Private Research: An Erotic Novella (13 page)

Chapter Ten

I
STAYED ANGRY
with him for days, yet it didn’t change how much I desired his body. He was pushing me, as if he wanted something more from me that I didn’t understand, even as he gave nothing of himself. I watched him in the evenings, working on his computer on a series of seemingly endless calculations, while I worked on either the Harridan House research or on my dissertation, making sense of whatever information I’d gathered during the day. I focused on Anne Gracechurch’s place at the nexus of several different social circles, her correspondence with renowned thinkers of the day, how they affected or didn’t affect the subject matter of her stories. If only I could prove the James Mead connection beyond statistical doubt, then this whole thing would really leap to another level.

For four nights, I slept on the couch, making good use of the pull-out bed. Friday was poker night with his academic and financial friends who apparently weren’t that welcome in casinos either, and the first evening that wasn’t filled with tense silence as we both simmered with our own private emotions. But somehow having him gone was worse. He still wasn’t back when I fell asleep after midnight, barely managing to turn off the television, which I’d used to drown out the complete solitude.

When I woke abruptly, it was dark in the apartment, the only light the intermittent green glow of the power cord on my computer. But there was something different about the darkness. Then I caught his scent and his heat.

“Seb?”

The bed shifted, and I felt him stretch out next to me.

“Mina.” He said my name as a sigh, and as he reached for me, I also caught the faint scent of alcohol. His lips closed over mine and I tasted it, too, the single-malt whisky he preferred, the desperate desire in his kiss.

Or maybe that desperation was mine. I’d missed his touch, and now it seemed his hands were everywhere on my body. My own slid over him, over his naked chest, the boxer shorts that did little to keep his erection from burning me where he pressed against my thigh.

Not quite awake, not quite asleep, sex was a fever dream of sensation, and when he finally slid inside me, we both made little whimpering sounds as if we’d finally been allowed something denied so long.

I came, again and again, the climax fading into sleep where it seemed to keep going forever.

T
HERE WAS MUSIC
playing. Loudly. Irritatingly.

Then my mind pulled together the notes, the familiarity, and I realized it was my phone ringing. I sat up, eyes squinting open, and reached for the cell where it rested on the side table. As I flipped it open, a groan and the creaking of the sofa bed made me look over my shoulder. At Sebastian, naked, pulling the covers over his head. So it hadn’t all been a dream.

“Ms. Cavallari?”

“Yes?” My voice was rough and too high, and I coughed, trying to wake myself up.

“It’s Roberta Small, dear.” Sleepiness turned into excitement. It had been about a month since I’d last talked with her.

“Yes, how are you doing?”

“Did I call too early?” she asked, and then rushed on before I could assure her it wasn’t. Not that I knew the time. “I wanted to thank you for putting me in touch with my cousin. Bruce and Sally are just lovely, and their kids as well.” I listened to her go on and on about what a lovely family it was and how they planned to have a family picnic this summer if they could gather all the relatives.”

I was happy for her, but if that was the entirety of why she was calling me on a Saturday morning at an hour that was too early regardless of what it was in actuality, I could have done without.

“I’m so pleased that worked out for you,” I said instead.

“And I wanted to let you know that my cousin Paul in Bedfordshire thinks he has some letters that might interest you.”

Excitement thrummed again, and I asked her to hold on while I fumbled for a pen and one of my spiral notebooks. I wrote Paul’s name and number down and thanked her. It was entirely possible that this guy had nothing, or that his findings would lead to nowhere in my search for a connection to James Mead, just as with Bruce Mallard’s treasure trove. Entirely possible, but I was still blissful from the 2
A.M.
sex and the progress I was making in every other aspect of the research. I wanted to be hopeful.

I hung up with her and snuggled back under the covers next to Sebastian. With a small, sleepy growling noise, he wrapped me in his arms. I smiled against his chest. I needed to call Paul, but it could wait just a few more minutes.

S
EBASTIAN WAS
IMPOSSIBLY
sweet to me that day, touching me constantly, looking at me with this indescribable intensity that was very different from the intensity of his desire, and when, a few hours later, I’d arranged to go out to Cranfield the following day, he offered to drive me. Which I, of course, accepted.

So Sunday morning we headed out. Cranfield was in the north of Central Bedfordshire, about thirty minutes past Luton, which itself was an hour outside of London. Of course, back in Anne’s day, those minutes would have been hours or even days.

I had been up this way several months ago to see the area and homes in which Anne had spent the majority of her life. I looked in the church records for the marriage and birth records, enjoyed seeing her signature. I had seen the name Randall on the list of local gentry, but there had never been a connection other than proximity before.

Paul Randall lived in his family’s ancestral home. Though he was a relation of Roberta Small, he wasn’t actually a blood relative of Anne’s. Instead, he was a descendant of a contemporary of hers with whom she had exchanged numerous letters.

If I had been more thorough in my research on all of Anne’s neighbors, perhaps I would have stumbled upon him earlier.

As it was, we pulled up to a pretty, ivy-covered two-story house that was surrounded by big lavender bushes.

“A cozy cottage,” Sebastian observed. Which made me laugh since, to me, four thousand square feet was nearly a mansion. But it was petite compared to the nearby manor house, and the size suggested that Paul’s nineteenth-century ancestor had been well-to-do in a “genteel” sort of way.

“Phillip Randall,” the slim, fiftysomething man said as he led us through the house, “was a solicitor. Runs in the family,” he added with a laugh. “From what I understand, he was against the enclosure act as a young man, then an early champion of labor reform, education reform . . .”

He brought us into the kitchen, which was bright with sunlight, and where, on a huge farmhouse table, he’d laid out several piles of letters.

“I’ve been in the process of conducting an inventory of everything in the house,” Paul continued, gesticulating toward the table. “I doubt I ever would have known this existed otherwise, but I’m the last Randall at the moment. Someone needs to do this.”

“This is fabulous,” I said, resting my hand on the back of one of the chairs. “May I?”

“Go right ahead.” I sat down, reaching for one of the stacks, distantly aware that Sebastian sat as well. I was entranced by Anne Gracechurch’s writing on the outer fold of the letter. I’d seen quite a bit of her correspondence over the last year and a half, at the Huntington Library in California, at various other archives and literary collections, in the collection of her publisher. Every time, a thrill buoyed me, that here I was bridging the distance between history and the present, fiction and reality. That the mystery of this author previously relegated to obscurity was mine to explore.

“Anne Gracechurch is an author, you say?” Paul asked as I unfolded the first letter carefully. He was leaning against the center island, watching. I had a pair of cotton gloves in my bag and I stopped for a moment to pull them out, to protect the paper from the oils of my skin. Not that the kitchen table was the cleanest of workspaces for archival work to begin with. But while I didn’t know what would happen to these letters after I’d left, I didn’t want to add to their decay. I hoped that someday a Gracechurch collection could be created and hosted at a university or a museum.

“You haven’t read these?” Surely, the answer to his question was clear from her correspondence that she wrote. Every letter I had ever read of hers, other than the domestic ones at the Mallards’, had been rife with literary discussions.

“A few only. Mostly political diatribes,” he answered with a shrug. That was interesting. I wondered what her relationship with Phillip Randall had been like. I looked at the date on the letter in my hand—1827. Two years before the first James Mead book was published, a morality tale about the dangers of corruption in pocket boroughs.
Coincidence?

Beyond excited, I pulled out a notebook and pen, as well as my camera, and slid them over to Sebastian. I filled Paul in on Anne’s life as I worked, first rearranging the piles by date. He was a lively man who asked insightful questions, and soon he was part of the team, taking over the notebook from Sebastian to copy down my dictation, while Seb took numerous photographs of each letter. Although I’d worked one summer for one of my English professors, I’d never had assistants before, and it was an enjoyable novelty to work in a team.

We broke briefly for lunch, moving to an outside table in the garden for sandwiches before returning inside to finish.

A narrative was developing as I read, and, while I’d have to go back through my notes to verify, I was fairly certain based on the timeline that this relationship with Phillip had been a huge inspiration for Anne’s social work and an instigator in the acrimony between her and her husband.

“In these early letters, she keeps referring to Mary and the poor children,” I commented. “Is that his wife?”

“Yes, she died in childbirth according to the family Bible,” Paul filled in. “Phillip had two surviving children.”

“What year was that?” Sebastian asked. He had that thoughtful look on his face, the one where he looked like he was chewing the inside of his mouth. Paul went to get the Bible and check.

“What are you thinking?”

Seb turned the camera on me and snapped a quick shot even as I held up a hand in front of my face.

“I’m thinking they were lovers.”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course it would be about sex.”

“No, think about it, Mina. Isn’t this just before the James Mead books? And weren’t those books at the same time as she was having marital troubles? So she’s friends with Phillip’s wife, who dies, and in comforting him and the children, they strike up a friendship, intellectual at first, then”—he shot me a hot look that made me squirm on the wooden seat—“as we know, intellectual attraction easily turns into physical.”

I twisted my lips, ignoring the suggestion that it was my intelligence that had attracted him to my body when it had been very easy for him to ignore me when sex wasn’t on the table. The conjecture about Anne and Phillip was an interesting theory but one I wanted to reject. As I turned back to the last stack of letters, I examined why I felt that way. Was it because I had some idealistic view of the past? Like people from the nineteenth century didn’t commit adultery or sleep around or have premarital sex? I knew that wasn’t true. But emotionally, was that a false story I still bought into?

Paul returned, and the date supported Sebastian’s theory.

“Listen to this!” I exclaimed with excitement, forgetting Sebastian’s theory. “She writes, ‘I find it harder to write of Caroline and Mayberry’—those were the protagonists of
At Michaelmas,
” I inserted. “ ‘When I think of the poor who will never have such an education, will never know what it is to rise above brute labor.’ ”

I looked at Paul and Sebastian. “Okay, it doesn’t quite prove that she wrote about education reform, but it shows she leaned toward it and certainly at the same time as James Mead was about to publish his book fictionalizing the plight of children.”

But even as I said it, I knew that it was still not enough. Circumstantial. Considering the milieu of the time, many reformers felt the same, might have done the same. There might very well have been a James Mead who did. Or Randall might have been James Mead. I would have loved an example of Phillip’s writing to Anne, but unfortunately those letters were either lost to the past or still hiding somewhere out of my grasp.

Several letters later, I read another snippet aloud: “ ‘I cannot visit again this summer. Mr. Gracechurch returns and wishes to reconcile. For the children’s sake.’ ”

There had been great affection apparent in the other letters, but this was the first that said anything quite so bluntly.

“Do you think they were having an affair?” Paul asked.

I looked at Sebastian, who smirked. My lips twisted again I had to concede. “It’s definitely a possibility.”

“
I
T’
S NOT WHAT
you hoped for, but it’s not a loss,” Sebastian said when we got in the car. I blinked and stared at him. He met my gaze. “I know you’re disappointed. It’s obvious. No, not to Paul, don’t worry, but to me. But this is one of those things that happen. You find useful information, not the information you hoped for. But still useful.”

He turned his attention to the road, and so did I, staring at the outline of trees in the twilight. He was right. Not that it helped settle my emotions at all. This whole process was a roller coaster.

“It’s like trading, or playing poker,” Seb continued. “There are the highs and the lows. Good thing is, there’s no real losing for you here. No millions down in a millisecond.”

“I still think that’s ridiculous,” I said, fully distracted now. “That people make a career on gambling. Or on insuring someone’s gamble. On real things that other people make. See,
that
I understand. Manufacturing. Creating something.”

“From the woman who wants to have a nice, tenured university job where she’s insulated from the realities of the economy. Where you’ll spend, what? Maybe ten hours a week actually teaching and helping with education and the rest of your time writing grants for more money to help fund your writing about topics that don’t actually create anything useful for people.”