Chapter 3 #2
“I shall,” she said, drawing a finger through the cold, clear pool. “I shall study as much as I am allowed to. But suppose my husband does not want his wife to be playing on the seashore while there is a household to manage and dinners to prepare and children to raise?”
She felt his gaze resting on her cheek. He did not bluster. Explain. Or chide. She appreciated that. He simply held still, as if he were absorbing the information. Thinking. Listening.
To her.
She leaned forward. Her sleeve brushed his shoulder, and she felt the contact as if their flesh had touched. Her insides quivered.
“This is sea lettuce,” she said. “That is red dulse. And this.” She drew her fingers through the silky fronds, cold and smooth. “This might be hairweed?”
“In Norfolk we call it mermaid’s tresses.”
He watched her still, perhaps studying the color of her hair, perhaps trying to read her face.
She thought of the story of the mermaid who had traded her voice for feet so she might follow a human man to his home, hoping to win his love.
She did so even when her feet burned like stabbing knives.
And when he did not return her love, she went back to the sea and disappeared.
Effie was going to disappear when she married. She was bound to lose that part of her that loved the sea, that freedom to immerse herself for hours of walk or study. Would this man blame her, that she wanted something of her own before she made that last awful trade?
Would he agree to her proposal? Or would he shun her?
“A shrimp.” He pointed, his arm brushing hers. She wondered if he intended the contact. If he longed to touch her as much as she longed to touch him. He’d been so warm last night when she kissed him. As if there were a fire inside him, banked so the world would not see.
She knew what that felt like. “That is a hooded prawn. They look like a tiny lobster.”
He followed the prawn as it pumped its way into a rocky crevice and sheltered there. “This one I know. Acorn barnacle. We have these— Oh!” He startled as a small animal shot out from beneath the rock when he lifted it.
“Sea slater!” Effie grabbed his arm. “They move forward, not backward, like a crayfish. How interesting.”
“That is a woodlouse,” he said with mock sternness.
She laughed; she laughed so often around him. He made her insides feel buoyant, as if she floated on a gentle wave. “That is a crustacean, sir.”
He dropped his gaze to where her bare hand rested on his sleeve. Would he fuss because her hands were wet? Or was he as astonished as she at her boldness?
The shush of waves a yard away, the low tide readying for its next incursion, faded a moment from her ears. The earth tilted gently, leaning her toward him, and something inevitable slipped into place with a soft click.
He moved his other hand, as if he meant to cover hers with it. Her heart bloomed like an anemone in her throat. She had imagined, a dozen times already, holding out her hand to him. She had not known what to imagine once he took it.
A streak of color broke her thought. “Ooh! A cuttlefish!” Grabbing her net, she scooped and had the creature in her bowl before he’d completed his squirt of brownish ink. “I’ve wanted a look at one of these.”
“You might take him home to Hector.” He moved close to peer at her catch and Effie caught his scent, leather and bergamot and rich, dark earth. She drew a breath through her nose, bliss lifting the edges of thought. He would say yes. He had to.
“Did it just change color?” Her companion hung over the bowl, completely absorbed in the cuttlefish. The sight charmed Effie more than anything he’d done yet.
“They are masters of disguise. Watch.” She poked the cuttlefish with a finger and a blaze of orange rings rippled over its skin. The creature propelled itself backward, hitting the side of the bowl and squirting ink again. Inside the cloud, it turned brown and completely disappeared.
“What a skill that is. To blend so well with your surroundings.”
Effie sat back on her heels. “You speak as if you have some knowledge of the practice.”
He stared at her a moment before schooling his expression. She sensed his guardedness was a habit, an adaptive trait, yet he kept letting it down around her.
“You, Miss Iphigenia, pay very close attention to the world around you, I think.”
No one had paid her such a compliment in her life. “Effie, please. But I do not know your given name,” she said shyly. She ought to, given what she meant to do to the man. She’d decided on him already, but every gesture, every word, made her more and more certain.
“Jay.” He stirred the water in the bowl, watching the cuttlefish change color again.
“Just Jay?”
“John, after my father, but my mother calls him Jack and I was Baby Jay. Are you going to keep it?”
“No one has published a study on cuttlefish, to my knowledge. I could release a memoir on the subject, as Richard Owen did on the pearly nautilus.”
“Have you published anything before, Miss Iphigenia?”
“Effie,” she said. “And nothing that has circulated beyond my schoolmates. I live in Bath. No one cares much for the white-tailed crayfish or pondweed produced by our lovely Avon. Besides, I do not think I could bear to be introduced as a lady naturalist. As if I were an amusing oddity, like a trained monkey.”
“An insult indeed. I should hope that would not be the case.”
The corners of his mouth quirked up, as if he were holding back a laugh, and that absurd sense of space filled her chest again.
She longed to make him laugh, as he did her.
Why did it feel like this man she had known for one day understood her, when family who had known her throughout her entire life did not?
“Are there any women excelling in your field?”
“No.”
“My point.”
He settled on one haunch, lowering his leg, while his other hand still dangled over his knee. She could reach out and take his hand. He might squeeze her fingers again as he had the previous night.
“But that is because my field is dull. There is no cleverness to it, no discovery. At best we refine the tools or hit upon a way to improve a formula, or a firing process, or a bond—”
“What is your occupation?” At last, a way she could ask without seeming too abrupt.
He leaned back slightly, as if bracing himself. “I make bricks.”
A tradesman. Not of her class at all. No wonder there seemed such a solidness to him, that rugged quality, as if he were familiar with hard work.
This explained the rough spots on his hands as he’d slid them alongside her face when he kissed her.
He was a man who used them to craft things, build things, make things. Things that lasted.
He was perfect. “That is fascinating,” Effie said sincerely.
“Not many think so. They want their bricks available when they are ready to build, and that is far as the interest extends.”
Effie crossed her legs and rested her chin on one fist. Her mother would have fits at such a posture, but she was with Jay. A man who stood barefoot in the water to study mud, who kissed as if the world were ending and it were the last thing he would ever do.
“Is there a trick to making bricks? I confess I’ve never considered the process.”
“There is no trick needed here. Brighton is surrounded by brick earth. That is clay that need only be dug, tamped into molds, then dried and heated as is. No lime, no sand, no additives required—I beg your pardon, I must be boring you.”
“I will say when you are boring me.” She smiled, and she liked how his face changed at her expression. How his gaze dropped to her mouth.
Was he imagining kissing her again? All the more likely he would agree to her proposal if so. Her belly fluttered as if she’d swallowed damselflies.
“Is this brick earth rare?”
“It’s been mined certain places in Norfolk, and Kent is full of brick earth, but on the whole it is not common. It’s a particular mixture of clay, silt, and chalk that— You must not let me go on. Even my sisters find it tedious, and bricks pay for their pin money.”
“So you are in Brighton to make bricks.”
“Yes.”
He was here for a time and then would leave. This was not his home. A slower, deeper smile dawned, spawning from the lift of her heart. Better and better.
“Are you building the sea wall?” She pointed toward East Cliff, where the high gray wall stretched from Old Steine to the Royal Crescent, with Chain Pier stretching into the water like the foot of a mollusk.
“That is cement, and I have talked with William Lambert, the builder, about his process. He means to reach all the way to Kemp Town in time.”
She stirred her fingers through the rock pool, stroking the shell of a dogwhelk. “Are you making repairs to the Royal Pavilion?”
“I dream of such a commission from the King, but no. At present I am helping finish Brunswick Terrace.”
“That is where I found you yesterday.”
“Yes. I’d been visiting the kiln, and I felt the need to cool off.”
Effie glanced down the coast, though the terrace was too far away to see. “I had not perceived that building material to be brick.”
He laughed, and she curled her fingers with delight, wanting badly to touch him. “You are correct. The dressing is Bath stone, which is expensive and heavy to transport. All the inner walls you do not see? Brick.”
“You seem very pleased with yourself.”
“I enjoy my trade.”
“And you shall not be obliged to stop when you are married,” Effie observed. “Unless…” An awful thought sank into her chest. “You are married already?”
“I am not.”
Then he was ideal. No one expected men to be celibate before marriage. No one would fault a bachelor for frequenting a pleasure club. Not the way Effie’s parents would have an apoplexy, then bind her in chains in the cellar if they knew what Heddy was doing, and that Effie had been part of it.
“You should know,” he said, watching her with that steady gaze of his, “I would not be here, with you, if I had obligations to another.”
So, a man of principles. She tried to settle her heart, still pumping like a prawn through the water, elated that he belonged to no one else. She wanted so badly to take his hand. She settled for picking up a starfish, stroking the delicate ridge along its arms.
“I want to hear more about bricks. That school I told you about, the one in Bath I attended, Miss Gregoire’s—our buildings are in need of some repairs. I should like to hear your advice on the subject. Are you free this evening?”
“I made a commitment for this evening,” he said slowly, dropping his gaze to the rock pool. “Tomorrow?”
He meant Hedone. He was coming to see her at Hedone, as he said he would.
The top of her head lifted off and drifted among the clouds. He was coming to see her. He might kiss her again. She would ask him then, and she was almost certain he would say yes.
“Tomorrow Heddy and I plan to walk around Adelaide Crescent. We have been watching the construction of the new Anthaeum,” she said. Bold, bold, but he had not been put off by her frankness before.
He traced the starburst ridges of the animal she held, his finger close beside hers. “Please do not stray too close to that site. I question some of the decisions that builder has made.”
She glowed. She knew she did; her cheeks heated. “If we had a wise escort, we should not fear. But I do not expect we will be about much before eleven. Heddy is not an early riser like I am.”
He did it, finally. He lifted her hand into his, sliding his palm beneath hers so easily. As if he knew he had the right. As if he knew she ached for him to touch her, and he would not deny her.
“I should very much like to be your escort, Miss Iph—” She shaped the word, but he said it, with a disarming smile. “Effie.”
That smile. That confidence with the barest trace of bashfulness, as if he would only put himself forward so far.
That ease in his manner, the wariness that dissipated as he talked of bricks and building and his sisters.
His wife, when he settled on one, would be the luckiest woman alive. Effie envied her already.
He gathered his gloves and walking stick, rose easily with his hat in hand, then held out his other hand to raise her. She slid her starfish back into the water, took his hand, and held it as long as she dared.
“Until tomorrow, Mr. Jay.” My, she was breathless from the mere motion of scrambling to her feet.
“Until tomorrow, Miss Effie.” He placed his hat on his head and touched the brim with his walking stick in salute.
She would see him tomorrow. But there was tonight first.