“You have a son right here in Scotland and you weren’t planning on seeing him?” Shocked and appalled, Lydia wanted to heave a heavy book at his empty head, but he was too far out of range.
A large man gesturing helplessly was an impressive sight. “Richard has a mother and stepfather. He doesn’t need me. I provide for him with my travels. It’s not as if I know anything about raising children.”
He was probably right. An only child, growing up in boarding school, expecting nannies to take care of the young. . . Lydia almost felt sorry for him and others like him. But he had a son who needed him now, and he needed encouragement to do the right thing.
“I should read you the journals of some of your ancestors,” Lydia said. “You are not the first and will not be the last of the Ives to raise a cadre of bastards. Of course, in earlier times, they were far more callous about them than you seem to be.”
He ran his hand through his hair. “Oh, I’m still a callous bastard, all right. What I want to do right now is invite you to my room so I can see if your hair is as hot to the touch as it looks.”
Five
Max cursed his penchant for speaking to the red-headed secretary as if she were a man. Her sensible suggestions and prosaic tone had relaxed his guard. When he had his back to her, he could almost believe she was Mr. Cadwallader listening to his tale.
And then he’d turn and those haunting, deep blue eyes would fix on him and that voluptuous figure beckoned and. . . He turned into a monster not fit for polite society. He’d made a lewd suggestion to a lady!
And the truly odd thing was that he never said things like that to other women. He’d never had to. They simply took his arm and went home with him, no encouragement necessary.
He might as well be eighteen all over.
After his indecent proposition escaped his mouth, the lady’s eyes widened in shock. Then amazingly, her brow puckered in thought. Lydia Wystan was a work of art comparable to the Mona Lisa when she fell still like that.
He waited for the scathing blast he deserved.
Instead, a little V formed between her eyes. “That is a very strange suggestion, Mr. Ives. I am not a ravishing beauty. I do not flirt or tease. I merely sit here behind this typewriter like a tool meant to be used. You complain of women who throw themselves at you, yet when one does not, you are disappointed?”
“Even I cannot analyze my behavior, Miss Wystan. I take it we are back on formal terms? I am very good at analyzing most situations, but somehow, you’ve . . . No, I can’t blame you. You’re right. You’ve done nothing to give me any notion that you’d be receptive to my suggestion. It just fell out of my mouth, bypassing what I’ve always considered to be a formidable brain. I’ll go now.” He started for the door on the far end of the parlor where he didn’t need to pass by her.
“Mr. Ives.”
Her tone brought him up short.
“Perhaps while you are analyzing your behavior, you might consider that your mind scrambles women the same way that your eyes scramble letters. You need focus.”
“Thank you for that thought, Miss Wystan. I deserved it. If you will excuse me, I mean to soak my head in water to see if that cleans out my filthy mind.”
Max didn’t, however, go to his room. He went outside to wander around the tower, hoping to prove his mind had better purposes than insulting maidens.
He was quite sure that Miss Lydia Wystan was a virgin who had probably never been kissed.
What on earth was the matter with him? The first woman who hadn’t used her big blue eyes—
Malcolm eyes. Max thumped his head—hard—at his stupidity. Lydia Wystan’s name was on that foundation. She was working in a Malcolm library. Her family name was on a friggin’ Malcolm castle.
She was a Malcolm, just like his mother. He’d known that. He just hadn’t comprehended the consequences.
He was an Ives, like his father.
Like magnetism, they attracted and repelled with equal force.
He needed to get the hell out of here first thing in the morning. He’d stay in town, meet the boy at the station, and take him directly to school. He had plenty of time to catch the Burma ship.
To hell with journals and intriguing towers and an even more intriguing woman. He needed to make a living, and he couldn’t do it here.
But he had tonight to explore the tower just a little more. For the sake of his more educated relations, he’d like to know the library was safe.
Lighting a lantern, he easily found his way through the maze of rooms. He admired the builders who had made it almost impossible for invaders to access the stronghold of the upper floors from the ground floor entrance. They would even have difficulty bringing it down with fire since all the supports were stone, and the stone center was completely inaccessible and probably magicked somehow, if he believed his mother’s nonsense.
He found a long augur in the tool pile and carried it with him, looking for cracks, under the theory underlying mining excavations or streams may have caused the ground to shift.
Since the inner tower seemed to be the central support, he started there.
He had the augur almost all the way up to the hilt in the dirt floor without finding any sign of a shaft when he became aware he wasn’t alone. Strange. How could anyone walk back here without flashing a lantern like a warning signal?
Straightening, Max wiped the sweat from his brow and glanced around.
A white-bearded figure shrouded in gray watched from the shadows.
“Mr. Cadwallader? Did I disturb you?” Max asked, fearing Lydia had run straight to the librarian with her tale of insult.
Oddly, the old man wore the cloak over the front of him, with the hood hanging down his chest so Max could finally see his face. Letting his long white hair brush his collar, the librarian tilted his head as if he might be studying Max. “You have disturbed me in many ways, yes. You are not what I imagined. In other ways—you relieve me. The burden has been heavy, but I believe Lady Agnes’s surmise might be correct.”
All Max made out of that was that the librarian had been corresponding with his mother, not unusual. His mother had a teacher’s affinity for libraries. Her house contained an entire floor of books.
“And what did my mother surmise?” he tried to ask politely, and not with the exasperation he felt.
His mother’s all-female school of Malcolms was one of the many reasons he’d never go home.
“That you would return when you are needed. Take care of Miss Wystan, please. She is far more valuable than she understands.”
The gray-shrouded figure turned and walked away—straight through the sealed-up stone arch.
* * *
Lydia was in her office, unable to sleep. She’d written out every word she remembered Max saying, including the bit about analyzing his behavior.
She didn’t write about the offer of his bed.
The idea had so unsettled her that she couldn’t think straight. She had no experience in these matters except what she found in books. And she didn’t know what journals to look in for matters of carnal relations without asking Mr. C, and she wasn’t about to do that.
A man of the world like Maxwell Ives thought she was attractive? Or was that flummery he offered because he was bored, and he missed his mistress?
How was a woman supposed to know these things?
She couldn’t, which was why marriage had been invented. That settled it. No beds without marriage. He’d already proved his procreative ability and didn’t need her or more children. As entertained as she might be by the notion of a man finding a large lump like her attractive, she refused to be another notch on his bedpost.
Lloyd knocked on the doorframe, looking for permission to enter. Mr. C’s manservant didn’t entirely approve of women and seldom sought her out. She was instantly concerned.
“What is it? Do you need a hot toddy to settle him down?” she asked, knowing Marta had gone off to bed.
Lloyd shook his head, his bas
set-hound face even more mournful than usual. “He’s going, miss. I thought you might like to say your farewells.”
“Farewells?” Stunned, Lydia sat up straight. Was Lloyd saying what she thought he was saying? “What do you mean, going?”
“He still breathes, but he’s not there. I tried to wake him for his dinner, and I can’t. It’s only a matter of time.” He looked lost and sorrowful.
She’d had one too many shocks this evening and couldn’t absorb another. “But he was fine earlier.” Fearing some misinterpretation, she hastily rose. “Stay here. I’ll go up and see for myself.”
She took the concealed door and inner stairs up. Lloyd knew all Mr. C’s secrets, so she wasn’t revealing anything the servant didn’t know.
Carrying her lantern, holding her skirt, Lydia almost flew up the spiral staircase to Mr. C’s chambers. She’d never given the tower’s construction a single thought until Max had described it to her. He hadn’t seen the top floor, but the engineer had known it was there.
Mr. C’s suite sat on top of both towers. Mighty beams supported the roof. The walls of the different chambers on this level might be supports also, for all she knew. She had never seen more than the room where the stairs opened out. Mr. C used that room for his bed these days. After his stroke, he’d wanted to be closer to the library.
Lydia caught her breath as she entered and felt the emptiness. Mr. C’s energy had always consumed this space. It was gone. Setting the lamp down on a dresser, she approached the bed. A candle burned on the table, illuminating the gray bulge beneath the covers.
Lloyd was right. The librarian still breathed. Praying anxiously, she took his gnarled hand. It was cold. Lloyd had laid an old cloak over him for extra warmth. She checked the grate, but the fire burned steadily.
He breathed. She had to bring him back from wherever he’d gone.
Pulling up a chair, she sat beside the bed, holding Mr. C’s hand and offering muddled prayers to the universe and any gods who might be listening. She didn’t even know she was weeping until a teardrop fell on her arm. Mr. C didn’t move.
She brushed his bearded face, tucked his overlong white hair behind his ear, and whispered words of encouragement.
For one brief second, she thought he squeezed her fingers. And then his chest stopped moving.
She didn’t need a physician to know he was gone—his journal was already whispering to her.
He’d left it on the table instead of holding it.
* * *
Royally spooked, Max searched the stone arch for any secret opening he might have missed and found no means of entering. Determined to find answers, he returned to the darkened castle in search of his elusive host. Walking through solid stone was just not done. He needed to know the trick. He wanted inside that tower.
Entering through the side door Lydia had first shown him—did no one ever lock doors here?—he saw no light burning downstairs. Since there were few servants to lock doors or light lamps, those tasks were probably neglected. He liked that there wasn’t a bevy of maids hovering, so he wouldn’t complain.
He checked the office where he’d found Lydia once before. Embers glowed in the grate. She or her employer must have been here recently.
Mr. Lloyd was slumped in a chair beside the fire, fast asleep. That seemed ominous.
A gray cloak hung on a hook behind the door. Did that mean the old man had returned here by some secret passage?
To hell with looking for secret passages. Max started up the narrow stone tower stairs. He couldn’t see beyond the next bend as he climbed , but when he reached the final turn, he saw light under a door at the top.
It looked like a good hiding place for a reclusive librarian. If the old man could startle the daylights out of Max, Max could return the favor.
He raised his fist to knock. The door swung open with the brush of his knuckles. “Mr. Cadwallader?” He didn’t like entering without permission.
A soft sob greeted him.
Max knew he wasn’t a demonstrative man. Weeping women caused him to turn on his heel and head the other way.
But the door opened wider to reveal Lydia curled in a wing chair, weeping her heart out, and he couldn’t bear it.
She didn’t even look up. Momentarily flustered, unable to shed the fear of women flinging themselves at him when he entered a room, Max warily studied his surroundings.
The gray-cloaked, white-bearded figure he’d seen below lay in a small bed against the wall. The room was almost overheated, but the man was buried in covers.
Max tried to correlate the figure he’d seen in the cellar with the one he saw here. He was very good at sizing up situations, but this one added up to the impossible.
He crossed the room to check the old man’s pulse. There was none. He was cold to the touch, which meant the librarian had been dead for a while. The chances that Mr. Cadwallader had run down a set of stairs to warn Max and run back up to die—zero.
He was wearing the cloak over his chest like a blanket, just as the. . . apparition. . . in the cellar had.
He’d seen a ghost. Max shivered a little, but he was a pragmatic man. The living came first.
He turned to Lydia. She clung to one of her ancient tomes, hugging it to her chest as if it were a child. He hated emotional scenes, never knew what to do, but he couldn’t just abandon her.
“Should I bring up Mr. Lloyd?” he asked tentatively.
She shook her beautiful sunset curls, sending a few more tumbling. “There’s nothing can be done until morning.”
“Would you like me to sit with him so you can get some rest?”
She shook her hair again.
At a loss, not wanting to mention ghosts at a time like this, Max drew up a chair in front of hers. The apparition had said to take care of her, that she was more valuable than she thought. If that was a man’s dying wish, he should listen. “Is that a book you can read to me?”
That startled her. Her liquid blue gaze jumped from him, to her dead employer, and down to the book.
“It’s Mr. C’s journal. It’s calling to me,” she whispered. “It never did that before. That’s how I knew he was gone.”
“Books call to you?” he asked, trying to hide his skepticism.
His doubt flew right over her head. The curl near her ear bounced as she nodded again.
“Mr. C’s journal never spoke to me before, because he was alive. Your. . . journal. . . isn’t really a book and you’re alive, so I don’t hear it. But all those volumes in the library. . .” She gestured helplessly. “They whisper, but I can’t hear the words.”
“Is this one talking any louder than those?” It didn’t matter if he believed her. She’d stopped weeping. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?
She thought about it, then reluctantly nodded again. “But it could just be me wishing it was saying ‘open me’ because I want to so badly.”
Out of curiosity, Max pried the book from her elegantly long fingers. She released it without a fight, watching him as if he held the secrets to her heart’s desire.
“It’s all right for me to open the journal now because he’s no longer alive?” At her reluctant nod, he opened the first page to see how badly the words swam.
Pretty badly. The librarian had written in a precise, ornate script, with so many loops and swirls they threatened to make Max’s head pound. He flipped through to see if there was any interesting formula or drawing of the tower. The writing deteriorated as it progressed. Near the end, he discovered shaky but large square block letters.
He handed the book back to her. “Start there.”
Her thick, reddish-brown lashes flapped in surprise. Gently, as if the old leather was a precious jewel, she took the book back.
She traced her name—Max had been able to read that much clearly in the plain print. Then she took a deep breath and began to read, to herself.
Fair enough. Max waited impatiently.
After a few minutes, she glanced up at him in ast
onishment. “He says the books tell him we need an engineer to save the library. And I can be the next librarian as long as the books live. I’m to write his solicitor for anything I need.”
Her eyes darkened to indigo with hope and despair. “I want to be the librarian more than anything on earth. Can you save the tower?”
Six
Lydia knew how to bury deep, abiding sorrow. She’d done it after her father died by handling all the practicalities that her weeping mother and sisters had been unable to deal with. She’d turned herself into an impervious tower shielded from emotional drama so she could see her way through disaster.
Afterward, out of sight of her family, she ’d wept all the way from her home to Edinburgh.
She didn’t have the option of fleeing now. She had to stay and sort through Mr. C’s affairs and try to establish her own position somehow. If she trusted Mr. C’s journal, this was her home—or could be, she thought, maybe.
She could be the librarian—if she saved the tower. She’d never had the ability to control anything in her life, but Mr. C had left her one thin thread of hope.
That slender thread held her together. She’d had a few hours of sleep in the chair beside Mr. C’s bed. Then Marta had come to sit with him while Lloyd rode with Marta’s uncle into town to seek the local minister. They needed pallbearers to carry Mr. Cadwallader to his final resting place in the vault beneath the castle chapel, with the other librarians. The list of things she must do kept growing.
Mr. Ives made her nervous, so she avoided him. She needed him to stay, but the thought worked on her very few nerves, so she didn’t think about him either. It had been kind of him to help her through last evening. That’s all she would admit.
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