Sophie jerked to a halt. “In love?” she stammered. “How can I be? I barely know him.”
“The heart does not always wait for such practical things. When I first met Hart Mackenzie, I told myself he was an arrogant, high-handed wretch who thought too much of himself and needed to be kicked squarely in the backside. I was right, of course, but at the same time, I fell hopelessly in love with him. Common sense told me to turn a cold shoulder, but my inconvenient emotions urged me to smile at him and kiss him silly at the first opportunity. Ah, my dear, I see your blush. You already have kissed David silly.”
The duchess’s very perceptive gaze made Sophie’s face go hotter.
“Not deliberately,” she managed.
“It was indeed deliberate, my dear. If you’d found David repugnant, you’d have punched him in the nose and marched away, demanding your uncle turn him out for the scoundrel he is. That means David kissed you, and you did not mind.”
“No.” Sophie had to face what was in herself. “I did not.”
Eleanor’s crooked smile warmed her. “Well then, we must retrieve you from this wretched marriage so you can kiss David with impunity.”
Sophie gave a bitter laugh. “My husband is trying to push me from it quite eagerly.”
“In a most inelegant and shameful way. Never mind. We shall see what happens.”
She looked mysterious, and Sophie’s misgivings rose. “David … Mr. Fleming hinted there could be an annulment, but that is impossible. What do you know of it? I see by your face you know something.”
“I do. But I do not wish to raise your hopes. Let me simply say that Mr. Fleming knows powerful people, my husband included in that number. They will work, and we shall await the outcome.”
“Why should they?” Sophie ceased walking, facing the duchess as the wind tugged at hats and skirts. “Why should powerful men care about the bad marriage of the Earl of Devonport and his nobody wife?”
Eleanor regarded her calmly. “You are an intelligent young woman, I can see. Why do you suppose?”
Sophie did not believe her face could grow any more scalding. “You are saying David … Mr. Fleming … cares for me. I think you’re wrong. I think he is trying to redeem himself—perform a good deed and be praised by his friends, or be forgiven for his past, or … I don’t know. He was very much in love with you.” Sophie looked straight into the duchess’s blue eyes. “Perhaps he is trying to gain your admiration.”
“He is always attempting to gain my admiration,” Eleanor said without concern. “And Hart’s. That does not mean he cares nothing for you.”
“He was in love with you,” Sophie said, exasperated out of her politeness.
“Not at all.” Eleanor’s tone turned brisk. “David liked me very much—he still does, bless him—and he felt sorry for me. David lives very much in Hart’s shadow—he usually prefers that, but it can’t be easy. He took the opportunity once Hart’s shadow moved to propose to me, but I knew full well we’d never suit. David knew that too once he worked through his wounded vanity. He is neither a slave to his emotions nor a fool.”
Sophie listened in disquiet. Uncle Lucas had implied that David had nearly wrecked his life for this woman, and she’d observed how easily Eleanor and David had fallen in with each other upon her arrival.
Because they had been friends for so long? Were they that comfortable with each other?
Sophie envied them this, even under her flare of jealousy. How lovely to have such a friendship. If the world were a different place, she could live forever with Uncle in the vicarage, friend David appearing for long stays, the three of them growing closer as the years passed.
But the world was not comforting. It preferred Sophie to either be married or widowed, to have no bodily desires, and to not dwell under the same roof as an unmarried gentleman, even with her uncle as a chaperone. Her bubble of coziness here would come to an end soon, never to be repeated.
Eleanor turned with Sophie and began walking again, in silence this time, sweeping her gaze over the landscape.
Sophie studied her curiously. “What about you, Lady Eleanor? You mentioned your husband’s shadow—you must live constantly in it, as I do in my husband’s. How do you manage?”
“Easily,” Eleanor answered without rancor. “I side-step right back into the sunshine. Drives Hart spare.” She smiled broadly, a woman confident in her own life and power.
Sophie had once thought she was as confident. Now she swam in a sea of confusion.
“You must be very happy,” she said glumly.
Eleanor pulled her closer and patted her hand. “You must not give way, my dear. We will see that you are happy. I have determined this. I am so determined that Hart rolled his eyes at me and sent me away. Which means he agrees with me.” Another pat as Eleanor gazed across the fields again. “What lovely country. I believe there are picturesque ruins of an abbey that I can photograph, are there not? I will have so many plates to develop I’ll not come out of my darkroom for weeks.” She squeezed Sophie’s arm and smiled excitedly. “What a treat.”
* * *
David watched Sophie as she held a mirror to beam a ray of sunlight onto the floor. She remained patient while Eleanor repositioned her camera a dozen times, none of the angles right, or so she claimed.
David hunkered on the other side of the mosaic with his mirror, he and Sophie trying to send the faint light onto the tiles. They’d cleared the hole and shored up its walls, but even so, it was tight quarters.
“You had to unearth the smallest Roman villa in creation,” David called up to the hovering Dr. Pierson. “Instead of the lavish Golden House of Nero.”
“I’m certain even bits of that found will be small,” Pierson said without rancor. “It has been two thousand years, my friend. We cannot expect vast parlors for us to lounge in.”
“I don’t see why not. The Romans were fond of lounging. They ate dinner lying down.”
“Must have been a messy business.” Eleanor bent over her camera, covering her head with a black cloth to shut out what there was of the light. “I can’t tuck into a cream cake at tea without dropping it all over my clothes.”
David’s imagination flashed to Sophie biting into the profiterole, cream sliding over her lips.
She must have thought about it at the same instant, because her eyes sought David’s, and they shared a hot look.
He flinched at how much his heart turned over at her smile. When Sophie walked away once she was free, David would hurt, and hurt excessively. He knew it, but could he climb out of this hole and leave now, to get the pain over with?
No, of course not. He’d remain and be tortured by what he could not have. It was his way.
“Ah, there we are. Now, David, for the love of all that’s holy, do not move. Oh, forgive me, Vicar.”
“Not at all, my dear,” Uncle Lucas said. He gazed eagerly into the opening, out of the light—Eleanor had already scolded him about casting shadows.
David tried to become a statue. Sophie, her arms a graceful curve as she held the mirror, did the same.
She’d make a beautiful sculpture, David thought. Like the Daphne of Bernini, or the glorious marble perfection of a Canova. It would of course be a nude statue, every curve of her delectably caught, her limbs displayed for all to see. But it would be a private thing, for the two of them …
“David,” Eleanor said in exasperation. “Do pay attention.”
David snapped his mind from its treacherous path. “I beg your pardon, old friend.”
“And cease calling me old. No lady likes the adjective, even when she’s ninety.”
“I am devastated to upset you, my friend from the far-off days of my callow youth.”
The light from Sophie’s mirror wavered. David, who had not looked away from her for a moment, knew she was laughing.
Eleanor flung off the black cloth. “Well, I have done my best, but I see that I cannot have the pair of you down here at the same time. You are conspirin
g to ruin my work.”
Sophie’s mirror shook harder, and David fell in love with her a little bit more.
“Good heavens,” Pierson rumbled above, but he’d left the lip of the hole. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon.”
All three on the mosaic rose and peered over the edge in bewilderment. David thought they must look like moles poking out of their burrow to see the wide world.
A tall man with a thick brown beard, a brown suit in nearly the same shade, gaiters, and a shapeless hat walked toward Pierson, his arm outstretched. “Well met, Dr. Pierson.”
“Indeed. Indeed.” Pierson engulfed the man with his usual enthusiastic handshake and turned him to the three faces watching them. “My friends, this is Dr. Gaspar. Howard Gaspar. I took your advice to heart, Fleming, and decided to ask a professional archaeologist to help me with the site. I wrote to him while you were away.”
“At your service.” Dr. Gaspar bowed politely to the company.
His surname was Hungarian but he dressed, sounded, and behaved like an Englishman. Probably had never set foot in Hungary. He had brown eyes, brown hair, and sun-bronzed skin that blended with his rather shabby suit. Drab, David thought. Extraordinarily drab. Probably worked hard at it.
David knew bloody well he’d not have disparaged the man if Gaspar hadn’t stared in a rude and intrigued way at Sophie. As Pierson assisted first Eleanor then Sophie to solid ground, Gaspar gazed at Sophie as though he’d been clouted between the eyes.
Exactly as David must have appeared when he’d first seen Sophie. Damn it all.
“May I present the Duchess of Kilmorgan,” Pierson said grandly. “She’s agreed to do the photography. And my niece, Miss Tierney.”
Gaspar paid little attention to the fact that he was in the presence of a lofty duchess, because his interest was all for Sophie. David expected him to say something about envying Pierson for being surrounded by beauty, or exclaim that no great find could compare to the ladies—something smarmy and overblown.
Gaspar managed to stammer, “How do you do?” and then went silent.
Sophie took the hand he offered after he’d shaken Eleanor’s and smiled at him. It was an admiring smile, a welcoming smile.
“How very nice to meet you, Dr. Gaspar. Uncle Lucas has spoken so highly of you.”
She sounded happy to see him. David slipped as he climbed out, and ended up with mud all over his hands and knees.
Stifling curses, he made a show of comically wiping the earth away, but no one had noticed. Not Pierson, or Gaspar, or even Eleanor, blast her.
Most oblivious of all was Sophie. She continued to hold Gaspar’s hand and smile into his face, and David’s spirits went straight to hell.
Chapter 10
Things did not improve over tea. Dr. Gaspar had recently returned from the Near East, where he’d been digging up Nineveh, and the ladies were full of eager questions.
Damn and blast that David had to admire intelligent women. Eleanor was the daughter of Britain’s foremost botanist, and she’d done the photographs and plates for all his published works. Now she was reading her way through the Mackenzies’s formidable library. David joked from time to time that she’d married Hart to get at his books, and Eleanor never corrected him.
Sophie’s Uncle Lucas was not only a vicar but a Cambridge fellow, who, it was clear, had taught his niece many things about archaeology and ancient history. Instead of inquiring where on earth Nineveh lay—David had only the vaguest idea himself—she asked Dr. Gaspar if he’d seen Ashurbanipal’s library and had the Babylonians left anything of it when they’d sacked the city?
Gaspar warmed under the ladies’ interest and began to hold forth without arrogance. He told delightful anecdotes about how the local men and the donkeys had always gotten the better of him, which made the company, David excepted, laugh in merriment.
Dr. Gaspar wasn’t much older than David, David decided, even if harsh climates had left lines on his skin. The beard made him look more elderly as well, though there wasn’t a gray hair in it. He must have been at university around the same time as David—it turned out that Pierson had been one of Gaspar’s tutors.
David had no memory of him. Either Gaspar had been finished by the time David arrived, or he’d existed in a world of reclusive scholars while David had sown his wild oats with Hart at his side. There had been times when David had barely remembered his own name, let alone those of his fellow undergraduates.
“Are you pleased to be home?” Sophie asked Gaspar when he paused for breath. “Or do you miss the excitement of the Arab lands?”
Gaspar considered the question. “There are benefits to England. Tea.” He lifted his cup. “And a comfortable, dry home with a jolly fire, good food, and fine company.” He raised the cup again. “But there is much to miss about the desert. Its weather suits me better than the damp air here. You would think we’d be isolated and know nothing of the wide world, but in fact, I learn news there almost quicker than in my lodgings in Cambridgeshire. Gossip abounds, and anyone who goes into town is bombarded when he returns to the dig. We learn of events not only in Britain—we have news from so many countries.”
Eleanor gave him a sage look. “I believe you are itching to be off again, Dr. Gaspar.”
“Perhaps. But when Dr. Pierson wrote me about this Roman villa, I had to come. I can coordinate the excavation here before I return to the Ottoman lands.”
Everyone but David smiled, pleased with him.
“In that case, I’ll run up to London,” David said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Now that you have a much better expert at digging in the dirt, Pierson.” He gave Gaspar what he hoped was a gracious nod.
“Nonsense,” Pierson answered in surprise. “I can always use another man with a shovel.”
“For which you can hire a villager. I have business to attend.”
Sophie glanced at him, but said nothing. Whether she gave a damn if David came or went, he couldn’t say.
On the other hand, Eleanor’s glare held volumes. “Business you have other people looking into for you. Or do you mean you need to look into other people’s business?”
Sophie quickly lifted her teacup, smothering her delicate cough.
“Very amusing, ol— I mean, dear friend,” David said. “I have much to do, as always. I’ve rusticated here far too long.”
“No, no, my good fellow,” Pierson said. “You came here for sanctuary, and I believe you need to remain for a time.”
True, both Fellows and Sinclair had counseled him to stay out of London as much as possible until his trial. Or, if he insisted on London, to remain home, under a voluntary house arrest.
Well, he couldn’t be in a much more remote spot in England than Pierson’s vicarage in Shropshire. David could walk outside whenever he wanted here, no locks or chains to keep him in, because there was nowhere to escape to.
“Perhaps not London,” David said after a swallow of tea. “I might return to the old family farm.”
“Oh, you are a farmer?” Gaspar asked with sudden interest. “Very like an archaeologist, is a farmer, except you dig to help living things and we dig to find dead things.”
The room found his wit outstanding.
“Not much for farming, me,” David said when they’d calmed themselves from the hilarity. “My pater left me an estate in Hertfordshire. Lovely country, though I’m apt to let the steward do as he pleases with the arable.”
Gaspar’s expression didn’t change. “Quite a responsibility, a large landholding. I am not surprised you don’t want to leave it for long.”
Now David felt Sophie’s eyes upon him, a hard stare as she sipped tea. Could he never please her?
“I don’t mind rushing out to help Dr. Pierson with his hobby when he needs me,” David said. “But we will be a bit crowded here. I should at least make way for a new guest.”
“Not at all,” Gaspar said quickly. “I am putting up in the village. And archaeology is not a hobby, my good sir. It i
s a science, revealing knowledge of the past—we learn many astonishing things we never understood even from the writings of the ancients. Pieces from a faraway age tell us much about day-to-day life of the ordinary person, as well as of kings.”
He did not speak with rancor but as a learned man instructing a simpleton.
David clutched his teacup and bared his teeth in a grin. He who could hold a roomful of lords and ladies, princes and princesses, bishops and archbishops in the palm of his hand, was losing a battle against a vicar, an academic, and two beautiful women.
Before he could speak, Eleanor said, “Besides, I want to photograph the nearby abbey ruins, and you and Sophie need to show them to me.”
“An excellent idea,” Pierson said, far too earnestly. “We will all go. An outing away from the dig will do me good, and I can tell Dr. Gaspar all about it as we walk. The abbey at Weston is lovely, the cloisters amazingly well preserved—Cromwell’s men fortunately missed it when they were kicking over ancient churches.”
And so, David, instead of being able to flee to the solitude of his London flat or the green fields of Moreland Park in Hertfordshire, found himself roused from sleep at dawn the next morning by Eleanor’s brisk knock.
“Come along, David,” she said through the closed door. “We are about to set off. We’re waiting for you, so do get up. At once, please, there’s a good fellow.”
* * *
Sophie knew David had no wish to accompany them to the abbey ruins, and only Eleanor’s prodding had him on the path a half hour after she woke him.
He dressed in the tweeds he’d brought back from his London sojourn, cleaned and pressed by Mrs. Corcoran, but he’d quickly ruin the suit in the damp. He looked like a dandy trying to fit into the country and failing miserably.
Dr. Gaspar, in plain brown flannel and thick-soled boots, was prepared to be grimy by the end of the day. A professional archaeologist, Sophie mused as she studied him. She would meet more of them as she followed Uncle about the world.
A Rogue Meets a Scandalous Lady: Mackenzies, Book 11 Page 10
