Chapter Five
‡
“This is the worst codicil so far,” Philomena said. “I’ll need to start a list of terms I can’t translate and have Jane help me with them.”
Ramsdale had taken to wandering the library rather than making notes. That’s how convoluted and hopeless the sixth codicil was. Philomena had been able to translate the first three at sight, the fourth by consulting a few references, and the fifth by consulting every reference Ramsdale’s library boasted.
Five days remained before Papa’s banquet, with three codicils to go and not a Duke or de Motibus Humanis—the portion of the work Hephaestus referenced most often—in sight.
Ramsdale peered into the lens of a telescope that was aimed at the leafy canopy of the square across the street. “You’d consult Jane rather than your father?”
“Papa thinks I’m teaching your sister French.” That scheme had been Ramsdale’s own invention, though for the past few days, the earl had been distracted—taking very few notes, mostly staring into space, while Philomena stumbled and thrashed her way through Hephaestus’s verbal puzzles.
“Teaching Melissa her French, right.” The orrery gained his notice next. He gave Venus a gentle nudge with one finger and set the planets in motion. The solar system had been crafted mostly of copper, and midday sunshine pouring through the window turned the heavenly bodies to fire as they traveled in their orbits.
“My lord, if you’re bored, I can struggle on here without you. I’m sure you have better things to do.”
Better things to do than distract Philomena from her Latin, which Ramsdale did without even saying a word. The pull and stretch of his breeches over his thighs as he paced the library was a declension Philomena had never noticed before: need, want, desire, yearning, longing.
Ramsdale’s mouth had become a conjugation of possibilities: I kiss, you kiss, he kisses, we kiss…
He halted the sun, moon, and planets. “I shall be going out. I can have your luncheon served here or in the breakfast parlor.”
Philomena was certain that “going out” had not been on his lordship’s agenda two minutes ago, but getting rid of him would be a relief.
Mostly. “In here will suffice. We are running out of time, and so far, I can’t see a single clue among all of Hephaestus’s rantings.”
He’d gone Old Testament on them with the fourth codicil, pearls before swine, a dog returning to its vomit, all quite graphic and unpleasant, and much of it an exhortation in Ramsdale’s direction.
“I’d rather you not consult with Jane, if you can avoid it.”
“I can avoid it.”
He crossed to the door, then paused and scowled at Philomena. “You are working too hard. You are tired, and I’ll not have it said I was inconsiderate of your welfare.”
Sleepless nights spent alternately regretting and reliving certain kisses and long evenings consulting Papa’s reference books had cost Philomena much rest.
“While you have grown snappish, my lord. Be about your business. It’s not as if I’ll make off with your uncle’s will.”
Philomena had offered, daily, to take the will home with her, where those references would be closer at hand and the distractions fewer. She’d have to hide her work from Papa, and that didn’t sit well, but her concern was moot.
Ramsdale was adamant that she work in his town house. He had latched on to the notion that further clues to the Duke’s whereabouts lurked among his uncle’s small collection of rare tomes, all of which were housed in the earl’s library.
“You’ve tried to make off with the will,” Ramsdale said. “You pester me daily to make off with that document, when you expressly agreed to do the work here.”
Philomena rose, her back protesting even as other parts rejoiced to be free of the chair.
“I had no idea how complicated your uncle’s prose would become. I had no idea you would be perching at the reading table like a mother cat at a mousehole. I had no idea…” Philomena stood before Ramsdale, truly looking at him for the first time that day. “You are tired, and you see your own fatigue when you look at me.”
“Too much waltzing, one of the hazards of my station.” Still, he didn’t march off to his appointment, if any appointment he had.
“Do you want to kiss me again?” Philomena hadn’t planned to ask the question, though it had filled every corner of her mind not already crammed with Latin.
Ramsdale’s expression became very stern. “What I want doesn’t matter, Miss Peebles. I should not have taken liberties with a young woman who has enjoyed a sheltered existence and, in a temporary sense, could be said to be under my protect—”
Philomena kissed him, mostly to stop him from spouting a lecture about propriety, deportment, and the temptations of the flesh.
Also, because she’d thought of little else but kissing him for days.
The experiment was a failure. Kissing Ramsdale in his library, Philomena found none of the surprise, none of the tenderness and wonder that she’d experienced in the shadowy alley. She might as well have been kissing the planet Saturn, warmed by the sun but inert metal for all its fiery—
Ramsdale’s arms stole around her and pulled her close. “Drat you—” He drew the pencil from Philomena’s chignon and tossed it over his shoulder. “All week, I have tried…”
That was encouragement enough. Philomena resumed kissing him, her pace more leisurely. Ramsdale was not indifferent, but he was held hostage by gentlemanly scruples, for which Philomena had to like him.
“All week, my patience has been tried,” Philomena said against his mouth. “Are you truly indifferent to a woman whom you’ve embraced so passionately?”
Jane said men were like that. Their pleasures did not involve their finer feelings, but Jane was a spinster, as best Philomena knew.
Ramsdale twisted the lock above the door latch. “Are you truly more interested in a lot of damned Latin than you are in my kisses?”
Philomena answered him without words, until tongues tangled, the world fell away, and she had the earl pressed up against the door. Delving into great books was a fine pastime for a lively mind, but as the mind gorged, the heart could starve.
Ramsdale had shown Philomena that with a single kiss.
“You are interested.” Philomena glossed a hand over Ramsdale’s falls. “I grew up in a house full of biological treatises and rude university boys. You are interested, my lord.”
Ramsdale captured her hand and kissed her knuckles. “Ladies aren’t supposed to be interested, and regardless of your father’s reduced circumstances, you are a lady.”
Amid the joy and desire coursing through Philomena, confusion blossomed. Papa’s circumstances weren’t reduced, though compared to an earl’s, they were humble. Comfortably humble.
Too humble for Philomena to have designs on a peer of the realm. “I am a spinster, my lord, and you spoke in error. I did not enjoy a sheltered upbringing, I endured one. My situation was all the more frustrating because I had access to the best literature penned here or on the Continent. The French have a far more enlightened view of women than we English do, and their women are doubtless happier as a result.”
Ramsdale sidled away from the door and picked up the pencil he’d tossed aside earlier. “The French women you call happy I call left to fend for themselves, unprotected, even disrespected.”
Nothing killed a tender moment as quickly as a philosophical disagreement.
“I’m sure the ladies of France would rather we’d killed fewer of their menfolk in the recent hostilities, instead of quibbling about the respect the women are owed now.”
Ramsdale slid the pencil back into Philomena’s coiffure. “I concede that point. I will also admit that, on the one hand, my knowledge of Hephaestus and his life will prove invaluable if we’re to identify clues to the location of any part of the Duke. On the other hand, if I sit here any longer staring at your mouth, or your hands, or your other attributes, I shall go daft. We are at another impasse, Miss Peebles. As a gentleman, I apologize for my blunt speech. As a man, I owe you honesty. This arrangement is not working.”
Philomena took the pencil from her hair—it was pulling at her scalp—and set it on the blotter.
“This arrangement is working well to get the will translated. Not another scholar in all of London, save Jane or my father, could undertake this exercise half so expediently as I have, and they’d charge you—”
Ramsdale put a finger to her lips. “Miss Peebles—Philomena—I am trying to be a gentleman. You agreed to translate the will in exchange for coin. I would be the basest scoundrel imaginable if I parlayed that agreement into an exchange of favors no gentleman would ask of a lady.”
That finger slid across her lips, down her cheek, down her neck, to trace along the décolletage of Philomena’s day dress. One touch, and she was muddled beyond speech.
Ramsdale was propositioning her.
No. He was trying not to proposition her.
“You don’t even like me,” he said. “I know well that kissing a man out of curiosity or boredom isn’t at all the same thing as liking him. We have… an animal attraction. I’ve been attracted before, doubtless so have you. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
Had he spouted off in some obscure eastern dialect, Philomena could not have been more befuddled.
“I do like you,” she said. “You are honorable, you are considerate, you are patient and determined. You are… I like your voice. When all I knew of you was the strutting earl, I did not care for your company. Now I know the man who keeps the fire built up, who insists on escorting me, who makes sure I eat and refuses to let me toil until all hours. You gave me a rose.”
He studied the floor, a complicated parquet of blond oak. “Nobody gives you roses?”
“Nobody gives me roses, violets, or even daisies. Nobody fixes my tea just how I like it. Nobody demands that I put my books aside to take a pleasant stroll in the early evening sunshine. Nobody listens to me spout off about the lesser-used Latin cases.”
“You are passionate about the vocative.”
Also the locative, which everybody forgot. “I like you, my lord. I like you.”
Happy surprise accompanied Philomena’s words, because they were utterly true. The last, grumpy, lonely part of her still didn’t entirely trust Ramsdale—he’d had years to hunt for the Duke, so why take on that challenge now?—but she did like him.
And his kisses.
*
“He’s no longer interested in offering for me.” Lady Maude sounded about eight years old, while her papa felt closer to eighty-seven. Late nights arguing politics took a toll, and young people these days were given to needless drama.
“Ramsdale will certainly not offer for you if your mouth becomes set in that unattractive pout, my dear. He’s been back in Town but a fortnight, and he was most attentive to you when he took a meal with us.”
“I am a marquess’s daughter,” Maude said, opening the cover over the pianoforte’s keys. “He can’t think to do better.”
Amesbury set aside his morning newspaper, for he’d get no reading done once Maude started on her finger exercises.
“Don’t put on airs, my dear. Ramsdale could well marry the daughter or sister of a duke. The earl has ever been close to the Duke of Lavelle, for example.” Ramsdale and Lavelle had met under Phineas Peebles’s roof, of all places.
Maude placed a sheaf of music on the rack, though after all these years of diligent study, she ought to have every drill and scale memorized.
“Lavelle’s sister is married. Why must men be so fickle, Papa? Ramsdale showed me marked attention last Season. Everybody said so. Then he disappears to Berkshire, and it’s as if he forgot all about me.”
In all likelihood, given the blandishments available in the countryside, he had. A man of Ramsdale’s robust nature didn’t hare off to Berkshire to watch birds.
“If it’s any comfort, Ramsdale could barely give me his attention for the duration of a single chess game. Once you left us, he was incapable of focusing.”
Or he’d been bored.
“I adore a rousing game of chess.”
Rousing game of chess was an oxymoron, even with Ramsdale, who enjoyed deep stratagems and wily ploys. A pity the earl wasn’t much inclined toward politics.
“One of your many fine accomplishments,” Amesbury said, wishing for the thousandth time his marchioness had not abandoned him for the celestial realm. Her ladyship would have known what to do with Maude, who seemed one Season away from becoming shrewish and demanding.
And the poor lady was barely twenty years old.
“A countess must be accomplished,” Maude said, beginning on an infernally gloomy minor scale at an interval of a sixth. This was one of her favorite exercises, one she could execute in every key.
“My dear, might you start off with a graceful air? I’ll repair to the library, and the happy strains of your pianoforte will lighten my mood as I deal with the day’s correspondence.”
Amesbury started for the parlor door, while Maude brought her scale to a close in the bass register.
“Papa, I can’t lose Ramsdale. He’s not charming, he’s not friendly, he barely makes conversation when he stands up with a lady, but he’s an earl and well-to-do.”
“So you’ve mentioned.” Several dozen times a day for the past six months.
“He also singled me out last Season. I can’t allow him to go strutting on his way, or I shall become an object of pity. You must make him offer for me.”
Never had a stack of correspondence beckoned with such a sense of succor. “His lordship won’t be marrying me, Maude Hermione. He’ll propose to you. If you’ve set your cap for him, then you must be the one to inspire his addresses. He said he’d invite us to dinner when he was settled here in Town, but nothing is stopping you from enjoying the carriage parade at the fashionable hour or enjoying a quiet hack first thing in the day.”
Ramsdale would never subject himself to the carriage parade. Maude would never leave her bed in time to ride at dawn.
“Everybody takes the air in the park,” she said, embarking on the same lugubrious scale at an interval of a tenth. “I must be more bold.”
“No, you must not. In my day, if a couple was thought to suit, their mamas would have a friendly chat, their papas would nod agreeably, and the young fellow and the lady would be given a few opportunities to get to know each other. Nobody grew desperate, nobody engaged in unseemly fits of pique. If Ramsdale senses that you have become so lost to dignity as to pursue him, then I assure you, he’ll decamp for the shires without a glance in your direction.”
Amesbury wanted to decamp for the shires, and Maude was his only begotten daughter.
She increased the tempo of her scales, and her fingers stumbled. “Mama was eighteen when she married you. I’m twenty, Papa. Twenty years old, and everybody knows it. Marilee Newcomb is plain, common, and only modestly dowered, and she’s engaged to a marquess.”
Maude’s litany of indignities could go on for hours.
“The press of business does not allow me to discuss this topic at greater length, my dear, but lamenting and comparing gain you nothing. If you are interested in Ramsdale, then you must be where he will notice you in a favorable light. Show off your new bonnet, show off your French. He’s known to be a fine amateur linguist, and I’ll warrant Marilee Nobody can barely wish her marquess good day in any language but English.”
Maude always had a new bonnet, also new shoes, new reticules, new gloves. She was nothing if not well attired.
“That’s it,” she said, leaving off in the middle of a scale. “My French. I’m quite clever at it. All of my tutors said so. Tomorrow, I’ll pay a call on Lady Melissa, and we’ll chatter away in French until Ramsdale is quite besotted. Thank you, Papa. It’s a fine strategy, and when next we dine at the earl’s home, he’ll be smitten.”
That was no sort of strategy at all. Ramsdale wasn’t even likely to be home, much less at his sister’s elbow when she entertained callers.
“Very clever, my dear. I’m off to tend to my parliamentary business. A keyboard serenade wouldn’t go amiss, if you’re in the mood to indulge me.”
Maude set aside the book of finger exercises and laid her hands on the keyboard. A sinking sensation accompanied the pretty picture she made, for if she wasn’t using music, that meant Amesbury was about to endure one of her party pieces.
He withdrew, leaving the door open, because Maude would notice if he closed it. As he sat down to work at his desk across the corridor, strains of some sonata or other reverberated through the house, the tempo too fast, the dynamic too loud.
As usual.
*
Nobody gave Philomena Peebles roses—or violets or daisies. This struck Ramsdale as a great wrong, beyond an injustice. Of all ladies, a woman whose imagination dwelled in ancient Rome, while her nose was in a book and her person stuck behind walls of treatises and tomes, deserved posies.
He held out a hand. “Come with me, Miss Peebles.”
She crossed her arms. “I have work to do.”
He dropped his hand. “And if you are to do that work efficiently, you must rest your eyes and your mind, take sustenance, and permit an occasional change of scene.”
Her gaze went to the desk, where the dratted sixth codicil lay in its crabbed, arcane glory. Hephaestus was waxing dire about Sodom and Solomon, admonishing his nephew at length about abuses of titled power, as best Ramsdale could figure.
Or possibly, Uncle had been going on about the House of Lords. For the first time in days, Ramsdale didn’t care.
“Miss Peebles, that will isn’t going anywhere. You will work more efficiently for allowing me to divert your attention to a different topic.”
She studied her hands, the right one bearing various ink stains. “You might try asking.”
Ah. Of course. “May I show you something?”
“Yes, you may.” The mischief in her eyes transformed a modestly pretty woman into a siren. Ramsdale’s imagination galloped off in unruly—unclothed—directions while he held open the library door.
“Where are we going, my lord?”
“Up to my office,” he said. “I keep some references there rather than here in the library, this being a public room.”
“Latin references? Histories?”
He accompanied her up the stairs, pausing only to ask a footman to have luncheon served on the back terrace.
“I work up here,” Ramsdale said, ushering her into his private office. “Meet with my factors, tend to correspondence, and hide from my sister. She would no more disturb me here than I’d intrude on her sitting room.”
Miss Peebles stood peering about near the doorway. The library was on the ground floor, the windows looking out on the street. Propriety was skirted when Ramsdale was alone with an unmarried woman there, particularly with Melissa in the house and the library door open.
Or mostly open.
The office, by contrast, was private and much smaller. When Ramsdale had invited—ordered, asked—Miss Peebles to join him here, he hadn’t considered what the chamber said about him or how intimate the closer quarters might feel.
“You are tidy,” Miss Peebles said, “and you like to have beauty around you.”
Landscapes rather than portraits, a few roses in a Venetian glass vase. “Yes.”
“And you are attached to your comforts.”
Worn slippers sat by the reading chair near the hearth. An afghan had been folded over the hassock, and Uncle’s youngest cat, an enormous gray specimen named Genesis—the only tangible bequest from uncle to nephew—lay curled atop the afghan, his chin on his paws.
“I’m not half so attached to my comforts as that dratted feline is.”
“Oh, isn’t he splendid?” Miss Peebles advanced into the room and knelt by the hassock. “Such a handsome fellow and so soft.”
Genesis began to rumble—he claimed nothing so refined as a purr—and Miss Peebles stroked his head and back as if she’d never before had such a privilege.
Genesis squinted at Ramsdale. This lady can visit any time.
“I’d give him to you,” Ramsdale said, “except he’ll eat you out of house and hanging hams without catching a single mouse. Genesis enjoys a contemplative existence.”
Miss Peebles cuddled the cat against her chest. “You’d give away such a fine, handsome beast? You’ll hurt his feelings with such jests.”
Genesis rubbed his cheek along Miss Peebles’s décolletage, then squinted at Ramsdale again.
Some expressions needed no translation, not even between species.
“By virtue of Uncle’s final arrangements, Genesis and I are stuck with each other. If you can tear yourself away from his abundant charms, there’s a book I’d like to show you.”
She carried the cat with her to stand beside Ramsdale as he took a volume bound in red leather down from the shelves.
“You are in want of flowers,” he said. “This is an herbal of sorts, published by Professor Axel Belmont. The illustrations are exquisite because the professor’s discourse is on the medicinal use of common ornamentals.”
Miss Peebles set the cat on Ramsdale’s desk and took the book. “He dedicated it to his wife. How lovely.” She leafed through the pages, and lovely became a woman standing in Ramsdale’s office, her bodice adorned with gray cat hairs, a pencil sticking out of her chignon.
“If the book appeals to you, I want you to have it.” I want you to have me.
That thought was like the solution to a chess riddle. Ramsdale had spent the past few days pondering, considering, cogitating—and lusting—when he ought to have been attending to Miss Peebles’s translations of various codicils.
He desired her. That sentiment—those sensations—had been easily categorized. He wanted to join his body to hers and bring her pleasure as no ancient poem or elegant translation could. He wanted to make her burn and laugh and forget every word of every language she’d ever learned save pure physical expression.
He’d desired other women. She’d probably desired other men. Nothing profound there, though the attraction he felt for Miss Peebles bordered on the ungovernable.
Desire, however, wasn’t the entire definition of Ramsdale’s feelings where Miss Peebles was concerned, and thus he’d devoted his attention to that riddle while she’d devoted her attention to Uncle’s will.
What, exactly, did he feel for her?
She looked up from the book. “You are giving me this herbal? The illustrations belong in an art collection.”
“Nobody gives you flowers,” Ramsdale said. “These are flowers that will never fade, with descriptions that include the Latin names as well as the practical uses of each blossom. The book suits you.”
She clutched it to her chest. “Because I am practical?”
He took the herbal from her and set it on the desk. “Because you have an attractiveness that will not fade, a luminous spirit that’s as much passion as intellect, as much of the soul as the body, and I must kiss you in the next instant, or I will descend into bad verse and maudlin quotations.”
He did not kiss her, but rather, waited for her verdict.
Desire could be as impersonal as it was intimate. A randy fellow sought a willing wench, a lusty wench sought a willing fellow. Beyond a few details of physical preference, the particular party on the other side of the bed in such an encounter didn’t matter. Fondness might play a role, but attachment need not.
Ramsdale wanted Philomena Peebles to desire him—not the earl, not a willing, randy fellow—but Seton Avery, a man better than some, by no means a saint, who very specifically valued her. He wanted her respect, not simply her desire. He wanted her to enjoy his company, of all the daft notions, to look forward to being with him as he looked forward to being with her.
In some language or other, these inclinations of the heart likely had a name, probably among the incurable ailments and afflictions.
“You look so serious,” she said, smoothing an ink-stained finger between his brows. “And so kissable.”
She pressed her lips to his, gently, as if he needed coaxing, and yet, she was right. This kiss was different—premeditated, prefaced with what amounted to a declaration, for him—and a headlong descent into passion wasn’t all that he needed from her.
Ramsdale took Philomena in his arms and rejoiced.
And then he kissed her back.