Violet

by Lauren Royal

“Unlike Rowan, you’re good at mathematics.” He grinned, thinking she was good at a lot of things. Especially heating his blood. “Does your family sometimes live at Tremayne Castle now?”

  “Not anymore. We retreated there to wait out the Great Plague—Rowan was born there during that time. But then Grandpapa died, and we haven’t been back since.” Seeming deep in thought, she gazed out over the Thames, swaying gently to and fro in the swing. “The castle was only ever half built. Mum says it’s too far from London, and Father prefers Trentingham’s gardens. It’s a quiet sort of place, Tremayne…” She met his gaze again with a smile. “See, I told you my childhood was boring.”

  To his great embarrassment, his stomach growled. Loudly.

  “Oh!” she said. “It’s been at least two hours since you said you were starving! Before we even bought the books!”

  “I haven’t perished.” He stood and handed her the shoes. “But I wouldn’t mind wandering over and taking a table.”

  While she put them on, he went to fetch the children.

  “Not yet!” Jewel yelled, swinging higher. “Another minute!”

  “Two minutes!” Rowan countered.

  “Three!”

  “Five!”

  “Ten!”

  “Ten,” Ford agreed, giving Jewel one final push. “But only because it’s your birthday, mind you.”

  Violet followed Ford to an empty table. As she slid onto the bench, she aimed a concerned look to where the two young ones were still swinging, facing away as they soared over the picturesque river.

  “Sit,” he told her. “They’ll be safe. If they fail to come over and join us, they can eat their portions on the barge on our way home. And the two of us can dine in peace.”

  A nice thought, Violet decided. Even more nice after he went inside to order a light dinner, then returned to sit beside her.

  Could he actually be interested in her as a woman? Every idea she’d ever held told her no, but his actions told her yes. It was confusing, to say the least. Especially when her hands drifted up to her face and she remembered her ugly spectacles. For a while there, she’d forgotten all about them.

  “No one’s staring,” he said gently. He lowered her hands and laced his fingers with one of them. It felt intimate, and her heart skipped a beat. “You look fine, Violet. You look lovely.”

  Through the lenses, he looked sincere. She surveyed the few patrons seated at the other tables. The buzz of their conversation sounded pleasant to her ears, and he was right: no one was staring.

  Besides Ford, no one was looking at her at all.

  His gaze dropped to the book, his face brightening at the sight. “I still cannot believe I may have found Secrets of the Emerald Tablet.”

  “I’m so happy for you.”

  “It might not be the right book,” he reminded her, although she suspected he was actually reminding himself. He squeezed her hand. “But I thank you for sharing my excitement.”

  “It’s contagious,” she told him. Her fingers tingled every place they touched his; she’d never realized her hand had so much sensitivity. And when he leaned forward and grazed his lips over hers, they tingled, too.

  Almost unbearably.

  It hadn’t been enough. Even the kiss on the swing hadn’t been enough, and it had been so much more. If the two of them were someplace more private, she would have wrapped her arms around his neck and held him close. As it was, the brush of mouths happened so fast, she wondered if she’d imagined it.

  But if so, her imagination was very powerful indeed, because her breath was coming shallow. “Ford,” she breathed, unsure whether it was a protest or an entreaty.

  “Hmm?” He raised one brow.

  She touched her free hand to her suddenly hot cheek. “We’re in a public place.”

  “I must endeavor to get you alone, then.”

  Her laugh was embarrassingly shaky. “I think not.”

  He only smiled. A serving maid came out and put two tankards on the table, along with a pewter platter piled with fat slices of cream toast. She set down two empty plates, and Ford dropped Violet’s hand to take one of them.

  Her spectacles seemed to be fogging. She pulled them off, polished them on her skirt, and put them back on. “Thank you for sharing your dream,” she said, lifting a tankard. A bracing swallow of ale seemed just the thing. “I truly hope it comes true.”

  “It would be amazing, wouldn’t it?” He also sipped, regarding her over his tankard’s rim. “And what are your dreams, Violet?”

  “You’d laugh.” She’d never told anyone outside her own family. Ever. Avoiding his eyes, she busied herself sprinkling sweet brown sugar on a slice of the egg-battered bread.

  “I won’t laugh. I promise.” He sprinkled extra cinnamon on his. “Tell me,” he said, cutting a piece.

  “Well, one day…” As a delaying tactic, she swallowed a bite of cream toast, then washed it down with some ale.

  “Yes?” he prompted, looking amused.

  “I’d like to publish a philosophy book,” she blurted out. “Not now, of course, but when I’m older. I still have much to learn first.”

  “A lady authoring a philosophy tome.” Chewing, he considered. “It’s quite an ambitious dream.”

  He was listening, and he wasn’t laughing. “I would publish it under a man’s name. Else no one would read it.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I know so.” She sipped, then rushed on. “I have an inheritance coming, you see, enough to print and distribute the book far and wide.”

  He finished his slice and took another. “What is it you’re so burning to say?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Perhaps that sounded rather foolish, but it felt so good to finally tell someone—someone who really listened. “I’m still researching, still changing my opinions. But I believe these things are important. Ideas can change the world. And…I dream of leaving my mark.”

  “So do I.”

  “But with science, yes?” Ford was different, like her. She’d never expected to find a man like her. “You want to leave your mark with science. Science can change the world, too.”

  “Exactly.”

  He smiled, reaching across to trail his finger on the back of her hand. She thrilled at the contact—until she heard his next words.

  “You know, most ladies would think they have better things to do with their money.”

  The sentence cut her to the core, robbed her of breath.

  She’d thought he understood.

  Disappointment swamped her earlier giddiness. Raising her tankard to hide her face, she ordered herself to shrug it off. She focused on Rowan and Jewel still swinging in the distance, their lighthearted laughter floating to her on the breeze. Of course a man would think like that, she reasoned—she should expect nothing else.

  Ford was different, but not as different as she’d hoped. A man that different didn’t exist.

  With a sigh, she lowered the tankard. “I realize most men marry for money.” And Ford would be no exception, especially given his obvious lack of the same. “But as far as I’m concerned, that isn’t a good reason to shackle oneself for life.”

  She watched him rake his fingers through his hair. “Did I say anything about marriage?”

  “You didn’t have to say it—I knew what you were thinking.”

  “I think not.” He lifted his own tankard, looking puzzled, as though he had no clue he’d said anything that could possibly upset her. “Are you never planning to marry, then?”

  Perhaps she’d dreamed of it for a minute—one short, self-delusional minute. “My family isn’t a conventional one.”

  “Question Convention.”

  “Yes. I feel no compulsion to lead a typical female’s life.”

  He just gazed at her for a while. A long while, while she tried and failed to figure out what he was thinking.

  “No,” he said at last, and paused for a sip. “Nobody would ever call Violet Ashcroft typical.”

>   That hurt, but she only stiffened her spine. “I’m aware that I’m an odd woman, my lord. It’s why I’m certain no man would want me except for my inheritance.”

  He bristled. “Bloody hell, is it that much money?”

  She couldn’t tell whether he was sarcastic or serious, and she didn’t get a chance to find out. Because in the next moment, two voices rang out from the riverbank.

  “I dare you!”

  “I dare you!”

  And a moment after that, both children flew from their swings into the water.

  TWENTY-TWO

  VIOLET JUMPED up from where they were eating. “The children!”

  Splashes and screams followed.

  Icy fear gripped Ford’s heart. Boots and all, he made a running dive into the river.

  But the splashes were playful ones—on Rowan’s part, at least. And if Jewel’s shrieks weren’t exactly in fun, they weren’t a harbinger of death, either. It was immediately apparent both children knew how to swim.

  The shock of cold water helped Ford regain his equilibrium as he gathered them close, one in each arm. He should have given his niece more credit. She was much too bright to jump to her death. And if she was less than happy with the outcome of her prank, perhaps it would be a lesson learned.

  Mere moments later he’d hauled them ashore, no harm done. Back on the barge and sailing for home, he couldn’t imagine why Violet was so hysterical.

  “We shouldn’t have left them!” she lamented, wringing her hands. He’d never seen a woman wring her hands. Not in real life. He’d thought people only wrung their hands in plays.

  And they hadn’t left the children—they’d been watching them the entire time. There had never been a true risk of drowning, he told himself, struggling to hold on to his logic in the face of hysteria. He’d been there within seconds. His racing heart was beating only double-time now. He knew how to deal with an emergency.

  “All’s well that ends well,” he told Violet philosophically, wondering if a philosopher had actually said that. But if she knew, she was in no state to inform him.

  Jewel was hysterical, too. “There were fish in there!” Her entire body shuddered, and not from the wet and cold. “Fish! Slimy fish!”

  Rowan was hysterically laughing at Jewel, and Ford…well, if he’d thought hysterics would have mitigated matters, he’d have been hysterical along with the rest of them.

  “Of course there were fish,” Rowan crowed between snorts. “You goose,” he added with undisguised glee.

  Ford suspected he’d been waiting to call Jewel a goose since she’d called him one on the swings. Pouring water from one of his boots, he rather sympathized with the boy.

  Women could be so irrational. They puzzled him in general, and Violet was no exception. Take their conversation at the inn, for example. They’d been discussing their dreams, nice as anything, then suddenly she was declaring she’d never get married. Or at least not to anyone who had the nerve to be interested in her money.

  Where the devil had all that come from?

  As they neared Trentingham’s dock, he sighed and tipped his second boot. Water ran out, along with a tiny sliver of silver.

  “Another fish!” Jewel screamed.

  Rowan snickered.

  Violet moaned.

  And Ford knew he wasn’t going to get an answer to his question.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE NEXT DAY, Ford paced Trentingham’s library. He still had no idea where he stood with Violet following that confusing, interrupted discussion. He’d tried to talk to her before coming upstairs, but here at the Manor there always seemed to be a sister or two around.

  Turning the old book in his hands, he sighed, supposing the conversation probably hadn’t meant all that much, anyway. Violet seemed to have recovered from yesterday’s hysteria, at least, and her family had allowed him in the house, so apparently they didn’t hold him responsible for the young heir’s soaking.

  A good sign. He’d hate to think Jewel might lose her playmate.

  “Lord Lakefield?” Jarring him out of his thoughts, Rose sauntered into the room with Violet, fluttering her seventeen-year-old lashes. “My sister said you wanted to see me?”

  He stifled a laugh, then fastened his gaze on those bold dark eyes and tried his famous smile on her—the one that seduced all the ladies. “Violet tells me you’ve a special expertise in languages.”

  Looking a bit off her stride, she leaned a hand on one of the library’s two impressive globes, then jumped when it spun beneath her fingers. “Not truly,” she said, glaring at Violet as she brushed the front of her magenta skirts. “I know only a little.”

  “More than a little,” Violet argued. “You know French and Spanish, German, Welsh, some Gaelic—”

  “Would you know this one?” Ford interrupted, struggling for patience. So far as he could tell, the book was none of the tongues Violet had mentioned or anything related. He walked to a round wooden table and opened the book on its surface. “Does this language look familiar?”

  When Rose didn’t make a move, he sent a pleading look to her sister.

  “Rose…” Violet said. It was a single word, but uttered in a tone he hoped never to hear directed at himself.

  “Oh, very well.” Rose unriveted herself from the floor and came to lean over the table. She frowned at the book, reaching to gingerly turn a page, then another. The brittle paper crackled in the silence of the richly paneled library.

  “No,” she said at last. “I’ve never seen this language. It may be obsolete.” When she looked up, her dark eyes were apologetic. “I know only modern languages, my lord.” Her false pretense of empty-headedness gone, she closed the book respectfully and slid it across the table.

  Disappointment formed a weight in his gut. Reaching for the book, he sat himself on one of the table’s four straight-backed chairs. Violet surprised him by sitting beside him. After yesterday, he didn’t know what to expect from her.

  “How about the title?” he asked, not quite ready to give up. He reopened the book. No author had signed it, but there, right on the first page, was the alchemical symbol for gold. Of course, the symbol was just a plain circle with a dot in the center, so it could mean something else. Or nothing at all—in a handwritten book, such a mark could be a decoration or a doodle. But the sight of that symbol had set Ford’s heart to pounding in John Young’s shop.

  The title alone could confirm whether or not he’d found the right book. He pushed it back toward Rose. “Can you puzzle out a single word of the title, even?”

  “I can try.” Rose’s reluctance disappeared as she took a seat on his other side and drew the book closer. Clearly warming to the challenge, she ran a tapered finger across the handwritten text. “There are five words.”

  “Yes.” But were they the right words? “Can you read any of them?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I think not.” She flipped back to the center of the book. “Some pages are stuck together.”

  “It’s old,” he said with a shrug. He’d peeled a couple of them apart and found nothing of interest, just more of the same. And he’d ripped one of the pages in the process. “I hesitate to start tearing at it, when I don’t even know—”

  “This is strange.”

  “What?” Violet asked.

  “Well, I can read this one word here. Argento. It means silver in Italian.”

  Silver. Ford’s hopes took an incautious leap. A book that mentioned silver might also mention gold. And Raymond Lully had lived in Italy for years.

  Violet reached across Ford to lay a hand over her sister’s. “Are you sure? I never knew you could read Italian.”

  “I’m sure.” A hot blush touched the girl’s lovely cheeks.

  Rose resembled Violet, but her features had a glossy perfection that was missing from her sister’s. Tabitha had been like that, too. They were too perfect, Ford thought. Violet’s looks were friendlier, more comfortable.

  He could touch her
without worrying about messing her up.

  “I found an Italian book,” Rose explained, gesturing to the shelves that stretched to the high, geometric-patterned ceiling. “It wasn’t too difficult to teach myself. The language shares much with Spanish.”

  Nodding, Violet sat back. A pity—he’d rather enjoyed having her hang over his lap. She’d smelled like flowers. Probably violets, he imagined.

  Rose looked back down to his book. “Of course, some languages share the same words with different meanings. For example, in French four means oven, but in English it’s a number. So just because argento means silver in Italian doesn’t mean it couldn’t mean something else in another tongue.” Carefully, she flipped another page. Scanning it, she hummed under her breath.

  “What is it?” Violet asked.

  “It’s odd, that’s all. That one word appeared to be Italian, but others aren’t. There are letters here that are foreign to me, and here”—she looked up—“look at this line, here.”

  Both Ford and Violet scooted closer, their chair legs rasping on the carpet. “Yes?” Ford prompted.

  “This line is written backwards. Even the letters are backwards, like in a mirror. And then this line here”—she drew a graceful finger along some text—“has no strange letters at all.” In her enthusiasm, her voice had lost its deliberate seductive quality. “The writing is a bit faded and more than a bit smeared, but all readable, you see?”

  Violet shook her head. “I cannot read it.”

  “You cannot comprehend it,” Rose corrected. “But you recognize the letters, don’t you?”

  “It may be a code,” Ford realized suddenly.

  “Different languages and patterns. You may be right.” She looked up at him, her dark eyes excited rather than coquettish. “Violet said this could be an important book. Was the book you’re looking for written in code?”

  “I never considered it before, but it could have been.” The book had been rumored to be difficult to read. If he were recording priceless secrets, he’d be tempted to do so in code.

  And he knew someone who was very good at cracking codes.