Chapter 15 #2
“I am an employer,” Millie said. She was saying it for herself as much as for Betty, which she noted with the habitual honesty she applied to her own processes.
“The terms of the arrangement are clear. Three months. When the work no longer requires his specific capabilities, he will return to the viscount’s household or find other employment and that will be the conclusion of it.
” She paused. “One cannot court a secretary. It would be entirely inappropriate, and practically speaking, it would make no sense.”
“Yes, miss,” Betty said. She said it with objectivity, earning every penny of her discretionary wages. The words left unsaid were fully present. Present and fully formed and entirely unexpressed.
Millie adjusted her spectacles with one finger, and they slid back immediately.
She watched the gate and thought about the study yesterday.
About the warmth of the room and the enciphered journal on the table and the spectacles lifted from her nose and the full, accumulated weight of days arriving all at once in a single, magical kiss.
She thought about this morning. About waking with the sort of wakefulness that came after something had changed.
About sitting across the breakfast table from Nick while he discussed the Malory manuscript and the Merton access problem with the engrossed attention he brought to operational questions.
His dark hair was slightly disordered, his Nordic-blue eyes moving over the problem he was genuinely interested in.
She had been watching him and thinking about the study.
And had been doing a very poor job of not thinking about the study.
One cannot court a secretary, she thought again, with the asserted firmness of a conclusion that should have settled by now and had not. It should have taken. Why has it not taken?
She turned them back toward the gate for what she estimated was the sixth or seventh circuit of the morning and continued to wonder.
They ate a pie from a street vendor at half past twelve, standing at the corner of Merton Street in the cold.
Betty ate hers with the uncomplaining practicality she had developed over two years of traveling with Millie, two years of meals consumed in a variety of unconventional circumstances and never a word said about it.
Millie ate hers without tasting it. She was thinking about what happened when the work was done.
Not the immediate next step, which was clear enough.
The deciphered journal, the key to the pictograms, whatever the Merton copy of the Historia was going to yield.
But the larger next. The one that existed after all of that, when the Oxford portion of the quest was complete and there was no longer an operational reason for Nick to be here rather than somewhere else.
Will he leave when he is no longer needed?
She had been thinking about this with the recurring insistence of a thought that had fought for its place and intended to keep it.
She had employed him for three months, overjoyed to have found a candidate for the task that she had been contemplating for several months.
When that task no longer required an educated man with Oxford connections who could enter the restricted libraries she could not enter, what was the reason for him to remain?
He would need to consider his career. A life that existed entirely separate from this one.
The specifics of which she had never fully established despite nearly two weeks of close proximity.
Because there were a great many apprehensions she had chosen not to press.
And she was beginning to understand that the choosing not to press had been its own kind of answer to a question she had not been ready to ask.
She finished the pie. She turned to the gate.
She thought about his attitude when he was genuinely occupied by a problem.
Which was different from his attitude when he was feigning interest. She had seen both and knew the difference.
The difference mattered. And she was aware that thinking about the pattern of a man’s attention with this level of obsession was not how a woman thought about a professional arrangement.
She set this observation aside in the place where she set worries that she was not yet ready to examine. And continued walking.
The third hour was quieter. They walked. They passed the gate at regular intervals. Betty had her ribbon and her roll and the self-contained equanimity she brought to extended waits. Which Millie appreciated more than she had ever said.
Oxford continued its business around them, faculty and students, carriages and clerks moving along and paying no mind to two women loitering on the corner.
Millie watched them and thought about years of carrying this alone.
Being in Oxford alone with an ailing father.
Of being the only person who knew where the journal was and what the cipher meant and why it mattered and how much it cost Papa on the days when his mind came back long enough for him to understand what had been lost. And these past days of not being alone in it.
And about what it was going to feel like when she was alone with it again.
She did not enjoy this line of thinking.
She continued it anyway. Because she was always honest with herself even when honesty was uncomfortable.
She heard the gate.
She was at the far end of Merton Street, twenty yards from the gate, and she heard it open and turned, and Nick stepped out into the street.
Her feet moved before she had consciously instructed them to.
Three hours, she noted with impatience, and she was already walking.
Betty kept pace beside her with the quiet efficiency of long practice.
Nick was searching down the street in the other direction and had not yet seen them.
She was six yards away and closing when she became aware of the older man in the gate behind him.
Iron-gray hair and a comfortable settled bearing that announced he was part of the institution of the college.
As Nick moved away, the older man called out in the carrying voice of someone accustomed to being heard across quadrangles.
“Give my regards to Lord Blackwood when you see him.” He said it warmly. The easy warmth of old acquaintance. “The porters still complain about what a rapscallion your brother was when he attended Merton.”
Millie stopped.
The street continued around her. A student passed on the far side, head bent.
Betty came to a halt one step behind her.
The older man was already retreating into the college with the cheerful gait of a pleasant visit concluded, returning to his usual business.
None of this made any impression. Because what mattered was Nick’s face.
She was close enough to see it happen. The half-second before the composure assembled itself over the top of it.
The brief, unmistakable element of something behind his expression that he managed quickly but not quite quickly enough.
Because she had been learning his expressions, and this one she had not seen before in its full form, had only glimpsed it in fragments.
She understood it completely in the instant of seeing it clearly.
He has heard truths he did not intend to be overheard and knows that they have been overheard.
She watched him calculate the damage, swiftly, the sort of calculation that had been running in the background for some time and had hoped it would not be required in its full version.