Poetic Justice (12 page)

He stepped back to let her go through the front door, and as she brushed past him she sensed the guardedness of his stance. "What is the condition?"

She glanced up in exasperation. "Well, you needn't think I will expect your firstborn! I merely hope you will let me copy that list before you return the book to the library. Mr. Wiley has never let me have one." She bit back a bitter comment and continued with determined brightness, "I have a list I've done from memory, but I've only come up with about six hundred book titles, and nowhere near that many manuscript titles."

"You have a very good memory."

"Not good enough, I fear."

"He's only listed the Bacon works, and not all of that."

"Well, I can add those to my list, then. I'm certain I didn't recall all those."

It was a bright June day, with only a few clouds floating above the chimney tops and trees of Berkeley Square. As his phaeton was brought round, Sir John hesitated on the steps, turning his face to the light breeze and his gaze towards the horizon. "Storm brewing." He caught her startled look and added reassuringly, "Not till tonight. You needn't worry that the picnic will be ruined."

"Picnic?" she said faintly, but she supposed if he could conjure up a storm from a brilliant day, a picnic would not strain his ingenuity. He tossed a gold coin to the stableboy bringing the fashionable phaeton and sent him down the street with a low-voiced order, and once again Jessica found herself revising her estimate of him. He must have an unexpectedly romantic streak, she thought as he helped her onto the high perch, planning a picnic for her this way. While he was busy with his horses, she surreptitiously bent to look on the floor for a basket of delicacies, under the seat for champagne bottles, back to the tiger perch for a serving groom. But the phaeton was meticulously bare of picnic paraphernalia.

She had forgotten about his maverick streak. His idea of a picnic apparently had nothing to do with a linen tablecloth, crystal champagne glasses, and hovering servants. As they stopped at Piccadilly—he was headed for Green Park, instead of the more populous Hyde Park—the stableboy ran alongside and handed up a couple green jars and a cloth parcel tied up with string. Sir John transferred these to Jessica and rewarded the stableboy with a grin and another coin, then urged his horses across the busy street.

Jessica was too surprised to comment, but only sat there with the parcel radiating heat in her lap, a cold jar clutched in each hand., her feet braced against the floor, praying that his driving skills weren't limited to steering ships into dock. Fortunately, they arrived at the park without mishap, and he pulled up in the middle of a little grove of trees.

"I didn't want you to miss your meal," he explained, taking the parcel from her lap and vaulting to the ground. He held up his hand for a jar, then deposited the goods on the grass under an old oak tree. And then, with that impeccable courtesy that accorded so well with the cool elegant accent, he lifted her to the ground.

There was a moment, before her feet found the earth, that her body brushed against his and she recalled that too-intimate waltz at Devlyn Keep. Then he dropped his hands from her waist and took the other jar from her, set it down against the exposed tree root, and went to see to the horses.

The sunlight filtering through the leaves spread like a canopy over the green, isolating them in a pastoral oasis in the middle of the city. It was inviting, the deep soft grass, the dappled shade, the ancient tree, but for just a moment she was unable to enter the pretty scene.

Why the prospect of sitting alone with Sir John seemed more improper than driving alone with Sir John, she couldn't say. And why she was so conscious of the impropriety, she didn't know. She was no green girl, living in terror of ruination. She had been alone with men before, for as long as a half-hour, and felt no more than a frisson of guilty pleasure. But here, in broad daylight, in the midst of a crowded city, she felt that same sense of danger she knew last week, when she had shared a bit of darkness with this man.

"You'll pardon my shirtsleeves, I hope," he said, tugging off his coat. And then, to her mingled horror and pleasure, he spread it on the grass and bade her sit. It was a Weston coat, she could tell from the precision of the cut, and he was sacrificing its pristine folds for her comfort. He had his gallant moments after all.

She could do no more than graciously accept, arranging herself so her sandals didn't touch the superfine fabric. As he sat across from her on the exposed root, stretching his long booted legs out before him, her thoughts skipped with alarming rapidity from coats to gallantry to queens and finally, inevitably, to the collection. "Did you see in the reading room that we have not only a copy of Hakluyt's account of the first expedition to Virginia, but a copy of Hariot's scientific notes about the second?"

"Oh, my coat won't get so muddy, and I can't think you will reward me by lopping off my head, as Elizabeth did to poor Raleigh."

And then as he tilted his head to the side and smiled at her, she realized why she felt in such danger to be alone with Sir John Dryden. It was that eerie intimacy—that certainty that he knew her very well, even without knowing her at all. For he had traced her thought-skips backwards, and arrived at their debarkation point—Hakluyt and Hariot's employer, Sir Walter Raleigh, who had once spread his cloak over a puddle so the queen's shoes wouldn't get muddy. "How did you know what I meant?"

He shrugged and with dexterous fingers made short work of the elaborate knot in the parcel. "You think quickly, but clearly. Don't you?"

"No one else thinks so." He only understood, she realized, because his mind worked in the same way. But there was danger there too, in imagining them kindred. They couldn't be, of course; they were as different as night and day.

She had to halt the inner debate to accept the napkin and the meat pie and the apple as he handed them to her in rapid order. The mechanics of juggling the food and the jar of lemonade were sufficient to divert her, but still she hesitated before beginning the feast.

He saw her frown at the jar, and smiled again. "Don't think of food poisoning, Miss Seton. Think of this as a culinary adventure."

Because he had read her mind again, because she did like to think of herself as adventurous, because he raised his own jar in salute, she laughed and took a sip and told herself that lemon probably killed all evil humors. And then, to distract herself further from speculation about their commonality, she returned to the subject that haunted them both. "What did you think of Mr. Wiley?"

He set the rest of his meat pie down on the napkin, as if Mr. Wiley had deprived him of his appetite. "You are right. The man's a menace."

Sir John, she knew already, wasn't one to exaggerate; if anything, he deliberately kept his responses muted. So "menace" must reflect a severe antipathy to the librarian. "What did he show you?"

"Bacon's candle expenditures. For some reason, he thinks the Regent will want to snap that up. Where did you slip off to, by the by?"

"Back to the vault. You made me worry about the Folios, so I thought I'd best check on them. As far as I can tell, they haven't been touched."

"I thought you said only the solicitors had a key to that vault."

"Oh, I didn't get into it. There's a tiny slit in the door, and I could see that the case holding the Folios was still on the shelf."

He turned his apple in his hand, studying it with remarkable concentration. "What else is in this vault?"

She was not deceived by his casualness. The little catalogue Mr. Wiley had given him wouldn't be enough to quench his curiosity. So she took her time, biting into the meat pie and chewing meditatively before replying. "Oh, all the illuminated manuscripts, and a few parchment scrolls, an early codex, one of the early printed editions of the Psalter—" she waved her hand vaguely. "Too much to enumerate, really. But it hasn't been opened since my father's death."

"Does Wiley know what the vault contains?"

This question came brisker. Aha, Jessica thought, the vault fascinates him, for some reason—a reason he hasn't shared with her. It was a necessary reminder that they might be allies now, but they were not comrades. She looked squarely into those reflective eyes and told the truth. Fortunately, the truth revealed nothing crucial. "My father surely told him. He has never been in it, as far as I know. No one has, since my father took me in there before he died."

"No unknown treasures, then?"

For once, she was glad that her father had been so close with his information. Very carefully, she said, "I know only the known treasures." She looked away, disillusion stinging at the back of her eyes. She should know better than to trust so quickly, especially a man with so many secrets. He wasn't the sort to be a white knight, sacrificing his own interests to help her.

Perhaps he sensed her withdrawal, because he told her then of his interview with Wiley, reminding her that whatever his real purpose, they had one goal in common. "Wiley didn't mention Shakespeare's signature. Instead, he told me that he has found no book bearing Shakespeare's name, therefore he had no library, therefore—he implied, but did not say—that Shakespeare must have been illiterate."

"An illiterate actor? I suppose the Globe hired someone to read him his lines?" Jessica scoffed, then frowned. "But that is curious, isn't it? That Mr. Wiley never found books with Shakespeare's name inside?"

"Curious. But meaningless. First, as I told him, not everyone defaces a book by writing in it. Second, Shakespeare has no living descendants, so his possessions were probably dispersed a century or more ago. And third, Wiley is a curator, not a dealer. I doubt he knows how to search for a book. I suspect he just sent letters round to the Warwickshire landowners, asking if they had any of Shakespeare's books. How would they know? Most probably never set foot in their libraries, and only figured that someone would have noticed if they owned such a prize. So they would never bother to search the shelves, much less the cupboards and under the floorboards."

"The floorboards?"

"Certainly. That's where Royalists hid their valuables during the Civil War. That's how I found that sheaf of medieval caricatures. The Royalist owner had been executed by Cromwell, so I suspected he never had a chance to dig the treasures back up." He added in afterthought, "Perhaps I might discover which Warwickshire landowners were executed as Royalists, and—"

Then he shook his head briskly and rose. He walked over to his horses, slipped their bits, and shared out the remains of his apple between them. Over his shoulder, he said, "Wiley also neglected a possibility that no librarian should ignore. Libraries are full of paper, and frequently they go up in flames. And everything is lost. It's possible that Shakespeare's library, and perhaps his manuscripts and notes and personal papers, has burned in the last two centuries." He added casually, "I was in France recently, looking for copies of the Stephanus Bible and a few other items. The Revolutionaries, you know, respected books no more than they respected churches. They sacked and burned many libraries. It's impossible to count what has been lost."

"My grandfather—my maternal grandfather—was killed in the Revolution. His chateau was burned." Jessica didn't know why she mentioned this, for her family seldom spoke of it. She'd had to piece the story together from details her parents let slip. But they were long dead, and their reticence reflected the same suspicion that had led to her father's strange will and the isolation of the collection. Not that her motive in revealing this was so noble—she just wanted to impress Sir John. She might not have rescued Bibles from their burial grounds, but she knew a few good book stories too.

And she had succeeded in capturing his interest. He left the horses and returned to sit under the tree, circling his knee with his clasped arms. "Where was the chateau?"

"Near Chantonnay, in the Vendee. He had a great library, you know. I gather he was something of an Anglophile—he often travelled to London to find volumes. That is how he met my father."

"And so he arranged your mother's marriage?"

"Oh, no, I don't think so. He wasn't so farsighted as that! But my mother knew no one else in England after the Terror. My father must have thought he owed it to his friend to take care of her. Mother always said he married her for her dowry."

"What was that?" Sir John asked quietly, leaning closer.

"She meant it ironically. She had no dowry. Everything was lost in the Terror. Except—"

She saw the silver flash of his eyes, the sudden tension of his body. "You know, don't you? You know about the trunk. Did Mr. Wiley tell you?"

He had the grace to look guilty, but that only lasted a moment. "No, he never mentioned it. The Prince Regent told me about your mother coming here as an émigrée. He said he sent them a Bacon letter as a wedding gift."

Automatically she murmured, "How good of him to remember." Conflicting emotions flooded her. As always, when she thought of her parents, she felt the wrench of loss, of incomprehension. They were unknown to her in so many ways. And she felt betrayed by this man, who withheld so much from her, even as he claimed to be an ally.

But, she thought, clasping her hands tightly around her drink, perhaps she was taking it too personally. She had been keeping much from him, too. It was only politic to test a potential ally before revealing secrets.

She studied him from under her lashes, wondering what else he knew about her family and her collection. "I did not realize that the Regent was aware of my mother's trunk."

Sir John shrugged and looked away. "Is it kept in the vault?"

"Yes. It's always been there."

"What's in the trunk?"

The question came too quickly, betraying him, and he must have realized it. He picked up his drink and assumed a careless expression, but she had already learned what she needed to know. Whatever he wanted from the trunk, he could only hope it was really there. She shrugged, just as he had, insouciant, unconcerned. "I don't know. No one does, as far as I know. It's never been opened."