Chapter 3
“One may justify the means, given sufficient attachment to the outcome.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, on the realization that Nicholas’s near death had finally secured her older son Simon’s compliance.
* * *
Millicent Metcalfe had eaten a greasy oggie wrapped in cloth for breakfast from the local inn.
The meat pie had sat heavy in her stomach when she had then walked around the village with an impatient patience born of necessity.
Then she bought Betty ribbons she did not need from the haberdashery.
All before the morning was properly under way.
Betty Smith did not remark on any of it, which was why Millie kept her.
The arrangement between them had been established on Betty’s first day and had never required revision since.
Betty was to look after Millie’s appearance, keep up the appearances of respectability that polite society required of an unmarried woman traveling without a male relation, and under no circumstances interject any of her views about appropriate behavior into Millie’s day.
For this, Betty received the princely sum of thirty-five pounds a year, nearly double what she might have earned in another household.
In return, she received meals fit for an heiress, travel to unusual and picturesque places that most lady’s maids only saw illustrated in engravings, and the occasional gift from whatever shop Millie wandered into when her mind required occupation that was not the work.
Today, it had been a length of ribbon from the haberdashery.
Millie had wanted to buy something. She had not needed anything for herself.
And Betty had looked at it in the window.
All Betty was required to do was to be company when Millie wanted it. To be invisible when she did not. To maintain the veneer of appropriate behavior required by polite society.
Today was one of those days.
The village sat beneath a coastal headland with the settled conviction that implied it had decided on its location several centuries ago and no amount of time, weather, or change could sway it to reconsider its verdict.
It was, objectively, a picturesque place.
The sort of village on the very edge of England that made a person feel the country had come to its natural conclusion here and simply stopped.
Millie had walked the cliff path. She had stood above the sea for some time and looked at it, which she privately thought of as chewing on a view, because it required the full attention of the jaw and produced a peculiar satisfaction.
She had gone to the village baker and bought them both currant buns.
Warm from the oven. And they had eaten them while standing on the path, with the gulls wheeling overhead and expressing their thoughts at considerable volume.
She had thought about Nick Scott for most of it.
This was inconvenient. She was entirely aware that it was inconvenient.
Which made it exceedingly worse. She was not the sort of woman who thought about men.
She was the sort of woman who thought about manuscripts, about her father’s research, about the journal still waiting for her in the Radcliffe Camera and the sequence of steps required to retrieve it.
She had a quest, that had already consumed four years and several counties, and a father whose mind was going out like a lamp running out of oil.
And she did not have room in her days for distractions of this romantic variety.
Nick Scott, however, was proving resistant to being filed under distraction and left there.
He had a deep voice. He was tall and dark-haired and sharp-witted.
He had listened to her in the bedchamber with the kind of attention she recognized from scholars in their best moments.
The attention of a mind that was genuinely occupied by what was in front of it rather than feigning interest while thinking about something else entirely.
She had not expected that from a private secretary at three o’clock in the morning in a strange house in Cornwall.
She had not expected any of it, if she were being accurate, and she was always being accurate.
She had been musing about the kiss. Her fingers drifted to her lips on more than one occasion.
Enough to draw curious glances from Betty Smith, who usually knew when to refrain from asserting her presence but could not entirely conceal her confusion about Millie’s new fascination with her own lips.
Millie had caught Betty looking twice. And both times, Betty had returned her gaze to the path ahead with an expression that made it clear she was being paid well to not remark on Millie’s behavior and earning every penny of it.
She thought about her promise to administer the liniment to his thigh, and wondered if Betty should be the one to do it.
Betty had steady hands. Betty was sensible and entirely without complication on the subject.
Millie opened her mouth once to raise it, then closed it again without uttering anything … and walked on.
She adjusted her spectacles with one finger.
She could not quite bring herself to raise the subject.
Which told her something she was not yet prepared to examine too closely.
Despite her usual single-mindedness, despite everything she had on her mind …
the Malory manuscript, the journal, the cipher, her father …
Millie found herself looking forward to spending time with Nick Scott.
It is because of the places he can visit, she told herself. The actions he can accomplish on my behalf. The access he has that I do not. That is the entirety of it.
She adjusted her spectacles again.
She had never seen a man’s bared calves before, other than her father’s, and there was certainly no comparison to be drawn.
She wondered if his thighs were proportionally as impressive as his calves which had been displayed in the candlelight.
His complete lack of self-consciousness was simultaneously alarming and rather educational.
Her fingertips were at her lips again.
She dropped her hand firmly to her side and turned back toward the inn. The sea wind was too loud and too cold for thinking in any organized fashion. And she had quite enough to think about without standing on a clifftop making it worse.
The notion of hiring him had been impulse. She was willing to admit that. But it was also a brilliant solution to a problem she had been carrying for the better part of two years.
The hope that he would be waiting at the end of the drive at sunrise tomorrow was entirely professional in its nature.
Betty fell into step with her on the path back, glancing imprudently at Millie whose fingertips had found her lips yet again.
* * *
The library table had become a small battlefield.
Lorenzo was on one side. Henri on the other.
And Gabriel in the middle doing the thing he did best, which was remaining expressionless while both parties stated their convictions at him with increasing emphasis.
Nicholas sat at the far end of the table with his notes in front of him.
Technically present. Actually watching the fire and thinking about a scarlet ribbon.
“He must go,” Lorenzo said. It was the fourth time.
His arguments did not change with repetition.
They simply got louder, and more Italian.
“Miss Metcalfe is not the threat. She warned your tutor of the danger. She did not kill him. She came here to find the manuscript, not for blood. If she has knowledge of the Dominus, of the Regis Aeterni, we cannot afford to let her leave for Oxford alone.”
“What we cannot afford,” Henri said, with the characteristic vigor she brought to arguments she intended to dismantle at the foundation, “is to send Nicholas into a situation we do not understand. With a woman we do not know and on the basis of Lorenzo’s instinct and a single midnight visit.
She searched this house, Lorenzo. She searched the bedchambers.
We have no idea who sent her or what she is truly looking for. ”
“She told him what she was looking for,” Lorenzo said.
“She told him a version of what she was looking for,” Henri said.
Gabriel had not spoken. He did this sometimes, the old diplomacy habit of a viscount waiting until the argument had run itself out before offering the observation that settled everything. He was watching Nicholas.
“She was the woman who visited Horace before his death,” Gabriel said at last. “She came looking for the Caxton first edition of Le Morte d’Arthur, and Horace redirected her to Malory’s original The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of the Rounde Table.
That chain of events is what brought us to Grimsfell Hall.
She is not the danger. She is, if anything, a step ahead of us on the same path.
” He paused. “Whether Nicholas chooses to accompany her is a separate question.”
“Of course he should accompany her,” Lorenzo said. He squinted at Nicholas with an expectant expression, waiting for him to state that same conclusion. “Tell them.”
Nicholas became aware that everyone at the table was peering at him.
He did not much like being the center of things.
In fact, he would usually choose this moment to deflect attention to someone else by picking at some insecurity that would distract but, rather than make one of his customary quips, he set down his quill.
His leg had been lodging its complaints about the library chair for the better part of an hour, and he had been ignoring it with diminishing success.
He considered Lorenzo. Then Henri, whose expression had settled into watchful patience.
Then Gabriel, who had no expression at all.
All the while, Nicholas weighed his words so that when he spoke, it would be crystal clear what he intended to say.