Chapter 18
“I could not, at that time, reconcile the two.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, on choosing which paramour to keep and which to discard.
* * *
She had not expected Nick to lead them to Cresswell’s rooms.
She had expected him to organize the search differently. He had sent Pike in one direction and her and Betty in another. Millie thought they would continue the grid until Papa was found.
Instead, Nick had come around the corner of the street where she and Betty were searching, his cane hitting the stones at a pace that must be hurting him, and he had told them they needed to go to Cresswell’s rooms now.
She had not argued. The way he said it made her set aside her hurt and follow without any questions.
So the four of them went, moving through the Oxford streets as the cold evening gathered around the edges to lengthen shadows and chill her to the bone.
Nick and Pike set the pace, Millie and Betty keeping it.
Nick was leaning on his cane more than usual.
His limp was pronounced in the way it got when he had been on his feet too long and the leg had stopped tolerating it.
She knew the cold would be bothering him.
She noticed this and refrained from asking about it.
Because there was nothing to say about it that he would welcome and nothing that would change it. Papa needed to be found.
It irked her that she knew so much about him, but there was no time to consider her thoughts on the matter. Nick was helping search for Papa, and that was all that mattered in this moment.
When they reached the staircase at Oriel College, Nick raised the knocker while Pike, Millie, and Betty waited behind him, congregated in a small, shivering group.
Nick brought the knocker down twice.
Cresswell opened the door with his usual composure. He took in the four of them on his threshold, and a shadow moved briefly in his pale gray eyes before his expression settled back into the calculated sympathy he used whenever he called on her.
“Miss Metcalfe.” He inclined his head. “I do hope there is good news.”
“There is not,” Nick said.
His voice was different. Millie had heard him sardonic and facetious and pleasantly neutral and sharp.
She had heard him deflect difficult moments with a perfectly timed remark that left the other person uncertain whether they had been insulted.
She had watched him manage situations with a raised eyebrow and a crooked smile and the full comprehensive repertoire, likely using behavior as a tool for most of his adult life.
This was none of that.
This was still. Quiet. Commanding. No charm and no theater. Just Nick confronting Cresswell and telling him the truth of what was happening with complete economy and without offering him any exit from it.
“I know what the knocker means,” Nick said. “I know what the Dominus is. And I know that Mr. Metcalfe did not wander.”
Cresswell was still for a moment. He had been playing a long game, and he recognized the position he was now in. He tilted his head slightly and produced a small, regretful smile.
“Mr. Scott, I understand you are distressed. It is entirely natural given the circumstances.” His voice was soft and placatory.
Millie could not help the small gasp that escaped her lips. He had not denied it!
“But I think perhaps in the anxiety of the moment, you may have misread the situation. The knocker is part of the university buildings, quite old, and I confess I have never given it much thought. As for Mr. Metcalfe, I assure you I have the deepest concern for—”
“I am going to give you one opportunity to make this right,” Nick said. “Before I make the next conversation considerably less comfortable for you.”
That was when Cresswell changed. The composure cracked slightly, followed by a display of affronted dignity. A man who has decided that offense was the better strategy. He drew himself up.
“I do not know what you think you are implying, Mr. Scott, but these are serious accusations.” His voice was still soft, but the warmth had gone out of it entirely.
“I will not stand in my own doorway and be subjected to this. Whatever you believe you know, you are gravely mistaken. I am not prepared to tolerate this kind of impropriety.”
Pike folded his arms.
Nick banged his cane on the step. The sound of it was sharp and final, echoing in the narrow staircase. “Bring him out,” he said. “Now.”
“I beg your pardon—”
“Mr. Metcalfe.” Nick’s voice did not rise. It did not need to. “Bring him out.”
Millie stood very still. She was watching Nick, and she was watching Cresswell.
Something was unfolding that she had not seen before.
The man standing in front of Cresswell’s door was not the man who had deflected and quipped and performed his way through his days since she found him in a Cornwall bedchamber.
This man was not performing anything. He was simply there.
Immovable. Assured. He spoke with a complete confidence, having decided something and unwilling to be shifted from it.
How did I not see that he was born of noble blood?
Cresswell accused them again.
“This is outrageous,” he said. “Unfounded insinuation of the worst kind. I have years of friendship with the Metcalfe family, and this is how I am repaid? You come to my rooms with these wild accusations and expect me to simply accept them?” His voice had taken on a wounded tone; he had clearly decided that indignation was his best available weapon.
Millie, to her great surprise at noticing it, could hear for herself that it did not ring true.
“I must insist that you leave immediately, or I shall be forced to involve the authorities.”
Nick was not interested in the protestations. He said it again. Simply. “Bring him out.”
The argument escalated. Cresswell’s composure was intact, but there were machinations working beneath it now. A calculation. He had encountered an unexpectedly solid obstacle he had not anticipated and was determining how to manage it.
“I have no idea what you are suggesting,” he said, his voice dropping back into the measured register he was most comfortable in.
“Mr. Metcalfe is a vulnerable man. A confused and vulnerable man. This kind of disturbance is not good for him and you know it.” He turned to Millie directly.
“I have had the welfare of your father and your family entirely at heart from the beginning, Miss Metcalfe. All I have done has been in service of that.”
Nick banged his cane on the step again. “Then prove it.”
Millie was not thinking about the deception.
She knew she should be. She knew that somewhere underneath the urgency of this moment, the conversation from Merton Street was still waiting for her.
The one she had been carrying since the Fellow’s revelation of Nick’s family and Nick’s non-denial and the walk home in silence because she could not make a scene in the streets of Oxford.
She knew it was there, and she was not thinking about it.
Because she was watching Nick refuse to back down from a man who was smooth and prepared for this kind of exchange.
And she was finding it difficult to think about anything else but how much Papa seemed to matter to Nick.
She had not expected this from him. She could not make sense of it alongside all she was holding. The deceit that had been established that afternoon, and this. The absolute sincerity of a man fighting for her father’s safety.
It was Pike who moved next.
He turned his head. The butler’s bearing gave way to the soldier alertness. One who had learned to listen for disturbances other people missed. His thick shoulders squared and his chin came up, and he was attending to something farther up the staircase behind the door.
Then Millie heard it.
The shuffling sound of Papa moving through an unfamiliar corridor.
The low, continuous murmur of a man whose mind was somewhere in the past, talking to people who were not in the room.
She knew that sound. She had been listening for it for two years.
Could tell from the mutterings roughly where he was in whatever decade his mind had taken him to.
All hesitation and social niceties were forgotten as she pushed past Cresswell into the hall and started up the staircase.
Cresswell’s strategy changed immediately. His tone shifted behind her as she climbed.
“I was about to send word,” he said. The indignation dissolved as quickly as it had arrived, replaced with the smooth regret he was apparently most practiced at.
“Mr. Metcalfe wandered in on his own earlier this afternoon, quite confused, poor man. I have been attending to him and making him comfortable. I had only just been on the point of sending a message to the house when you knocked.” He cleared his throat as if nervous.
“I am relieved you are here. I was most concerned for him.”
Nobody responded to it.
At the top of the stairs, a door was open.
Papa came through it carrying a volume he had apparently found in Cresswell’s shelves and considered worth investigating.
His waistcoat was buttoned wrong. Two buttons off on the left side.
The same asymmetry as always. He was looking at the book rather than at the stairs and murmuring to himself in the low commentary that meant he was somewhere considerably earlier than 1822.
He glanced down and saw Millie approaching.
His expression altered, and the prevailing fog lifted like a brisk breeze blew it apart, without warning and without guarantee of how long it would stay up. The old scholar surfaced behind his eyes, clear and present and himself.
“Millie,” he said.
Just her name. But it was her name said in the voice that knew her.
The voice that had argued with her about Arthurian theory across the dinner table for twenty years.
The voice of the man who had carried her on his shoulders through these same Oxford streets when she was small enough to be carried.
He searched around the hall with the mildly irritated expression produced by interruption in the middle of reading.
“I should like to go home,” he said. “Cresswell has been a very bad host. He keeps pestering me about that old journal I found some years back.” He paused. “Quite impolite, really.”
She ran up the last of the stairs to embrace Papa with all the feeling she could muster, relief washing through her so fast and hard, it made her feel giddy.
Behind her, she could hear Nick’s cane and footsteps on the stairs.
This man she was furious with. This man who had given her twelve days of Nick Scott, private secretary, while being someone else entirely.
She glanced back to find him arriving to where Papa was standing, and she let her arms drop to step back.
Nick took him by the shoulders. And the embrace that followed was not polite relief.
It was not the act of comfort for the benefit of an audience.
It was the embrace of someone who had been worried and was no longer worried because he was not pretending anymore.
And had not been since the Merton gate, if she were honest.
Papa, surprised by the embrace, patted him on the back with the volume he was still holding. He considered the young man in front of him with genuine interest.
“There, there, young Blackwood,” he said.
“Just Scott, sir. My brother is the baron.”
Millie watched her father patting the back of the man who had not told her who he was.
But Papa had known. In whatever moments of clarity had visited him across the past week, he had seen it and accepted it without saying so.
Perhaps because he forgot in the next moment.
Or perhaps because in the sharp, clear windows of his lucidity, he had understood more than she had given him credit for and had decided that the young man was not a threat to his daughter, despite the Scotts’ recent notable troubles.
She did not know which it was. Might never know.
She gazed at Nick and thought about the Merton gate and the arm offered in correctness and the walk home in silence and the wall she had been building since that afternoon.
And she observed this moment. And she did not know yet what to do with either of them.
But she knew they were both true and that she was going to have to find a way to accept both at once.
“Take Papa home,” she said to Pike.
Pike nodded. He moved to Mr. Metcalfe’s side with the alacrity of two years of this and spoke in the low, easy tone he always used. Papa allowed himself to be redirected without difficulty, trusting the man beside him the way he always trusted Pike.
Millie turned to Cresswell.
He was standing by the door with the composure mostly restored. Watching her with eyes that shielded more than they revealed. He was waiting to see what she was going to do.
“We will discuss this,” she said, “at a time of my choosing.”
It was not a question, and it was not a threat. It was a statement of fact, delivered in the same voice she used for all statements of fact. She held his gaze until he inclined his head, the small acknowledgment of a man who recognized that the day had not gone as he had intended.
She turned from him and descended the staircase and did not look back.
Nick was behind her. She could hear his cane on the stairs. She did not wait for him, but she did not walk quickly. And when they came out into the street, and Pike and Betty were ahead of them with Papa, Nick was beside her.
They walked in silence. And all that Millie could think about was how grateful she was that Papa was safe.
The cold was in the air, and the Oxford evening was dark now around the old stone.
The lamplights were being lit along the street.
Papa was telling Pike about a paper he had read in 1798 that had never received the attention it deserved.
Nick was beside her with his cane on the cobbles and his leg carrying him at the pace it could manage.
And neither of them said anything, but each of them thought their thoughts very loudly.