Chapter 9
“I had formed a very clear intention. It did not survive the circumstances.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, regretting that her favorite slippers were ruined the night Lord Filminster died.
* * *
Nicholas had been maintaining arguments with himself for the better part of his adult life. Had learned that presuming their conclusion before they had actually concluded was the surest way to find them waiting for him around a corner at an inconvenient hour with more to say.
The argument about what to do about Millie had, without asking his permission, removed itself from the front of the room. It was now somewhere in the middle. Sitting there with the settled patience of something that intended to be heard when the time suited it.
Which was not right now.
Splendid. First the leg, now the arguments. Nothing is where I left it.
He limped along the Oxford streets in the March morning.
The cane knocked against the cobbles in the changing rhythm that marked his development of mind and body since choosing to give up drink and take action about his leg.
Both projects, he had discovered, operated on the same infuriating principle.
He could not rush them. He could only be honest about where they were.
The leg was better than it had been at Grimsfell.
That was the honest accounting of it. Lady Trafford’s initial work in autumn, Angelo’s sustained campaign through the winter, and now Millie’s hands each evening in a firelit room, working the muscle with the thorough interest he had grown accustomed to.
It was not healed. It was not going to be healed.
But he had spent enough years treating better as insufficient to have finally arrived at the position that it was worthwhile.
That it deserved to be acknowledged as such.
Which was, admittedly, a conclusion that had taken rather longer than it should have, but he had never claimed to be quick.
He thought about Cresswell.
The visit had been smooth. Words were spoken with the glibness of frequent use, in the practiced tones of someone accustomed to saying them.
That was what sat uneasily in his chest. The unannounced call.
The claiming of friendship. The sympathy that did not reach the eyes.
And the way Cresswell had talked about Mr. Metcalfe in the third person while Mr. Metcalfe sat three feet away.
Not once glanced at, not once addressed, not once acknowledged as a man in possession of a mind that, when it surfaced, was still formidable.
Almost predatory. Then, with some discomfort, recognizing a similarity he would rather not: And what precisely are you doing, then?
He turned onto the street that led toward the Camera and let the thought sit. It was something he had been getting better at. Letting things sit without immediately covering them with something noisier.
He was still in Oxford under a name that was not quite his name, in a role that was not quite his role.
Learning what Millie knew for purposes she did not know.
He had been charming at her breakfast table.
He had been patient with her father. He had extracted a genuinely interesting discussion from Mr. Metcalfe about Geoffrey of Monmouth’s treatment of his Welsh sources, which had delighted the old man and which Nicholas had found, to his own mild surprise, entirely absorbing.
He had not spoken to Mr. Metcalfe as though he were a condition rather than a person. He had simply chosen patience.
None of which alters the fact that you are a dissembler of the first order, Scott.
It sat uneasy. It had sat uneasy since he had climbed into her carriage. It sat uneasier now with each day that added itself to the account.
She had begun to trust him. He could see the trust building in the way she spoke to him, freely and without the managed care of a woman uncertain of her company. In the way she said his name, the name which he had given her in deceit. In the way she had examined him over breakfast that morning.
He did not want to lose that. He was finding that he did not want to lose it rather more than he had anticipated, which was a problem, on top of the other problem he already had. He was, apparently, developing a talent for accumulating problems.
And he was happy.
It was an observation he was making with some caution, in the manner of his observations about the leg.
Provisional. Accurate rather than optimistic.
He was waking up in the morning without the crushing weight of the past several years resting on his chest, which was new.
And even though there were still bad dreams, they faded quickly.
He was spending his evenings in a warm room with Millie’s hands quiet and thorough against his thigh. That was new too.
He was not yet prepared to contend with what would happen when she discovered who he actually was.
Once she knew, her attitude was bound to change.
Even if she was not furious about the deception, which she would be.
She would view him with those watchful eyes, and the whole architecture of his past would be visible with nothing left of Nick Scott as a separate proposition from the Honorable Nicholas Scott, youngest brother to the Baron of Blackwood, son of the deceased Lady Isla Scott.
All the accumulated weight of that name and that history would be in the room with them, and he would not be able to pretend otherwise.
Enjoy it while it lasts, then.
Which was not a remarkably edifying conclusion but was, at present, the best he had, and with that thought, he arrived at the Camera.
Millie and Betty had left him one street back.
Millie had not made much of the parting, which was characteristic of her.
She had simply stopped walking. Regarded him with those blue eyes.
Said that she would be on Oxford Street when he came out.
She did not say good luck. She did not say be careful.
She looked at him with an expression that said she had gauged the situation and found him adequate to the task.
Which was, he discovered, rather more fortifying than good luck would have been. He was going to have to think about why that was. Later.
He went in.
He signed the register. He walked the stacks for some minutes, browsing with the unhurried interest of a man with a full afternoon at his disposal, and then went upstairs.
The staircase was narrow and steep. His thigh made known its reaction immediately and with considerable enthusiasm.
Yes, thank you, I am aware of you.
He took the steps slowly, carefully, his expression arranged in the subdued calm of a man with no worries pressing him, even while his muscles conducted their own rather heated debate about the whole enterprise. He arrived at the top, breathing evenly. Small victories.
The gallery was circular, dim beneath the dome. Curved wooden bookcases followed the line of the stone wall, fitted close, the intervals between them falling into deeper shadow where the light did not quite reach.
The stone balustrade at the gallery rail was waist-high. Below, the reading room was visible in its entirety. The long tables. The attendant at his desk. Two scholars bent over their work with absorption, men who had located subjects worth their full attention.
Nicholas selected some volumes from the shelves nearest the staircase. He carried them to one of the library tables where he sat and opened the first and appeared to read.
He was watching the reading room below.
The attendant’s habits. The rhythm of it.
Which readers stirred from their books and which did not.
How long a period of quiet lasted before someone entered or moved.
He watched with the methodical patience of a man surveilling, something he had discovered over the past year that he was rather good at when he committed himself to it without a bottle in his hand.
He read for one hour. He learned the room.
Then he returned the volumes and went to find the Leland.
Hearne’s 1710 Oxford edition of The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary.
Nine substantial volumes, large format, heavy, their spines worn at the top from years of extraction and reshelving that had apparently ceased some time ago.
Hearne’s, it would seem, was no longer in fashion, scholastically speaking.
They sat on the lower shelf with the settled dust of volumes rarely consulted. Whoever had last disturbed them had not been back in some time. He selected the first volume and opened it.
He read for a few minutes, then leaned down to the bottom shelf again.
His left hand rested against the back of the case, his fingertips exploring the back of the shelf.
Not the boards. The junction. Where the rear edge of the lowest shelf met the plinth and the stone beyond it.
He did not press. He simply rested them there, feeling the line.
Locating the seam at the back edge. The shallow recess that ran beneath the shelf, hidden from above and only accessible from behind.
He found the point where the fit was fractionally less tight.
Where the wood gave the smallest degree under pressure.
Where someone had been here before him and done exactly this.
He went back to reading.
He did this for a while. Not continuously.
In intervals. Between intervals, he read at the gallery rail, or appeared to, occasionally coughing in the dry, scholarly manner he had introduced to the room’s atmosphere shortly after his arrival.
Not dramatically. Just sufficiently. A cough that fitted the gallery air and had, by now, become part of its rhythm in the way that repeated sounds become unremarkable after sufficient repetition.