Chapter 5 #4
Behind the Leland. She had written it in her notebook and read it back to herself so many times in the months since that it had acquired the nature of a navigational fixed point. Something to orient by when everything else was uncertain.
“Retracing his footsteps,” he said. “Through the murk of his own mind.”
“Yes.” She said it without inflection. It was accurate, and she had no argument with accuracy. “It is like following a path that someone walked while the snow was still falling. You can see where the ground is disturbed, but not always what disturbed it, or in which direction it was going.”
He was quiet for a moment, and she appreciated that he did not say something unkind about it. Callousness toward Papa required more of her than she generally had available. She was already giving this conversation more than she had planned to give it.
“The Regis Aeterni,” he said. “You mentioned two factions. Do you know how they are organized? Who leads the Dominus faction?”
Her hands went still.
She was aware of them going still and did not immediately move them.
She sat with the silence for a moment, studying her hands on his leg, and thought about the question.
About the specificity of it. About the exact direction of his curiosity.
Which she had noted in the carriage and set aside.
Which had now inserted itself with enough rigor to require attention.
“You ask a great many questions,” she said, “about what I know.”
“I am a curious man,” he said.
“You are a remarkable man.” She held his gaze. “Your curiosity has a direction. Why does a private secretary care about the Regis Aeterni?”
He watched her openly. He did not look away. He did not produce one of his deflecting quips, which she noted, because he almost always produced one when a subject was raised that he would rather not address directly.
“I wish to know what I might run into in Oxford,” he said. “To be prepared.”
She considered this. She saw the intent dark eyes and the controlled expression, and weighed it against all else she had observed about Nick Scott in the past two days.
The hat that cost more than his wages. The way he managed the inn arrangements with the ease of a man entirely accustomed to being attended to.
The self-assurance, not a secretary’s self-assurance.
The Oxford education that he mentioned without any pride to hint he had been accepted there on merit alone.
There was more to him than he was presenting. She was increasingly certain of it.
She also needed him. Needed his access and his Oxford connections and his capable hands. She had a journal to retrieve and Papa whose presence of mind surfaced less and less. She could not afford to lose the only useful ally she had found in years of pursuing this alone.
She returned to the treatment without pressing further. She told herself it was because his explanation was plausible. She was aware it was also because she was not yet ready to hear the answer if the answer was not what she wanted it to be.
Her estimation of Viscount Trenwith, she noted, had risen significantly since Cornwall. A man who surrounded himself with men like Nick Scott, irreverent, unconforming, sharp-minded men who challenged rather than deferred, was a man whose own choices were intriguing.
She finished. She stood, straightening, and was aware of the subsequent tiredness that came with it.
Not the tiredness of the work, but the tiredness underneath it.
The exhaustion of having managed the enormous alone for a very long time.
Of having carried Papa’s quest and Papa’s affairs and Papa’s failing mind through years of diligent, solitary effort.
Of finding herself, in a firelit room in Bath, unexpectedly and inconveniently less alone than she had been.
She moved toward the door.
“Thank you,” he said.
She turned.
He was watching her from the bed, languid in the firelight, his leg stretched out and his expression open in a way it was not when he was being sardonic.
Which was most of the time. He appeared, in that unguarded moment, like he had also been managing something alone for a long time and had arrived, unexpectedly, at a moment of respite.
She understood that. She understood it well.
“You are welcome, Mr. Scott,” she said.
She left.
She walked to her own room and sat on the edge of the bed and did not immediately open her notebook.
Which was unusual. She sat with her hands in her lap and thought about how he had a way, this sardonic and inconvenient man, of making her set down the weight of her troubles for a little while.
Of making the quest feel like a burden shared rather than a burden borne.
She had not known how tired she was of carrying it until she had encountered someone who could, apparently, carry some portion of it alongside her.
Without requiring her to explain why it mattered.
Betty exhaled a light snore in the bed next to her, and Millie set her thoughts aside to lay back. She was asleep before the candle burned down.