The Songbird's Seduction (8 page)

It had always instilled a curious conflict in him. On the one hand, he was jealous the girl could so easily forget her responsibilities and enjoy that swing; on the other, he worried about those damn sheep. What if they got lost or some wolf found them or they plunged off a cliff?

He shook it again, watching the petals swirl on the facsimile
of a gentle breeze, catching on the shepherdess’s carved skirts. He bet if she opened her eyes they’d be hazel . . .

“What’s that you’re whistling?”

He turned to see his grandfather being wheeled in by a robust-looking footman. His gout had flared up last week, making it excruciating for him to put any weight on his foot. “Was I whistling?”

“Yes. And it wasn’t Handel, either.”

At seventy-three, his grandfather still posed an arresting figure: tall and straight-backed—when he was standing—with an aristocratic nose, a thick, unkempt head of silvery curls, and the same cleft chin he’d bequeathed Ptolemy. His character was even more distinctive. His ungoverned wit and blunt observations had made him a glaring exception in a family noted for their serious-mindedness.

Not that he’d always been impolitic and outspoken. He wouldn’t have successfully won the hand of Ptolemy’s formal, perpetually unsmiling grandmother otherwise.

“In fact, that tune sounded suspiciously like
popular
music,” he said.

“Really?” Puzzling. Ptolemy hadn’t thought he knew any popular music. Not that he had anything against popular music; he just never had occasion to hear it, his work leaving little opportunity for that sort of thing.

Perhaps if Cornelia had shown an interest . . . but Cornelia considered theatre frivolous and believed popular music caused brain decay. But it really was a catchy tune.

“Good heavens, my boy! And where did you get that black eye? Did you walk into a door?” his grandfather asked in increasingly amazed tones as he nodded a dismissal to the footman.

Heat rose in Ptolemy’s face.

“You . . . you haven’t been in a
brawl
?” His grandfather’s dark eyes gleamed with approval. Not surprising: his grandfather had
always enjoyed being the black sheep of the family, a role Ptolemy’s grandmother had claimed he’d come to rather late in life.

Apparently the dignity that once had been the hallmark of his lordship’s character had eroded with time, eventually making him nearly unrecognizable as the somber, respectable young man to whom she’d been betrothed. At the time of her death last year, Ptolemy’s grandparents had not shared the same address in over two decades.

“No. Of course not. I was involved in a minor incident at the Savoy. A misunderstanding.”

The thick white shelf of his lordship’s brows climbed toward his hairline. “At the
Savoy
? You interest me greatly. I didn’t think you ever left the classroom. Or the mud huts. Or wherever it is you do your research.”

“I was there with Cornelia and a fellow instructor, Lionel Underwood.”

“Well, bully for Mr. Underwood for dragging you off that campus. You’re a young man, Ptolemy. It won’t kill you to act like one occasionally.”

He smiled at his grandfather’s misinterpretation of the situation. Lionel Underwood, a bon vivant? Hardly. Lionel was a consummate teetotaler. He’d only come along because Ptolemy had asked him, being as he was the only person both Cornelia and he liked.

Though, Ptolemy allowed with a twinge of guilt, he didn’t like self-effacing, hardworking and, well, frankly, dull Lionel so much as found him useful. Lionel always made himself available to escort Cornelia to the seemingly endless and—Ptolemy admitted—endlessly boring functions associated with the college where both Lionel and he were employed as dons.

“
I
arranged the evening. It was to be a celebration.”

“A celebration?” His grandfather tipped his head inquiringly.

“Yes.” He took a deep breath. “I had planned on asking Cornelia to marry me—”

“Please, say it’s not so!” His grandfather clamped his hand to his chest. “Not Cornelia!”

“I resent that, Grandfather. Miss Litchfield is a remarkable young lady. She’s a highly organized and thorough researcher, with a true gift for management—”

“I can well believe that.”

“Don’t mutter. It makes me think you are saying nasty things.”

“I am.”

“Grandfather.”

“I’m sorry—no, I’m not, I’m horrified. What on earth possessed you to ask Miss Litchfield to marry you?” He glanced sharply at Ptolemy. “You weren’t sozzled, were you?”

“No!” He never got drunk. Drunk people lost their inhibitions and he had been trained from the cradle to believe that inhibitions provided civilization its best bulwark against anarchy. “And I haven’t asked her yet.”

There hadn’t been any opportunity. Before coming to the Savoy, he’d planned to meet her at the British Library and propose somewhere in the stacks. But he’d missed his train and so had rung up Lionel and asked him to pick up the ring at the jeweler’s and then escort Cornelia to the Savoy to meet him. It had worked out as smoothly as clockwork but there hadn’t been a moment when they’d been alone so that he could propose.

In fact, now that he thought of it, he realized Lionel still had the ring. He supposed it was as well. Lionel never lost things. Dependable as a rock, old Lionel.

“Thank God for that.”

“But I will.”

“Do you think that wise, m’lad? I don’t think you have any idea of what life with Miss Litchfield will be like. You have always been utterly oblivious where females are concerned. I blame my daughter.”

“That was hardly her fault.”

His grandfather ignored him. “She was not a natural mother. Sending you and your brothers off to school so young. Did you even know what a girl was before you were ten?”

“There were a few references in books.”

“You make light of it, but it’s true. You are absolutely a babe in the woods where women are concerned. Especially a woman like Miss Litchfield.” He shook his head.

“I know you think her a tad dry—”

“A tad?”

“Cornelia has more in her head than the pursuit of pleasure.” Unlike that strange girl at the Savoy. She had all the earmarks of a—what did the students call them? Oh, yes, a crackerjack.

“There’s an understatement,” his lordship said. “I dare-say Miss Litchfield has never taken a step in pleasure’s direction, let alone actively pursued it.”

Ptolemy blew out a deep breath. “Grandfather . . .”

His grandfather forestalled him. “I have nothing against Miss Litchfield other than that she is a managing sort of woman. The sort who inspires laziness in a man.”

“Laziness?”

“Yes. You’ve always been a little obsessive when it came to your work, my lad. You can’t deny it. It has made you—and yes, I know this is harsh, but it is said with affection—neglect other areas of life. Miss Litchfield has encouraged this neglect. Perhaps fostered the mistaken belief that nothing else matters aside from . . . What is it that you do?”

“I am an anthropologist. A cultural—”

“Yes. Well, other things
do
matter.”

Ptolemy gave this a fair consideration. He did tend to become a tad obsessive about things he found fascinating, but he’d never found anything nearly as fascinating as people and cultures.

“Are you in love with her?”

His grandfather’s abrupt question caught him off guard. “I . . . I . . . Of course. Yes.”

His grandfather steepled his hands together and peered at him over the tips of his fingers. “I believe, Ptolemy, I
truly
believe, that the men in our family only love once. So choose your mate wisely, my boy.”

He shifted uneasily. Cornelia expected him to ask for her hand in marriage. At least, he assumed she did. It was a natural progression in a relationship between an unmarried man and woman after a number of years, and he had given her no reason to expect otherwise.

“We’ll make a brilliant team,” he said. “She has only my best interests at heart and she’ll help me achieve . . . er, those things that I want to achieve.”

“Wonderful,” his grandfather said. “Why don’t you hire her rather than propose to her?”

“Grandfather.”

“You sound like you’re choosing a teammate, not a bedmate.”

“Grandfather.”

“Fine.” He held up his hand. “I shan’t say another word. Today. I’m sorry. I really won’t. I mean if you want to marry a woman who—no, no, no! Sit back down. I promise. Don’t leave. Tell me how you got that bruise?”

He’d forgotten about it. “Some college boy reeking of bay rum thought I was importuning a young lady at the bar.”

“What were you doing in the bar? I didn’t think you drank.”

“Of course I do. I just don’t overindulge.”

“God, that you would.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. And what did Miss Litchfield think of you importuning this young lady?”

“Oh, for—I
didn’t
importune her. I don’t even know the girl.”

Once again, his grandfather’s brows mounted his noble forehead. “Then what happened?”

“What happened?” Ptolemy frowned. What
had
happened?

Before he quite realized it the words were spilling out, his forehead furrowed in an effort to sort out the events that had led to his black eye.

“—and I took a step after her, the girl, and in doing so stepped on her hem and it
ripped
, the whole back of her gown ripped open to the waist—a shoddy bit of workmanship if you ask me—leaving her in a state of immodesty.”

He regarded his grandfather earnestly. “Do you realize young ladies wear practically
nothing
beneath these new gowns?” He didn’t wait for an answer.

“She said, ‘Do something!’ So, naturally, I obliged. I threw my coat over her shoulders and it was then that this boy decided I’d intentionally insulted her and hit me. And he wouldn’t have landed the blow except I was caught off guard. One doesn’t expect to be knocked out in a restaurant.” Ptolemy threw out his hands in an invitation to commiserate. “And that’s what happened.”

“I see.”

“Do you?” Ptolemy asked, abruptly sitting down on the edge of the wingback chair opposite his grandfather. “Because I’m not sure I do.”

“And when you came to she’d vanished, hadn’t she?” his lordship said. “They usually do.”

Ptolemy could think of no retort to this bizarre non sequitur and so made none. “No. She stayed there, all right, yelling in my ear and shaking me and insisting on helping me up even though she’s about as tall as that wood nymph statue in your garden, and with similar features, too . . .” He paused, considering, then shook
his head. “But not really. She actually looks a lot more like that shepherdess.”

“Shepherdess?”

“Yes. In your glass globe,” he explained distractedly. “Not physically, but there’s a quality of careless . . . I don’t know.” He shook his head, defeated by his inability to properly describe the girl.

“As soon as I was on my feet she started in about the pen again, only her male friend had arrived by now—the one I mentioned who supposedly gave it to her—and he finally explained that he’d borrowed the pen off my table when I’d gone after Cornelia.”

“Where was Cornelia going?”

“Cornelia? Oh, she had a ticket to some lecture and it turned out Lionel did too, so they went off together. Anyway, she said—”

“
Who
said?”

“The girl, Grandfather. Please try to attend.”

“Believe it or not, I am.”

“Anyway, she said, and I quote, Grandfather, ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ and smiled with a sort of regal forbearance, like a queen forced to deal with a simpleminded peasant. Then she handed me my pen and
then
she vanished.”

His grandfather clapped his knee. “I
knew
she would eventually vanish!”

“
And
she took my jacket.”

His grandfather nodded.

“Why would she
do
that?”

“Take your jacket?”

“No, all the rest of it.” He felt like he was twelve again, trying to sort out the mystery of why the cook’s daughter had taken an inexplicable aversion to him when he’d returned from boarding school on one of his infrequent visits home, tossing her head and flouncing off whenever he said, “Hello.”

“I haven’t the faintest notion,” his grandfather said with a broad grin. Why he should find the situation in the least amusing was beyond Ptolemy. “What’s her name?”

“Name? Why . . . I don’t know.” An odd feeling of disquiet seized him at this realization.

Ptolemy stood up, annoyed and exasperated. He’d already wasted enough time wondering about the girl. “Anyway, that’s how I came to have a black eye. Now that I’ve satisfied your curiosity perhaps you can satisfy mine and tell me why you sent for me.”

His grandfather studied him for a long moment before replying. “I have an errand I need you to do for me.”

“Of course. What is it?”

Ptolemy stopped in front of the wrought iron gate and tipped his dripping black umbrella back to better peer at the manor house. He wasn’t certain he had the right address. He pulled the folded paper from his mackintosh pocket and checked it against the placard embedded in the brick hitching post next to the gate; this was it, all right.