Chapter 5 #2
Nicholas had been thinking since Grimsfell about how to extract what Miss Metcalfe knew about the Regis Aeterni without revealing that he already knew the name.
He had mapped several approaches over the past two days and discarded most of them.
The direct question was useless. He was a private secretary, in her accounting.
And a private secretary had no business knowing the name of a centuries-old secret society unless it had been mentioned to him.
Which it had not, in the story he was maintaining.
Miss Metcalfe was an intelligent woman. It would require considerable finesse not to alert her to what he was actually doing here.
He began with Matteo di Bianchi, the natural beginning.
“The journal,” he said. “Tell me what I am actually retrieving.”
She pursed her lips. “A journal purchased at an estate sale some years ago,” she replied.
“Cataloged in the sale as an Italian merchant’s account book.
Papa recognized it for what it really was.
A Renaissance draughtsman’s working notes.
Written in cipher. He believed it contained references to Arthurian legend that held some kind of key to a larger body of work. ”
“How long did he work on it?”
“Several years,” she said. “Before his mind began to go.”
She said this last part in the same tone as the rest. Unemotional. Factual. But her jaw set in a way Nicholas had not seen before, a slight tightening that lasted less than a second and was gone.
He noted it but left it alone. He thought about the library at Grimsfell. About the argument Lorenzo and Henri had conducted over his head. He felt a flicker of guilt that he intended to set aside. And he found, inconveniently, that it did not set aside quite as cleanly as he had intended.
This young lady was trusting him with what she had. Because she needed him. Because she had made a private calculation about what he could be trusted with. And he was sitting across from her in a carriage in Somerset, taking mental notes for a quest she did not know he was already a part of.
He told himself this was the arrangement. He was finding the arrangement less comfortable than it had been to merely contemplate at Grimsfell.
The truth was that he liked Miss Metcalfe and it was difficult to deceive someone whom he liked. The only gratifying part was that it made him less of his mother’s son than he had previously supposed. Isla Scott had not liked anyone enough to feel guilt over deceiving them.
He moved toward the secret society in increments. One question at a time. Across the miles between Exeter and Shepton Mallet.
“Your father,” he said. “Why did he hide the journal?”
She glanced up from her notebook. “He became aware he was being watched,” she said.
“By men connected to a scholarly order called the Regis Aeterni. He had encountered them in Oxford. In the colleges. Private manuscript viewings. Candlelit discussions in cloistered libraries.” She paused.
“He had thought them fellow scholars at first. Men with a serious interest in certain historical materials.”
“And they were not?”
“Their interest went considerably beyond the scholarly,” she said.
“There are two factions. The larger order, the Regis Aeterni, and a more aggressive faction within it. The Dominus.” She said the name with a bland tone, making him think she had been sitting with it for a long time.
“It was the Dominus that made him cautious. He removed the journal from the house and hid it in the Camera. Where it could not easily be taken from him while he worked to find a key.”
Nicholas nearly rolled his eyes in aggravation.
A key? So this damn journal was yet another diary written in cipher.
But she gave him more than he expected. The name Regis Aeterni she had produced herself, without prompting.
The second faction, the Dominus, without being asked.
She was trusting him with the whole of it because she had made her calculation and he had passed it.
Nicholas absorbed this, suppressing the grimace that threatened to cross his face at the irony of it all.
Mr. Metcalfe hiding Matteo’s journal in the Camera to protect his work from people who wanted to exploit it.
While Lorenzo di Bianchi spent weeks at Grimsfell attempting to unlock the very same cipher from similar journals.
All of them circling the same problem from different directions.
In a state of mutual ignorance. It would have been funny if Horace Pelham were not dead.
“How do you know,” he asked, bracing himself for her reaction, “that the journal is genuine? That the Dominus is real, and not a story that Mr. Metcalfe constructed when his mind was already—”
She bristled. Her chin came up. “Because I do,” she said.
Betty glanced up from her window, apparently deciding that this exchange warranted a brief suspension of her invisibility.
She observed Miss Metcalfe with a mild affection, and Nicholas could see she intended to make that caring felt without overstepping.
Then she said, in a voice that was smaller than he had expected from her, “I believe Mr. Metcalfe. It is clear when he speaks of it. He is more himself. More present.” She paused.
“It is the one subject that brings him back.”
Miss Metcalfe inhaled. It was the first genuine crack in the composure he had witnessed since Cornwall. An inhalation of heartfelt gratitude. She turned to Betty and nodded once. A nod that communicated a great deal.
Nicholas watched the Somerset countryside and gave them a moment.
“You do not know who they are,” he said. “The Dominus. Which faces.”
“No.” She did not stray from her notebook.
“I do not know what they want with Matteo’s work.
I do not know who they are in Oxford. Which faces they wear in the common rooms and the college libraries.
” She chewed on her thoughts briefly. “But Papa was afraid of them. He is not a man given to fear without cause. They made him afraid enough to hide his most important research in a public institution rather than keep it in his own house.” She closed the notebook.
“That is the nature of what I have. It is my duty to resolve it.”
“He sounds,” Nicholas said, after a moment, “like a man who loved his work.”
Her expression flickered. Just briefly. Just enough to show him the sentiment beneath the composure … and then it was gone.
“He is,” she said. Present tense. Not past.
He let that sit for a moment. Miss Metcalfe would not want to be seen being moved to emotions, and he respected that. Then, he said, “Though I imagine the hidden journal would have been more effective if he had thought to give it to you before his mind became unreliable.”
She stared at him. “That is a terrible thing to say.”
“It is also true.”
“It is—” She stopped.
He watched the reaction that happened when she was processing something unexpected. The slight narrowing of her eyes and the tilt of her head.
“That is not a jest, that is simply an observation stated with unnecessary levity.”
“They are not mutually exclusive,” he said.
“You make a great many jokes,” she said.
Nicholas quirked his lips, realizing she had been compiling evidence and was now presenting it. “It is to cover a great deal of pain,” he said, with the lightness he affected too close to the truth. And he heard the edge in his own voice a half-second too late to remove it.
She examined him with a thoughtful expression. Not with the cataloging treatment she directed at manuscripts and the opening hours of Oxford reading rooms. Something more sympathetic than that.
He averted his gaze out the window.
“The Roman Baths,” she said, when Bath appeared in the late afternoon. Its crescents were arranged against the sky with the collected confidence of a city that knew exactly what it unique. “They are worth seeing, if you have not.”
“I have,” Nicholas said. “My mother brought me. She had heard there were restorative properties.” He paused. “She was hoping to transform my leg to be more presentable. She found the waters did not extend to that specific service.”
He heard the grimness in his own tone and did not greatly regret it.
It was accurate. Lady Blackwood had taken him to Bath at sixteen with the frivolous desperation of a woman for whom a visually imperfect son was a personal affront.
She had left two weeks later with the same imperfect son and a markedly lower opinion of the restorative powers of thermal baths.
Miss Metcalfe scrutinized him. She opened her mouth and then, in a departure from her established practice, closed it again without correcting him. Or offering supplementary information about the historical efficacy of Roman mineral waters. She wrote in her notebook instead.
He watched her bent over the page, the gold of her hair catching the late afternoon light.
And he thought about the night before. About the warmth of her hands and the character of the sleep that had followed.
Deep and peaceful. The kind of sleep he had not had since before the fall.
Since before the drinking. Since before all of it.
He thought about the possibility of waking with those hands still available. About the unique gold of that hair on his pillows. Which was a thought he had no business having and which made itself known with complete disregard for his attempt at being honorable about the entire matter.
His leg, for its part, was in perceptibly better spirits than it had been in weeks. It offered no objection to any of it, and he could not help the errant thought that his predawn nightmare would not have happened if she had still been in his bedchamber.
* * *
Millie knocked at half past eight with a resolution she had composed, revised, and finalized before she had finished undressing.