Poetic Justice, a Traditional Regency Romance (Regency Escapades)

by Alicia Rasley

  And it was worth it after all, for Jessica's laughter bubbled over as she whispered that surely it was dark enough, and she couldn't wait any longer, and did John like the burglary attire she had stolen from the laundry of the stableboys.

  "The breeches are too big," she whispered, tugging at her thigh to demonstrate.

  "Good," he replied with feeling, and she laughed. This was no green girl. She knew what he was thinking, and must have found it amusing that the sight of her slender form even in too-big breeches and a boy's shirt tight across the breasts might make him think that. To distract himself, he stared up into the branches of the elm tree and calculated their route to the window. "Let's go," he said, and compliantly she edged over to him, so he could put his hands on her waist and help her up to the first branch.

  He'd done something like this before, guiding the climb of other bright-eyed ladies in the rigging on his ship, to show them the view that couldn't be had anywhere but the crow's nest. But his senses were especially heightened now, as if the light breeze scraped up every nerve ending. Her calf was slender but surprisingly firm under the rough breeches, her skin warm where his fingers accidentally caught in her wool stocking. The excitement she couldn't quite contain radiated like heat from her body as she scrambled for the next branch.

  "Let me go," she murmured, but he didn't. He guided her foot to the fork in the tree, then slid his hand up her calf to the back of her thigh and gave her a gentle shove. Once she slipped, and he found himself with his arms around her waist and his face against her silky fragrant neck. If he hadn't spent his youth climbing masts in hurricanes, he might have fallen right out of the tree.

  Once he'd managed to untangle himself, he got her settled on a sturdy limb and started on the window. He edged out on the branch, and when it swayed ominously he braced his knees against the window frame. It was dark enough now that he had to feel with his fingers to find the slight gap between the two casements. He slipped his knife into the gap and ran it up to the latch. With a twist of his wrist, he dug the knifepoint into the latch and flipped it up. Jessica exclaimed admiringly, but he shook his head as he pushed the casement open. "Easy as it was for me, Alavieri could do it too if he could get up this tree. Then your prizes would be gone. Not that anyone would notice, since your family hasn't bothered to catalogue."

  "Monsignor Alavieri?" she inquired, completely missing his point. "The consultant to the Vatican? He wrote that lovely essay on the ethical values of book collecting."

  "Precisely." He stood up on the branch, balancing for an instant on the balls of his feet, and, grabbing the window frame, swung into the library. When he had his feet planted, he turned and held his hand out to her. She took it and stepped onto the window, as daintily as if she were descending from a carriage. But then, as if she'd put on a boy's nimbleness when she put on a boy's clothes, she let go of his hand and jumped lightly to the floor.

  Then she peered around the dark room. "We're in the work area."

  He pulled the drapes shut on the window and started for the next. "Yes. Careful, the table's right in front of you. Can you find the lamp there? I brought a flint."

  So had she, and he let her win the argument of who got to light the lamp, just so he could see her face in the glow as she turned the flame up and set the lamp on the table. Her cap had come askew. He pulled it off and her hair tumbled down, pins falling to the floor. With a corner of his mind he counted the clinks, reminding himself that they must pick up every one, so as not to leave evidence of their entry.

  But for the moment he just caught another pin when it loosed as she shook her hair free.

  He had never seen her with her hair down. It fell around her face in tangles, golden as the lamplight. He reached out to pull off the last clinging pin, letting his fingers rest just for a moment on the lock of hair. It was a moment of synesthesia, of sensual confusion, when he felt a warmth that was but a reflection of flame on gold, when his desire was stirred by the aesthetics of sweet femininity in rough masculine attire.

  I am losing my mind, he thought very clearly. And it's all I have just now. He dropped his hand, turned away from that aching vision, reached out blindly to one of the nearby shelves, and closed his fingers on a volume.

  But he could see her still, on the edges of his vision, her hands tangling in her hair, capturing the radiance and taming it. "Wait," she said, as her fingers combed it through and began a plait down over her shoulder.

  He set the volume back on the shelf and bent to feel through the dark for the discarded pins. The floor was reassuringly solid, cool to the touch. He traced the gaps between the floorboards, finding the last pin when it jabbed his finger. "Here." He handed her the pins, one by one, and quickly she bound up her hair, pinning the braid to the top of her head. It was a curiously intimate moment: Their quest was arrested so that he could watch her braid her hair.

  When she finished, she jammed the cap into her pocket, a minor blessing, for it left the gold untarnished. She seemed not to have noticed that the world had changed for an instant there, but perhaps she was better at hiding her feelings than he knew. The glance she gave him was level and discerning. "Where do we start?"

  "You promised to show me this famous vault."

  The vault was in a storage room, down the corridor and up a staircase hidden by a wall of shelves. The lamp illuminated a cluttered room, a glue-spotted table, and a wooden panel instead of a wall along the narrow end. John knocked with his knuckles against the panel; it was constructed of the heart of oak, as thick as the hull of his ship. In the middle was a sturdy door of wrought-iron over oak. Each of the three bolt-latches was secured with a massive falling-pin iron lock. He hefted the middle lock in his hand and said with some relief, "I might be able to take this off with a four-pounder aimed close, but a pistol certainly wouldn't answer. Hold the lamp up, will you?"

  With Jessica beside him, holding the lamp near his shoulder, he could just see into the half-inch slit cut into the door. But the darkness within was so total he could distinguish nothing. Disappointed, he withdrew. "Are you sure the trunk is still in there?"

  She lowered the lamp and took her own turn at the aperture, with no greater success. "During the day, more light gets in, and I can make out the trunk amidst the other items. I check it as frequently as I can."

  And when he looked again, he could almost see it there, an aura in the darkness, glowing as if powered by the treasures within. Once again he felt with disconcerting clarity that his grip on his own thoughts was loosing, that he wanted something so much he was surrendering logic to desire. But then that unaccountable certainty returned. The script was there, and it was safe, at least for the moment.

  John felt in his pocket and brought out a small square of beeswax wrapped in sailcloth. Molding a thin sheet between his hands, he pressed a bit of it against the back of each lock. This way, if anyone opened the lock and closed it later, the seal would be broken. It might be too late to remedy, but at least, as long as the seal remained intact, they might rest easy.

  "Now what do we do?" she asked as he finished.

  He freed the breath he had been holding. "That is for you to decide. You know where your mother's secrets are."

  She liked that, this momentary surrender of command. She tried to hide a smile, he noticed, but a tiny dimple appeared in one cheek to betray her. With a slight ring of authority, she said, "Come this way, then, and don't forget the lamp, will you? We'll look in the French area, first. Corneille and Racine."

  Unerringly she led him through the dark labyrinth of shelves to one at the other side of the library. She held up the lamp so he could see the volumes, all with the elaborate bindings the French were known for. He ran his finger down the slender spine of Racine's Andromache, tracing the gilt of the title and the lacy engravings set across the bands. "Fine work, this binding. Padeloup, is it?" he asked. "Or one of the Deromes?"

  "I don't know," she replied, amusement lilting her voice. "But we'll have time to catalogue l
ater. Now we're looking for this index you're so certain my mother hid."

  He was glad she had set the lamp down on the floor, so she couldn't see the unaccustomed flush her rebuke had brought to his face. "You know, I am used to being in charge. I haven't been ordered about like this since I was a boy."

  "Just as well. It doesn't seem to have any effect on you. Here." She slipped in between him and the bookshelf and handed him several volumes. Then she took a handful herself and began to page through them.

  "Careful," he warned, as she held one by the spine and shook it. She made a face at him, then held the book up and, closing one blue eye, peered through the gap between the spine and the binding.

  "Check the casing too." He followed his own advice, opening the cover of a book and running his fingers over the inside, finding no telltale bulge. "If the pages are but glued onto the binding, she might have prised them up and put the index underneath."

  "I hardly think my mother would have needed to tamper with a book's binding, John. She would have merely hidden it in the pages, I believe."

  Dryden ran his hand along the back of each shelf, steeling himself not to wince at the brush of spider corpses and a decade's worth of dust. "When you take over this place," he muttered, "remind me to give you the direction of the cleaning concern that maintains the British Museum. An army of maids couldn't do this up without laying waste to the books."

  "It is lamentable, isn't it?" Jessica gazed around her and sighed. They were still speaking in whispers. It was not so much that fear of being overheard, so far from the rest of the house, but rather the need to listen for opening doors and approaching footsteps that kept them hushed. "I have tried to sneak in and dust, at least, but Mr. Wiley has always caught me out. No doubt it is the worst-maintained library you've ever seen."

  "Not at all. This is pristine compared to your usual monastic library, which has been neglected for centuries. I found one, in fact, that had been closed up a century ago after a bit of flooding, and never cleaned. Mildew everywhere. And the rodents. I never knew horror till I saw a rat sitting on an old refectory table, feasting on a codex of the Psalter."

  She liked such stories, he could tell from the sparkle in her eyes. And it was pleasant to realize that her theatrical shudder had less to do with the thought of the rat than the nature of his meal. No one else he knew, except for the antiquated antiquaries at the Royal Society, would even recognize the rarity of a Psalter from the codex period, or mourn its fate so sincerely.

  It was too dangerous, this appeal of hers—the curious mind and the lilting voice and the willowy body. "What next?" he said, as curtly as he could make himself sound.

  She drew back a bit from this coldness, but after a moment she picked up the lamp and started towards the corridor. "The classical section. Aristotle was her favorite philosopher."

  The subdued quality of her voice made him sorry, so more gently he said, "I should have known. Aristotle the scientist, always making tests."

  She looked back startled over her shoulder. "Tests? Oh, you mean making my father promise not to open the trunk. Yes, she was an Aristotelian! It drove Papa mad. He was a Platonist, of course."

  "Insisting on absolutes? Absolute beauty, absolute truth? What did your mother think of that?"

  "She said she would believe it when she saw it. All she had seen, she said, was absolute wickedness—the Terror, you know."

  The classics shelf was not, as he foolishly hoped, filled with ancient papyri, but printed editions and modern translations of the earliest works. "With that kind of debate over the dinner table," he mused, fanning the pages of Momachean Ethics, "I'm not surprised you turned out the way you did."

  "What do you mean, the way I did?"

  Surprised by her defensiveness, he closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. "Intellectually seeking. I didn't mean to offend you. It's an admirable way to be."

  "Most people don't think so." She flashed an apologetic smile. "I shouldn't be so thin-skinned. But I have heard most of my life that intellectual curiosity isn't the ideal quality in a young lady."

  "I know." He did know; intellectual curiosity was no virtue in a shopkeeper's son either. "But you do have all those dinner debates to recall fondly."

  "What were the debates at your dinner table?"

  He laughed and scanned a modern Greek translation of The Republic. "Well, you may be sure that Plato and Aristotle didn't figure into the conversation. Food. Was the beef too tough, were the berries ripe enough. My father liked to talk about his business, trying to interest me in it, but of course the reverse happened. And Dennis—my brother—and I would argue about whose turn it was to help wash up."

  As Jessica pushed aside a book and looked behind it, she was frowning, probably at his reference to washing up. An heiress would not have had to help her mother wash up the dishes. He took some perverse pleasure in that, so much that he couldn't go on to confess that his mother actually did little housework, as they had employed two servant girls who left at dinnertime. That would have spoiled the story.

  But when she replied, it was only to ask, "What happened to your father's business, if you didn't take it over?"

  "He left it to my brother, but only after I told him I planned to tear the building down if he were foolish enough to leave it to me."

  She glanced back at him assessingly, and he sensed she was trying to fit him into some schema of the world as she knew it, into some confluence of class and birth and ability. Good luck to her, he thought, replacing a book on the shelf. He'd done his best all his life to make that impossible.

  But she surprised him again. "It is ironic, don't you think, that you went so far to avoid inheriting the family business, and I will do anything I can to inherit mine. I can't help but think your father—"

  She broke off there, and he wondered what it was she couldn't say. That his father must have been disappointed? That he had had the right idea? Perhaps it hadn't to do with his father at all, but with hers. "Fathers are usually incomprehensible, in my experience," he said with some intention of comforting her.

  But that only emphasized what he didn't want to consider: how much alike they were, under the obvious differences. Both were incapable of filling the roles carved out for them—idle noblewoman, shopkeeper's son.

  "How did you do it, then," she asked, "learn so much about art?"

  He was surprised to find himself telling her the truth. "It was free-trading that did it. I was, oh, afraid to go home after my first voyage, and so I joined another crew on the way to the Ottoman Coast." It was so long ago that he couldn't remember what they were there to purchase, but he recalled very well the heavy scent of incense that floated out over the harbor to greet them. "I found some ceremonial torch-holders from the early Roman era in the marketplace in Ismir, and that got me started on dealing in ancient artifacts. The statuary came later, when I'd gotten my own ship and had more room for cargo. I was never much interested in paintings, though I procure them for clients. Mostly dimensional art. And books, of course."

  "Why books?"

  He shrugged. "I expect it's to make up for my illiterate childhood."

  She gave him a wary look. "You weren't illiterate."

  She was learning to ignore his more provocative statements. He would have to be more persuasive, he decided. "No, but I seldom read. As a boy, I wanted only to sail, and hadn't much use for school. But then there were those long voyages, and nothing to do when the work was done. The only books aboard were the Bible, and Robinson's Elements of Navigation, and Dr. Johnson's edition of Shakespeare. I'd near worn the covers off by the time we were back in the Atlantic—not the Bible. But the plays, and the sonnets, and navigation, of course."

  "What was the first book you bought?"

  "The first antique book? Ben Jonson's Works. I wanted one of the Shakespeare folios, but most of them are kept hidden away."

  She ignored this ironic reference to her family's vaulted treasures. "Do you still have the Jonson?"


  "No. I sold it. I'm a dealer, you recall."

  She shook her head with the same consternation that he had witnessed with other collectors. "But if you loved it, how could you sell it?"

  His answer must needs be inadequate, for no collector was likely to see a dealer's motivation as anything but mercenary heresy. But he tried to explain, because—because he wanted her to understand. "I sold it so I could buy something else I loved. I don't need to keep it to have it. Just to hold it. And I wouldn't sell it just to anyone, only to someone who could appreciate and care for it. Then I find something else. It's the discovery, not the possession, that is my aim."

  To his surprise, she did not take issue with this. Instead, she asked, "Is that what you're doing with me?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "Helping me with the collection. Are you doing that because you want to make sure it is appreciated and cared for?"

  He couldn't answer immediately, because he couldn't easily untangle his motives. Initially, of course, he wanted to find the lost manuscript. But now—"Yes, I suppose so. You will be a better steward than Wiley, and better than your father too. And," he added honestly, "I want to be the first to know what the collection—the entire collection—contains."

  She closed the book she was searching and brought it to to her breast in an unconsciously supplicating gesture. "You said before 'When you take over this place.' Do you think that I might somehow—somehow—inherit it? I confess, I am losing hope."

  Hopelessness was not an emotion he could let her experience, and so, uncharacteristically, he made a rash prediction. "I think that no matter what happens July 23, you will shortly be charged with the care of this collection. Wiley can't last long as trustee." Not, he added silently, when I'm done with him. "And you are the most likely replacement."