“No. Of course not. I was involved in a minor incident at the Savoy. A misunderstanding.”
The thick white shelf of his lordship’s brows climbed toward his hairline. “At the Savoy? You interest me greatly. I didn’t think you ever left the classroom. Or the mud huts. Or wherever it is you do your research.”
“I was there with Cornelia and a fellow instructor, Lionel Underwood.”
“Well, bully for Mr. Underwood for dragging you off that campus. You’re a young man, Ptolemy. It won’t kill you to act like one occasionally.”
He smiled at his grandfather’s misinterpretation of the situation. Lionel Underwood, a bon vivant? Hardly. Lionel was a consummate teetotaler. He’d only come along because Ptolemy had asked him, being as he was the only person both Cornelia and he liked.
Though, Ptolemy allowed with a twinge of guilt, he didn’t like self-effacing, hardworking and, well, frankly, dull Lionel so much as found him useful. Lionel always made himself available to escort Cornelia to the seemingly endless and—Ptolemy admitted—endlessly boring functions associated with the college where both Lionel and he were employed as dons.
“I arranged the evening. It was to be a celebration.”
“A celebration?” His grandfather tipped his head inquiringly.
“Yes.” He took a deep breath. “I had planned on asking Cornelia to marry me—”
“Please, say it’s not so!” His grandfather clamped his hand to his chest. “Not Cornelia!”
“I resent that, Grandfather. Miss Litchfield is a remarkable young lady. She’s a highly organized and thorough researcher, with a true gift for management—”
“I can well believe that.”
“Don’t mutter. It makes me think you are saying nasty things.”
“I am.”
“Grandfather.”
“I’m sorry—no, I’m not, I’m horrified. What on earth possessed you to ask Miss Litchfield to marry you?” He glanced sharply at Ptolemy. “You weren’t sozzled, were you?”
“No!” He never got drunk. Drunk people lost their inhibitions and he had been trained from the cradle to believe that inhibitions provided civilization its best bulwark against anarchy. “And I haven’t asked her yet.”
There hadn’t been any opportunity. Before coming to the Savoy, he’d planned to meet her at the British Library and propose somewhere in the stacks. But he’d missed his train and so had rung up Lionel and asked him to pick up the ring at the jeweler’s and then escort Cornelia to the Savoy to meet him. It had worked out as smoothly as clockwork but there hadn’t been a moment when they’d been alone so that he could propose.
In fact, now that he thought of it, he realized Lionel still had the ring. He supposed it was as well. Lionel never lost things. Dependable as a rock, old Lionel.
“Thank God for that.”
“But I will.”
“Do you think that wise, m’lad? I don’t think you have any idea of what life with Miss Litchfield will be like. You have always been utterly oblivious where females are concerned. I blame my daughter.”
“That was hardly her fault.”
His grandfather ignored him. “She was not a natural mother. Sending you and your brothers off to school so young. Did you even know what a girl was before you were ten?”
“There were a few references in books.”
“You make light of it, but it’s true. You are absolutely a babe in the woods where women are concerned. Especially a woman like Miss Litchfield.” He shook his head.
“I know you think her a tad dry—”
“A tad?”
“Cornelia has more in her head than the pursuit of pleasure.” Unlike that strange girl at the Savoy. She had all the earmarks of a—what did the students call them? Oh, yes, a crackerjack.
“There’s an understatement,” his lordship said. “I dare-say Miss Litchfield has never taken a step in pleasure’s direction, let alone actively pursued it.”
Ptolemy blew out a deep breath. “Grandfather . . .”
His grandfather forestalled him. “I have nothing against Miss Litchfield other than that she is a managing sort of woman. The sort who inspires laziness in a man.”
“Laziness?”
“Yes. You’ve always been a little obsessive when it came to your work, my lad. You can’t deny it. It has made you—and yes, I know this is harsh, but it is said with affection—neglect other areas of life. Miss Litchfield has encouraged this neglect. Perhaps fostered the mistaken belief that nothing else matters aside from . . . What is it that you do?”
“I am an anthropologist. A cultural—”
“Yes. Well, other things do matter.”
Ptolemy gave this a fair consideration. He did tend to become a tad obsessive about things he found fascinating, but he’d never found anything nearly as fascinating as people and cultures.
“Are you in love with her?”
His grandfather’s abrupt question caught him off guard. “I . . . I . . . Of course. Yes.”
His grandfather steepled his hands together and peered at him over the tips of his fingers. “I believe, Ptolemy, I truly believe, that the men in our family only love once. So choose your mate wisely, my boy.”
He shifted uneasily. Cornelia expected him to ask for her hand in marriage. At least, he assumed she did. It was a natural progression in a relationship between an unmarried man and woman after a number of years, and he had given her no reason to expect otherwise.
“We’ll make a brilliant team,” he said. “She has only my best interests at heart and she’ll help me achieve . . . er, those things that I want to achieve.”
“Wonderful,” his grandfather said. “Why don’t you hire her rather than propose to her?”
“Grandfather.”
“You sound like you’re choosing a teammate, not a bedmate.”
“Grandfather.”
“Fine.” He held up his hand. “I shan’t say another word. Today. I’m sorry. I really won’t. I mean if you want to marry a woman who—no, no, no! Sit back down. I promise. Don’t leave. Tell me how you got that bruise?”
He’d forgotten about it. “Some college boy reeking of bay rum thought I was importuning a young lady at the bar.”
“What were you doing in the bar? I didn’t think you drank.”
“Of course I do. I just don’t overindulge.”
“God, that you would.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. And what did Miss Litchfield think of you importuning this young lady?”
“Oh, for—I didn’t importune her. I don’t even know the girl.”
Once again, his grandfather’s brows mounted his noble forehead. “Then what happened?”
“What happened?” Ptolemy frowned. What had happened?
Before he quite realized it the words were spilling out, his forehead furrowed in an effort to sort out the events that had led to his black eye.
“—and I took a step after her, the girl, and in doing so stepped on her hem and it ripped, the whole back of her gown ripped open to the waist—a shoddy bit of workmanship if you ask me—leaving her in a state of immodesty.”
He regarded his grandfather earnestly. “Do you realize young ladies wear practically nothing beneath these new gowns?” He didn’t wait for an answer.
“She said, ‘Do something!’ So, naturally, I obliged. I threw my coat over her shoulders and it was then that this boy decided I’d intentionally insulted her and hit me. And he wouldn’t have landed the blow except I was caught off guard. One doesn’t expect to be knocked out in a restaurant.” Ptolemy threw out his hands in an invitation to commiserate. “And that’s what happened.”
“I see.”
“Do you?” Ptolemy asked, abruptly sitting down on the edge of the wingback chair opposite his grandfather. “Because I’m not sure I do.”
“And when you came to she’d vanished, hadn’t she?” his lordship said. “They usually do.”
Ptolemy could think of no
retort to this bizarre non sequitur and so made none. “No. She stayed there, all right, yelling in my ear and shaking me and insisting on helping me up even though she’s about as tall as that wood nymph statue in your garden, and with similar features, too . . .” He paused, considering, then shook his head. “But not really. She actually looks a lot more like that shepherdess.”
“Shepherdess?”
“Yes. In your glass globe,” he explained distractedly. “Not physically, but there’s a quality of careless . . . I don’t know.” He shook his head, defeated by his inability to properly describe the girl.
“As soon as I was on my feet she started in about the pen again, only her male friend had arrived by now—the one I mentioned who supposedly gave it to her—and he finally explained that he’d borrowed the pen off my table when I’d gone after Cornelia.”
“Where was Cornelia going?”
“Cornelia? Oh, she had a ticket to some lecture and it turned out Lionel did too, so they went off together. Anyway, she said—”
“Who said?”
“The girl, Grandfather. Please try to attend.”
“Believe it or not, I am.”
“Anyway, she said, and I quote, Grandfather, ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ and smiled with a sort of regal forbearance, like a queen forced to deal with a simpleminded peasant. Then she handed me my pen and then she vanished.”
His grandfather clapped his knee. “I knew she would eventually vanish!”
“And she took my jacket.”
His grandfather nodded.
“Why would she do that?”
“Take your jacket?”
“No, all the rest of it.” He felt like he was twelve again, trying to sort out the mystery of why the cook’s daughter had taken an inexplicable aversion to him when he’d returned from boarding school on one of his infrequent visits home, tossing her head and flouncing off whenever he said, “Hello.”
“I haven’t the faintest notion,” his grandfather said with a broad grin. Why he should find the situation in the least amusing was beyond Ptolemy. “What’s her name?”
“Name? Why . . . I don’t know.” An odd feeling of disquiet seized him at this realization.
Ptolemy stood up, annoyed and exasperated. He’d already wasted enough time wondering about the girl. “Anyway, that’s how I came to have a black eye. Now that I’ve satisfied your curiosity perhaps you can satisfy mine and tell me why you sent for me.”
His grandfather studied him for a long moment before replying. “I have an errand I need you to do for me.”
“Of course. What is it?”
Ptolemy stopped in front of the wrought iron gate and tipped his dripping black umbrella back to better peer at the manor house. He wasn’t certain he had the right address. He pulled the folded paper from his mackintosh pocket and checked it against the placard embedded in the brick hitching post next to the gate; this was it, all right.
Once it might have been a prime example of Georgian architecture. No longer. It looked like pensioners’ apartments. Or a not-particularly-well-funded charity hospital. A pea gravel drive sprouting tufts of grass arced in front of a slightly skewed front portico. From roof to base, dark streaks defaced the stone façade, marking places where the drain spouts had long ago come undone. A few of the upper windows were shuttered and, as evinced by the ivy growing across the planks, had been for some time. On the gabled eastern end, a pile of branches adorned the chimney top, home to a stork.
And yet, despite all that, the warm light glowing in the tall, front-facing windows and the incongruous pot of brilliant red geraniums sitting at the bottom of the steps leading up to the porch made it seem somehow inviting.
He pushed open the gate and closed it behind him, stepping over the water-filled ruts in the drive on his way up to the house. At the front door, he looked for a doorbell and, finding none, lifted the heavy knocker, letting it fall just as a wet, tailless cat slipped by him and shot through the four-inch opening under the front window.
From the other side of the door he heard the muffled sound of voices, one raised in question, another answering. The edge of the lace curtain covering the window moved, fell back into place, the door in front of him opened, and there she stood.
He gaped at her. She looked entirely respectable today, having traded the low-cut blue dress for a serviceable white blouse and dark gray skirt, a plain linen apron stretched taut around slender hips, her gleaming brown hair tied in a soft knot at the nape of her neck. A few curls trailed down to caress a rosy cheek. Behind her, the tailless cat sat on a threadbare Oriental carpet in a central hall and eyed him unblinkingly.
She tipped her head, her gaze traveling deliberately up and down his length. She didn’t look at all surprised. In fact, she looked quite sanguine, as though she’d expected to open the door and find him dripping on her doorstep. She smiled, a roguish curve of her lips, one brow arching above her shining hazel eyes. Humor. He’d known she couldn’t hold a serious thought.
“Don’t tell me,” she finally said. “It was the wrong pen.”
“What? No.”
She set a hand on her hip. “No? Then you’ve come for your jacket. I’ll just—”
“Jacket? No. No, I didn’t even know you were here.”
She laughed, a pretty, infectious sound. “Now, that’s just plain silly. Why else would you be here?”
The question struck him as bizarrely apt. He stared at her, confused, a condition into which this young lady seemed to all-too-easily reduce him. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here.”
“That’s impossible. You can’t be—”
“Tch-tch-tch.” She silenced him, making a metronome of her index finger. “It is and I can. The question better asked is why are you following me?”
“I tell you, I had no idea you lived here.” The idea that she thought him capable of imposing himself on her in such a manner took him aback. “I wasn’t following you.”
She gave an unladylike snort. “Oh, aye. You just happened to show up here, twenty miles from London, the day after you ripped the seam of my dress open. Tell me another.”
“Tell you another what?” With each passing second he felt more and more discombobulated. “And that was an accident.”
If he’d believed in sorcery, he would have thought someone had put a spell on him, one that had caused his placid, well-ordered, and well-arranged life to tumble into pandemonium. And the sorceress would probably be her. No, he thought, undoubtedly it would be her.
He tried gathering his dignity. “I assure you, er, miss, er . . .”
“Eastlake,” she supplied. “Lucy Eastlake.”
“I assure you, Miss Eastlake, I would never insult a young woman in such a manner.”
The warmth faded from her extraordinary eyes. He had the distinct impression that until this moment she hadn’t realized such behavior would be considered offensive.
“Oh. Well, then, why are you here?” An unpleasant idea seemed to occur to her for she suddenly frowned. “You’re not from the phone company, are you?”
“Phone company? No. I have come to see—”
“Lucy?” A genteel female voice called from deeper within the house a second before an elderly woman in an oilcloth coat appeared in the hallway, stomping mud off her rubberized boots. She was rail thin, with a long, sharp-featured face and deep-set blue eyes, soft white hair floating in a nimbus about her head. “Who is that you’re talking to, dear? We saw a man coming up the drive and so I came directly. It isn’t fair you always have to—”
She stopped abruptly and stared.
He took a chance. “Miss Litton?”
Her eyes went round, her head snapping up on her slender, crepe-hung neck like a startled grouse, setting the wattle swinging. “Oh,” she said, then, “Oh,” and then what sounded like, “Tom,” and then her eyelids fluttered shut.
He caught her before she hit the ground.
“In here.” The girl, Lucy, p
ushed open the hall door and stood back, ushering Ptolemy into a front parlor. Once inside, he gently laid the old woman on a divan that had seen better days while Lucy jerked a bouquet of fall asters from the vase standing on a nearby table and dunked the end of her apron into the water. He stepped back as she knelt down beside the unconscious woman and gently dabbed at her brow.
The elderly lady stirred. Her eyelids fluttered open. “What happened?”
“It’s all right, dear,” Lucy said, relaxing back on her heels. “You just had a bit of a start.”
“I thought I’d seen—”
“Is someone here?” another female voice demanded from somewhere deeper in the interior of the house. “Lavinia thought a man was at the front door.” An elderly dumpling of a woman, her retroussé nose turned up from her double chin, appeared in the doorway. She stopped short upon seeing him. “You’re not from the phone company, are you?”
“No,” Lucy answered. She waved a hand in his direction. “This is the fellow I was telling you about, the one whose pen I nipped the other night.”
“Good heavens!” The plump woman puffed out her cheeks like a disgruntled bull terrier and started into the room. “I realize that you young people follow a different set of standards today, but still! To stalk a young lady to her home—” She stopped abruptly, having spied the reclining figure of the other old lady. “What’s wrong with Livie?”
“I had a bit of a startle, is all. Quite silly,” the woman on the divan replied. “I’m quite all right now.”
“She fainted,” Lucy explained. “She took one look at this fellow, called out ‘Tom!’ and fainted dead away.” She turned her green-gold eyes on him. “Your name isn’t Tom, is it?”
“No, it’s Ptolemy Archibald Grant.”
“Truly?” she sounded unconvinced. “Well, you don’t look like a Ptolemy. Does anyone actually call you that?”
“Yes. But most people call me Mister Grant,” he said quellingly.
She was not to be quelled. “Grant?” She laughed. “I should say not. People will mistake you for some sort of endowment. Maybe Archibald? No . . .” She snapped her fingers. “I have it: Archie.”
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