Chapter 7 #2
He thought about what it cost a person to want something they could not have.
Every day. For the whole of their adult life.
Without complaint and without accommodation and without any adjustment of the wanting.
Because the wanting was not the problem.
The prohibition was the problem. And the prohibition was not going to shift on account of her desires.
He understood it. Sat with it. The Bodleian passed behind them and she returned to her notebook, and he said nothing because there was nothing adequate to say.
Yet, somehow, he found himself wishing that he could give her what she wanted.
Contemplating if there were any avenues to granting her access to the halls of learning that she craved.
That she deserved, for she was far more intellectual and committed to learning than he had ever been.
But he could think of none. Not even his eldest brother, the baron, had that kind of power in these hallowed halls deemed to be the domain of men alone.
The Metcalfe house was a good address, two streets from the Bodleian precinct.
The kind of house that had once had more people in it.
Had settled into fewer with the subdued quiet of reduced occupancy.
Furniture arranged for a larger life. Rooms proportioned for a household that had contracted.
Prosperous and scholarly. The house of a wealthy gentleman who was also a serious man of learning.
The books were everywhere. In the hall. On the landing.
Visible through every open door. Which told Nicholas more about the house’s character than any of the fittings.
The door was opened by a manservant of some age, whom Millie addressed as Pike, balding and in possession of a healthy quantity of cynicism.
Spare and upright. London accent. The measuring stare of a man who had been assessing people for a long time and had developed a very efficient method.
He appraised Nicholas with an expression that stated he had encountered smooth-speaking men before and retained detailed views about them.
“How long has she had you, then,” he said.
It was not quite a question.
“Four days,” Nicholas said.
Pike considered him thoroughly. Intentionally. Completing his assessment at his own pace.
“She doesn’t usually keep them this long.”
Then he turned and moved toward the kitchen with a carefree gait, having made his point and not feeling any need to elaborate.
Nicholas stood in the hall. Considered whether there was a “them” with a history or whether the old man was conducting a private entertainment at Nicholas’s expense on enjoyable principle.
He concluded it was probably both, and followed Millie, who said that her father, Mr. Aubrey Metcalfe, should be in his study, farther into the house.
She had said it in a flat tone as if she was quelling her sentiments regarding it.
The same tone in which she spoke of the journal in the Camera and the years of pursuit and all she had been carrying alone for longer than she should have had to.
Nicholas waited in the hall while she went in first. He heard the low, coaxing tone of her voice through the door. Then quiet. And then the door opened.
Mr. Metcalfe was in his late sixties, and he had clearly been magnificent.
The frame was still there. Tall and upright.
The white hair substantial. The face splendidly weathered for a man who had spent his life studying thick tomes with the full force of his attention.
His waistcoat was buttoned wrong by two buttons, producing an asymmetry that no one had apparently corrected or felt it their place to mention.
He was carrying a Latin text with a distracted, proprietary hold that declared he had picked it up some time earlier in the day and had not yet put it down.
He turned his gaze on Nicholas. It had an aspect Nicholas had not anticipated.
Complete attention. Sudden and absolute.
The eyes of a man entirely present in a way that the mistreated waistcoat and the Latin text had not prepared him for.
A mind that was, underneath whatever had happened to the surface of it, still formidable.
Nicholas held the look and did not flinch from it.
“You are not Walter,” Mr. Metcalfe said.
“No,” Nicholas said. “I am Nick Scott.”
Mr. Metcalfe repeated the name. He said it once. Quietly. With the thoughtful weight of a man searching the inner recesses of his mind. He was still for a moment. Nicholas watched him. Then Mr. Metcalfe said, without explanation, “Blackwood.”
At which point, he opened his Latin text and sat down in an armchair, utterly absorbed, as though he had not shattered Nicholas’s deception.
Nicholas was frozen.
His family’s title had arrived and landed like a cannonball at his feet.
He waited for the earth to shatter into a thousand pieces.
Beside him, Millie’s face twisted into an apologetic expression that contained an entire paragraph about her father.
About the nature of his mind and how it moved without explanation.
About the connections it made. And Nicholas slowly concluded that they were legitimate connections, and he might be in some trouble if her father outed his secrets.
Aubrey Metcalfe was more in touch with reality than Millie knew.
She put her hand briefly on her father’s shoulder. A gesture so habitual that it spoke volumes about their affinity for each other. Nicholas could not recollect the last time his mother had touched him. He suspected it was before he had shattered his leg.
Then Millie guided Nicholas down the hall with an ease that suggested she had learned to manage these moments without drawing attention to them or to herself.
Nicholas followed. He inhaled deeply to calm his pulse.
Mr. Metcalfe had said Blackwood with the quiet certainty of recognition.
Not confusion. Nicholas was going to have to trust that the connection had surfaced and departed without settling anywhere it could cause damage.
He was going to have to trust that, and he was finding it an imperfectly uncomfortable position in which to place his trust.
Hold, he told himself, with a flat emphasis because he had given himself this instruction before and found it reliable. Just hold.
He was not ready for Millie to learn the truth. To have the affinity that was growing between them shift. He … he just was not ready.
Dinner was the three of them. Millie, Nicholas, and Mr. Metcalfe, who appeared at the table, was settled into his chair by a household accustomed to the process, and engaged in the meal with the enthusiasm of a man who had just remembered he was hungry.
Between the soup and the fish, he read pages of the Latin text.
Between the fish and the remove, he set it down and spoke, with sudden and complete lucidity, about a fragment of Welsh Arthurian verse he had been cross-referencing against Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of the same campaign.
The divergence in the two accounts of a notable battle.
What that divergence suggested about Geoffrey’s sources.
He spoke with the clarity of a man entirely in possession of his subject.
His eyes sharp. His hands steady. The Latin text forgotten at his elbow.
And the table was very quiet while he spoke.
Then he picked up the Latin text and was gone again.
Nicholas shook his head, marveling at the speed Mr. Metcalfe’s mind drifted from fully present to wholly vacuous. And he understood why Millie, who clearly loved her father deeply, strove to keep him engaged by pursuing the quest on his behalf.
Millie laid out the first task across the soup, her notebook open beside her plate, with the brisk common sense of a woman presenting operational facts.
The journal was in the Radcliffe Camera. Upper gallery. Hidden behind the Leland volumes.
Mr. Metcalfe had placed it there when he became certain he was being watched and had reason to believe his study had been searched.
The journal had been hidden in plain view since then, the only reason it remained in his possession rather than someone else’s.
Millie revealed that there had been a break-in shortly after he had hidden it.
Someone had broken the window to his study.
Perchance, Metcalfe had hidden it in the Radcliffe the prior day.
Nicholas listened. He mused over the functional details: access and gallery hours and the arrangement of the shelving.
Millie conversed with her customary bluntness.
Her notebook was full of notes that he could see were organized by a system that was entirely her own, entirely legible to her, and that he found rather beautiful in its thoroughness.
His leg had been making itself known since the afternoon.
The cold of the day and the long hours of the carriage had led to the noisy protest his right leg lodged after extended sitting in one position.
A protest that had become so familiar, he had learned to manage it in company without showing it.
It was, this evening, at the outer limit of manageable. He eased himself, discreetly, once.
Millie noticed.
“It is late,” she said, in the tone of concluding a meeting that had arrived at its useful limit. “We should sleep. There will be time enough tomorrow to continue.”