CHAPTER ELEVEN

Damn, damn, damn Harry Braxton, Desdemona thought. Ever since he’d left that morning, Harry’s words had played through her mind like the underlying ostinato in an intricate melody; deep, recurrent, and inescapable.

 … The camber of your back slipping so easily by the narrows of your waist and jettied hips to the …

She fanned herself with her fingertips. Her lips tingled.

“Miss Carlisle?” Blake Ravenscroft’s voice recalled her to the present with a nearly physical jolt.

“Hot,” she declared. “Unseasonably hot. Usually winters here are much more temperate.”

“You were woolgathering, m’dear,” Blake said indulgently.

He tucked her gloved hand more firmly in the crook of his arm, leading her down one of the Ezbekiya gardens’ more traveled gravel paths. She glanced behind her and looked away again, chagrined. Above the rail on Shepheard’s balcony, her grandfather beamed down at them.

He was so openly exulted by Lord Ravenscroft’s invitation to lunch. As was she, she reminded herself. Then why did she keep hearing Harry’s low, yearning voice?

You are my Egypt …

“I had asked how you came to Egypt, Miss Carlisle,” Blake said.

“My parents died in a train derailment when I was fifteen. As my grandfather is my only living relative, I came here to be with him,” she answered.

“I’m sorry.” He stopped at a wrought-iron bench, sheltered beneath the dusty boughs of an ancient acacia tree, and bade her have a seat. Carefully he positioned himself so that she was shielded from the traffic. He was a broad man. He made a good shield.

“You must miss England, Miss Carlisle. It must have been devastating to lose both parents and one’s home.” He caught her hand and squeezed it sympathetically. “How alone you must have felt. It is a testimony to your courage that you have managed not only to exist in this forbidding land but flourish.”

“It wasn’t all that bad,” she said, embarrassed.

“No?” Lord Ravenscroft asked, his brow climbing.

“Certainly I missed my parents but I had Grandfather.”

“True,” he said kindly. “Still, for a gently bred and sheltered young girl to be uprooted like that …” He trailed off, inviting confidences.

Rooted? Since when had she ever felt rooted in any place, any time? she wondered. “Gently bred, sheltered, but extremely well traveled,” she answered. “I feel quite at home among my grandfather’s colleagues. Obsessive Egyptologists are a universal lot if nothing else. My own parents were among their numbers. Not that I follow after them,” she added hastily.

“But surely,” Blake said, “Egypt itself must have seemed alien.”

“Enigmatic,” she corrected with a fond look about her. “Rich and evocative.”

“Rich? Except for the riverbanks it’s all dry and barren.”

“Oh, no! You have to understand—” She broke off suddenly, realizing how her defense of her adopted country would sound. She adored England. She would adore England. Her grandfather—and she, of course—might soon be living there. “What I miss most about England is its emerald green color, the wee crofter’s hut, the shaggy moorland ponies.”

“Ah!” Blake nodded understandingly. “You were raised in Scotland then.”

“Oh, no. No. I was raised in London. Mostly.”

He blinked in perplexity. “Forgive me. When you mentioned craggy moors and a crofter’s hut I assumed—”

“Well, I’ve never actually been in Scotland but I’ve read about it. A lot. The craggy moors and Heathcliff and—”

“Heathcliff?”

“J-just a name,” she stammered flustered. “Anyway, I distinctly recall Hyde Park and it was most wonderfully green.”

He smiled. He had straight even, white teeth. One of Harry’s front teeth was slightly crooked. “What do you find to like about this place?”

“Egypt? Everything,” she answered, sweeping her hand in a casual, encompassing motion. “The fairy-tale minarets, the sun-scraped desert, the damp, chalky smell of the Nile. I love the colors: bleached high country, roan-striped wadis, green-gold floodplains. I even love her sounds, from the hiss of the desert sand to dervishes’ finger cymbals to the street vendors’ music.”

“Music,” Lord Ravenscroft repeated sardonically. He laid his arm across the back of the bench and his fingers brushed the nape of her neck. “Well, the din I heard when I wandered through the bazaar yesterday could hardly be called music.”

“Oh, but it is. Listen.” She tilted her head. Around them the ululating call of the date vendors and water sellers mingled with the clomp of donkey hooves hitting the cobbled earth, the creak of braking carriage wheels, and the chirruping voices of countless street urchins.

“Perhaps if one understood the, er, lyrics,” Lord Ravenscroft said doubtfully.

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t understand the words but I still appreciate the orchestration.”

“I thought that you were something of a linguistic genius,” he said in surprise.

She laughed. “Well, I am. In a way. I can read twelve languages. I simply can’t speak them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Not everyone is like Harry,” she explained patiently. “Translating the written word is a far cry from understanding the spoken one. There’s the matter of accents and speech patterns and the frustrating rapidity with which people speak. It’s a skill I’ve never mastered. A natural gift for Harry.”

“A trick,” Lord Ravenscroft said flatly. “Thankfully he has one he can put to profitable use.”

It was her turn to pause. “I wouldn’t call Harry’s talent a trick. He speaks at least six dialects like a native. Indeed”—her lips twisted ruefully—“he’s been adopted by one tribe as an honorary member—the Tuarek ruffians. He takes particular pride in it.”

There was polite indifference in Blake’s expression, but beneath that something like exasperation. “Well, I’m glad he’s found something here. I’m afraid poor old Harry has never had anything of his own. I imagine it was hard for him as a child, wanting things he couldn’t have and I did. It rather colored our relationship.”

“I’ve never thought of Harry as being … envious.” Mercenary to a degree. Ambitious, certainly. But not envious.

“Perhaps you are not as well acquainted with my cousin as you believe,” he said coolly.

 … the clean, sweet well of your mouth freshening but sealed against me. She knew Harry. Didn’t she?

She straightened. She was wasting entirely too much time thinking about—and talking about—Harry. She would far better spend her time discovering more about the enigmatic gentleman by her side. She studied him.

The shuttered expression had returned to the English lord’s classic countenance. His square jaw jutted in dramatic profile. His brow beneath his glossy black hair was pale as a pearl, his expression as fierce as an eagle. He was magnificent, even his shirt was clean. Few in this country managed a shirt that blindingly white.

“Tell me about your home in England, Lord Ravenscroft.”

“My home.” He lifted his square, cleft chin. “Darkmoor Manor is the most magnificent place on earth,” he began passionately. “It is a great gray-stoned house, crowning the bleak, wind-lashed headlands of Cornwall. It is a harsh land, harried by winter gales and steeped in fog. It is a land that challenges a man.”

It sounded more like a sentence than a challenge, but she forbore comment. He gazed at her, obviously awaiting a response.

“I bet it’s hard to heat.”

He stared at her for a second and then gave a sharp bark of laughter. It was the first time, she realized, that she’d heard him laugh. The sound was rusty, she thought, unused. Someone should teach this man to laugh often and openly.

Like Harry.

“It is that,” he said, his amusement evaporating abruptly into reverence. “Chill majesty, raw, stern. Some would say Darkmoor Manor is a forbidding place, and they would be correct. But it is my heritage, my birthright. I only hope I am someday able to act as its conservator.”

“Why wouldn’t you?” she asked in confusion. Hadn’t he just said it was his birthright?

“I will.” He spoke as if making a vow. “If there is any justice at all, Darkmoor Manor will be mine. And I will be able to restore it to its former glory.”

Never having owned a manor—or a house for that matter; every place she’d ever lived had been rented—and never having owned anything of value that was not destined for a museum, she could not quite understand his vehemence. She shifted uncomfortably. “Well, even if you can’t restore it, you still have your health and you—”

“Darkmoor Manor is the one thing in this world I love.”

“How sad.” The words were out before she could stop them.

“You think so?” he asked bitterly. “Well, I have not found human attachments particularly successful. My own—” He stopped. “Suffice to say my mother has spent a lifetime amassing transitory pleasures. There have been times I’ve suspected that all women were like that. But you, you are different.”

Different. How she loathed that word. And it was untrue. She was a normal girl. She wanted pretty fribbles and lawn tennis games and a smitten swain … all the things she’d read about and never experienced.

“But I do not want to bore you,” Blake continued. “Let me just say I find it more satisfying to invest my passion in something lasting. Like Darkmoor Manor. I think you’d like it. Anyone who can grow to love this land would have no trouble learning to love my home.”

She smiled weakly. Well, of course she could. It is what she’d always wanted, to return to England, and didn’t it sound wildly romantic, all cold and remote? She glanced across the street at the vibrantly clad throng milling among heaps of gaudy silks, fragrant, ripe fruit, and shimmering brass goods, a chaos of color and texture dazzling beneath the brilliant Egyptian sun.

She gazed wistfully at the riotously sensual scene, recognizing the flaw blotting her planned return to England. She loved sunlight and warmth and wearing gossamer light clothes and sipping iced lemonade and wandering barefoot over hot terra-cotta tiles in a tea-scented garden. But surely England had some warm places, with cloudless skies?

“I would love to show you Darkmoor Manor,” Blake said. “Read each impression as it is reflected on your guileless little face.”

Luckily, she wasn’t nearly as guileless as he imagined. She proved so now. “That sounds wonderful,” she enthused. Unwilling to commit herself to further equivocations, she searched for a new topic of conversation. “Are you enjoying your stay with Harry, Lord Ravenscroft?”

“I’m not staying with Harry. He insists his quarters were inadequate for housing guests. I’m staying here, at Shepheard’s.”

“Harry’s right,” Desdemona replied. “He lives in a dilapidated old Mameluke palace. It is little more than a warren of boxes and statuary and books.”

“Books?” Lord Ravenscroft frowned. “Now why would Harry have books?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Desdemona asked.

“Well, it’s not as if he’s going to be using them for research, is it?” he answered with odd, bitter compassion.

“What are you talking about?”

His face reflected his surprise. “You don’t know.”

“Know what?”

His frown disappeared. He reached over and clasped her hand, looking at her gravely. “I thought you and Harry were friends.”

“We are,” she answered, thoroughly confused. “What do you mean, Lord Ravenscroft?”

“I’m sorry, my dear. It isn’t my place to tell you. But next time you’ve the opportunity, ask Harry why he was expelled from Oxford.”