Chapter Eight
‡
The coins on the blotter winked up at Ramsdale in a shaft of morning sunshine, while the cat silently mocked him.
“She isn’t coming,” he informed Genesis. “Miss Peebles—I am to call her Miss Peebles—says she has an urgent matter to see to involving the Eagan Brothers’ Emporium in Knightsbridge this morning. She will resume her duties tomorrow.”
Ramsdale set Philomena’s note—he thought of her as Philomena—before the cat, who gave it a sniff.
Knightsbridge was a hodgepodge of shops, taverns, inns, the occasional newly built mansion, and lodging houses more famous for the highwaymen who’d bided among them than for hospitality. What would matter so much to Philomena that she’d use the next to last of the Duke’s ten days shopping and in such surrounds?
Genesis rose from the desk, leaped down, strutted across the library, and affixed himself atop the family Bible, which was closed for once.
“Blasphemer. Philomena is about the least-mercantile female I’ve ever met.” Unlike Lady Maude, who likely kept half the shops in Mayfair in business.
Genesis circled twice and curled down into a perfect oval on his cushion of Holy Scripture. Ramsdale had the peculiar sense the cat was telling him to have done citing Proverbs and quoting Isaiah and go after the lady.
“It’s a fine morning for a jaunt about Town. Guard the castle, cat. I have a countess-errant to find.”
Purring ensued. At least somebody was having a good day.
Ramsdale’s morning deteriorated as he cut through the park. Everywhere, couples were taking the air—happy, devoted, new couples, who had sense enough to enjoy each other’s company without the interfering presence of a chimerical Duke.
“I must court my countess,” he muttered, crossing south into Knightsbridge proper. “I wouldn’t mind if she were to court me a bit too.”
He would have gone on in that vein, except a dog nearly tripped him—one of the many strays running about London—and thus he looked up in time to see Philomena striding along ten yards ahead of him.
No maid, no footman, no handy aunt. Because the next Countess of Ramsdale was once again dressed as a young man. She’d changed her walk, changed her posture, queued her hair back, and donned the blue glasses along with a fancy cravat, top hat, and walking stick.
Marriage to Philomena would be an adventure.
She marched into the Eagans’ shop, and thus Ramsdale had no choice but to march in right after her.
One of the proprietors, a spare leprechaun of a fellow, totaled a ledger behind the shop counter, his fingers clicking away on his abacus. A book bound in red leather sat at his elbow, while his pencil trailed down a single page of foolscap. An older woman in a bonnet sporting four different stuffed birds inspected shelves of patent remedies, and a young lady all in pink—two pink birds amid her millinery—sniffed at the tisanes stored in large glass jars.
Philomena went on an inspection tour, studying the shop shelf by shelf. She was very likely waiting until the other patrons left, and when they did, her gaze met Ramsdale’s.
By God, she was good. Her perusal of him was exactly what a young gent would spare an older fellow of means. Brief and neither disrespectful nor envious.
“May I help you gentlemen?” the proprietor asked. “Jack Eagan, at your service. I believe you were first, young sir.”
“He was,” Ramsdale said.
“These Tears of Aphrodite,” Philomena said, taking a blue bottle down from an arrangement on the shelves. “They’re quite expensive.” She uncorked the bottle and held it under her nose. “Rose water, cheap brandy, perhaps a dash of cloves. I hope you don’t expect the young ladies to drink this.”
The shopkeeper took off his glasses, a man prepared to be patient with a difficult customer.
“Have you any idea, sir, how unhappy the young ladies become when you gents fail to show them proper attention? When you dismiss all of their efforts to please you, put up with your conceits, flatter you, and endure your indifference? If I could sell my fair customers strong spirits in the name of medicine, I would, but that bottle you hold contains nothing less than a miracle of mythical proportions.”
Ramsdale was uncomfortably reminded of Lady Maude—of all the Lady Maudes—and of Philomena’s question about respect.
“I’m well aware of those tribulations,” Philomena replied. “Does your elixir claim to end the young ladies’ suffering?”
The shopkeeper folded his page of foolscap. “It can, indeed. Sometimes, what we need to see us through a challenge is a drop of hope. That bottle can give a young lady hope. My sainted mother believed that half of an apothecary’s inventory was hope and the persistence it yields. How many problems can be solved by application of those two intangibles?”
Philomena jammed the cork back in the bottle and brandished the label side at Eagan. “You imply the recipe for this potion was discovered by the daughter of Professor Phineas Peebles. How did she come by her discovery, and why would she share it with you?”
Unease crept into Eagan’s eyes. “You know the good professor?”
“And his daughter.” Philomena’s tone brought the temperature in the shop down considerably.
Eagan grasped his lapels with both hands. “Then you know that she’s exactly the sort of young lady—a plain spinster, overlooked for years, no hope of marriage—who would have sympathy for others similarly situated, though I daresay her circumstances are none of your affair.”
Ramsdale strode forward, shamelessly using his height to glower down at the shopkeeper.
“Miss Peebles is neither plain nor overlooked. She is brilliant, tenacious, passionate about her scholarship, and honorable to her beautiful bones. You slander the next Countess of Ramsdale at your everlasting peril. My intended would live on crusts in the meanest garret before she’d take another’s coin under false pretenses. You either erase all evidence of your vicious scheme from this shop in the next hour, or expect a call from my man of business.”
Eagan scuttled back behind his counter. “And you would be?”
Ramsdale dropped his voice to the register that carried endlessly even when he whispered. “Your sainted mother’s worst nightmare.”
Philomena came up on Ramsdale’s side. “You behold the Earl of Ramsdale in a mild temper, sir.”
“Mild…” Eagan cleared his throat and slipped his sheet of foolscap into a slit in the ledger’s binding. “Mild temper. I see. Well. Then.”
He kept two sets of books, and he swindled young women. Probably swindled old women too, and anybody desperate enough to rely on his pharmaceutical products. He did not sell hope and persistence.
He sold lies.
Except for Eagan and Philomena, the shop was empty. Would she truly mind if Ramsdale indulged in a bit of pedagogic violence?
She was staring at the ledger, at the barely discernible slit in the red leather binding into which Eagan’s foolscap had disappeared. Staring more fixedly than she stared out of windows, into fires, or at her tea.
Not more fixedly than she’d regarded Ramsdale in the office, though.
“What is it?” Ramsdale asked.
“I know where the Duke is. Ramsdale—or at least where the Motibus Humanis is, I know.”
“We’ve no need to involve a duke,” Eagan sputtered. “I’ll happily relabel—I mean, remove the offending bottles. Cupid’s Tears would sell quite well, or Cupid’s Revenge. I rather like—”
Ramsdale grabbed Eagan by his neckcloth. “No tears, no revenge, no more profiting from the false hopes of the lovelorn with your greed and dishonesty.”
He gave Eagan a slight shake—a minor, almost gentle shake, truly—but didn’t let him go until Philomena flicked Eagan’s cravat.
“Every bottle,” she said. “Gone, before the next customer sets foot in this shop of horrors. I have it on good authority that the professor is about to unveil the contents of the real manuscript, and your paltry scheme will be similarly unmasked.”
Eagan changed colors, from pale to choleric. “No more love potions. I understand. I do understand, my lord. Sir. I mean—I understand.”
“Come,” Philomena said, taking Ramsdale by the arm. “We have a Duke to set free.”
*
Ramsdale hailed them a hackney. As a female in polite society, Philomena would have traveled with him in a closed conveyance at risk to her reputation. She had never occupied anything but the tolerated fringe of good society, and to all appearances, she was not a female.
“I wanted to hit him, Ramsdale. I wanted to ball up my fist and plant him a facer. Draw his cork, put up my fives. He lied. His whole shop is a lie.”
Ramsdale kissed her cheek. “The soaps and sachets seemed genuine enough. I wanted to do more than hit him.”
How Philomena loved the menace in Ramsdale’s voice and the affection in his kiss. “The soaps and sachets are lures for the unwary, and when we’re upset, we’re all unwary.”
Ramsdale took her hand. “I can bring a lawsuit for the way he maligned you, and that would be the end of his chicanery. I should have taken that execrable sign with us as evidence. To think that my future countess’s scholarly research was bandied about as fodder for shop-window gawkers. Perhaps I’ll threaten him a bit, give him a few sleepless years.”
Frightening the little toad within an inch of his larcenous wits had probably already accomplished that aim.
“Ramsdale, be sensible. You lied too.” All in good cause, but the nature of those fabrications dulled the golden lining from the morning’s adventure.
Ramsdale turned a lordly scowl upon her. “I am not prone to dissembling, Philomena. Unlike some people, I present myself as I am in all particulars at all times.”
How did he make the hackney’s interior shrink? How did he fill the entire space with two indignant sentences?
“I’ve seen your particulars, Ramsdale, and I’d like to see them again soon, but you told that scoundrel I am your prospective countess. I doubt he’ll be gossiping about your conversation, but you did misstate matters.”
Though Philomena had dreamed. Despite all common sense and logic to the contrary, she had dreamed. She knew where the Duke was, though, and thus her dreams, and even her time with Ramsdale, were over.
How ironic, that finding the Duke meant losing the earl.
“Shall I kneel in the dirty straw of a moving conveyance, Philomena? Shall I go down on bended knee now, when the ring I ordered has yet to be delivered and your infernal Duke has revealed his whereabouts to you?”
Two realities collided as Philomena searched Ramsdale’s gaze.
At this moment, she didn’t care one whit for the Duke. Let Papa’s reputation rest on decades of sound scholarship and inspired teaching. He didn’t need the Duke to polish his academic halo.
Philomena didn’t need the Duke either. She needed the earl.
And apparently, the earl needed her. “You aren’t jesting.”
“When do I jest?”
“When you haven’t any clothes on. You tickled me. That’s a jest of sorts. You truly want a bluestocking spinster for your countess?”
He did not lie. He did not dissemble. He did not… well, he did embrace pretty young women on staircases, or they embraced him. Philomena had done likewise at the first opportunity, so she couldn’t really blame Lady Maude for attempting to secure Ramsdale’s notice.
“Spinsters are fine company,” Ramsdale retorted. “They are fearless and direct, also given to independence and blunt opinions.”
“You’ve just described yourself, my lord.”
He kissed her on the mouth. “So I have, but it’s not a spinster to whom I offer my hand in marriage. I plight my troth with a brilliant, dauntless, wily, unstoppable, beautiful, passionate woman, with whom I’d consider it the greatest privilege of my life to be married. What say you, Philomena?”
The hackney swayed around a corner, pushing Philomena away from Ramsdale, and yet, he held her hand. She mentally searched for words—any words, in any language—and found only one.
“Yes. I say yes, and yes, and yes. I will be your countess, your wife, your lover, your greatest privilege.”
“And if I haven’t any connection to His Perishing Literary Grace?” Ramsdale asked. “If all of Uncle’s maunderings are only that and no part of the Duke lies in my possession?”
That this bothered him gave Philomena’s conscience a pang. “What matters the Duke when I can possess myself of the lover, the husband, the companion?”
The hackney slowed.
“You’re not enamored of the earl?”
“Let’s repair to your lordship’s office,” Philomena said. “I’ll show you just how enamored of the earl I am.”
*
Thank God for the servants’ half day and for a widowed sister with a sense of discretion. Ramsdale had taken “Mr. Peebleshire” not to the office and not to the library—so there, Your Grace—but to the earl’s private sitting room.
Which adjoined the earl’s bedroom, of course.
The midday sunshine turned the skin of Philomena’s shoulder luminous as she slept on Ramsdale’s chest. Her hair was a chestnut and cinnamon riot tumbling down her back and her breath a soft breeze against his throat.
They’d worn each other out, twice.
Ramsdale was determined that their next bout of passion would wait until after the vows had been spoken, so that his bride—and her groom—could fully enjoy the wedding night. Philomena would probably poke eight holes in that strategy before next week, and what pleasurable holes they’d be.
“You’re awake,” Philomena said, pushing up to straddle him.
“I’m engaged, also in love.”
She blushed, which on a naked woman was a fascinating display. “As am I.”
For a polyglot, she could be parsimonious with her declarations.
Ramsdale patted her bottom. “You’re shy. No matter. I will earn your passionate devotion, and soon you’ll be declaiming panegyrics in my honor from the—”
“Dining parlor,” Philomena said. “I’m hungry. Your passionate devotions have put an appetite on me.”
Also a rosy flush and a smile. Ramsdale’s whole body was smiling in response. “I could order a tray.”
“We’ll go down to lunch. Do you suppose your sister might lend me a dress? We’re of a size.”
Melissa made that loan without a question, though it would likely come at a high rate of sororal interest. Ramsdale played lady’s maid, Philomena served as valet, and a composed and proper couple descended to the dining parlor.
“You wouldn’t rather stop by the library first?” Ramsdale asked.
“The Duke has waited two hundred years,” Philomena said. “He can wait another hour.”
“A fine notion.”
Philomena did justice to the food, Ramsdale did justice to the wine, and the afternoon was half gone before they joined the cat in the library.
“I should put him out,” Ramsdale said, lifting feline dead weight off the Bible. “He’s overdue for a trip to the garden.”
“Let him stay,” Philomena said. “We can all admire the roses together once we’ve found what we came for.”
She was eyeing the Bible, and chess pieces rearranged themselves in Ramsdale’s head. “All those biblical references and allusions.”
“But only when your uncle was discussing you or your father. For everybody else, Dante, Chaucer, Voltaire… but for you, always the Bible. For the cat, a book of the Bible. Your uncle would have been in this room, probably alone, on those few occasions when he was allowed to visit his books.”
Philomena carried the Bible over to the desk and sat.
“I’d examine the front first,” Ramsdale advised. “He named the cat—my first bequest—Genesis.”
Said cat began to purr.
Philomena took up Ramsdale’s quizzing glass, peering at each edge of the front cover. “Here, right along the edge. The stitches are so fine, I can barely see them even with your glass. It’s here, Ramsdale, but I’d best not wield a knife when my hand is shaking.”
Something lay beneath the binding covering the front of the family Bible. When Ramsdale joined Philomena at the desk, he could feel the slight bump beneath the leather and feel the lack of a corresponding bump under the back cover.
The cat sat on the blotter, as if having called the meeting to order himself.
“It might be a map or a letter,” Ramsdale said, “or another codicil.”
“We can give it to Papa to translate, then, something to occupy him in retirement.” She sent Ramsdale a look that promised he’d be too busy to aid the professor—and so would she.
Ramsdale tested the edge of a penknife against his thumb. Sharp, not too sharp. Stitch by stitch, with Philomena holding the quizzing glass for him, he worked his way down the binding.
“Do you suppose Uncle enjoyed taking a knife to an heirloom?”
“Not at all. He knew that of all your possessions, the one you’d likely carry from your home in case of fire or flood, the one you’d safeguard against mobs or invading armies, was this Bible.”
Philomena’s confidence was comforting, also convincing. Uncle had been eccentric, not unhinged.
“Something has been secreted in here,” Ramsdale said when the last tiny stitch had been cut.
“You do it,” Philomena said. “Do it carefully.”
Little care was needed. The old leather was supple, and a document about a half-inch thick and maybe seven by ten inches otherwise, slid easily from behind the Bible’s binding.
“That’s it,” Philomena said softly. “Don’t open it. Give it a chance to adjust to the air and light, but that’s it.”
The weight of the volume suggested vellum rather than paper pages. No glue had been used to fasten the pages to the leather protecting them. A Latin title had been scripted onto the leather in a handsome hand: Liber Ducis de Scientia—de Motibus Humanis. Below the title was an ornate numeral 4 and golden shield bearing three fleurs-de-lis on a blue circle with six red balls beneath.
“That’s the Medici coat of arms,” Philomena said. “The number of red balls tells us this cover is dated from…” She fell silent, a tear meandering down her cheek.
Ramsdale set the manuscript aside, out of reach of the cat, and took Philomena in his arms. “You found your love potions. You put together the clues, you did the translations, you had the combination of knowledge, dogged persistence, and inspiration to find the treasure, Philomena. The world is in your debt, and I am obnoxiously proud of you.”
Tears intended to manipulate could not move him, but honest tears—of relief, joy, gratitude, and exhaustion—earned his respect. Philomena shuddered in his embrace for a time, the cat stropping himself against her hip all the while.
“You helped,” Philomena said at last, stroking the cat’s head. “You perched on the Bible, you kept us company. I want to be married in this room, Ramsdale.”
“And shall we travel to Florence on our wedding journey?”
If he’d given her the other three volumes of the Liber Ducis, Ramsdale could not have earned a more brilliant smile from his countess.
They were married in the library, and they did travel to Florence—also Rome, Siena, Paris, Budapest, Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, and Amsterdam.
And Philomena eventually had an opportunity to study the entire compendium of The Duke’s Book of Knowledge, but the stories of those other three volumes involve other members of the Bibliomania Club and are tales for another time.
What did Ramsdale inscribe on his beloved’s engagement ring?
Amor omnia vincit—of course!