, I would have only the legend of the Pink Carnation to go on, with perhaps a frill of family stories to bolster the tale. But if the Selwicks held on to bits of paper, what else might they be holding on to? People did tend to follow in their parents’ professions, for the simple reason that familiarity bred comfort — and connections. There was a reason my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been lawyers. And that sort of tradition would be all the more important in a profession where there were no organized academies, no professional course of study.
Amy and Richard Selwick had started a spy school at this very same Selwick Hall. The spy school had initially been conceived of as a way of training outsiders, but it would have been just as natural for Amy and Richard to raise their children to play the same great game in the pursuit of which they had met. Goodness only knew, the middle and later nineteenth century hadn’t lacked for opportunities for espionage.
What if it had continued on, on to this very day?
I looked at Colin as we walked in companionable silence away from the Tower, his hands stuck comfortably in the pockets of his Barbour jacket, his dark blond hair damped with wet, his Wellies comfortably smeared with mud and dead leaves. He looked every inch the English country gentleman, straight out of an issue of Country Life — or Joan’s magazine, Manderley. The thought of Joan brought to mind, with renewed clarity, her enigmatic words in the ladies’ room of the Heavy Hart.
“Why do you not like to talk about what you do?” I asked, all in a rush. Blunt — but maybe blunt was what was needed.
Colin looked down at me in surprise. He maintained his casual pose, hands in the pockets, shoulders slightly forwards to accommodate my lesser height, but I didn’t miss the glaze of wariness that settled over him.
“What d’you mean?” he asked, with studied ease.
“I found the piece of paper under your desk. About the gold souk — and the guns.”
Colin’s eyes closed in an “Oh, shit” expression. “So you know.”
“Well, between the paper and all your books, I put two and two together. I heard Joan saying something in the ladies’ room the other night,” I added, by way of explanation.
Colin’s hazel eyes shifted sideways, towards me. “I gather she wasn’t complimentary.”
“No,” I said apologetically. “But Sally defended you.”
Colin scuffed his already scuffed Wellies through the withered winter grass. “I should have mentioned it to you before, but I don’t usually like to talk to people about it.”
That was much better than “Now that you’ve found out, I’ll have to kill you,” or whatever the British equivalent of the witness protection program was. I didn’t even know if the British had an equivalent of the witness protection program. I tried to envision myself trying to blend into Nowheresville-on-Thames under an assumed name and failed miserably.
“I can see why you don’t like to tell people,” I said understandingly. “That would kind of jeopardize your position, wouldn’t it? If people knew.”
“Jeopardize my position?”
“You know,” I said, waving my hands in the air. “Give the game away. I mean, I always wondered how James Bond did his job when everyone knew who he was.”
“That’s a good point, I suppose,” he said, in that way people have when you’ve just said something that’s so off the mark, it might as well be in Sanskrit, but they like you, so they want to make something positive out of it so they can give you the credit you both know you don’t deserve. “And it would certainly be an interesting twist on the theme. But I think the reader should know who the main character is, even if the villains don’t.”
Now it was my turn to look at him as though he were speaking Sanskrit. “The reader?”
Colin shrugged self-deprecatingly. “Potential readers, then. I’d like to think I’ll have them eventually.”
Was he talking about his memoirs? “I thought you didn’t want to publicize what you do,” I said, in what I thought was a reasonable tone.
Colin smiled down at me, looking disconcertingly boyish for an international man of mystery. “Well, I’ll have to publicize it eventually, won’t I? At least, if it all goes well.”
“Your mission, you mean?” I ventured.
Colin looked at me in confusion. “My novel,” he said, as though that were self-evident. “I suppose you could call it a mission, but I think of it more as a vocation.”
“Your novel?” The word tasted like a foreign object on my lips. “But what about — oh! Then all those books — the travel guides . . .”
“All research. For my spy novel. But if you didn’t know about the novel, then . . .” His face was a mirror of my own, bearing an identical expression of horrified comprehension as each of us realized just what the other had been talking about all this while.
I could feel my cheeks go a deep, painful red.
Colin rubbed two fingers against the bridge of his nose, as though trying to clear his head. “So when you saw the books and the travel guides, you thought . . . you didn’t really think” — he seemed to have trouble getting the words out — “that I was a spy?”
“Only for about five minutes,” I muttered.
A snorting noise erupted from Colin’s nostrils. It sounded like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be laughter when it grew up.
“What was I supposed to think, with strange men getting murdered in the gold souk?” I demanded spiritedly. “And there was Joan making cryptic comments in the ladies’ room and you not wanting me to get too close to the family archives. You have to admit that it makes a certain amount of sense.”
“What did you think, that we had a spy empire?” choked Colin.
“Not an empire,” I said sulkily. It wasn’t that ridiculous. Okay, maybe it was. But it was his fault for being all strange and cagey about the family history. “Maybe just a very small spy dukedom.”
The amusement faded from Colin’s face as the implications sank in. “You really believed it, didn’t you? I hope you didn’t think you were dating the Purple Gentian,” he said sharply.
“I don’t see you in any knee breeches,” I retorted.
“I’m not my ancestors,” he warned me. “I’m not some sort of — Errol Flynn on a rope.”
“You really didn’t like that movie, did you?” I mumbled inconsequentially. “I know that. I wouldn’t want you to be one of your ancestors. If you were, you’d be dead.”
That one caught him up short for a moment. Folding his arms across his chest, he asked challengingly, “Are you disappointed that
I’m not the spy you thought I was?”
I scowled at him. “Honestly?” Really, men could be such babies. “I’m relieved. I wouldn’t know the first thing to do with a spy. I was completely freaked out by the whole idea. Do you know the hours of sleep I lost because of that damn piece of paper under your desk?”
“Is that so?” He was still standing in the classic male pose of aggression, arms crossed, legs spread like Errol Flynn on the deck of a pirate ship, but I could see his elbows begin to relax, like cookie dough going soft at the edges in the oven.
Seeing my chance, I sailed into the offensive. “And what’s the deal with people calling you from Dubai at three in the morning?”
“Dubai? Oh.” Understanding dawned. He must have found just the missed calls when he woke up that morning, without having realized there had been predawn alarums. “Did that wake you up?”
“What do you think, Sherlock?”
Looking harassed, Colin ran a hand roughly through his hair. “That was a friend from university. He works in Dubai now. Great crunching numbers, but has some difficulties calculating time zones. I just visited him there,” he added unnecessarily. “On a research trip. For the book,” he emphasized.
Okay, I got it, I got it. As far as I was concerned, though, Mr. Selwick still had some explaining to do.
“Why didn’t you just tell me about the book?” I demanded. “Instead of being all cloak and dagger about it?”
“What would you think of a grown man quitting his job to write a novel? It’s a bloody cliché.” There was no mistaking the cri de coeur; the man was so full of angst, he resonated like a tuning fork.
My irritation washed away, subsumed in a tidal wave of intense protectiveness. I wanted to yell at all the other children in the play yard and make them play nicely with him. I could feel myself beginning to ooze sympathy like an underdone soufflé. “It could have been worse,” I said bracingly. “It could have been pig farming.”
“Pig farming?”
Oh, right. Colin hadn’t been there for that spies/sties discussion. At least now I knew I hadn’t been going crazy. Joan had said spies. She had simply meant fictional ones.