Chapter 4 #2
Betty did not open her eyes. Her breathing remained perfectly even.
“Miss Metcalfe,” he said, with the careful patience of a man recalculating. “The joke was not about the historical merit of Arthurian scholarship.”
“What was it about?”
“The English habit,” he replied, “of building a national identity on a story that is, at its core, about the failure of an ideal. We celebrate Camelot. We do not dwell on the fact that it fell.”
Millie considered this. “That is a great deal of effort,” she said, “for a very small joke.”
He stared at her.
She stared back.
“I admit it was not a very good joke, if I had to explain it,” he finally relented.
“Correct.”
Betty opened her eyes. Glanced between them once with the expression of a woman assessing a situation she had been paid not to remark upon. And closed them again without a word.
“Do you always,” he said, after a moment, “correct someone?”
Millie considered this with the seriousness it deserved. “I have not yet found a reason not to,” she said. “Inaccuracy does not improve with being left alone. It compounds.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then she heard, or thought she heard, a sound that might have been a suppressed laugh. She was not certain. She examined him, and his expression was perfectly composed.
“Compounded inaccuracy,” he said. “Yes. That is the great hazard.”
“It is,” she agreed, and returned to her notebook.
The journey settled into its rhythms after that.
He asked questions that were sharper than she would expect from a secretary.
About Matteo di Bianchi. About the sequence of Papa’s research.
About what specifically the Radcliffe Camera journal was expected to contain.
And she answered them with the directness that was her only available mode, gauging as she did so that he retained everything, the mark of a trained mind.
She noticed he asked about the journal she wished to retrieve but not about how Papa had come to place it there, and she did not volunteer that information.
There were details she did not yet know about Nick, and she was a woman who proceeded delicately with things she did not know.
At some point in the early afternoon, the rhythm of the road and the warmth of the carriage interior overtook him.
He fell asleep the way she imagined men with chronic pain fell asleep when they finally managed it.
Absolutely. Without transition. Without moving.
His head did not tip. His hands remained folded in his lap. Only his breathing changed, deepening.
In sleep, he appeared younger. The watchfulness he wore like a second coat was gone.
What remained underneath was a face that was, she observed with what she hoped was scientific detachment, really quite arresting, with a strong jaw, dark hair somewhat disordered from the journey, and the lines at the corners of his eyes smoothed out and unfamiliar.
He looked, without the sardonic composure, like someone who had not had an easy time. Who had developed the composure to conceal it.
She watched him for longer than she intended.
Then she stared firmly out the window and put her fingers to her notebook instead of her lips.
Which was an improvement, she felt, on yesterday’s habits.
She wrote four lines about the Malory manuscript and the retrieval sequence.
Then she stopped writing and watched the Cornish moorland giving way to the softer country of Devon and thought about absolutely nothing of note for the rest of the afternoon.
He is a means to an end, she told herself again.
Her fingers drifted to her lips.
She put them back in her lap.
* * *
Nicholas was tying his banyan when the knock came.
He glanced at the connecting door, which he had noted with satisfaction upon being shown to the room.
It currently represented either a great opportunity or a very interesting evening.
He was prepared for it to be either. He had spent dinner in the private dining room the landlord had produced without being asked, watching Miss Metcalfe eat with the brisk concentration of someone treating meals as a logistical necessity rather than a social occasion.
He had found himself unreasonably entertained by it.
She had asked him detailed questions about the Bodleian’s restricted collections between bites and had not looked up from her notebook once during the removes.
He had not been bored. He was noting this as a significant character point.
And he could not help but wonder who had knocked on his door. Miss Metcalfe herself, or Betty dispatched in her place?
He rather hoped she had the courage to see it through herself.
He crossed to the door, noting his leg’s material improvement after being freed from the prolonged immobility of sitting in a carriage all day, and opened it.
Miss Metcalfe stood in the doorway in a white wrapper, her fair hair loose over her shoulders.
Adjusting her spectacles with one finger, she behaved as though arriving in his bedchamber was entirely unremarkable.
The spectacles, he observed, were still on the scarlet ribbon.
Even in a wrapper, at an Exeter inn, at nine o’clock in the evening, she had kept the scarlet ribbon.
He found this, in some way he could not have explained to anyone’s satisfaction including his own, rather endearing.
He also noted, with the involuntary attentiveness born of rather too long without female company, that her hair was visibly more gold than it appeared pinned up.
And it fell past her shoulders in a way that the wrapper did not entirely conceal.
That she was gazing at him with the stubborn resolve of someone refusing to retreat from a choice already made.
There was a faint color in her cheeks. She was not going to acknowledge it and neither was he.
“Miss Metcalfe,” he said pleasantly. “No chaperon?”
“Betty is merely here to maintain appearances,” she said. “I see no reason to include her, and she does what she is told.”
He felt his face split into a grin that he made no great effort to suppress.
The smugness, he was aware, was not his most attractive quality.
He felt it anyway. She had come herself.
He had hoped she would and she had, and he was not going to pretend it did not please him.
At least not in the privacy of his own head. “You chose to tend to me yourself.”
She adjusted her spectacles again. A flush crept up from the collar of her wrapper. Which she was not acknowledging either. Her chin came up a fraction, like she had decided to hold her ground and found the ground required effort. “I gave my word,” she said. “I keep my word.”
“Of course,” he said, and stepped back to let her in.
Because she had, and he respected it. And also because there was something about the combination of the blush and the lifted chin and the scarlet ribbon that made stepping back feel like the wisest available option before he did something ill-advised.
She entered with the briskness of a woman on an important errand, smelling of lavender and something faintly sweet, clean and warm, that cut through the smell of the room and settled somewhere in his chest before he could take any sensible precautions against it.
She stared at the bed. Stared at the table where he had set the pot of his liniment.
And appeared to perform some internal calculation that she completed and put away.
He was going to have to enjoy her scent while he could. The liniment would shortly overwhelm everything else in the room.
“On the bed,” she said, her rigid composure revealing her intention to view his body as a medical responsibility rather than a masculine dilemma.
It would have been more convincing without the color still in her cheeks, but he was not going to point that out, and filed this newfound restraint under personal growth.
Nicholas obliged. He moved to the large, soft bed and stretched out with the placid ease of long experience, with subtle shifts and judicious angles mastered over years spent learning how to exist comfortably within the boundaries imposed by pain.
Arranging himself against the pillows, he then drew the banyan back to expose the length of his right leg from the knee upward.
He was in his small clothes beneath. He kept his expression entirely neutral, an exercise in considerable self-discipline given that she was standing four feet away, with her hair loose and her wrapper tied at the waist, and was staring at his leg with her scholarly intensity.
“The liniment is on the table,” he said.