Betina Krahn (8 page)

“Oooh. And a touch of humor. You didn’t mention that, Celeste.” Lady Sophia chuckled at Celeste’s ill-concealed distress and leaned over to pat her hand. “Well, Stephan, I
believe we’re ready for Maria’s soup.” She turned to the professor with a confidential air. “Oyster, you know. It’s our Maria’s specialty.”

“Your Portuguese cook?”

“Why, yes. How did you know?”

“It was in Miss Ashton’s book,” he said, shifting his broad shoulders to one side to allow the old butler to serve him.

“You recalled that from my book?” Celeste asked, grateful to move on to another topic, any other topic.

“I have made a thorough study of your writing.” His voice was noticeably cooler. Their gazes met briefly and she felt a ripple of uneasiness, wondering what sorts of conclusions he had drawn from her work, and hoping she hadn’t revealed more in her book than she intended.

“In my sort of work,” he continued, “it is important to be well prepared.”

“Your sort of work?” Lady Sophia said. “Tell me, Professor, what is your field of study?”

“Ichthyology, madam,” he responded.

“
Fish science
. How interesting. Not my cup of tea, of course. I’m far more interested in—” She caught Celeste’s glower and—scowling back at her—changed direction. “In more artistic endeavors. And travel. Not that I get to do much, these days. Do you travel much, Professor?”

He looked up from his nearly empty soup dish. “When the occasion calls for it. But I spend most of my time in Oxford.” He paused, considering something as he looked at Celeste. “I just returned, not long ago, from a stay in Newcastle.”

“Newcastle?” Celeste frowned, thinking instantly of coal, iron ore, smelters, and hot, sulphur-laden air, and wondering what a skeptical “fish scientist” could possibly find of interest in a notoriously rough and dirty industrial town. “What were you doing there? Collecting specimens?”

“Hardly. I was researching and exposing an archaeological fraud.” He ignored the clang of Celeste’s spoon dropping in her dish, and looked at Lady Sophia as he continued. “It
seemed a fellow in that city claimed to have unearthed a Viking ship covered with magical runes. He set up a tidy little business, charging for viewing it. After a while, he began to claim it could effect miracle cures. For a fee, people with dire illnesses could spend a night in the ship and be healed.”

“And were they?” Lady Sophia leaned forward. “Healed?”

“Despite his claims,” he replied with obvious satisfaction, “I was unable to locate a single person who had been cured of anything but false hope or a fat purse. Most of the charlatan’s patrons returned to the boat night after night until they were drained of resources.”

“Were you able to stop the blackguard?” Lady Sophia asked eagerly.

“With some effort. A survey of his former clients exposed the shameful number of failed cures, and could not bring to light one verifiable healing. After careful study, I was able to determine that the carvings were neither ancient nor authentic. All that remained was to discover who had actually done the carvings on the boat and bring the fellow and his accomplices to justice.”

“But how did you come to investigate Viking artifacts?” Celeste asked, thinking of the artifacts her grandmother had packed into every available inch of the library and breakfast room. “Archaeology is not your field.”

He looked at Celeste speculatively. “I am called upon to investigate a wide range of inventions and discoveries which seem a bit ‘fishy.’ ”

“How appropriate. Who better to investigate a ‘fishy’ situation than an ichthyologist?” Lady Sophia called for their next course.

Her grandmother obviously hadn’t heard the veiled threat, but Celeste had. What could possibly be more
fishy
than a “mermaid” … especially one who wrote about her underwater experiences with dolphins? Coupled with what she’d heard from Mr. Cherrybottom about him, his
declarations were nothing short of ominous. He was a crusader against shoddy and fraudulent science, a self-appointed arbiter of truth, a one-man justice and jury in the courts of scientific opinion. If there had been any doubt in her mind that he had come here to discredit her, he had just dispelled it.

“You are a professional skeptic, then,” she said tautly.

“I am a scientist first and foremost, Miss Ashton. As a scientist, I am devoted to the search for the truth. And as a seeker of truth, it is my duty to unmask falsehood masquerading as scientific progress.” That echoing pronouncement brought dinner conversation to a total halt.

Celeste had lost her appetite. In contrast, Titus Thorne systematically demolished Maria’s oyster soup and Spanish paella … closing his penetrating, sea-green eyes to concentrate on each bite. By the time he sampled the braised sole with capers and ginger butter, and pronounced it “surprisingly light and delicate,” it was all she could do to keep from launching herself across the table at him.

The wretched man analyzed and evaluated everything around him … passing judgment as if he had been put in charge of standards for all of humankind. Nothing escaped him. She watched him mentally cataloguing flavors and deciphering ingredients in the food, fingering the worn table linen, scrutinizing the crystal, running his hands over the edges of the plates, as if examining them for chips. She found herself staring raptly at those hands … large, neat hands, long, slender, supple fingers … She finally looked up and found him watching her. Her face heated defensively.

Judging her now, was he? She could just imagine what he was thinking.
Poor desperate, deluded creature
…
living with an eccentric grandmother in a crumbling house. Small wonder she believes she can talk to dumb animals
.

It was during the raspberry trifle that Lady Sophia finally resurrected the conversation. “Tell us, Professor, what sorts of ‘fish’ things do you study?”

He cleared his throat. “I specialize in the feeding habits of
large fish … the saltwater varieties. Swordfish, sharks, marlin, tuna, sunfish, and the like.”

Nana beamed. “Then I imagine you must fish a great deal, Professor. How fortunate you are. Not many men manage to combine their vocations and avocations.”

“Oh, I never fish,” he said, finishing the last bite of his trifle and settling back in his chair. “That would be a deplorable waste of time.”

An ichthyologist who wouldn’t waste time fishing? “If you don’t fish, how do you get your specimens?” Celeste asked pointedly.

“I contract with certain parties to secure them for me.”

“What parties?”

“I have a standing arrangement with certain fishing-boat captains who operate out of the London docks.” He spoke succinctly, with a hint of annoyance. “I give them a list of the specimens I need and when they haul one in, I go around to the wharf and collect it.”

She frowned, thinking of some of the large fish she had encountered, trying to imagine how he could handle and study seven- to twelve-foot specimens in captivity. “Then what do you do? I mean … I should think keeping them in a tank would be terribly difficult—not to mention costly and dangerous.”

“A tank?” He looked briefly puzzled, then gave a short laugh. “Hardly. I put the specimen in the back of an ice wagon and take it to the London School of Medicine. They allow me to use their operating theater.”

“For what? Surely, by then, the creature must be
dead.”

“Of course it’s dead.” He adopted a professional air. “I perform a dissection and analyze the contents of the creature’s digestive tract. Whatever the fish has eaten in the last six to eight hours is evident. Most large fish swallow their prey whole … with the notorious exception of the shark, which will also bite and tear away pieces of much larger prey. But even then, one can still usually identify bits and pieces as belonging to …”

That was it? Celeste sat stunned, listening to him recount his gruesome technique.
That
was how he researched the feeding habits of fish? He dissected their stomachs and examined the debris?

“Let me see if I have this straight,” she interrupted, sliding to the edge of her chair. “You claim to be an authority on the feeding habits of fish, but you don’t watch them feeding in the wild … never see them capture or eat their prey … and never have more than one or two fish at a time to study?” Her voice rose along with her indignation. “You simply go down to the London docks, buy the odd carcass, cart it off, and cut it open to see what’s inside?” She paused, struggling to contain her outrage. “A fishmonger could do as much!”

He reddened. “It is hardly that
simple
, Miss Ashton.”

“It is hardly more complex, Professor,” she countered, gripping the edges of the table and rising. “And it is hardly science!”

He shoved his chair back and sprang up. “It is certainly better science than if I claimed I swam about in the ocean, leering at animals, then concocted tawdry stories about their sexual habits.” He raised his chin. “At least when I cut open a fish, there is no question about what it has ingested. It’s there or it isn’t. I deal in pure, undeniable fact, not dubious tales or lurid conjectures.”

“That’s what you think, is it? That I’ve just made it all up?”

“I believe that is what I’m here to determine.”

“So, you’ll decide if I am a liar and a charlatan, or just some poor deluded little ninny who wouldn’t know a dolphin mating if she saw one!”

His voice lowered so that it set her fingertips vibrating.

“Oh, I don’t doubt that you’d know a
mating
if you saw one.”

She looked straight into his sea-green eyes and was suddenly engulfed in treacherous waters. Undertow. It took a moment for her to catch his meaning.

That
again … the intimation that she knew more about such things than a young woman should know.

“The real question here, sir, is: will
you
know one when
you
see it?”

He straightened, a vein suddenly visible in his temple, and she rounded the head of the table to confront him.

“And there is no better time to find out than now. Come with me.”

“What? Now?” He gestured to the lowering light coming from the window. “It’s practically night.”

“Dolphins don’t sleep … at least not like we do. It’s in my book, remember?” She headed for the door.

Appealing to Lady Sophia with an incredulous look, he received only a beatific smile in response. He gave his vest a violent jerk downward and followed Celeste.

The old lady sat for a moment, her eyes glowing as she studied the doorway where her granddaughter and the professor had disappeared. Then she clasped her hands together and broke into a laugh.

“She has needed someone for so long … And such magnetism. Such dynamic opposition. Together, they positively radiate sacred energy!” Her gaze darted over unseen possibilities as she considered what to do, then gradually narrowed upon a course of action. Moments later, she reached for her wine and finished it with a flourish.

If things went as she hoped, soon dolphins might not be the only things “mating” around here.

CELESTE LED HIM
through the house, through a cavernous stone kitchen—where she paused to thank a rotund, dark-eyed woman for dinner—and then along a worn gravel path that ended precipitously at the edge of a cliff. Titus’s heart thudded when she veered from the path and disappeared over the edge of the cliff.

Hurrying to the edge of the cliff, he glimpsed a stepped path leading down the side of it, and reluctantly followed. He was still burning from their confrontation, and fixed his gaze on the swaying blue skirts ahead of him.

Infernal female—having the temerity to disparage his work and compare him to a
fishmonger
. He was a respected researcher, a professor who held a chair at Oxford. The list of his papers and presentations was as long as his arm. True, his method of inquiry wasn’t dashing, or adventuresome, or wildly romantic. Why was it that people—even some who should know better, like his colleagues on the Cardinal College faculty—persisted in promoting the myth of the great romance of discovery? The old boys talked about research in grandly overblown terms, as if it always involved sailing up the Nile or wading through Amazonian swamps or being bitten by some exotic vermin in some exotic climate. Yet another symptom of encroaching senility, he was convinced.
They had forgotten the details of their earlier days and now simply made some up.

The truth was, real science involved precious little glamour. Real science was methodical, exacting, and sometimes even unpleasant. Real research employed grit and determination in the dogged pursuit of elusive but critical details. The study of ichthyology didn’t require sailing the seven seas, and it certainly didn’t require making oneself
into
a fish in order to study fish!

His eyes narrowed.

Celeste Ashton clearly hadn’t the first idea of the methodologies of legitimate scientific investigation. If she did, she wouldn’t be dragging him down to the water in the dark to witness God-knew-what. Then it struck him like a thunderbolt: she was hauling him down to the water at dusk … declaring dolphins don’t sleep …