Chapter Two
‡
“I shall begin with the will,” Miss Peebles said.
This morning, she was dressed as a female, barely. Her round gown had probably begun life as flour sacking, each finger of her gloves had been mended, and she wore not even a watch on her bodice for decoration.
But the intelligence snapping in her blue eyes sparkled like sapphires, and she moved about the library with radiant confidence. When faced with a linguistic challenge, she was not the drab Miss Peebles of Ramsdale’s memory, but rather, some mythical creature who combined intellect, determination, and—confound it, when had this happened?—curves.
“There is no need for you to read the will,” Ramsdale retorted. He’d ridden in the park before breaking his fast and should have felt more prepared for this encounter.
This argument. Everything with Miss Peebles had been an argument. She’d debated the best route to take homeward the previous evening, how long she would work per day, and whether her compensation should be paid at the end of the day or the end of each week.
Ramsdale didn’t have weeks. He had days to find his assigned portion of The Duke’s Book of Knowledge, only nine days now.
For every position Miss Peebles put forth, she had reasons by the dozen, in addition to corollaries, theses, supporting statements, and evidence. When on a flight of logic, she used her hands to punctuate her lectures, and twice while strolling down the street, Ramsdale had had to grab her arm lest she march across an intersection in the midst of traffic.
“If I’m reading the codicils,” she said in patient tones, “then I must know the substance of the document they refer to.”
“Chancery found the will quite valid,” Ramsdale said. “The estate has been distributed, and the will itself holds nothing of any import.” Except some specific bequests, that made Uncle seem more than half-daft.
Miss Peebles strode across his library, her heels beating a tattoo against the carpets. “The settling of the estate was doubtless uncontested. Chancery waved this document under the nose of one elderly, overworked clerk and took a year to do that much. Let me see the will.”
Chancery had taken a mere year and ten months, actually, which meant Ramsdale had seen the will in its entirety only a fortnight ago, when the document had been couriered to him in Berkshire.
And now he was wasting time arguing. “You will not write out a translation of the will,” he said. “You will read it for your own reference.”
Miss Peebles gave him the sort of look Ramsdale’s friend, the Duke of Lavelle, gave his infant daughter. As if His Grace hoped that someday the little mite would speak in intelligible sentences, or at least refrain from bashing about the nursery heedless of her own well-being.
“You have changed your mind, my lord. Last night, you told me the translation effort included thirty pages of the will itself. You also look fatigued about the eyes, suggesting you might have spent the night studying the document yourself when I know your command of the law hand is indifferent at best.”
Ramsdale had spent the night losing repeatedly to his friend the chess madam and refusing increasingly bold invitations to take the game up to her boudoir.
Fatigue had doubtless dissuaded him. A remove to Town always taxed his energies, and one didn’t acquit oneself less than enthusiastically in the bedroom, ever.
“I spent the night reacquainting myself with the blandishments London offers a peer of means, Miss Peebles. I am quite well rested, and a gentleman does not change his mind.”
Her gaze cooled, a fire dying out over a procession of instants. “Then logic compels me to conclude that you are not a gentleman, for yesterday you described the task before me as including a thirty-page will, and yet today—”
“I know what I said yesterday.” When he’d been distracted by the degree to which the determined curve of a woman’s jaw was revealed when she arranged her hair in a masculine queue.
“You do not trust my motives,” Miss Peebles observed, stepping away. “And I do not trust yours. We must get past this, my lord, or your coin is wasted. I can claim the will translates into a recantation of Hephaestus’s criticisms, while you could put anything before me and say it’s a newly discovered codicil describing destruction of The Duke’s Book of Knowledge thirty years ago. If Professor Peebles’s own daughter translated those words, they’d be credible indeed. We are at point non plus.”
She wafted away on the faint fragrances of vanilla and cinnamon, rich scents at variance with her brisk words. Memories of warm biscuits and cold milk in the professor’s kitchen stirred, along with the realization that the lady was right.
They either moved past this bickering, or Ramsdale was stuck, searching blindly for a document that had eluded discovery for centuries.
“What’s wanted,” Ramsdale said, “is a modicum of trust.”
He was capable of trust. He trusted the Duke of Lavelle to gush tiresomely about his brilliant daughter and his lovely duchess, for example. He trusted English weather to be fickle. He trusted women to be bothersome, and poor relations to turn up at the worst times with the most pathetic fabrications of misfortune.
“Trust?” Miss Peebles took the seat behind the desk that had belonged to the Earls of Ramsdale for time out of mind. “Perhaps your lordship might explain himself.”
She looked good in Ramsdale’s armchair, self-possessed, ready for a challenge. Ready to tell a peer of the realm to explain himself.
“We will agree,” Ramsdale said slowly, “that whatever is discovered or disclosed within these four walls will not be made public without the consent of the other party.” Such a term should have been part of any contract for translation services, and yet, he’d not thought to draw up a contract, had he?
Hadn’t wanted to involve the solicitors at all, and quite honestly did not have time.
Miss Peebles opened the left-hand drawer—not the right—and took out a penknife. “What do you fear I’ll find in the will?”
She tested the blade against the pad of her thumb, then set to sharpening the quills in the pen tray. Her movements were quick and sure, and the parings accumulated on the blotter in a small heap.
“Your turn to offer some explanation, Miss Peebles. What do you fear the will might reveal?”
She swept the parings into her palm, rose, and dumped them into the dust bin on the hearth.
“I am afraid I will find proof that my father has been a fool, or perpetrated a hoax the better to draw notice to himself. I am afraid that Papa’s years of research have been for naught, that if he dies without finding proof of at least one volume of the Duke’s wisdom, then nobody will take up the hunt in future generations, and a great literary treasure will be lost forever. I am afraid,” she went on more softly, “that without the Duke, Papa will be unable to attract pupils to tutor, and his old age will be characterized by penury and despair.”
She spoke of her father and of great literature, not of herself, and her concerns were valid.
Which would be worse, having a fool or a charlatan for a father?
Which would be worse, penury or despair?
“What of you?” she asked, remaining by the unlit hearth. “If you don’t seek to vindicate your uncle’s skepticism regarding the Duke, why go to the effort of translating a hundred pages of what appear to be rambling invective?”
She’d gleaned that much by glancing at one page of one codicil?
Ramsdale closed the door to the library, which was ungentlemanly but necessary if soul-baring had become the order of the day.
“Hephaestus left little to anybody,” Ramsdale said. “His legacy was debts, a few books, and several obese felines. He was too poor to even house the tomes he’d collected. You see them here,”—he swept a hand toward the shelves—“but such was the enmity between my father and my uncle that having agreed to shelter Uncle’s books, Papa in later years denied his brother access to the premises. Their quarrel was bitter and stupid. I would not want their disagreement to become public knowledge.”
“Family linen,” Miss Peebles said, packing a world of impatience into two words. “My mother’s relations never stopped criticizing her choice of spouse. Mama married down, you see, which surely qualifies as the eighth deadly sin for a marquess’s granddaughter.”
“Any particular marquess?”
“My uncle is now the Marquess of Amesbury. He and Papa correspond annually at Yuletide.”
The lofty title and its proximity to Miss Peebles herself was a surprise. An unwelcome surprise. An exceedingly unwelcome surprise.
For years, Miss Peebles had been one of the myriad figures on the periphery of Ramsdale’s busy life. He liked and respected her father—he owed her father—and had continued both a correspondence and a social connection with the professor after leaving university.
As a decent female of humble station, Miss Peebles had occupied the status of nonentity to the young Ramsdale heir. He’d more or less forgotten about her as he’d taken up the reins of the earldom, and she’d doubtless forgotten about him.
To learn that he had something in common with her—family linen, of the wrinkled, stained variety—was oddly comforting. That she was brilliant, devoted to her father, and inconveniently logical made her interesting.
That she was a marquess’s niece and had not been presented at court was wrong, and yet, polite society would not have been kind to one of her unique gifts.
“You probably don’t like me,” Ramsdale said, “which bothers me not at all. I like very few people myself. But can you consent to the terms I propose, Miss Peebles? We keep whatever we learn from the will to ourselves, unless we both agree otherwise?”
“You don’t like me either,” she replied, returning to the desk to put away the penknife. “That’s a credit to your common sense, because I am difficult and overly educated. This has addled my female humors, and the damage is likely permanent in the opinion of Papa’s physician.”
She crossed the room at the brisk pace Ramsdale was coming to associate with her. Only when dressed as a man had she been capable of a leisurely stroll.
She stuck out her hand, a slim, pale appendage with a smear of ink at the base of her thumb. “We have a bargain, my lord. No disclosures unless we’re both agreed in advance.”
She expected him to shake hands with her, proof of her addled humors.
Perhaps Ramsdale’s humors were a bit addled as well. He took her hand in his and bowed. When he straightened, Miss Peebles was smiling at him, a wonderful mischievous expression as surprising as it was heart-warming.
He did not like her—he barely knew her, and one could not like a woman whom one did not know—but he liked that smile.
He liked it rather a lot. Doubtless, Ramsdale would never see that smile again if she learned he was all but courting the Marquess of Amesbury’s daughter.
*
“Philomena mentioned nothing to me about tutoring Ramsdale’s sister,” the professor said.
“She told you last night at supper,” Jane replied, taking a pinch of salt and sprinkling it over her soup. Cook had made a wonderful beef stew flavored with a hint of tarragon, but her efforts, as usual, had to compete with some tract or treatise at the professor’s elbow.
“Is the Duke joining us at table again?” Jane asked.
The professor—without looking up—took a slice of bread from what happened to be Jane’s plate and dipped it in his soup.
“You banished His Grace from supper five years ago. We’re not eating supper.”
That would be a yes. From some arcane manuscript unearthed by one of the professor’s students at a bookstall in Prague, or at an estate sale in Italy, somebody had come across a fleeting reference to that dratted Duke.
“Professor, you are retiring,” Jane said, gently moving the pamphlet away from his elbow. “Isn’t it time the Duke retired as well, or that a younger generation of scholars debated his existence?”
Phineas Peebles had aged well, if not exactly happily. He still had snapping blue eyes, a thick thatch of white hair, and a posture many a military recruit would envy. He sat up very tall.
“Just because nobody has seen the manuscript for two hundred years doesn’t mean it ceased to exist. Britain has many documents that are much older, and Shakespeare folios and quartos seem to turn up every other year. Where’s the butter?”
Jane passed him a dish sitting not eight inches from his pint of ale. “Why must you be the one to find him?”
“Jane, you wound me. When Lorenzo de’ Medici commanded that the most significant knowledge of his day be set down in a single compendium, by God, you may trust that knowledge was set down. I am the Duke’s champion in the present age, and every scholar and dilettante involved with ancient languages and philosophy knows it.”
Mostly because they disagreed with the professor. A document of that size and significance would not simply disappear. Rumors abounded—perhaps the French had pilfered it from a Florentine villa, or the Spanish had married their way into possession of the Duke. Perhaps the four quires had been flung to the compass points in an effort to ensure at least one part of the treatise survived.
The professor had followed every hint, every shred of evidence, and they all confirmed—in his opinion—that the Duke of Buckingham had got hold of the entire work on behalf of James I.
“You won’t find a document that has been missing for two hundred years in the next nine days,” Jane said. “Will you devote the next thirty-five years of your life to the same fruitless cause as you have the last thirty-five?”
The professor buttered another slice of bread, broke it in half, and passed half to Jane. “My career has been distinguished by much scholarship, endless teaching responsibilities, and research into all manner of ancient documents and theories. Why attack the Duke now, Jane? In retirement, I will be more free than ever to track him down.”
“Phineas, the Duke is not a person. We speak of him as if he’s a distant relation who’s wandered off after taking an excess of spirits. Your own daughter wanders off and you take no notice.”
This criticism was pointless. Phineas loved his daughter if he loved anybody, but loving somebody and being able to show that love were not the same in his case.
“I noticed,” the professor said. “You said she’s teaching French to Ramsdale’s sister, hardly a dangerous undertaking. Do you intend to eat that bread?”
Jane passed him the buttered half slice when she wanted to upend her soup in his lap. “Phin, you should be taking Philomena to visit her maternal relations. You will have time now. She’s too old to be presented at court, but titled relations might help her meet an eligible man, might even see their way clear to—”
The professor held up a staying hand—and a half slice of buttered bread. “If you utter the word dowry, I will not answer for the consequences, Jane Dobbs. The exalted marquess well knows Philomena’s circumstances and hasn’t invited her to visit her cousins, much less to drag me into the countryside as her escort.”
“Because you refuse to ask it of him.”
“She doesn’t want to go,” the professor said, taking a bite of the bread. “She’s smitten with the Duke too, though I defy you to explain how a woman can find what trained scholars have been unable to search out after two centuries’ effort. Philomena’s loyal, though, which is more than I can say for some people.”
That was… that was the professor’s version of a tantrum. For him to retire without finding any direct evidence that his precious Duke existed was turning his usually placid nature sour.
“You’re right,” Jane replied, pushing away her lukewarm soup. “Philomena is very loyal to her papa, while I am only her paid companion. She’s approaching thirty, though, and nobody expects a confirmed spinster from a home of humble means to require a companion.”
The professor put down his spoon. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You are actually looking at somebody with whom you’re sharing a meal. I will die secure in the knowledge that miracles occur.”
He had the grace to look abashed. “Jane, I am much distracted of late, I know, and I do apologize, but the Duke… A man who unearths a treasure of that magnitude might aspire to a token of royal favor. He might attract the best tutoring prospects. He might be appointed a librarian or special lecturer, or curator to a significant collection. Without the Duke, I am merely another fading scholar, wearing my nightcap at odd hours and tucking scraps of paper where they do not belong.”
Jane chose to be encouraged that Phineas was discussing his frustrations, but she could not afford to relent so much as one inch where Philomena’s future was concerned.
“You have much to be proud of, not the least of which is your daughter. Can you not take a few months away from your obsession to see her settled?”
“Obsession is an ugly word, Jane.”
“So is pride, Phineas. The Duke has waited two hundred years, wherever he’s lurking. He can wait another few months.”
Jane was angry, but she’d been angry with the professor for years. She’d hoped retirement would inspire him to finally act like a father to his only child, finally make room in his life for something other than scholarship. In Jane’s opinion, that scholarship was merely a desperate quest for recognition from a lot of prosy old windbags who dropped Latin phrases into their conversations like debutantes showing off their French.
“The Duke cannot wait, Jane. You recall Mr. Handley.”
“I have never met anybody named Handley.”
“He’s an apothecary with a shop in Bloomsbury. Makes excellent tisanes for aching joints.”
Aching joints, such as one acquired when one spent long hours gripping a quill pen.
“What of him?”
“He attends monthly dinners with others of his profession, and he heard Mr. Eagan, of Eagan Brothers Emporium in Knightsbridge, bragging about a new source of recipes for love potions, one written in an ancient hand and stolen from an Italian monastery by the plundering French. That could only be the Duke, or a partial copy of the Duke, for he devoted an entire volume to the emotional workings of the human heart.”
While the professor lately appeared to have no heart. “Magic potions are nonsense, particularly where amatory matters are concerned. What’s wanted in that case is for two people to have mutual respect and compatibility.”
The professor finished Jane’s ale. “Such a romantic, Jane. In any case, rumors are based on facts, and while Philomena is off pretending to tutor Ramsdale’s sister in French, I will be making a jaunt down to Knightsbridge.”
Jane helped herself to the professor’s ale. “Shall I hold supper for you?”
“Please. I expect Philomena will be back before I am.”
He rose and collected his half slice of buttered bread, though he hadn’t finished his soup. “My compliments to Cook. The soup was a bit bland.”
Delicate. The soup had been delicate. Jane’s nerves were growing delicate. “Philomena said she might not be back until after supper.”
“Of course she’ll be back,” the professor said, picking up his treatise. “Ramsdale’s sister spent two years at a French finishing school, and the earl is fluent in French. Her ladyship has no need of a French tutor, much less one underfoot the livelong day.”
He resumed reading as he left the dining room, muttering under his breath and leaving a trail of crumbs on the carpet.
Jane drank the last of his ale and clung stubbornly to the notion that the conversation had been encouraging, for it had been a conversation. With the professor, that was an accomplishment in itself. He’d also set aside his reading for a good five minutes and noticed the peculiarity of Philomena’s scheduled activities.
He had not, alas, noticed the woman who’d taken over raising his daughter more than a decade ago.
Not yet.
*
The will was a puzzle, just barely comprehensible in places, ridiculously satirical in others, and touchingly genuine in still others. Philomena had plowed through eight pages of cramped, slashing prose rife with idiosyncratic abbreviations and odd phrases before Ramsdale interrupted.
“That is enough for the present, Miss Peebles.”
“You’ve taken notes?” His lordship had sat at the reading table, paper, pen, and ink before him, while Philomena had stumbled and lurched through the text from the comfortable chair behind the desk.
Once or twice, Ramsdale had snorted or guffawed, but he’d mostly remained silent.
“I have taken three pages of notes,” he said, capping the silver ink bottle and laying his pen in a matching tray, “but mostly, I have enjoyed hearing my uncle’s voice in your words. Luncheon should be ready, if you’d accompany me to the dining room?”
He rose and approached the desk. Philomena had the thought that he was about to toss her from the library bodily, then realized he expected to hold her chair.
“I hadn’t planned on a midday meal, your lordship, though a tea tray with a few biscuits wouldn’t go amiss. I promise not to get crumbs on your blotter.”
She offered him a smile, lest he think to lecture her into acceding to his wishes. A day offered only so much sunlight, and Philomena needed to make use of every instant. Thus far, Hephaestus had made several references to “that misguided fool, Peebles,” but had said nothing about the Duke.
Philomena hoped Hephaestus would wax eloquent about the volume of the Duke’s manuscript that dealt with the secrets of the human heart—de Motibus Humanis—a topic Hephaestus had publicly declared Lorenzo the Magnificent would never have troubled over.
Why particularly discredit that one aspect of the ducal manuscript, unless—?
The earl braced his hands on the desk and leaned across. “Please join me for lunch, Miss Peebles. The mind grows dull without periodic rest, and I daresay if you’re to make progress this afternoon with Uncle’s specific bequests, then you will need more than a few biscuits to fortify you.”
What magnificent eyes he had. Very… compelling.
“I am a trifle peckish,” Philomena said, which was something of a surprise. “Perhaps you’d send a sandwich with the tea?”
The earl leaned closer. “Perhaps you’d for once let somebody show you a bit of consideration and take a meal with me?”
How many times had Philomena and Jane made small talk over a beef roast, pretending that Papa hadn’t once again forgotten to join them for his favorite meal?
“I’ll bring this short passage,” she said, picking up the first page of specific bequests. “We can work through it while—”
Ramsdale came closer, so he was nearly nose to nose with Philomena. “How can that brilliant and busy mind of yours fail to grasp the concept of respite, Miss Peebles? Allow me to explicate: respite, from the Latin respicere, to have concern for, to cast one’s thoughts back to; and the Middle French, respetier, to save, show clemency to, or delay. In modern English, to rest from one’s burdens.”
Rather than raise his voice, he’d pitched his little lecture just above a whisper and come closer and closer, until Philomena could see that his eyes were not black, but rather, a sable brown.
He tugged on the page of vellum she held, and Philomena was abruptly aware that she was within breath-mingling distance of an adult male to whom she was not related. She had spent four hours alone with the earl in the library and not given him a thought, so absorbed had she been in her task.
“I’ll join you for luncheon,” she said, surrendering the specific bequests. “But we’ll not linger over the meal, sir. Not when my progress this morning has been slower than I’d anticipated.”
He came around the desk and held her chair. “We’ll not linger over the meal, but we won’t rush either, madam.”
He offered his arm, another small surprise. Philomena accepted that courtesy, and wondered why her own father never bothered with such a small gesture of consideration.