She spoke with quiet vehemence, perhaps about a friend she’d known in Italy.
“In every fairy tale, there’s a wolf,” Grey said. “In every garden, a serpent or a poison frog. Do you miss Italy?”
He was changing the subject, or trying to.
“I have money, Grey. I have pots and buckets of it, and it’s my money, earned enduring years of marriage. I will sponsor your expedition to India.”
She flung the offer at him as if she knew he’d refuse it, for he must.
He rose and took the letter from her. “I am more grateful to you than I can say, Francesca, but you are a widow, alone in the world but for two aunts whom I suspect you support. I see how you attire yourself here—no jewels, no costly silks, no ostentation whatsoever. Even your nightgown bespeaks a woman of modest means. You’re young, and what funds you have must last the rest of your life. I cannot allow you to do this.”
She whirled away. “Allow? You cannot allow? Who are you to allow me anything, Greyville Trenton?”
He was an idiot. “I misspoke. I cannot ask you to do this. An expedition is exorbitantly costly. Stock all the machetes you please, and if nobody lays in a supply of whetstones to keep them sharp, you’re doomed by the fifth day in the jungle. If some idiot accepts a block of sugar instead of salt, more doom. The contingencies and precautions all cost money, and I cannot safeguard my future at the expense of your own.”
Francesca was standing before the fire, her arms crossed, and Grey felt as if he were bludgeoning her with a poker.
“You were willing to accept money from the comtesse.”
“She is a noblewoman,” Grey said. “She has an obligation to do what she can for the greater good with the means entrusted to her. She has taken such risks before and has extensive family to care for her if an expedition comes to naught.”
The argument had the barest pretension to logic, but Francesca could not possibly grasp the sums at issue and that the money—an entire fortune—could simply disappear. All Grey had to show for his trip to Greenland was a few papers in scholarly journals and memoirs purchased mostly by his friends.
Also a lung fever that had nearly killed him.
“That’s your justification for rejecting my help?” Francesca said. “I’m not a noblewoman?”
“You’re oversimplifying. I cannot be responsible for squandering your widow’s mite, Francesca. I’ll sell my estate in Kent before I’ll allow you to put your future at risk for me.”
“Don’t do that,” she said, marching up to him. “Don’t part with the only asset you have of your own, the one place you might call home, in a desperate gamble to bring the family finances right. Don’t do it, Grey.”
Her previous display had been pique, annoyance, or mere anger. This was rage.
“People sell estates all the time, Francesca, and the more London sprawls into the countryside, the more the estate is worth. I will provision a modest expedition, let my brother manage the remaining proceeds in the funds, and content myself with a succession of projects that allow me to do what I do best.”
He’d never planned on selling his only property, and the idea made him bilious now.
“Englishmen go home, Grey,” Francesca said. “My father told me this, and he was right. An Englishman might spend twenty years in India, Canada, or Cape Town, but he’ll come home. If you suffer an injury in the field, where will you retire for the rest of your life? If the title needs an heir, where will that future earl be raised? Under your brother’s roof? In a canoe? And you’ll entrust your money—the last of your private funds—to a man who can’t understand a basic budget?”
She was magnificent in her ire, and her litany was nothing more than Grey’s own list of anxieties, though there was plenty of time for Sebastian and Annabelle to have a son.
“I mention selling the estate as a last resort,” Grey said. “I can always sell a farm or two first.”
“No, you cannot,” Francesca said, pacing before the fire. “You sell a farm or two, and your income from rent drops, and the value of your estate falls too, because you sell off the best tenancies first. You have a bit of cash, but that cash always seems to disappear into necessary repairs, pensions for the elderly retainers, or emergencies. Do not sell your land.”
Her husband had been wealthy, and she spoke with the conviction of one who knew her subject well. Still, she wasn’t merely lecturing, she was quietly ranting.
“Why are you so upset, Francesca?” She hadn’t been this emotional discussing her husband’s infidelities or his death.
“Because you are an idiot, Greyville Trenton. You are the most intelligent, dear, principled, hardworking idiot I’ve ever met. Your brother is the earl, your mother is a countess. They are relying on you to risk your life, over and over, to keep them in pearl necklaces, matched teams, and Bond Street tailoring. Forget an obligation to do what they can for the greater good. Where is their obligation to do what they can for you?”
She asked a question that Grey had not permitted himself to pose.
“You make a valid point.” More than that, Grey could not say. His family had no idea the dangers he’d faced, and he’d left them to their ignorance rather than risk them meddling. They likely pictured the Amazon forest as a dampish place populated with spotted house cats, pond frogs, and the occasional parrot to add a dash of color.
“You mean I’m right,” Francesca said. “You’re right about something too.”
“An increasingly rare occurrence.”
“You said you were poor company and advised me to take myself off. I’ll oblige you. Leave the letter from the comtesse on the desk. I’ll answer her in the morning.”
She left without a hug, a kiss, or a touch of the hand, and she didn’t even have the decency to slam the door.
* * *
As Pietro lay dying, he’d stopped referring to the time when he’d regain his health and instead resorted to a series of warnings. Each of them had begun with, You must listen to me, Francesca.
The man who’d seldom listened to his wife demanded that she listen to him, and Francesca had tried her best to oblige.
He’d told her widows were vulnerable, and she might find pleasure where she chose, but to guard her heart. Always end an affair too soon, he’d said, end it with a smile and fond kiss. Let no man develop assumptions where her future was concerned—or her money.
Sir Greyville would have failed spectacularly at Italian court intrigue. He refused to develop designs on a fortune laid at his booted feet.
“He’d make a study of an intrigue,” Francesca muttered. “Sketch its parts in the wild.”
The maid looked up from banking the fire, but said nothing, for Francesca had spoken in Italian. Working with Grey’s notes, calling upon Latin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and even the occasional reference to Dutch, had revitalized her linguistic facility.
Also her body and, damn the man, her heart.
“Will that be all, ma’am?” the maid asked. Ma’am, not Your Grace, not even signora.
“Yes, thank you.”
The maid curtseyed and departed on a soft click of the door latch, and then Francesca was alone. She had no intention of wasting a night in solitude when she might spend it with Grey, even though he was a stubborn, pig-headed, arrogant…
No, not arrogant. Protective, but also presuming.
Francesca could not afford to indulge his gentlemanly sensibilities. She gathered the candles from the mantel, sat down at the escritoire, and took out paper, ink, sand, and pen. She was halfway through a letter to her banker in York when the door opened.
“I apologize,” Grey said, closing the door. “I’m not very good at it, and not sure it will do any good when I cannot accept your money, but I upset you and must make what amends I can.”
He was attired in a worn blue velvet dressing gown and his black cotton pajama pants, though his feet were bare.
“You’ll catch your death without slippers,” Francesca said. “Give m
e a moment to finish this letter, and you can make another try at soothing my ruffled feathers, though you’re right. It won’t do any good.”
While she signed and sanded her letter, Grey wandered the room like a wild creature in a menagerie—restless, exuding unhappiness, in want of activity. He opened the wardrobe, where pressed gowns hung and slippers were lined up by color. His next investigation led him to the cedar-lined trunk at the foot of the bed, where Francesca kept shawls, pelisses, cloaks, and boots.
He closed the trunk and sat on it. “I must get to India, Francesca, but I’ll not bankrupt you to do it.”
“You wouldn’t bankrupt me.” She hadn’t the means to prove that to him, though, not here in England, and he’d demand proof.
“You can’t know that. The optimal approach is to outfit an entire vessel, hand-choose my subordinates, bring all manner of botanical equipment with me and enough of my personal effects that if I never return to England, I can establish a household, conservatory, and laboratory of my own. The effort is comparable to moving a small, highly specialized army.”
And one stubborn Englishman.
“I have resources you do not,” she said, capping the ink bottle and pouring the sand back into its container. “By way of compromise, please allow me to contact them on your behalf. You’d be surprised how many princesses and dowager duchesses a diplomat’s daughter befriends at an Italian court. Don’t let your pride get in the way of your reason.”
Grey had great pride, but was also eminently rational.
“You think women will fund my next investigation?” He hadn’t dismissed the idea out of hand, which was encouraging. “I had considered the comtesse an anomaly, an eccentric.”
Whose coin he’d been willing to take.
“You drink tea in England largely because Catherine of Braganza made it a popular court drink, else you men would have hoarded it in your coffee shops. Think of the last time you took tea, Grey, and the time before that. A lady presided, and she doesn’t go through her day without drinking tea several times.”
He was on his feet again, poking his nose into Francesca’s effects. He lifted the lid of her jewelry box, which held only the few decorative pieces Francesca traveled with.
“I will concede that tea is a lady’s drink. What would you say to these women?”
“That I’ve learned of an investment opportunity full of both risk and potential reward.” He has dark eyes, dark hair, a brilliant mind, and a good heart, for all he’s sometimes dunderheaded.
Grey examined a strand of pink pearls that had been Francesca’s first gift to herself as a widow. “All investment opportunities present those factors. What else?”
“That if this investigation goes well, greater society could benefit as much as the investors do, eventually, but that scientific snobbery means this project will likely not receive the attention it deserves from other sources.”
He threaded the pearls through his fingers and sat cross-legged on the bed. “That’s very good, and you’re right. Haring about India in search of optimal conditions for a tea farm is hardly glamorous, not when compared with orchids in Mexican jungles or emeralds from darkest Africa. I also can’t disclose exactly why I’m looking now, lest I put my own fledging operation at risk.”
He toyed with the pearls, luminous beads among candlelit shadows. “Send a half-dozen letters, no more. I can’t have it said that Sir Greyville is growing desperate, though I am.”
He’d apologized, he’d listened to her, he’d made concessions. Francesca had by no means made her last argument, but the time had come for her to compromise as well.
“You’re desperate to find funding?” she asked.
He regarded her across the room, his expression unreadable. “Very nearly. I’m also desperate to see you wearing these pearls and nothing else.”
They had so little time. “If I asked you to leave, would you?”
He was off the bed, the pearls put back where they belonged. “Of course. I’ll bid you pleasant dreams and hope to see you in the morning.”
Another man would have tried to change her mind, flirt her past her frustrations, or explain to her that his stubbornness was an effort to put her best interests above his own. With Grey, Francesca didn’t need to protect her privacy, and maybe because of that, she couldn’t protect her heart.
“Stay with me,” she said. “For the time we have left, please stay with me.”
* * *
Lady Hester Stanhope was said to be leading an excavation of the ancient city of Ashkelon—leading it, not tagging along after her father, brother, or husband.
After serving as hostess for no less person than the British prime minster, she’d collected a companion, a personal physician, and such other retainers and supplies as she’d needed, before embarking on an adventure that was the envy of half the British scientific community.
Where it would lead, nobody quite knew. The scientific establishment seemed torn between discrediting her as an eccentric and admitting grudging envy for her pluck. Nothing—not shipwreck, not cultural prohibitions against women, not privation or hardship—had deterred her from her objective.
Caroline Herschel, sister to the recently knighted William Herschel, had been his salaried assistant when he’d served as royal astronomer. The woman had discovered no less than eight comets, among her other contributions.
How many anomalous data points could one man’s theory of himself as scientist withstand?
Grey set aside the question as imponderable, for science was useful only in situations lending themselves to measurement by the five senses. More complicated questions, such as how to put matters right with Francesca, required tools Grey did not command.
Last night, he’d apologized, but he hadn’t agreed to take her money. For the first time, they’d made love silently, no lover’s talk, no whispered confidences or spirited arguments. The aftermath had left him wrung out and, in some way, unsatisfied.
He missed Francesca already, though she sat at her customary place across the office, her pen moving steadily. She’d sealed up her letter to the countess before Grey had come down, and now she was occupied writing to her “resources.”
“Francesca, might you attend me for a moment?”
“I’ll be through here in two minutes.”
He took out a clean sheet of paper and let his pencil flow over the blank space. When she’d stormed off last night, he’d sat in his pillowed chair and tried to sketch her. Without a live model, he’d made a bad job of it.
“That’s done,” she said, setting her correspondence aside. “What would you like to discuss?”
“Join me on the sofa, please.”
Francesca took off his best glasses—maybe they were hers by now—folded her arms, and remained in her chair.
He still hadn’t the goddamned knack of phrasing his needs as requests. “I meant, would you please join me on the sofa?” Grey said, depositing his own aching backside in the middle of the cushions. She’d have to sit next to him, one way or the other.
“For a brilliant man, you are difficult to educate,” she said, taking the place to his right. “But I do see progress.”
Grey took her hand, knowing full well she was still unhappy with him. They’d made love, they’d not made peace.
“Stratton informs me that your coach should be repaired by week’s end. You’ll be free to resume your journey by Monday at the latest. Will you allow me to write to you?”
She stared into the fire rather than at him. “Why?”
Because he’d go mad without knowing how she fared, because his theories would not be as well-reasoned without her questions to test them, because nobody would celebrate with him as sincerely when he’d finished a publishable version of his accounts.
“Because there might be a child.”
She withdrew her hand. “But you…”
“I have taken precautions, but conception can occur nonetheless. I have at least two godsons whose existence attes
ts to this fact.” Darling little fellows he didn’t get to see often enough.
“And if I’ve conceived?”
What was the right answer, assuming there was one? “I will, of course, take responsibility for the consequences of my actions.” Not an outright proposal, which Francesca might well fling in his face, but not a wrong answer, Grey hoped.
And why hadn’t he proposed when they’d first become lovers?
Because he had so little to give her. No real home, no income other than what little he set aside from the revenue his estate generated, no solid prospects of a professional nature—none. A time of shared pleasure was all he could honestly offer.
That answer didn’t satisfy him. He doubted it would satisfy her.
“You are a good man,” she said, “and in the grip of circumstances not entirely of your own making. I have ample means to raise a child, Grey, and you needn’t fear I’d foster out my own progeny. After two miscarriages, if I have a chance to be a mother, then propriety can go hang, and a loving, joyously devoted mother I shall be.”
He should not have been surprised, at either the ferocity of her maternal instinct, or his reaction to her assurances that means were the essence of the discussion. He’d seen many families in far-flung locations whose means would be pitiful by British standards, and yet, their children had been happy and thriving.
“I cannot make demands of you,” Grey said, “but I can ask that you inform me if such developments are in the offing.”
“I’ll think about it.”
He also could not insist that he had a right to know. Not even that monument to patriarchal arrogance, the British legal system, gave a man the right to supervise the upbringing of his children unless that man was married to their mother.
Grey rose and for once could not make himself return to the damned chair behind the desk. “Please know that your joy in and devotion to the child would be matched only by my own. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll catch a breath of fresh air while the sun yet shines.”
* * *
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