Chapter 4
“Reason governs the mind. The body answers to other authorities entirely.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, having found a physician who did not possess any inconvenient theories about the proper use of laudanum.
* * *
The day was cold in the way of an early morning that had not yet decided to become a day. Millie sat with her notebook open on her knee and the pale Cornish dark pressing against the window glass. She had written absolutely naught for twenty minutes.
Betty was in the opposite corner with a traveling rug pulled to her chin and her eyes closed.
This was Betty’s way of being invisible when invisibility was required.
Her breathing was soft and even. Whether she was actually asleep was a question Millie had learned, in two years of traveling together, not to press.
Millie stared at the blank page.
She was a sensible woman. She had always been a sensible woman, a fact she considered one of her more useful qualities and that Papa had been prone to calling, depending on his mood, ‘My Millie’s great good sense or her unfortunate tendency to treat every issue as a problem requiring a solution, including problems that are not problems and solutions that are not required. ’
She had found this characterization unfair at the time. She was beginning, in the quiet of a cold carriage at an hour that was not yet morning, to have a more charitable view of it.
She picked up her graphite pencil and wrote: Radcliffe Camera, upper gallery. Behind the Leland.
Then she thought about his calves.
She put her pencil down to rest in the fold between the pages.
This was the difficulty. She was listing the reasons.
Rational reasons, well-founded reasons, reasons a sensible woman with a mission and a papa whose mind was going out like a lamp would enumerate without sentiment and would take seriously.
And every time she reached the end of the list, her mind simply went back to the calves.
Or the shoulders. Or the voice. Or the particular nature of his attention that indicated he was genuinely occupied by what was in front of him and not pretending it.
She had recognized that trait from the best scholars she had ever met.
Men like her father before he had become lost in the shadows of his mind, which was not a comparison she had expected to make about a private secretary.
At three o’clock in the morning. In a stranger’s bedchamber in Cornwall.
My first time in a man’s bedchamber.
The list. She would compose the list.
She had no time for it. She had Papa, whose mind surfaced less and less.
Who sat in his chair with a volume open on his knee.
Sometimes knew her. Sometimes called her Anne, her mother’s name.
Sometimes looked at her with the eyes of a man looking at a stranger in his house.
She had a quest that had taken years of his illness and hundreds of miles to reach this point.
She had a single-mindedness of purpose that had never in her adult life left room for anything that was not the work of taking care of Papa.
This was not a deficiency. It was a structure. The structure was necessary.
Men were a category of disruption she had studied at close range in academic Oxford and found to be largely unnecessary to her own functioning.
She had spent the better part of her adult life navigating men who dismissed her or tried to flirt.
Men who were condescending. Men who required her to simplify what she said before they would attend to it.
And men who attended but expected affections from her in return that she had no interest in providing.
She did not require a man of her own. She had certainly never wanted one.
She had, in point of fact, managed perfectly well.
Nick Scott, above all, was too sardonic.
Too amused. Too physically present to be useful to the mission without becoming a distraction from it.
She required his mind. His access. His Oxford connections.
His capable hands. Which was a thought she was going to move past immediately.
That was all. She absolutely did not require anything else.
She turned to a fresh page and wrote: Radcliffe Camera, upper gallery. Behind the Leland. She frowned at it. She had already written this. She turned back to the previous page and confirmed that she had. She closed the notebook.
She thought about the liniment.
She had agreed to administer it. She had agreed because it was a requirement of the arrangement.
And because she had noticed his cane in the moment he reached for it and understood in one second that agreeing was the right thing to do.
She remained certain it was the right thing to do.
She was less certain about how right it was going to feel when she was actually doing it.
Her hands on his thigh. In whatever room they found themselves in, alone.
She had turned the matter over several times since yesterday morning and each time returned to the same point.
Betty had perfectly steady hands and was paid to be useful, and there was no special reason Millie needed to be the one to—
She had cut off the thought before it finished forming. She suspected it was because her emotions had become entangled, but there was no need to admit it.
She peered out at the dark.
He is a means to an end, she told herself, with crisp internal emphasis. She had told herself this before and intended to make it stick this time.
He has Oxford connections and a Christ Church education and access to the Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian reading room, and that is what he is for. That is the entirety of it.
She heard him before she saw him. An uneven footfall on the gravel outside.
The slight drag that announced his injured leg and the tap of the cane, cadenced but uneven.
The carriage door opened and there he was, tall against the pale early morning, cane in hand, a leather trunk slung over one shoulder as though it presented no difficulty whatsoever.
He wore a hat that caught her attention immediately.
A beaver hat of excellent quality that cost considerably more than a private secretary earned in a month of wages.
She frowned at it. The viscount, she supposed, might have passed it along.
She had observed that wealthy men did occasionally shed items from their wardrobes for reasons that made no sense to anyone but themselves.
He exchanged a brief word with the coachman about the trunk.
Handed it up without ceremony. Lowered the carriage steps himself.
Considered Betty in the corner with the traveling rug pulled to her chin.
And folded his considerable length into the seat beside Millie with a care that did not wake Betty. He settled. He noticed her notebook.
“You made a note,” he said pleasantly.
The carriage was significantly smaller than Millie had previously appreciated.
“I make notes,” she said. “It is what I do.”
“What does it say?”
She turned the notebook facedown on her knee. “Radcliffe Camera.”
He peered at her with the sardonic expression that clearly stated he was fairly certain the notebook said rather more than that, and was prepared to find this entertaining for the foreseeable future.
Millie gazed out the window and decided he was insufferable.
The warmth of his hip pressed against hers was an irrelevant observation, and she was not acknowledging it.
But she remained where she was. There was room to shift toward the window and she did not take it, and she was not considering why. She was simply enjoying his physical presence.
“The Malory manuscript,” he said, after a moment, in the tone of a man offering information he expects will be received with interest, “is no longer at Grimsfell.”
She turned back to him. “Where is it?”
“Duke Humfrey’s Library. The viscount arranged a long-term loan to the Bodleian. It was sent last week.” He paused. “I will be able to view it. With the appropriate access arranged.”
Millie absorbed this. The relief was immediate and genuine.
The manuscript was at the Bodleian. It was findable, retrievable, accessible to a person with the right connections.
Exactly whom she now had beside her. Pressed warm against her left side, smelling of leather and coffee and herbal liniment.
It was not reasonable but she was enjoying it regardless.
“That is very good news,” she said.
“I thought you might think so.”
She looked back out the window. The Cornish dark was beginning to pinken at its edges.
The first suggestion of a dawn that might eventually arrive.
She thought about the upper gallery of the Radcliffe Camera and the journal waiting behind the Leland volumes and the sequence of steps required to retrieve it.
For a while, the work occupied her as it always had, completely and without mercy, and she was grateful for it.
Then he said, offhandedly, “The Arthurian tradition. Several centuries of the nation’s most ambitious exercise in wishful thinking.”
Millie turned from the window. “That is not accurate.”
“It was not intended to be accurate.”
“Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia is the foundational text,” she said, “and while Geoffrey embellished, and in places invented wholesale, the core of an historical Arthur, a late Romano-British military leader resisting the Saxon incursion in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, the text has material support from Gildas, in Nennius, in the Annales Cambriae. The tradition is not wishful thinking. It is the accrual of a genuine historical kernel beneath successive layers of literary elaboration.” She adjusted her spectacles.
“The wishful thinking is in the elaboration, not the foundation.”
He chuckled. “I was funning you.”
“I had noticed. The corrections stand regardless.”