“Easy for you to say. You’re not a man. And I haven’t got used to them yet.”
And she hadn’t got used to what happened when he looked at her in that way. She laughed. “Well, look, then, if you must. Great-Grandmama told me the time will come all too soon when men won’t be interested in looking there, and I ought to enjoy it while I can.”
“She hasn’t changed at all.”
“She’s frailer, and tires more quickly than she used to do, though she still gets about. I don’t know what I’ll do when she’s gone.”
Great-Grandmama was her confidante, the only one who knew all of Olivia’s secrets. She couldn’t possibly tell Mama or Step-Papa everything. They’d done their very best for her. The truth would only distress them. She had to protect them from it.
“I don’t know what I should have done tonight without her,” Lisle said. “She took my parents prisoner and let me escape.” He dragged his hand through his hair, turning it into a wild tousle that would make women swoon. “I oughtn’t to let them trouble me, but I can’t seem to master the art of ignoring them.”
“What can’t you ignore this time?” she said.
He shrugged. “The usual madness. I needn’t bore you with the details.”
His parents, she knew, were the cross he had to bear. All their world revolved around them. All others, including their children, were merely supporting players in the great drama of their life.
Great-Grandmama was the only one who could cut them down to size effortlessly, because she said and did exactly as she pleased. Everyone else was either at a loss or too polite or kind or didn’t think it worth the trouble. Even Step-Papa could do no more than manage them, and that was so trying to his temper that he did so only in extreme circumstances.
“You must tell me all,” she said. “I dote on Lord and Lady Atherton’s madnesses. They make me feel utterly sober and logical and rather sweetly dull by comparison.”
He smiled a little, a crooked upturn of the right side of his mouth.
Her heart gave a sharp lurch.
She moved away and threw herself carelessly into a thickly cushioned chair by the fire. “Come, get warm,” she said. “The ballroom was as hot as Hades, but not to you, I know. Away from that crush of warm bodies, you must think you’re in an ice house.” She waved a hand at the chair opposite. “Tell me what your parents want from you now.”
He came to the fire but he didn’t take the chair. He looked at the fire for a long time, then at her, but briefly, before reverting to the fascinating flames.
“It’s to do with a crumbling wreck of a castle we own, about ten miles from Edinburgh,” he said.
“How very strange,” Olivia said after Lisle had summarized the scene with his parents. He knew she could fill in the histrionic details herself. In the last nine years, she’d spent more time with Father and Mother than he had.
“I wish it were strange,” he said. “But it isn’t in the least odd for them.”
“I meant the ghosts,” she said. “How strange that workers keep away on account of ghosts. Only think of how many haunt the Tower of London. There’s the executioner chasing the Countess of Salisbury round the chopping block.”
“Anne Boleyn carrying her head.”
“The young princes,” she said. “That’s only a few—and it’s only one building. We’ve ghosts everywhere, and nobody seems to mind. How odd that Scottish laborers should be afraid. I thought they liked to be haunted.”
“I made the same point to my parents, but logic is a language they refuse to understand,” he said. “Not that this has anything to do with ghosts or castles, really. It’s all about keeping me at home.”
“But you’d go mad here,” she said.
She’d always understood, from the day they’d met and he’d told her of his determination to go to Egypt. She’d called it a Noble Quest.
“I shouldn’t mind so much,” he said, “if they truly needed me here. My brothers need me—they need somebody—but I’m at a loss what to do. I doubt my parents would miss them if I took them to Egypt. But they’re too young. Children from northern climes don’t thrive there.”
She put her head back a little to gaze up at him. When those great blue eyes turned upward to his face, things happened inside him, complicated things, involving not merely animal instincts and his reproductive organs. The things jumped about in his chest, and there was a kind of pain, like little stabs, when they did it.
He looked away, into the fire again.
“What will you do?” she said.
“I haven’t decided,” he said. “The so-called crisis broke minutes before we were to set out this evening. I haven’t had time to consider what to do. Not that I mean to do anything about the castle nonsense. It’s my brothers I need to think about. I shall have to spend more time with them, and decide then.”
“You’re right,” she said. “The castle isn’t worth your troubling about. A great waste of your time. If you—”
She broke off because the door flew open and Lady Rathbourne entered. Dark haired, her eyes not quite the same blue as her daughter’s, she was a great beauty in her own right.
Lisle could regard her with equanimity, though, and with affection, and without bewildering feelings.
“For heaven’s sake, Olivia, Belder’s been looking everywhere for you,” she said. “You were supposed to be dancing. Lisle, you ought to know better than to let Olivia lure you into a tête-à-tête.”
“Mama, we haven’t seen each other in five years!”
“Lisle can call on you tomorrow, if he doesn’t mind fighting his way through the hordes of besotted gentlemen,” said her ladyship. “At present, the other young ladies are clamoring to dance with him. He is not your property, and your prolonged absence is making Belder agitated. Come, Lisle, I’m sure you don’t want to end the party by fighting one of Olivia’s jealous swains, poor fools. It’s too ridiculous for words.”
They left the antechamber, and Lisle and Olivia soon parted ways, she to Lord Belder and her other admirers, and he to the scores of young ladies who could not have been less like her had they belonged to another species.
It wasn’t until later, when he was dancing with one of them, that he remembered what he’d seen, in the instant before Lady Rathbourne interrupted the conversation: the gleam in Olivia’s too-blue eyes before their expression turned inward in the way he’d learned to recognize so many years ago.
Thinking. She’d been thinking.
And that, as her mother could have told anybody, was always dangerous.
Somerset House, London
Wednesday 5 October
It was not an official meeting of the Society of Antiquaries. For one thing, they usually met on Thursday. For another, their meetings did not begin until November.
But the Earl of Lisle did not return to London every day, and he would likely be gone again by November. Any scholar interested in Egyptian antiquities wanted to hear what he had to say, and the event, though arranged on short notice, was w
ell attended.
The last time he’d returned, though merely eighteen years old, he had presented a significant paper dealing with the names of the Egyptian pharaohs. Technically speaking, the decipherment of hieroglyphs was Daphne Carsington’s specialty. Everyone knew this. Everyone knew she was a genius. The trouble was, she was a woman. A male had to represent her, or her discoveries and theories would be mercilessly attacked and mocked by the large and noisy element who feared and hated women who had any intelligence, let alone more than they.
Her brother, who most usually represented her, was abroad. Her husband, Rupert Carsington, though not nearly as stupid as everyone believed him to be, would never be able to read a scholarly paper with a straight face—if, that is, he didn’t fall asleep while reading it.
Since Lisle and Daphne had collaborated for years, and since he had the highest regard for her abilities, he was more than happy to stand in her place and present her latest paper with the seriousness it deserved.
But one person in the audience thought the whole thing a great joke.
Lord Belder sat in the front row next to Olivia, and he was mocking every word Lisle uttered.
If he was trying to impress Olivia with that technique, he was barking up the wrong tree.
More likely, though, Belder merely wanted to provoke Lisle. He’d made sure to be in the way yesterday, when Lisle had called on her. But half the world was at her parents’ house, and Lisle hadn’t a chance to exchange more than a few words with her. He’d told her about the paper he was presenting, and she’d said she would attend, and Belder had said he’d escort her: He wouldn’t dream of missing Lord Lisle’s “little lecture,” he said.
Lisle’s temper was easily ignited at the best of times. At present he was seething on Daphne’s account: Belder was mocking her hard work. Still, the idiot wouldn’t be let to continue for much longer, Lisle told himself. Belder wasn’t at Almack’s or a ball, and the present audience had little patience with this sort of behavior.
Sure enough, Lisle had scarcely thought it when one of the scholars spoke up. “Sir,” the gentleman said coldly, “perhaps you would be good enough to reserve your wit for a more suitable milieu: I suggest your club—or a coffee house or tavern. We came to hear the gentleman at the lectern, not you.”