‘I will make it right, Max.’ His eyes went to where his fingers had laced with hers and simply stared. ‘I promise... We shall send another letter admitting to my deception and that will bring it all to a crashing halt.’
‘It is too late... They are already on their way, Effie. I am to expect them tomorrow afternoon...’
‘Then I shall be there tomorrow afternoon and I shall tell them the truth to their face.’ His eyes finally rose to meet hers and he nodded. ‘I dare say they will be so furious to learn it is me—the most persistent and irritating bane of their life—they’ll order the edition delayed or, at the very least, every copy of that journal destroyed as a mark of protest before they can send it out. Rivenhall’s secrets will remain exactly that—secret. I promise...’
Her hand reached up to touch his face and he leaned into her palm. Then immediately pulled away when her tingling fingers had sought his hair and he had given her an intense and troubled look she couldn’t begin to decipher.
Other than it was troubled and she was the cause of it.
Feeling instantly awkward at indulging in such an obviously affectionate gesture when he had made it plain days ago he did not reciprocate the feeling, she glanced at her offending appendage, cursing it for having a mind of its own, then shoved the guilty hand behind her back in case it was tempted to go wandering again. Which it was.
‘Thank you, Effie.’ He was backing away, putting several feet of distance between them. Distance which felt more temporal than physical. Significant again, as so many odd moments with Max so often were. ‘I shall see you tomorrow evening, then...’
‘Stay.’ She didn’t want him to leave. Despite all her anger at him, all her hurt at his cutting uninterest, she couldn’t bear him going just yet when he was clearly upset and she had caused it. ‘You are soaked through. Have some tea... I’ll fetch some towels.’
‘No.’ He couldn’t meet her eyes again. ‘Pointless. I’ll only get soaked the second I leave.’ He gazed longingly towards the door and she felt her throat tighten at the blatant rebuff.
‘Mrs Farley made fruitcake.’ Why was she practically begging when only minutes ago she had wanted to give him what for? Pathetically, she gestured towards the desk where the housekeeper had left a slab of his favourite confection and was horrified to see the rusty spearhead still sticking out of it. The sight of it seemed to bring Max up short, too, because he blinked at it, then at her and shook his head emphatically.
‘No, thank you.’ Too polite. Too formal. He couldn’t meet her gaze. All very explicit signals he had misinterpreted her comfort as an attempted seduction and was plainly eager to run for the hills at the hideous prospect. ‘Adam and the children are returning back to London shortly and I promised Eleanor I would be there to say goodbye...’
‘Of course.’ It was staggering that a second rejection from him could hurt as much as the first, when the first had been so cutting and decisive she really no longer harboured false expectations or ridiculously girlish hope for more. Yet it did. Max had made it obvious he did not want her in a romantic sense—she’d already had that spelled out loud and clear—but clearly he no longer wanted to be her friend any more either and, as much as she had fantasised about stepping back from the relationship to serve him right for disappointing her, knowing he would be nothing but relieved at the news was an awful blow.
‘I will send the carriage tomorrow.’
She found herself bobbing a stiff and painfully awkward curtsy in the wake of the new parameters he had set, when she had never curtsied to him before. ‘That is very thoughtful of you.’
He bowed and hot tears prickled at this new starched formality. ‘Good day.’
No, it wasn’t. It was one of the worst. For the first time in a month she was categorically relegated back to being the annoying and peculiar oddity again, when for a while, with him, she had cast off those shackles and just been Effie.
‘Good day to you, too...my lord.’
* * *
‘Oh, I understand perfectly, little Brother! You hold all of her hopes and dreams, the fruit of two years of her labours and the power to help her in the palm of your hand and intend to crush it into dust. And I refuse to be a party to it!’
Max had known it was a mistake to confide anything to Eleanor because she always took the opposite stance to his, and always had, purely to vex him.
‘Then make yourself scarce. Or better still, I’ll saddle you a horse right this minute and you can follow your family back to town. I dare say you’ll have caught them long before they reach the first posting inn!’
His sister’s cup clattered in her saucer, sending tea sloshing over her skirts and the floor. ‘I might just do that! Because I am thoroughly sick of you and your dark moods! And thoroughly sickened by what you are about to do to poor Effie!’
‘Poor Effie!’ How typical she wouldn’t take his side. ‘Poor blasted Effie used my name without my permission...’ And invited strangers into his sanctuary. And crushed his stupid hopes in her fist, too. He was still reeling at her reaction.
‘Tell me, Max—if she’d have asked, what exactly would have been your response?’
‘Well I’d have...’ Said no. ‘Counselled her against using a pseudonym. Especially mine!’
‘You’re a two-faced coward, Max Aldersley!’
‘Two-faced? Two-faced!’
‘You heard me. What happened to the table-thumping advocate of last week? The one who was adamant Effie should publish her work because it was an outrage that she couldn’t?’
‘She should publish her work. As her. Not as me.’
‘Fiddlesticks! This has nothing to do with her borrowing your name and everything to do with the invitation she extended to the stuffy antiquarians who continually thwart her at every turn. You do not want them in the house!’
He couldn’t deny that part bothered him the most. It might not have last week when he had vociferously thumped the table—but last week she hadn’t trampled over the tender new shoots of his self-confidence and withdrawn herself entirely from him like a tortoise hiding in its shell.
‘You just want to be left alone.’
‘I don’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry overrunning Rivenhall once that article gets out...’
‘You don’t want anyone to see your ugly scars, Max!’
He recoiled as if slapped at the harsh comment, because, even in his darkest days when his skin had been a bloody and festering mess, Eleanor had never once openly acknowledged he had scars which others found abhorrent.
She pointed at her forehead hard. ‘I do have some idea how your thick head works! That’s what you think of them, isn’t it? Unseemly? Unsightly? You don’t want people staring or whispering behind your back... You don’t want to see their shock.’
‘By shock you mean disgust, surely?’ If they were going to finally speak plainly, then he’d speak plainly and be damned. ‘Recoiling in horror in case this mess is contagious! Crossing the street... Covering their children’s eyes.’ Eleanor had been there that day and yet neither of them had mentioned it at the time or since. To all intents and purposes, they had both been oblivious to it all because that was the easier option. More civilised. A denial of the truth—all pretence and all damn lies. ‘Of course I don’t want strangers in my blasted house gawping at my face, Eleanor! This is the one place where I can avoid all that humiliation!’
His sister’s anger dissolved at what he knew was a bereft and hopeless expression. ‘I understand your reluctance Max. I know the last eighteen months have been awful and the behaviour of some people hurtful in the extreme, but the scars really do not look half as bad as they once did...and you do need to come to terms with them.’
‘Easy for you to say.’
‘They are not going to get any better, Max, no matter how much you hope they might. They have been the same for months. Is it your int
ention to hide away for ever just because of a bit of...?’
‘Gnarled and hideous skin?’ He had no patience for whatever diplomatic adjectives she was scrabbling for.
‘You are a long way off hideous, Max.’
‘And a long way off handsome.’
‘Is that what bothers you the most? That you are no longer as handsome as you once were? When only the shallow and superficial would ever care about such nonsense.’ They both knew she was alluding to Miranda. ‘Effie isn’t like that at all. I doubt she even sees the scars now that she knows you.’
He scoffed, disbelieving. Wishing it were true, but accepting that it wasn’t. ‘You really need to take off those rose-tinted spectacles, Eleanor, and face the harsh facts...’
‘You need face the harsh facts, too, Max. If you pursue this course of action out of self-preservation, you will only end up pushing her away in the process. This decision will ruin things between you.’
‘How many times do I have to tell you there is nothing between us?’ At least not any more. ‘There never was.’
‘I have eyes, Max. I can see how much she means to you.’
‘We are friends.’ Were friends. Before he’d acted on impulse and ruined everything with one short, ill-considered and life-altering kiss. ‘Just friends, Eleanor.’
His sister smiled maternally and reached across the table to squeeze his arm. ‘Friendship is the perfect foundation to build love upon... Tell her how you feel.’
‘Out of the question.’ The words had flown out before he had considered the gravitas of them. Typically, his sister grasped them straight away and leapt on them.
‘Maybe she feels the same? Have you considered that?’
‘She doesn’t.’ There was no point in denying it when he’d already let the cat out of the bag. Eleanor would never let it go unless he killed her romanticised and forlorn hope stone dead, just as his had been.
He watched her face fall and saw the sympathy in her eyes. ‘You’ve told her already, then?’
‘Not in so many words.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake, Max. Then how could you possibly...?’
He held up his palm and tried not to show how thoroughly wounded he was by Effie’s latest rejection. ‘I am not some gauche and inexperienced virgin, Eleanor... I do know when a woman isn’t romantically interested in a man.’
They tended to react to an unwanted kiss with obvious discomfort as a rule, then hastily retreated, and in case he was in any doubt she felt disgusted at the prospect, her response this afternoon had confirmed it. She had inadvertently touched his scars and, when he had pulled back—filled with longing and foolish hope that to her they really didn’t matter—she had stared briefly at her palm as if they had burned it hideously, too, before she fisted it behind her back and he’d watched her erect a sturdy and prickly fence around herself to keep him well away. He still felt nauseous thinking about it because that hideously polite and distant curtsy had almost killed him. And he certainly did not want to contemplate exactly why she had stabbed the fruitcake.
‘Perhaps you used to have a good gauge on women—but I suspect your view of such things has become skewed since Miranda...’
Max leapt out of his seat to show his sister their conversation was done. He was not going to rehash the demise of his engagement on the same day as he had buried his blossoming dreams of Effie.
‘Maybe the enforced proximity of this unwelcome visit is exactly what you both need to sort things out. Why don’t I have some rooms readied for your guests in case you change your mind before tomorrow?’
Enforced proximity would kill him for sure. ‘The long and short of it is...’ He sucked in a calming breath and decided to bite the bullet in as brief and as matter of fact a way as he could without entirely humiliating himself in the process. ‘I’ve completely and thoroughly murdered the friendship between Effie and myself.’
‘Murdered is probably a tad exaggerated...’
‘Trust me. It really isn’t. It’s been dead for almost a week already.’
‘Which is why you are actively avoiding her.’
He hadn’t entirely avoided her. He had sent her a heartfelt note, a tenuous olive branch suggesting they talk about it all, and she had ignored it. Doubtless she had only been polite yesterday because she was so eager to have her research published, although it hadn’t lasted long.
Eleanor’s expression was filled with pity now and he suppressed the urge to dash away from it so he could curl up in a ball somewhere and lick all his latest flayed, open wounds in private. ‘Prolonging the agony of it all to continue the acquaintance is...is...’ Emotion strangled his vocal cords and threatened to overwhelm him, so to cover it he walked to the window and stared sightlessly out for several moments before he could choke out a response. ‘It would be...unbearable, Eleanor.’
Her silence said it all. It stretched for a good minute before she spoke again.
‘Can it be fixed?’
‘No.’
‘Are you certain? Only you’ve come such a long way these past weeks, Max, and I credit your friendship with Effie as the cause. Maybe you have misread things? Or panicked unduly? If you loathe yourself, I should imagine it is very difficult to believe another would see beyond the things you hate about yourself. Maybe she just needs a little time... Or wants to be wooed a little.’
Wooed! He would laugh at the ridiculous suggestion if it weren’t all so tragic. ‘It cannot be fixed.’
‘Most things can be fixed, Max—it all depends on how badly you want it and whether you can both be bothered to take the time and trouble to do so.’
‘We would both have to want to fix it, Eleanor.’ And she didn’t.
‘Would you like me to intervene? I could talk to her and...’
He shook his head. ‘Absolutely not! I want no interference.’ No more humiliation. ‘I’ve made my decision and so has she.’
‘Very well...’ He felt his sister’s hand rest on his shoulder. ‘All I know is—whether it be as a friend or otherwise, it is plainly obvious Effie cares for you a great deal, too. And you will regret crushing her dreams, Max. Because if you do, then whatever you have or might have is as dead as a doornail for sure and it really will be too late to resurrect it once it is done.’
Chapter Seventeen
Three antiquarians...
With a disapproving Eleanor noticeably absent from the drawing room, Max and Effie had sat in brittle silence in the half an hour since she had arrived until the sound of the most unwelcome carriage in the history of carriages could be heard on the gravel outside. There had been so many confusing and conflicting things he had wanted to say to fill the awkward void, he didn’t trust himself to say any of them without coming off as either entirely desperate or entirely pathetic. She simply looked drawn and miserable and he blamed himself for both, thanks to his sister’s persistent and unyielding argument that he was crushing Effie’s dreams regardless of the fact that it was the bane who was largely in the wrong because she had gone behind his back.
‘They’re here.’
He had never heard her voice sound so flat or so resigned. Where had all the fight and bloody-minded determination he associated wholly with her and secretly admired gone today? A stupid question when he already knew the answer.
Crushed in his fist.
But was self-preservation in this case selfish as Eleanor believed? Max had been mulling it over for hours and still wasn’t sure which of them was right. All he knew was how he felt and that was thoroughly wretched. He loathed himself—inside and out. And the silent woman before him certainly did not look as if she had any desire to be wooed. She could barely look at him.
‘I suppose we should go and greet them... Get it over with...’ He would support her in that at least. And defend her if they dared to diminish her achievements simply because of her sex. And even do hi
s damnedest to get them to publish her research under her name exactly as he had originally promised—because a promise was a promise no matter and he couldn’t bring himself to break his to her now he had pondered things long and hard.
‘Yes... Of course. The sooner it is done, the sooner they will be gone.’ And so would she and his world would be plunged into darkness again.
Max led the way, supremely conscious of her behind him, inhaling his last whiffs of her perfume and wishing he could turn back time to the second he had uncovered the shield and sent things spinning so catastrophically out of control. They arrived at the front step as the high-sprung carriage came to a halt and, before the footman could get to it, the door flew open and a grinning, short and rotund man jumped out with his pudgy hand outstretched.
‘Lord Rivenhall!’ Still beaming, the gentleman pumped Max’s hand enthusiastically. ‘I am in awe, sir! Complete awe! In all my years of research I have never read an essay so thorough, so compelling or so well written! And the attention to detail in those sketches! I cannot wait to see your magnificent pot in all its glory, examine that bracelet or cast my beady, eager eyes over your roundhouse... What a day this is! What an honour it is to meet you!’
‘Er...thank you.’ His eyes darted to Effie in the hope she could shed some light on the identity of man, but she seemed to be doing her level best to blend into one of the columns behind Smithson or melt into the flagstones. ‘And you are, sir?’
The slightly older man chuckled and slapped him on the arm as two more gentlemen alighted from the carriage. One reed thin and slightly pompous looking as he cast his critical eyes over the estate, the other so beige and nondescript he would be impossible to pick out of crowd. ‘Probably should have started with the introductions first, shouldn’t I? Sir Percival Egerton at your service, my lord. A devoted antiquarian both man and boy and, aside from digging the ground for buried treasure much like your good self, I also edit Archaeologia for my sins. As soon as your paper found its way to my desk, I knew I had to meet you.’
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