Chapter Eleven #3
He shrugged. “That, and—well, my marks at Cambridge weren’t anything to write home about.
I spent more time with my friends than I did at my studies.
I scraped through, but when I finished at university, my parents called me home to the family pile for this absurd dinner at which they sat me down and asked what, precisely, I intended to do with my life.
The implication was that I couldn’t hope to be as successful as my siblings.
There were all sorts of suggestions—had I considered working at a museum?
Or perhaps going on an archaeological dig? ”
“An—I beg your pardon?” Georgie asked. She could not imagine the state of his clothing were he to spend his days digging away in a pit somewhere under the Mediterranean sun; everything about this image was entirely incongruous.
Sebastian shrugged. “As I said, my father’s a classicist, so he could pull some strings—I expect he thought it was the only way I’d ever find gainful employment.”
“What did you read at Cambridge?” she asked curiously.
“Languages.”
She blinked; had she been given a dozen guesses, she didn’t think she’d have landed on that answer.
He did look at her now, and smiled, the dazzling, rakish grin that he seemed to have perfected over the years, although she thought that now, in the candlelight of the dusty cellar, as he sat here with her confessing his secrets into the silence, it looked a bit strained.
Perhaps, she thought, it had always looked that way, and she’d simply not been paying enough attention to notice.
“All the better to make my romantic conquests,” he said.
“Got to be able to communicate in as many languages as possible. I learned French and Latin at school, then studied Greek and German at Cambridge. I can tell you that studying German at the time didn’t make you enormously popular,” he added dryly, and Georgie nodded, recalling the suspicious treatment that a German couple who’d lived in the village when she was a girl had received during the war, for all that they’d lived in England for forty years by that point.
“In any case,” he added, a bit more quietly now, “it wasn’t much use as far as degrees went, if I didn’t want to teach or remain on at Cambridge for a doctorate.
I took the Foreign Office exam, but it didn’t work out—I scraped through the written portion, but the oral interview was a disaster.
I think they thought I was a bit of an idiot.
Turns out what works for making friends at university, or seducing pretty girls—always smiling, always up for a laugh—doesn’t serve you as well when you want powerful men to take you seriously.
That was the moment I realized that I might have gone a bit too far at turning myself into someone who would annoy my family.
And so when my father mentioned that Fitzgibbons was looking for a secretary, and that he’d recommended me for the role—he’s an old friend of Fitzy’s—I went along with it.
I needed something to do, after all, and it was easy enough—no danger that anyone would expect too much of me.
” There was an almost embarrassed note to his voice now, and Georgie, who had turned her head to look at him at some point while he was speaking, continued gazing at him now in the soft candlelight.
The effect of him—of his face, his hair, his clothing, that smile—was lessened in their present circumstances, and yet she found him almost more compelling here, for reasons she couldn’t articulate.
“Do you enjoy the work?” she asked after a long beat of silence.
He shrugged. “It’s an awful lot of paperwork—Fitzgibbons still receives a mountain of correspondence, and is constantly being invited to various ceremonies that he’s only too delighted to attend, since it gives him the chance to puff out his chest and preen and be the great detective.
But I’m actually quite organized, and I find it rather satisfying, even if…
” He hesitated, and Georgie held her breath, waiting for him to continue.
“Even if,” he said, after another couple of seconds, “I wish sometimes that he was still the Delacey Fitzgibbons I thought I was coming to work for. The great detective in truth. I’d like to help that man—like to make myself useful. It’s hardly taxing work these days.”
He sounded a bit glum as he spoke, and Georgie realized that two days ago she would not have thought him remotely interested in any work that might be described as “taxing.”
“Have you ever thought of striking out on your own?” she asked curiously. “Setting up your own agency? Surely a history of employment with Fitzgibbons would speak well of your abilities—he could even refer cases to you that were too laborious for him.”
“Ha. No.” He laughed, but it was dark and a bit sharp and so totally unlike any noise that she had heard him make thus far in their acquaintance that she was momentarily taken aback, any further response she might have uttered dying on her lips.
He glanced at her, and it was difficult to tell in the shadowy darkness, but she thought she saw his features soften slightly.
“Sorry. It’s just—Fitzgibbons would never refer a single case to me.
He won’t refer cases to anyone—he likes being highly sought after, even if he accepts almost none of the work that’s sent to him. ”
Georgie frowned. “I don’t think I like Fitzgibbons very much, based on all you’ve told me.”
“I don’t dislike him,” he said mildly. “I just… wish that the man I knew was the one he’d once been.” He paused for another moment, then glanced at her. “Because, I must say, of the detectives I’ve had to work with, Miss Radcliffe, you are by far my favorite.”
She did not know why, after two days of his calling her “darling Georgie,” largely to irritate her, she suspected, it should feel so much more intimate now to hear him address her so properly.
Perhaps because she suspected that this was the first conversation she’d ever had with him that had involved no artifice on his part whatsoever.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, suddenly and impulsively, without considering her words for even a split second, “I think you’d make a splendid detective. Should you ever gather the courage to become one.”
“Courage, is it?” he asked. “I’d like to remind you that I awoke in a darkened cellar with an unconscious lady whom I thought for a split second might be dead, and yet not a single whimper of fear escaped my lips.”
“That’s not the sort of courage I meant.”
“And yet, it’s the sort I’ve got.”
And it occurred to her, then, that he might have just betrayed something of himself—something he did not quite intend to share with her. Because she did not think she’d been imagining the strain in his voice when he’d uttered the word “dead.”
And she wondered, for all his “darling Georgie” and his flirtation and his smiles, if Sebastian Fletcher-Ford might care for her, just a little.
Just enough that the notion of her being dead might be the tiniest bit unbearable.
And, suddenly, recklessly, she wanted to know if this was true.
“Well,” she said coolly, ignoring the fact that her heart, for incomprehensible reasons, had started beating more quickly in her chest, “I’m alive and well, so there’s no need for fearful whimpering.”
He turned to look at her now.
“I know,” he said quietly. Then, quick as lightning, he reached out to take her hand in his. “It might take my body a bit longer to catch up, though.” And she realized, once she worked past the utter confusion in her mind at the feeling of her palm pressed against his, that his hand was trembling.
Because he’d been afraid for her.
She felt herself leaning toward him, as if drawn by some magnetic force. His eyes were fixed on hers, the perfect angles of his face softened by candlelight, and with his free hand he reached up to cup her cheek in his palm.
“Georgie,” he murmured, angling his face down toward her—
And then, suddenly, there was the sound of a key in the lock above them, and they jerked apart and scrambled to their feet, their hands still clasped, as a sudden shaft of light briefly blinded them, and a scolding voice said, “I just really don’t think a kidnapping was called for!”
Georgie squinted upward, to find…
Miss de Vere and Miss Singh beaming down at them.
“Hello,” Miss de Vere said with a pleased smile. “Did you require a rescue?”