Chapter Four
“When they speak, you will not answer.”
In the dream, the slot behind the false shelves had no back to it.
The wall she had set her spine against breathed slowly outward into a dark with no edges, and nothing was holding her up, but the long line of him pressed the length of her, chest to chest, his hand spread warm at the side of her face, his breath stirring the hair at her temple.
The fear that had been in it was still in it.
The warmth in her hip went wrong. It was blood, his blood and somehow also hers, and the slot tipped like a boat coming off the back of a wave, and his mouth that had been a half-inch from hers was all at once very far off and going farther.
She reached for the front of his shirt to hold him where he was, but her fist closed on nothing at all.
She woke with her hand at her own throat.
The room had gone grey with the first of the morning.
Her sheets were wound about her legs as though she had fought them in the night, and her pulse was still going hard beneath her own fingers where the dream had left his.
For a long moment, she lay still and could not have said whether what had woken her was the fear, the loss of him, or the shame that sat cold on top of both.
She had spent the whole of her remembered life turning away from men who stood too near her.
However, in her sleep, with a knife perhaps still somewhere in the house and his blood not yet dry under her nails, she had turned her face up towards the one man in England with every reason to ruin her, and waited, with the whole of her body, for him to cross the last of the distance.
She did not know which of those two women she was.
Lying in the grey light with her hand at her throat, she found she did not entirely wish to learn.
***
“Lord Veyr has come to pay his respects, Your Grace. He waits in the blue drawing room and asks after the health of the whole household by name.”
Giselle set down the index card she had been ruling and did not at once trust her hand to take up the pen again.
Crispin stood in the library doorway with the careful stillness of a butler delivering news he did not like, and across the table, the duke went on reading the letter in his hand as though the name had landed on water and sunk without a ripple.
“By name?” Royce said.
“He asked whether your new archivist was finding the work agreeable, Your Grace. I told him I could not say.”
“You told him correctly. Bring tea. The good service, the one with the gilt, since he will count the gilt.” Royce folded the letter away.
“And Crispin. Send Mrs Marlowe to stand at the door of the blue room and stay there, and have her note who in this house contrives a reason to pass it while he is within.”
“At once, Your Grace.” Crispin inclined his head and went to see to it.
“He will count the gilt. You said it as a certainty.”
“It is the one certainty Veyr offers. He counts everything, down to the spoons, and he is never wrong by a spoon. A man learns a great deal watching what another man bothers to total.” Royce set the folded letter inside his coat.
“Now come down, and let him count you, and find nothing on the page worth the addition.”
“He knows I am here,” Giselle said the instant the door had closed behind the butler.
“He has been in your house one minute, and he has asked about me. Last night three men hunted my name through this library, and this morning the man who sent them is in your drawing room asking whether I find the cataloguing agreeable.”
“He knows there is an archivist. He does not know who the archivist is.” Royce rose, and the only sign the movement cost him was a single tightening at the corner of his mouth. “Those are two very different pieces of knowledge, and I intend that he leaves this house with only the first.”
“Then I shall stay here and let him keep his ignorance.”
“You will not.” He came around the table and stood close enough to drop his voice below the reach of any door.
“If I hide you, he learns there is something worth hiding, and a hidden thing is the one possession Veyr cannot leave alone. You will come down. You will be exactly what you are, a clever woman engaged to set my books in order, bored by the gentlemen who interrupt her at it. You will give him nothing to carry away but tedium.”
“You ask me to sit in a room with the man who wants me dead and be tedious to him.”
“I ask you to be ordinary to him, which for you may prove the harder performance.” A flicker of something crossed his face that, on a less guarded man, she would have called affection.
“Do not be brilliant, Giselle. Brilliance is what he will remember. Be a governess with ink on her fingers and opinions about shelving, and let me do the rest.”
“And if he asks me a thing I cannot answer flatly?”
“Then answer it slowly, and a little foolishly, and let him grow bored and turn the talk. He reads silence and cleverness with equal ease. He cannot read tedium, for he has never once been tedious and does not know the shape of it.”
“You speak of him as a man you have studied for years.”
“I have studied him longer than I have studied anything, and learned him better than I have learned to live with the knowing.” His mouth thinned at the memory of it. “He is the one subject I ever truly mastered, but I would give a great deal to unlearn it.”
She rose and smoothed the ink-stained apron she had not thought to remove, and left it on deliberately, since a woman in a working apron was a woman no one looked at twice. “Then walk slowly down your own stairs, Your Grace, and do not let him see that you are counting them.”
The blue drawing room had been arranged to intimidate, and the man waiting in it had arranged himself to match.
Lord Veyr stood at the window with his back to the door, a study in grey silk and unhurried confidence, and when he turned, all of his attention at once settled on the Duke instantly, as a lamp floods a room when uncovered.
He was perhaps fifty and wore it as an advantage.
He never raised his voice, and nothing on him, from the cut of the silk to the angle of his head, had reached its place by accident.
“Calder.” He crossed the room with both hands a little open, all warmth, no haste.
“You look unwell. Forgive me for saying so. One hears the most absurd rumours, footpads at the very gates of the better houses, and one tells oneself they are nonsense, and then one finds an old friend gone grey about the eyes. You have not been troubled, I hope?”
“I sleep badly. I always have.” Royce did not take the offered hands, and the refusal was so smooth it passed for an invitation to sit. “You are abroad early for a man who keeps court hours.”
“I keep whatever hours the work demands, and the work has been demanding of late.” Veyr let his concern settle over Royce like a coat laid on a guest.
“You are quite certain it was footpads? One hears they grow bold, but a graze along the ribs, as it is rumoured that you have, is a curious souvenir of a robbery. Footpads take the purse and run. They do not linger to open a man who has already given it up.”
“I did not give it up. That will be the difference you are hearing.”
“Ah. You fought them. Of course you did. You were always a man who fought the wrong battles to the wrong finish and lived, which is its own small tragedy.” A smile came and went. “Do give my regards to whoever stitched you.”
“No one stitched me. It was a graze, as you say.”
“Oh, yes, indeed.” Veyr settled into the chair with the gilt arms, of course, and let his glance travel to Giselle as though noticing her only now, which she did not for one moment believe.
“And this will be the famous archivist. I confess I came partly to see her. A learned woman is such a rare ornament to a house. One hardly knows whether to address her or read her.”
“Miss Linfield is engaged to catalogue the library,” Royce said. “She is not an ornament, and she does not read aloud.”
“Linfield,” Veyr said the name slowly, turning it over, tasting it, and his pleasant face did not change at all, which was somehow worse than if it had. “What a singular name. I knew a Linfield once. A great many years ago. Tell me, Miss Linfield, are your people Kentish?”
“My people are not worth asking about, my lord.” She kept her voice flat and her eyes on the middle distance, a woman answering a tedious question from a tedious guest. “I was raised by a parish and educated by charity, and I have no people to speak of, only employers. His Grace is the latest of them, and the most disordered in his shelving.”
“A charity education. How enterprising of you. And which charity raised such a finished article? One likes to know to whom one owes a pleasure.”
“The Marsh Lane foundling house, my lord, in the north, closed these fifteen years. Its records were burned when it shut, with most of its foundlings’ histories inside them. I am told mine fit upon a single line, and the line did not survive the fire.”
“How convenient to be a woman with no history at all.”
“I have always found it so. There is nothing in an empty history for anyone to take hold of.”
“Miss Linfield’s past is her own affair, Veyr, and a duller one than you are hoping for,” Royce said. “She has told me a great deal less than she has just told you, and what she told me put me to sleep.”
“Has she? You are a trusting man.”
“I am a careful one. The two are forever confused by people who have never troubled to be either.”