Chapter 19
“I had already decided. I supplied the reasoning afterward.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, on the first occasion she administered arsenic to the new baron.
* * *
They were back home.
Papa was in his chair with a volume open on his knee, already drifting back into whatever comfortable distance his mind had found. His waistcoat was still buttoned wrong. He had not noticed and would not notice. And he did not like it if Millie tried to fix it, so they had learned to live with it.
Pike moved in the hall, organizing their dinner with Cook. Betty had disappeared into the kitchen to arrange a tea tray without being asked, murmuring that Mr. Metcalfe could do with something to warm him up.
The house was quiet in the way it got when something enormous had just been averted and everyone in it was taking a breath.
Millie stood in the middle of the study and stared at Nick.
He was standing by the fireplace. He had not sat down.
His cane was in his hand, and his leg had to be aching after the day it had been put through.
But he was standing because she was standing, and he was apparently not going to sit while she was on her feet.
She had just noticed this was something he did and realized that in his own way, he had been displaying respect all along.
She stayed silent for a long moment.
Then she asked him.
No preamble. No armor. She was too tired for armor and too direct by nature to construct it once it had come down.
“Why are you here?”
Nick told her.
Not in order. Not smoothly. She could tell from the first sentence that this was not a story because his first sentence was not the right one and he knew it and started again.
“Lorenzo di Bianchi,” he said. “He is … This is not the right place to start.” He stopped. “Grimsfell. Start with Grimsfell.”
She waited.
“Grimsfell belongs to a woman called Isolde Fairfax. She rents it out. Lorenzo has been using it as a base for a quest that his family has been pursuing for generations, since Matteo di Bianchi’s time.
Matteo was his ancestor. The artist. The journal is his.
” He paused, his expression sheepish as he stated a fact they both knew.
“Lorenzo has been trying to decipher similar journals we found at Grimsfell. He could not. I was there because I had nothing better to do and Lorenzo is interesting and it seemed like something useful to do.”
“What about Lord Trenwith,” she said. “The viscount.”
“Lord Gabriel Strathmore. Yes. He owns the Malory manuscript. He lent it to the Bodleian because it seemed the safest place for it until it was needed.” He studied the fire.
“When you came into my bedchamber that night, we had journals of our own we were trying to decipher. We did not know what you knew about them. We did not know you had the key to the cipher or that your father had already deciphered page one. We did not know any of it.” He paused. “And we very much needed to.”
“So you accompanied me to Oxford.”
“I volunteered to accompany you to Oxford,” he said. “To learn what you knew. And I could—” He stopped. Grimaced. “I told myself it was straightforward. Learn what you knew. Report back to Lorenzo.”
“And then?”
“And you were not straightforward.” He said it plainly, without the sardonic tone.
“You were the least straightforward person I had encountered in some time. And yet the most. And being Nick Scott … not the Honorable Nicholas Scott, not the youngest brother of the Baron of Blackwood, not the recovered drunkard with his mother’s insane journals and his brother’s guilt and all the rest of it.
Just Nick. Your Nick.” He pulled a face; she could see the edges of the muscles pulling even as he stared at the hearth.
“It felt like the first fresh breath of air I had taken in years.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“You knew,” she said, “that you should tell me.”
“Yes.”
“And you did not.”
“No.”
“Why?”
He turned, meeting her gaze. “Because I was a coward. And because I was happy. I have not been happy in —” He stopped. “I could not account for how long. And I was not ready to jeopardize it.”
She considered him for a long moment. “The quest was Lorenzo’s,” she said.
“Yes. It still is.”
“But somewhere between Cornwall and the Bodleian,” she said, “it became more for you.”
He was quiet. When he spoke, it was simply. Without deflection or the satirical register that he used when he was maintaining the distance between himself and whatever he was actually saying.
“It became more for me the instant I woke up and found you in my bedchamber. I wanted to spend time with you,” he said. “I wanted to learn about you, to ease your troubles where I could. I wanted to be with you.” A pause. “That is all of it. It is not a very impressive accounting.”
She thought for a moment.
It was not a declaration. It was not a speech.
It was just a man telling her the truth and having the grace to leave it simple.
He did not add to it or reach for a better way of saying it.
He left it simple, without any humor to decorate it.
And she was grateful for that because she was not in a condition to manage ornate speeches.
Millie took her spectacles off and set them on the table. She rubbed the bridge of her nose. When she put them back on, she aimed for bluntness that she was familiar with.
Decision made. The only question is what to do with it.
“You are the most aggravating man I have ever employed,” she said.
“I know.”
“You lied to me.”
“Yes.”
“You allowed me to believe you were a private secretary when you are—” She paused. “What exactly are you?”
“The Honorable Nicholas Scott,” he said. “Youngest son to the late Lord Blackwood. Youngest brother of the current Baron of Blackwood. Uncle to the future one.” A pause. “It is considerably less impressive than it sounds.”
She considered this. “You have a title.”
“A courtesy title. It comes with very little attached to it.”
“You have been lying to me since before we left Cornwall.”
“Yes,” he said. “All of that is accurate.”
She was quiet again.
“You are also—” She sighed, experiencing firsthand how difficult it was to say what one wanted to say.
“You are also the only person who has walked into this house in the past two years and simply remained. When Papa drifted off mid-sentence. When I needed access to libraries I could not enter myself. When I was frightened today, you were already moving.” She studied the fire. “You helped without being asked.”
“That is not a difficult thing to do,” he said, “when you are in the right company.”
“It has been for everyone else. Difficult.”
They stared at each other across the room. The fire settled quietly in the grate. The house was still around them. Papa murmured to himself in his chair about the unreliability of certain Latin translations but settled back down into quiet contemplation.
Then Nick asked, “Would you consider being my wife?”
She blinked in consternation, but he did not flinch.
There was no glib smile. He just had his full attention on her.
An open expression. No facetious layer. He had asked it the way she asked questions herself.
Directly, plainly, without any apparent expectation of an answer.
Just the question, set down in front of her and left there.
She said, “Yes,” before she had quite decided to.
The word arrived ahead of her. Which was not how she usually operated. And she was briefly startled by the sound of it in the room.
Then she laughed. A short, surprised sound, not her usual laugh. Her face was doing something pleased and involuntary that she could feel but not see.
“I suppose that answers that,” she said.
“I suppose it does,” he said. And the crooked genuine smile appeared as he crossed the room.
She did not step back. She had not stepped back from him since Cirencester, and she did not intend to begin now.
He cupped her face with his large hands, gloved, and kissed her with the full knowledge of all that had happened between the bedchamber at Grimsfell and this study.
Every inn and carriage and library and cipher and liniment evening, and the forgery and the deciphered text and Oxford Street and the search and the walk home.
All of it present. And it was not like any of the kisses before.
Those had been stolen or committed or charged with secrets they had not yet disclosed.
His true identity. Her feelings. This kiss knew everything about both of them and united them as two into one without hindrance.
It was notably better than any of the others.
Nick had stayed. He had stayed in the unremarkable way she had wanted someone to stay. He did not make a fuss of it. He simply remained beside her. And that was enough. More than enough. It was everything.
She had been alone in this house for two years.
Not without Pike or Betty. But alone in the way that mattered.
The way that meant every decision and every worry and every anxious night landed on her and no one else.
She had managed it because she was a woman who managed things.
But she had not known, until Nick had appeared at her side, how lonely she was.
The fire burned low. Papa murmured to himself about the Welsh sources. The clock marked the hour. They broke apart, panting as they stared deep into each other’s eyes.
Then Papa stood up.
He wandered over with his Latin text tucked under his arm and stood there considering them both with the complete attention he gave to subjects he found genuinely interesting. He cocked his head, smiling at Millie. Then Nick. Then Millie again.
“About time,” he said, with great dignity.
Then he went back to his chair.
Millie did not try to explain it. She stared at Nick and he stared at her, and the fire was warm and the house was quiet and Papa was in his chair where he belonged. And she agreed entirely.
* * *