Chapter 3 #2
“She says there is a book to retrieve from the Radcliffe Camera,” he said.
“Her father’s research. If it relates to Matteo’s journals, to the cipher, we would be fools not to have someone present when she opens it.
” He kept his voice level. He was aware this was approximately one-third of his actual reasoning.
“Oxford is the right place for this. The Bodleian, the college libraries. If the Dominus has people there, it is better to know it than not.”
“Assuming,” Henri said, “that Miss Metcalfe is not herself a Dominus operative, using exactly this logic to deceive us.”
The room went quiet for a moment.
“She slapped me,” Nicholas said.
The viscountess stared at him.
“If she is an operative,” he said, “she was sufficiently committed to the role to slap me with genuine conviction when I kissed her. I find it difficult to construct a version of the Dominus that deploys that distinctive method of establishing trust.”
Lorenzo made a sound that was very nearly a laugh and then thought better of it. Gabriel stared at the middle distance with considerable attention. Henri’s expression moved through several positions before arriving somewhere between exasperation and reluctant concession.
“You kissed her,” Henri said.
“A beautiful and intriguing young woman came into my bedchamber in the middle of the night,” Nicholas said. “I was asleep, not dead.”
“That is not a defense, Nicholas.”
“It is the defense I have available.”
Nicholas’s thoughts returned, as they had been doing at irregular intervals since three o’clock that morning, to the press of soft lips against his and the softness of her against his chest. He had several reasons he was considering accompanying Miss Metcalfe to Oxford.
Not all of those reasons had to do with three-hundred-year-old journals written by Renaissance artists.
A couple did. But not all, by any means.
“She is paying him,” Lorenzo said, returning to the sensible. He had identified the strongest ground and intended to hold it. “One thousand pounds. For three months?”
“Plus references,” Nicholas said.
“You do not need references,” Lorenzo said.
“Or a thousand pounds, but she does not know that.”
Another silence. This one had a different character.
“She thinks you are a secretary,” Henri said slowly.
Nicholas agreed, and found himself smiling faintly at the recollection of being mistaken for a valet first.
“Nicholas,” Henri announced, her hands clenching on the table.
It was a sign that she was about to make a statement she meant completely.
“If you go to Oxford under a false identity, and she discovers who you actually are, the consequences for betraying her trust in you are not recoverable. She is clearly not the kind of woman who fails to discover secrets, you understand that?”
“I understand it,” Nicholas said.
“Do you,” Henri said, not asking.
Nicholas regarded the fire. He thought about the scarlet ribbon.
The press of woman against him. The commitment to her cause, something to do with her father, spoken of in the dark about carrying it alone for a long time.
The capacity of a mind that did not perform engagement.
That simply was engaged, completely and without artifice, in the way very few people managed.
He thought about Oxford. About the Bodleian admissions book and the college libraries where he had arrived older than the other boys, after convalescing from his injuries, out of step and in considerable pain and furious with the world for reasons he had not yet fully worked out.
He considered how out of place he had felt since so thoroughly breaking his leg as a fourteen-year-old boy home for the school break.
How his mother had lost interest in him because he was no longer perfect.
How reading her poisonous thoughts about her imperfect youngest son had shed a clarifying light on what had come between the accident and his sobering up last year.
How disconnected he had felt upon learning of her death, as if it were a stranger who had died. A Lady Blackwood. Not his mother.
Nicholas realized he had been thinking about all of this rather longer than the conversation required.
“She has also,” he said, “proposed that I steal the Malory manuscript from you.”
This landed just as he had intended. Gabriel’s expression did something complicated. Lorenzo straightened sharply in his chair.
“She what?” Lorenzo said.
“She offered an additional one thousand pounds if I brought it with me. For a total of two thousand, with legal counsel provided in the event of prosecution.” Nicholas turned to Gabriel.
“She is aware it is in your possession. She appears to have tracked it from the Danbury sale. I imagine that is how she found us at Grimsfell Hall in the first place.”
Gabriel was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed.
The genuine kind, which was rare enough that it surprised the room.
“She will not need to steal it. I have already moved it. Two thousand pounds to Danbury to smooth his ruffled feathers, and it went to the Bodleian last week as a long-term loan. It is in Duke Humfrey’s Library by now.
Mr. Tyne collected it when he visited last week. ”
Lorenzo’s chair scraped back from the table. “You sent it? Without trying it as a key to Matteo’s cipher?”
“I did try it,” Gabriel said pleasantly. “A week in the study, with the manuscript and half a dozen of Matteo’s journals and adequate light. I found nothing that unlocked anything. Danbury was making noise. I made a decision.”
“You—” Lorenzo stopped. “Dio mio. A unilateral decision. About the manuscript that led us to this house. Without—”
“I am the Viscount Trenwith,” Gabriel said, in the same pleasant tone. “I make decisions about things I own. At considerable expense, I might add.”
What followed was neither brief nor quiet.
Nicholas watched it with the attentive appreciation of a man observing something impressively large in scale.
Lorenzo had somehow managed to pierce the viscount’s composure.
Which was not a thing Nicholas had previously witnessed, and he felt a distant, entirely private respect for it.
He waited. He had been getting better at waiting …
since sobering up. It was one of the few incidental benefits of the process.
He waited for the moment when the argument peaked.
When both men had said all that was available to them.
When they were simply repeating it at greater volume. Without further illumination.
Then he said, conversationally, “So, the manuscript is in Oxford.”
Both Lorenzo and Gabriel stopped. They looked at him.
“Duke Humfrey’s Library,” Nicholas said. “Restricted access. Which I can enter.” He raised an eyebrow at Gabriel. “Which Miss Metcalfe cannot. And which Miss Metcalfe, given her proposed theft, very much wants to access.”
The room was quiet again. Henri was watching him now with an expression that had altered, in the past half minute, from concerned to something notably more thoughtful.
Gabriel leaned back in his chair. “I can simply arrange for the manuscript to be made available for you to collect. Write to the Bodleian, have it waiting. You retrieve it and deliver it to her. Simple enough.”
“And then what?” Nicholas said. “I return with the manuscript and no explanation for how I obtained it. She knows immediately that I am not who I said I was. She has questions I cannot answer without revealing more than is wise.” He paused.
“We lose what she knows. About the Dominus. About whoever else is hunting for Matteo’s work.
About what her father worked out before his mind began to fail. ”
“You think she knows that much,” Lorenzo said.
“I think she knows substantially more than she has said,” Nicholas replied.
“And I think the only way to learn it is to be there.” He addressed Gabriel’s suggestion.
“I can hardly present her with the manuscript from the college with no explanation. She would close the door and that would be the end of it. It would be better to play along with whatever she wants to do. Remain Nick Scott. Learn the details of what she knows.”
“For Lorenzo,” Gabriel said.
“For Lorenzo,” Nicholas said.
He was aware, as he said it, that this was not the whole truth. He thought Henri probably knew it too, from her expression. He did not elaborate.
Gabriel said, “The decision is yours, Nicholas. It always was.”
Nicholas regarded the table. He regarded the fire.
His leg made its familiar evening observation, and he did not answer it.
But he picked up his cane and tapped it against the hardwood floor in a slow, steady rhythm.
The tapping settled his nerves. It always did.
He thought about a carriage at the end of a long drive.
About the pale gray of the Cornish dawn and a scarlet ribbon.
He did not tell them what he decided.
At dinner, Henri spoke to him quietly across the corner of the table while the others were occupied with their own conversation.
“You are not the man I grew up next to,” she said.
He considered this. “Sobering up and reading the journals of one’s murderous mother,” he said, “is bound to wreak havoc on any personality.”
She gazed at him with the expression that meant she was not going to accept the deflection. But had chosen not to press it tonight.
“You are better than you were,” she said simply. “I thought you should know that someone has noticed.”
Nicholas did not answer. He contemplated his plate and thought about Oxford and fair golden hair. Then his leg offered its nightly complaint, so he thought instead about delicate fingers and warm liniment, and he privately disagreed with the viscountess.