Chapter 10 #2
The title, he thought. The ease. The way he gazes at Millie.
He watched Lord Franklin lean forward when she spoke. Not conspicuously, not in the manner of a man performing interest for an audience, but as a man who had simply found what was being said worth his full physical attention and had adjusted accordingly.
Millie, for her part, appeared comprehensively unaware of this. She had very little conception of her own effect on people and showed no inclination toward developing one. Nicholas had found this charming for several days and was finding it somewhat less charming at present.
The other man also possessed not one, but two uninjured legs, he thought, and was mildly irritated at himself for thinking it. For comparing himself.
He studied Lord Franklin’s athletic frame and his signet ring and his impeccably tailored wool coat.
He glanced at the chair he was sitting in himself, cane against his knee, his bad leg extended at the angle that reduced the discomfort.
He thought about Nick Scott and the Honorable Nicholas Scott and the gap between them that existed not in fact but in this room.
In this situation. In the discovery that a man like Lord Franklin existed in Millie’s life.
Nicholas set his teacup down with the care of a man exercising restraint about a reaction that did not warrant an outward display.
The territorial arithmetic of the room was not invisible to Lord Franklin.
Nicholas caught his eye across the tea table twice.
On the second occasion, he was met with unmistakable awareness, a gentleman assessing his competition.
Nicholas returned the examination with the pleasant blandness he had developed for situations requiring it.
They had not addressed each other directly beyond the first introductions.
The restraint was mutual and entirely comprehensible.
Millie appeared to notice none of it. This was, in its way, profoundly characteristic.
Lord Franklin took his leave eventually, with a manner that stated he had accomplished what he had intended and was content to allow the rest to develop at its own pace.
He promised to return with the relevant papers once Miss Metcalfe had consulted her solicitors.
He inclined his head to Nicholas, who inclined his in return, and Pike appeared with respectful authority to show him out.
Which the other nobleman did not disdain as Cresswell had.
Yet another point in his favor. Nicholas sighed. There was naught to complain about.
The front door closed.
The drawing room was quiet.
Millie was writing in her notebook. Nicholas grimaced at the fire which, if he were being honest, had done little to solicit such a condemnatory glare.
His ire was directed at the discovery that Millie was a catch.
A Yorkshire heiress. A woman with potential suitors.
Not just any suitor, but a serious contender.
Lord Franklin was wealthy, handsome, and well-connected. Not just that, he was … more.
Worldly. Genuine. Infuriating.
* * *
That evening they sat at the library table with the journal between them. Nicholas had his first proper look at it in the lamplight.
He had held it inside his coat against his hammering heart. Had felt the weight of it on Oxford Street. Had watched Millie’s hands receive it. He had not looked at it then. Now it lay unwrapped and open on the table, and he examined it properly for the first time.
The first page carried a sketch.
Renaissance style, small and precise. The working compositional drawing of an artiste who drew to think rather than to present.
The lines carrying the economy of a craftsman rather than the ornament of an artist performing for an audience.
Nicholas recognized it without difficulty.
The lady in the water, arm extended, the pointing gesture directed toward the surface of the water below.
Lorenzo had been gifted the finished painting in London. This was the planning sketch Matteo had made before executing it. The plotting on the page before the artwork itself existed, which made it in some ways more intimate than the painting.
Below the sketch, a block of letters. No spaces. No punctuation. Dense and apparently without pattern.
“It is an anagram,” Millie announced. “Papa deciphered it before his mind began to go. It says THE TWELVE WORTHIEST PEERS. It points to the Malory manuscript as the key to the second page.” She turned to it.
“There. Numbers and letters in columns. Without the manuscript, they are unreadable. With it, the message resolves.”
Nicholas examined the second page. The coded sequence had the same structural merit as the sketches that had led Gabriel and Henri to Grimsfell.
He recognized the architecture, the calculated construction of a mind that had built its cipher with care and intended it to be resistant but not impossible. He turned to the third page.
The substitution alphabet. The pictograms. The axe.
The vertical sword. The wave crest. The circle with the inner dot.
He found the axe with his fingertip and moved it slowly across the column of symbols on the facing page, noting its frequency, and felt the satisfaction of a hypothesis that had just been confirmed by evidence.
He was not entirely prepared for how much achievement he felt for being the one to unravel it.
E, there you are. As I said you were.
He had worked out the axe at Grimsfell last week, sitting at the library table while Lorenzo vibrated with ancestral suffering.
The confirmation of it now produced a satisfaction that was not entirely about the cipher.
It was about the centuries Lorenzo’s family had been waiting for an answer, and the hope of a man who had come from Italy with everything staked on finding what Matteo had left behind.
Nicholas turned through the subsequent pages. The substitution alphabet ran across them in Matteo’s small, precise hand. The pages of apparently disconnected scholarship that Lorenzo and Nicholas had been staring at for a fortnight. This journal might be the key to unlocking that alphabet.
He had not expected to feel something about this.
He had arrived at Grimsfell a few weeks earlier with a bad leg and not much to do.
Had engaged with Lorenzo’s quest out of boredom and the general human instinct to apply one’s mind to a problem that was in the same room. He had never meant to care about it.
But somewhere during his time at Grimsfell, and then along the road from Cornwall, through the carriage conversations and the liniment evenings and the Camera and Millie’s blue eyes and the way she stared at the university buildings with the longing she did not show anyone, this had become his quest too.
He could not have named the precise moment it happened, but it had.
“We need the manuscript,” he said.
“Duke Humfrey’s Library,” Millie confirmed, concentrating on the journal. “Tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning,” Nicholas agreed.
He did not tell her about Gabriel’s letter.
Already arranged and waiting among his papers, it would ease the access question if his Christ Church credentials alone proved insufficient.
The Bodleian’s protocols were not regimens Millie had firsthand experience of, and there was no reason to explain the letter’s existence when its existence would require explaining other information he was not yet ready to explain.
He felt the omission with the familiar discomfort.
He had been making similar omissions for days and was finding each one marginally more uncomfortable than the last.
He stared at the journal and thought about Lorenzo.
About hundreds of years of the di Bianchi family’s unfinished reckoning with their ancestor’s disappearance in England.
About what it would mean if the answer were actually here.
In this room. On this table in the lamplight.
Between himself and a fair-haired scholar with spectacles on a scarlet ribbon and ink on her fingers and a notebook full of the most organized scholarship he had encountered outside an Oxford library.
He thought about the Room of Science at Grimsfell.
The sketches on the wall. Lorenzo’s voice cycling through Italian and English with increasing desperation.
And Nicholas felt the satisfaction that he had located the missing piece of a puzzle and understood for the first time the full dimensions of what it was missing from.
The journal was the key; he could feel it in his bones.
He considered Millie bent over the journal. Her lower lip was between her teeth in concentration, her notebook open beside her.
He recollected Lord Franklin and his blue-green eyes. The way he had leaned forward in interest.
Then he turned his thoughts to this. The lamplight and the cipher and the quest that had become shared between them and not knowing how to tell her who he was, or what he had lied about.
He sat with the quiet certainty that had been arriving in him by degrees since Cornwall and concluded that there was nowhere he would rather be than in this room, at this exact table, with this woman.
This has become my quest, he thought. She has become my quest.
* * *
After dinner, the three of them took tea in the drawing room.
Papa was in his chair by the fire with the Latin text.
Millie was on the sofa with her notebook open and with no thoughts to write in it.
Nick was at the far end of the room where the pianoforte stood.
It was a handsome instrument. Rosewood with brass fittings.
Positioned near the window in the slightly withdrawn manner of an instrument that had once been used regularly and now waited for its moment to shine in the manner of well-made things.