Chapter Seventeen
Courtship dances are not only for the birds.
Birds Through a Sherry Glass , H.A. Quirm
Beth was delighted to find that Devon was right about the journey north being “fun.” The moment they settled into a private compartment on the train, he closed the curtains, removed his coat, and brought Beth to a state of bliss by taking a long nap, thus allowing her two peaceful hours to read the latest Ibis magazine.
Upon his awakening, they visited the dining car and enjoyed wine and scallops, steamed cod, and assorted petit fours, while Beth revealed all the fascinating details of the Ibis articles and Devon listened with every sign of enthrallment. Indeed, he barely shifted his gaze from her face as she spoke, a rapt smile on his face, leading Beth to reflect that, despite all appearances, he really was a serious academic at heart.
It did feel a little dangerous to think about his appearances, however, especially since they currently retained the soft, lush-eyed look of sleep, and his lips glinted, wine-dewed, in the lamplight, and the way he stroked one finger slowly against the goblet as he listened to her created such a flutter in her stomach, she began to worry that the scallops were off. What would it feel like to have that finger stroke the source of those flutterings? Would she ever have the courage to suggest an experiment? And if she did, would he be willing?
“Yes,” he said, and drank wine, smiling, as Beth’s intellect scattered to the winds.
“I—um—I beg your p-pardon?” she stammered.
“Whatever that dreamy expression on your face is about, yes.”
“But you don’t know what I was thinking.”
He set the wineglass down and leaned forward across the table. “I’ll always say yes to you, Miss Pickering.”
In that sizzling, breathless moment, Beth’s brain ran around desperately trying to retrieve its intellect, and her heart just ran around until she felt quite giddy. But she’d survived two thesis defenses, and there remained in her that same strength, allowing her to at least say, “That is good news, since I want the last petit four.”
He grinned and sat back in his chair, gesturing to the plate. “As you wish.”
But when they changed trains in Suffolk, “fun” took a nosedive sharper than that of a gannet hunting fish. Each purchased a copy of the evening newspaper, and after boarding the westbound train, they settled in to read, hoping to save themselves from the torment of small talk. This they achieved with remarkable success by becoming utterly dumbstruck the moment they saw the front-page headline.
LOVEBIRDS SAVE THE DAY AGAIN!
The article spent two paragraphs describing their capture of the whopper swan—and five thereafter analyzing in depth the kiss that had followed. Included were profiles of Professor Beth Pickering, “England’s Cleverest Woman,” recently returned from tracking dangerous birds through the wilds of Europe, and Professor Devon Lockley, “The Sightly Scholar,” for whom hearts on either side of the Atlantic beat fast.
Beth, beginning to hyperventilate, looked around instinctively for tea. But considering they’d not only got her name right this time but also included a horrifyingly accurate illustration of Devon’s kissing her hand, she really needed something like chloroform. On the seat opposite, Devon was biting his lip in what appeared suspiciously like an effort not to laugh.
She considered leaving him to sit elsewhere, but the train was jam-packed. She then considered chastising him, but that would require her to discuss the article, and although her inner sense of etiquette was now so thoroughly plucked and seasoned she could have served it for American Thanksgiving, the thought of such an intimate conversation while they were in the forced proximity of only one train compartment terrified her. Actually kissing him would be less daunting than talking about it.
She dared to glance at him again, and intuited from the hot intensity of his stare that he was sharing the same thought. Immediately she retreated behind the newspaper and spent the remaining half hour of the journey pretending to read it while her brain indulged in visions of being kissed by the Sightly Scholar until her breath came so fast it could have outpaced the train.
Arriving in the picturesque village of Hathersage just as the sun was beginning to set, they stood on the train station platform with their suitcases at their feet and stared out over the softly rolling hills. Old, red-gold light glossed the land, tempting its outlaw ghosts from the shadows of plump ash trees and brightening farmhouse windows. A fragrance of grass, sun-baked stone, and rail dust freshened their senses after hours of being indoors.
“Magnificent,” Beth breathed.
“Truly,” Devon agreed.
“It must have a wingspan of six feet at least, for us to see it from this distance.”
Devon squinted against the light as he watched the enormous hawk swoop over farmland. “Buteo colossaeus,” he murmured. “It can kill a cow with one swipe of its claws.”
They sighed in happy unison. Beth’s hand twitched with a desire to sketch the bird, and Devon’s hand stirred as he imagined inspecting one of those long brown feathers—and despite their standing three feet apart, each shivered as if their fingers had brushed against the other’s.
“The locals call it Little John,” Beth said, clutching at ornithology to keep her steady. “It’s the only one of its kind remaining and is too old now to endanger livestock. Professor Gladstone pays the farmers an annual stipend to not shoot it so he can come every summer to work on a longitudinal study of it.”
“Where is his house?” Devon asked, entirely casual, but with a sidelong glance at her that conveyed, I want to do a longitudinal study of your body.
Beth swallowed dryly. “About half a mile west of the village.”
“Half a mile? In these shoes?” Devon frowned down at his thick-soled boots, in which he’d tramped across much of America.
“I lost my hat running for the whopper swan and am going to get terribly sunburned,” Beth said, even as twilight filled her vision with shadows.
They turned their heads and stared at each other.
Ten minutes later, the innkeeper of the George, Hathersage’s coaching inn, consulted her reservations ledger while they panted from having practically run there. “Why, yes, we can accommodate you,” she said, smiling. “A telegram came in just this afternoon, booking out most of the inn, but luckily there is one room left! And with an excellent view of the sky, in case an interesting bird just happens to fly past.”
Beth sighed. Devon rolled his eyes. “You know who we are,” he said wearily.
“I do!” she burst out, causing them to lean back. “You’re the othologists I read about in this morning’s Lady of the House . You were rivals from feuding universities until your eyes met across a crowded museum display of dodo bones!”
“O…kay,” Devon said.
“If we tell you the truth, will there be more than one room available?” Beth chanced.
The innkeeper laughed more than an Australian kookaburra establishing its territory, thus ending any hope of rational conversation. They followed her upstairs.
“Here we are,” she announced, flinging open a door.
Beth and Devon peered across the threshold into a large candlelit chamber, at the center of which stood one bed frothing with white lace, scattered with rose petals. Perfume did not so much waft from the room as emerge at force 7 on the Beaufort scale.
“By pure coincidence , our last remaining room is the honeymoon suite,” the innkeeper said disingenuously. “There’s a complimentary bottle of champagne on the nightstand, and I’ll have a special dinner sent up to you. Please feel welcome to autograph anything you wish.”
She hurried away, leaving Beth and Devon standing witless in the corridor.
“Why do I feel that she’s going to be on the other side of the door this evening, with a glass to the wood, trying to listen?” Devon said dryly.
Beth gasped, her face reddening. He gave her a tired look. “I apologize—”
But Beth’s attention had not been on him. “Shh,” she hissed, and tugged his arm until they were both huddled behind the open door. “Down there,” she whispered, pointing in the direction of the corridor’s end. Eyebrows raised, Devon stared at her until she frowned and flicked her finger again. He carefully peered around the edge of the door.
A gentleman bedecked in nothing more than a silk dressing gown was backing out of a room farther along the corridor. “But, my sweet Leibling ,” he protested to whoever was inside. “Be patient. I just want to get us more wine.”
“Oberhufter!” Devon murmured grimly.
“By Jove!” came a booming cry. “Never mind the wine, get back into bed, you buffoon! I haven’t finished with you yet!”
The blush drained from Beth’s face. “Hippolyta!” she tried to exclaim, but her voice had hidden itself beneath a blanket and refused to come out.
“ Mein Gott , you are insatiable, woman!” Oberhufter declared, untying the sash of his dressing gown as he strode back into the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
Devon was silent, seemingly captured by some imagined vision, the details of which Beth most definitely did not want to inquire about. She rubbed the heel of her hand across her brow as if she could erase her own imagination.
“Hippolyta told me she was going to the Cotswolds,” she said, bewildered.
“Suffice it to say, she lied.”
“What are they doing here?”
Devon raised an incredulous eyebrow. “I should think that was fairly obvious, even to a nice woman like yourself.” He paused for a heartbeat, then added wickedly, “The same thing we’re going to be doing.”
The words charged through Beth’s sensibilities like an avian metaphor she would have made had her brain not short-circuited. She opened her mouth, then closed it helplessly.
“Visiting Gladstone, I mean,” he added.
“Oh. Yes.” She nodded vigorously. “We must get there before them.”
A moment’s very interesting silence followed.
“First thing in the morning?” Devon suggested.
Beth understood what he was really asking. After all, she might be nice, but that did not mean she was stupid. And she knew exactly how to answer.
“Yes,” she said.
Suddenly, a raucous laugh from Oberhufter and Hippolyta’s room echoed down the corridor. Beth flinched. “But we can’t stay here,” she said. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” And without even one attempt to argue, Devon picked up his suitcase, took her hand, and led her back downstairs. As they slipped past the innkeeper and out into the cool gray evening, Beth found herself wondering if his manhandling continued in all situations…and for a wild, corrupted moment she regretted the loss of the magnificent honeymoon bed.
“This way,” Devon said, tugging her eastward.
Then, fifteen minutes later: “This way,” he said, tugging her to the north.
But it was no use. They found only two other inns, both of which had been fully booked via telegram that very afternoon. Directed at last to a private boardinghouse, they were welcomed on account of their pitiful expressions (and willingness to pay double).
“We’re at full occupancy, but I do have one room you can use,” the landlady said as she ushered them into a cozy, dark-paneled foyer. “However, I’m afraid there’s a small issue with the beds…”
—
“None,” Devon said in a dull voice, shaking his head as he surveyed what appeared to be a disused office. It contained a solid oak desk, an old filing cabinet, stacks of books, and—“No beds whatsoever.”
“But cushions!” Beth said brightly from behind an armful of them. “And a blanket. We can…make…”
Her voice faded as Devon pinned her with a dark, vehement stare. Her heart (or at least something) began to squirm.
“Three cushions and a blanket is not going to be adequate for our needs tonight,” he said. His tone could have melted railway steel faster than a feuerfinch.
Beth clenched herself into stillness, even while she raced frantically through her vocabulary for a clever response. But she found only bird facts and the dusty remnants of a joke she’d told in 1887.
Her eyes were eloquent, however, and Devon obeyed their request, striding toward her. She tossed the pillows aside, he caught her face in his hands, and they were kissing even before the narrative could summon a metaphor in preparation.
Beth’s good manners were instantly immolated. She reached for Devon with a kind of homing instinct, clutching his coat lapels, pulling the solidness and wildness of him closer to her heart. He wrapped his arms around her, encompassing all the shy uncertainty, desperate hunger, and textbook facts about courtship that tumbled confusedly within her. As their tongues slipped against each other in the secret dark, Beth wanted more, more, even knowing that a hundred years of this would not be enough, even as her bones seemed to melt into something that felt like pure liquid gold. Had the caladrius appeared in the room at that moment, interrupting them, Beth would have shot it.
Slowly, their kissing gentled, grew lush and silky, easing the storm of passion into true feeling. Tugging at the pins in her hair, Devon had it unbound in seconds, his hands smoothing the satiny ripples. His tenderness, and the palpable longing Beth could feel in his touch, brought her to tears. All the lonely years dissolved. Devon kissed away from her mouth in a glimmering trail down her throat, but before she could miss him he came back, kissing each sliding tear before touching his damp lips to hers again reverently. For the first time in a life of endless academic successes, she discovered what real happiness felt like.
Outside, night sank over the world, leaving only a soft wash of lamplight in the room. It swayed with breezes that slipped through cracks in the window frame and down the ashy chimney. Neither of them noticed. Without pausing between kisses, their fingers tangled while they worked to remove Devon’s coat and unbutton his shirt. As the cotton parted, Beth brushed a hand against his exposed chest, smiling when she felt the pulse beneath it tumble into disarray. Her fingers were snowy in comparison to his warm-colored skin. Ancient Greek script was tattooed across his left pectoral major: the wind is blowing, adore the wind , she translated, tracing the letters.
“Pythagoras,” she whispered, utterly seduced. His breath catching, Devon set a thumb beneath her chin and tilted it up.
“Let me see that beautiful cleverness,” he said, his voice husky with desire.
“Now you’re the one who needs a new dictionary,” she told him, her smile slanting. “Cleverness is incorporeal, therefore cannot be beautiful.”
“To hell with semantics,” he said, and bent to kiss her again.
Knock! Knock! Knock! Knock!
At the sudden loud rapping, Beth jolted. Her forehead smacked into Devon’s, and they stumbled back with cries of pain.
Knock! Knock! Knock! Knock!
Beth looked around for a giant woodpecker, despite their being endemic to Prince Edward Island, thousands of miles away, but Devon, scowling beneath the heel of the hand pressed against his forehead, strode toward the door.
“Wait!” Beth whispered urgently. “Your shirt.”
He stopped as if he’d collided with a wall of pain. For a moment, he did nothing but breathe; then he rebuttoned the shirt, tucking it impatiently into his waistband, before flinging open the door. On the other side, the boardinghouse landlady leaped back with an alarmed squeak.
Beth watched, fascinated, as Devon harnessed his temper and transformed it in less than a second into calm, endearing charm. “I’m sorry, you startled me,” he said, pushing a hand through his hair, smiling at the woman until she blushed. “Can I help you?”
“Um—um—” the landlady said, struggling to manage her flustered nerves. She held a folded newspaper, and Beth sighed even as she saw the heave of Devon’s shoulders that suggested he was doing the same.
“I just wanted to let you know,” the landlady said, “that I have a proper bedroom free after all…‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith.’?”
She winked broadly, and Beth realized the pseudonym they’d given when checking in had not withstood their portraits’ existence in the evening news. Devon glanced back over his shoulder at her, and his expression was so scandalous, she went from pleasantly warm to steaming hot.
Hurrying over to the door, she offered her own smile to the landlady. “Thank you for such kindness. Is there any chance the new room has two beds, since we are after all merely professional colleagues, entirely innocent of all improper behavior?” She asked this as if she wasn’t standing disheveled, her hair unbound and lips swollen from kissing, beside an equally disheveled man—as if her good reputation wasn’t almost certainly destroyed, her job no doubt gone, and the entire birding circuit sniggering over newspapers at her thoroughly shocking behavior. Kissing a man! Sharing a room with him! Going about in public without a hat! Nice customs might curtsy to great kings (and grovel before Hippolyta Quirm and Herr Oberhufter), but they demanded scrupulous obedience from England’s lady professors.
And yet, when the landlady murmured apologies for there being only one bed, all Beth felt was secret erotic delight.
“Before we go downstairs,” the woman said, “perhaps you’d be so kind as to provide an autograph?” Holding forth the newspaper in one hand, a pen in the other, she shrugged obsequiously.
“Of course,” Beth said, taking the pen.
The landlady turned her head. “They said yes!”
Suddenly, a small crowd of people in nightclothes and dressing gowns swarmed the corridor, all with paper in hand and questions bursting excitedly from their lips. Do you think the caladrius is in Hathersage? How can I become an opthologist like you? When are you getting married?
Beth and Devon signed their names, and smiled, and provided the kind of opaque responses professors are skilled at giving when they don’t have a clue how to answer. After some ten minutes, every item was autographed, the caladrius declared practically a native of the village, Devon’s physique contemplated almost to the degree of tape measures being produced, and the crowd shuffled away, leaving Beth to sag against the doorframe while Devon rubbed his face wearily.
“Come now, let’s get you properly settled,” the landlady said with a beckoning gesture. As Devon turned away to get the suitcases, she leaned closer to Beth. “Don’t worry, dear, discretion is our motto at Chattering Elm Cottage. I won’t breathe a word about your being here. By the way, do you have plans for a big church wedding? Or perhaps an intimate ceremony in a garden?”
Beth could practically see the headline in tomorrow’s newspaper. She managed not to sigh. “Conjecture on the potential connubial eventualities of our currently emergent relational situation in all its frangibility would be inadvisably precipitate and, to any perspicacious individual, contraindicated by prudence. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Er…” The landlady’s expression fell slack.
Devon stepped into the dazed silence, carrying both suitcases. “Shall we?” he asked, nodding toward the corridor.
They were led downstairs to a room near the back of the house. It proved to be warm and comfortable, lit by gas lamps and smelling of freshly laundered sheets.
It was also clearly the bedroom of a child.
“My daughter was happy to volunteer her room for the night,” the landlady said as they stared at the toys cluttering the edges of the room, the frilly pink curtains, and the bedspread printed with kittens and butterflies. Beth felt herself lose most of her color, at least half her appetite, and every last fragment of her sexual desire.
“Thank you,” she said as good manners marched triumphantly back into her brain (wiping their feet first, of course). Visions of Devon pinning her against a wall and expertly denuding her of her virginity skulked away to weep quietly in a dark corner of her subconscious.
“I’ll bring you a supper tray, shall I?” the landlady suggested. “It’s bangers and mash tonight.”
Devon muttered something that sounded suspiciously like not anymore, it’s not , but the landlady only smiled obliviously and dashed off, newspaper pressed against her heart, leaving the ornithologists drooping more than blackbirds in a rainstorm.