Chapter 2 #2
“Not a valet,” she said, with the certainty of someone reaching a conclusion they should perhaps have reached earlier. “Your speech is too refined. Too educated. Are you the viscount’s secretary? His private secretary?”
Nicholas considered the available options. “Something of that nature.”
“You attended university.”
It was not quite a question. “Oxford,” he said.
Her expression changed. It was not quite eagerness. It was more purposeful than that, more directed, the way a pointer dog shifts when it has detected the thing it has been bred to find.
“Oxford,” she repeated. “Which college?”
“Christ Church.”
“Do you still have connections there? Access? Could you enter the Bodleian? Radcliffe Camera? I mean … without difficulty?” Her spectacles slid down her nose with every excited outburst she blurted, tipping precariously as if they could not quite keep up with her thoughts.
“I expect so. One does not generally have difficulty entering the Bodleian if one is—” He stopped himself. An educated man. It would be insensitive when the young lady was so eager yet could not herself ever be considered an educated man. “If one has a legitimate scholarly interest.”
“Excellent.” She pushed her spectacles back up her nose with one finger, a gesture so habitual it had clearly stopped being noticed as a gesture some years prior. “I am going to make you a proposition.”
“Are you,” said Nicholas, a smirk spreading his cheeks.
“A professional proposition,” she said, with the slight sharpness from a noticed implication and an intention to address it before it develops. She clearly had experience doing so, but her gaze slid over his shoulders again as if she could not quite help herself.
He could well imagine her having to sternly turn inappropriate men away in an academic town that had far too many men and far too few women, but she appeared in two minds about turning his interest away. Nicholas found this unexpectedly flattering.
“I require the assistance of an educated man with access to Oxford’s restricted collections.
As a woman, I cannot enter the Bodleian.
I cannot access the reading room at the Radcliffe Camera.
I cannot present myself to the college scholars without either a male relative in attendance or being dismissed outright.
” Her firm little chin lifted slightly in pride.
The gesture said she had lamented this singular injustice many times and arrived at a position of cool, factual contempt.
“I need a proxy. Someone who can enter these spaces on my behalf, retrieve the materials I need, and take direction from me on what to look for.”
Nicholas watched her, noting how her eyes slid back to his shoulders. “And you are proposing that I—”
“You are a secretary. You are educated. You have Oxford connections.” She said it briskly, as though assembling the evidence for a verdict. “What does the viscount pay you? One hundred and fifty pounds a year? Two hundred?”
It took him a moment to recollect he was supposed to be a secretary. “Two hundred and fifty,” he said, picking a higher number that felt plausible and also, he discovered, slightly satisfying to claim.
Her eyebrows rose. She was impressed. He could see it. Then he could see her recalculating, revising whatever she had been about to offer against this new information. The mathematics were happening behind her eyes in a way that was entirely transparent.
“I will pay you one thousand pounds,” she said.
“Four years of wages for three months. In addition,” she held up a hand before he could speak.
“I will provide you with excellent references that will materially advance any future application for employment. Letters from my family’s solicitors, and from myself, attesting to your character and capabilities. ”
Nicholas stared at her.
One thousand pounds. For three months. From a young woman who had broken into Grimsfell Hall in the middle of the night.
Who was currently conducting a negotiation with someone she believed to be a private secretary.
In that secretary’s bedchamber. As though this were a perfectly ordinary situation which by no means required remark.
He found, to his own surprise, that he was thoroughly entertained. That, in itself, was notable. He had not been thoroughly entertained by anything that did not come in a bottle in rather a long time. And since he was now sober, not even bottles had entertained him in some months.
“And what would these three months entail?” he said.
“Oxford,” she said. “The Bodleian, primarily. I need access to a book that was … lent … by my father. The work of a Renaissance Italian named—” She stopped.
Reassessed him again. Appeared to determine, on whatever criteria she was using, that he could be trusted with this.
“Matteo di Bianchi. A painter and draughtsman.”
Nicholas’s expression did not change. He was quite certain of that.
He had spent enough years concealing secrets.
His pain, his drinking, his loneliness, his fundamental uncertainty about every decision he had ever made.
He was reasonably confident that his face was not currently revealing the fact that the name Matteo di Bianchi had just landed against his chest like the head of a battering ram.
“Your father.” He picked through her answer to find the right thread. “You mentioned—”
“An Arthurian scholar.” She said it with a matter-of-fact tone, implying she had had to learn how to deliver it without flinching.
“He is … not well. He has not been well for some time. But Matteo di Bianchi’s work …
it is his life’s research. He has spent years on it.
” Her chin was still up. Her voice was level.
And her spectacles had begun their southward migration again, and she ignored them entirely.
“He cannot pursue it himself any longer. I am pursuing it for him. It … makes him feel better.”
Nicholas looked at her. At the set jaw and the clear, watchful eyes and the scarlet ribbon and the spectacles at a forty-five-degree angle from where they ought to be.
At three o’clock in the morning and the dark cloak and the candle still held in her hand and the complete, absolute, unassailable certainty that she was going to do this. Whether he helped her or not.
He thought about Gabriel, who had lost his former tutor and pursued the killer until justice was meted.
He thought about Lorenzo, whose kin had been searching for centuries’ worth of ancestral legacy and had never stopped.
He thought about what it meant to have a reason to persist. A real reason, not boredom, not habit, not avoidance.
To pursue that reason with the kind of quiet, immovable conviction that did not require an audience.
She is fascinating, he thought. Without quite making the decision, Nicholas leaned down and pressed a lingering kiss to her plump pink lips.
She responded. A sharp intake of breath that became something else.
A soft sound against his mouth as she pressed closer, her free hand coming up to his chest. She kissed him back with the startled, fully committed passion of someone who had not been expecting to do so.
And whose mind had not yet caught up with the decision.
Then, suddenly, she wrenched her mouth away and delivered a stinging slap.
“Bastard!”
Nicholas held a hand up to quell the unexpected pain, but he grinned in devilish delight.
The kiss had been as hot as a furnace before the young lady had recalled her modesty, and he wondered what other secret passions might lurk beneath the tight clasp of her stays.
Passions he could be the one to unleash.
Because, despite her protestations, she still had the blush of a maiden aroused, and the hungry eyes of a curious miss coveting the hidden mysteries of carnal relations.
She was attracted to him as a man, and it was glorious to be the object of a woman’s lustful cravings after the horrendous suffering of the past few months.
She had taken a few steps back and was breathing rather harder than the exertion warranted. The candle was dangerously tilted. She righted it with an automatic movement and then squared her shoulders as though reorganizing herself from the inside out.
“That,” she said, “was not part of my proposition.”
“No,” Nicholas agreed pleasantly. “That was outside the terms.”
“It is not to happen again.”
“Of course not.”
She eyed him with a suspicious expression, seemingly not entirely confident that he was taking her seriously but deciding to proceed as though he were.
“You have not answered me. Will you come to Oxford?”
“There is a difficulty,” Nicholas said. He moved, leaning over to retrieve his cane from the night table, using the motion of turning away to manage it without display.
When he turned back, he held it in the manner of a man for whom this was so routine as to be unremarkable.
He watched her eyes drop to it and back up.
“I require medical treatment. A specific treatment. The application of liniment to my leg at least once a day. It is not,” he sought the word, “convenient to interrupt.”
He saw no need to reveal it had already been interrupted by sartorial emergencies in Truro.
She dropped her gaze to his right leg, then returned it to his face with scrupulous blandness, apparently having decided not to make anything of his stolen kiss.
“What kind of liniment?”
“An apothecary’s compound. For the thigh muscle. The injury is old, a boyhood break, but the treatment is ongoing and cannot be suspended without consequences.” He watched her. “My current … physician … would not be available, so I would require someone to continue the application in his absence.”