Chapter 15 #3
She stared at him.
He crossed to where she was standing in the quick, unbalanced step of a man managing his leg and his urgency at the same time and said, in a low voice, “Millie. I can explain.”
She blinked. The spectacles slid. She did not push them back.
She peered up at him over the lenses and remembered the hat that had cost more than a secretary’s wages.
The dexterity with which he had managed the Bodleian protocols.
The quality of his attention which had never quite been a secretary’s attention.
All of the concerns she had been filing under not yet.
The filing cabinet of not yet had just exploded onto the street in front of her, and she was staring at the contents.
“Are you one of those Scotts?” she said. Her voice was level. The voice she used for factual questions, the ones that needed confirming rather than discovering. “The family of Lord Blackwood?”
He watched her steadily. He held her gaze with the open expression, the one without the sardonic layer, and she could see in it all of the factors she had been not-seeing and was seeing now. And he said, “I have the key to the pictograms. We should not be having this conversation in the open.”
It was not a denial.
She stood with the absence of the word no and felt an emotion grow within her that was not anger, which she had been steeled for, and not outrage, which she had also considered, but an emotion significantly quieter and notably worse than either.
He lied about who he is!
It was devastating. She had begun to believe in them.
Guardedly, cautiously, against the evidence of every prior lesson she had taken from the world on the subject of believing in people.
Millie was now, in a public street in Oxford with the cold in her face and her spectacles at the end of her nose, not believing it anymore.
He is the brother of a baron.
She forced herself to face it, cleanly and completely, as she did with all unchangeable truths that needed facing. And the cleanness of it was the worst part. Because it meant there was no confusion available to soften it.
I knew, she admitted, with the factual honesty she could never quite turn off even when she would have preferred to.
I knew from the hat. I knew from the way he managed the inn in Exeter without being asked.
I knew from the quality of his voice and the Christ Church education that he wore his clothes as if it was simply a fact of his background rather than an achievement he had worked for.
I knew and I chose not to know because I had the quest and I needed him and then, somewhere between Grimsfell and Oxford, I needed him for reasons that were not the quest, and I still chose not to know because not knowing was more comfortable than knowing, and I am not a woman who chooses comfort over accuracy and yet here I am.
She gritted her teeth. She gave one sharp nod. She had faced the truth and intended to hold onto it regardless of what it cost.
He offered her his arm.
She took it. She placed her hand on his forearm with the correctness of a woman performing a social convention and meaning something entirely different by it.
Not the warmth of yesterday in the study.
Not the kiss or the warmth of the room or his thumb caressing her cheek.
The correct, neutral placement of a hand that had been positioned there by custom rather than inclination.
He bid the porter a farewell through the closing gate, something pleasant that she did not attend to, and they began to walk.
The three of them. His cane on the cobbles and her hand on his arm and Betty a half-step behind them.
The Oxford afternoon continued around them as though nothing had changed.
Which was something Oxford was very good at, having had centuries of practice at continuing regardless of the dramas that played out on its historic streets.
He is a stranger. I have a stranger living in my home. Kissing me. Why is he here? Is it the coin? But why would he need it?
She did not look at him.
She stared at the street ahead, and she thought about the work. Because the work was what she was and what she had always been, and it was the one constant that had not changed in the past thirty seconds.
The journal. The key to the pictograms. All of it still ahead. Still waiting. Still her responsibility regardless of what else had just been revealed or what was rearranging itself in her chest.
She was going to finish the work. That was the task she knew how to do, and she was going to do it. And when it was done, she was going to be the same person she had been before Grimsfell: a practical woman with a father and a quest and a household and Betty.
That had always been sufficient. It would be sufficient again. She was going to make it sufficient through the application of practicality. Because that was all she had and it had never failed her and it was not going to fail her now.
But why did he lie to me?