That Summer: A Novel (36 page)

It wasn’t quite the same as Natalie letting herself in by the kitchen door, but it made Julia wary, nonetheless.

“I wish I’d thought of it sooner.” If he’d realized anything was wrong, he was doing a very good job of pretending otherwise. “These papers are a gold mine.”

The choice of phrase made Julia’s hackles rise. “How so?”

Nick gestured dismissively at the cardboard box. “Thorne’s papers aren’t much use. You get the feeling he wasn’t very comfortable with a pen. He only wrote when he had to. But Rossetti … That man wasn’t at a loss for words. There are several references to Thorne—and,” he added, with the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, “at least three mentions of our
Tristan and Iseult
.”

Curiosity warred with caution. Curiosity won. “What does he say about it?”

Next to them, the grad student pointedly shifted two seats to the left. Julia leaned against the back of her vacated seat.

“Not much. Just the subject and that Thorne refuses to show it. That,” commented Nick, with a glimmer of humor, “appears to have been a sore point for Rossetti. He liked to see what his friends were painting.”

“But it means we do have a link between Thorne and the painting.” The
we
came out before Julia realized what she was saying.

Fortunately, Nick didn’t seem to notice. “It’s not proof, but it’s a damn good argument. How many Tristan and Iseults could there be from that year, in that style? But that’s not the best part.” His eyes were aquamarine with excitement.

“No?” The curved back of the chair was biting into Julia’s arms. She shifted her weight.

Nick flipped back a few pages in the book, which had been liberally dotted with white markers. “In January of 1850, Rossetti writes to William Holman Hunt that he stopped by Thorne’s studio and found that Thorne had cleared out.” Just in case Julia didn’t get the significance of that, he added, “Paintings, drawings, clothes, all gone.”

“We knew that Thorne left England in 1850. That’s not a surprise.”

“But this is. Thorne’s landlord told him that a lady had come by to pick up the last of Thorne’s things a week before. Not a woman. A lady.”

Julia thought she saw where he was going with this. “You think Imogen stole the painting?” It wasn’t an altogether bad idea. “If they were having an affair, she’d want the evidence hidden.… And that would explain how it wound up in the wardrobe.”

Nick shook his head impatiently. “I don’t think Imogen ran off with the painting. I think Thorne ran off with Imogen. Wait,” he said as Julia opened her mouth to protest. “Rossetti’s brother, William—who was also a member of the PRB, if a rather woodwork one—told his brother that he’d seen Thorne, or a man he believed to be Thorne, purchasing passage to New York. Not one passage, two passages. For a husband and wife.”

“It doesn’t work,” Julia argued. “How did the painting get in the wardrobe? You can’t have it both ways.”

Nick rolled his eyes heavenwards. “Can we abandon the wardrobe for the moment? Maybe Imogen stuck the painting in there for safekeeping before they fled.”

Julia looked at him closely. “You’re pretty invested in this, aren’t you?”

“I like a puzzle.” Jokingly he added, “You do realize what a story this would make. It has BBC special written all over it. Pre-Raphaelite painter, repressed Victorian wife…”

Like a devil on her shoulder, she could hear Natalie’s voice saying,
Ask Nicholas. Ask Nicholas why he’s been so keen to help.
“Is that why you’re taking such an interest?”

Nick closed the book. He looked at her quizzically. “I thought you wanted my help.”

Julia’s hands tightened on the back of the chair. “It depends on the price.”

Nick looked up at her through those gold-rimmed glasses, looking disarmingly boyish. “If you want to buy me a drink, I won’t object.” When she didn’t smile, his own smile faded. “What are you trying to say?”

With the memory of Natalie’s words buzzing in her ear, Julia blurted out, “Did Natalie ever tell you her theories about treasure in the house?”

“Well, yes, but it’s all—” Puzzlement gave way to dawning comprehension as the penny dropped. His lips tightened into a hard line. “You think I’m after Natalie’s imaginary treasure?”

Put that way, it sounded idiotic.

“You never told me the real reason you had to leave Dietrich Bank,” she said belligerently.

Nick pushed the book away from him. “It’s not exactly something I enjoy talking about,” he said shortly. He looked up at Julia. Whatever he saw in her face made his eyes narrow. “That’s what this is about? You think I’m—” Words failed him. “Christ. I would have thought you had more sense than that.”

Stung, Julia struck back, “You don’t exactly have a reputation for probity.”

Nick pushed back his chair with a scrape of wood against wood that made the grad student glare at them.

“If,” he said in a tight voice, “you had bothered to investigate before lobbing accusations, you would have seen that I was cleared. It was one of the junior members of the team who was moving the stock, not I. Not that it matters.”

His voice was utterly flat and without inflection. It made Julia feel worse than any display of temper might have done. It was like listening to the knell of a funeral bell.

Behind her, she could almost hear Natalie snickering.

“Nick—” she began.

He cut her off. “Since you’ve already tried and condemned me, there’s not much more for me to say, is there? Here.” He pushed the volume of Rossetti’s letters across to her with a quick, impatient gesture. “You can have this.”

“You don’t have to—”

Nick stopped her with one withering glance. With unerring aim he struck the final blow. “That will teach me to engage in charity work.”

Before Julia could gather her wits together, he was already well away, striding towards the exit.

TWENTY-TWO

Herne Hill, 1849

Gavin arrived at the orchard gate the next day armed with an arsenal of arguments in favor of flight. He had stayed up half the night, planning and replanning, parsing out his reasons with the precision of a barrister at the bar.

When he saw Imogen, all his well-reasoned arguments fled.

She was waiting for him by the gnarled apple tree at the base of the hill, the bare branches providing a rustic frame. Gavin held out his arms to her, and she came into them, resting against his chest with a little sigh of content.

They stood like that for what seemed an eternity, content just to be together, his cheek resting against her brow, her skirts rustling around his legs. The wind might howl around them, the branches might bow and shake, but they were warm and safe together, whole and entire to themselves.

Her voice rusty, she said, without moving her head, “Arthur is gone away to town and Evie is at the Sturgises’.” At the moment, Gavin couldn’t have given a farthing for any of them; all he cared for was the feel of Imogen in her arms, the warmth of her body, the smell of her hair. “Jane is doing something with the flowers at the church and the maids will be staying close by the fire.”

“So we are safe,” he said.

“For the moment.” In a voice so low he could hardly hear her she said, “I have missed this so.” Imogen lifted her head and looked him full in the face, her expression rueful. “I have missed you so.”

Gavin lifted her ungloved hand to his lips. He could feel triumph singing in his blood, although native caution urged him to go slowly.

“You needn’t sound so sad about it,” he said with rough humor. “This is a gift, what we have.”

Her eyes met his. “With a very high price.”

“It’s a price I’m willing to pay.” Gavin squeezed her cold fingers. “I want us to be together. I can’t say you truer than that.”

Imogen’s petticoats crinkled as she drew her hand away, making an anxious gesture. “But what about all the prospects you would be giving up? You’ve only just begun to make a name for yourself.”

He had thought all that through, the night before. “The skill is still there, name or no name. If I can make a name for myself here, I can make a name for myself elsewhere—it will just be a slightly different one.” He cupped her face in his hands, resting his forehead against hers. “I’m not afraid of hard work. I’ve worked with my hands before and I will again, if that’s what needs be. And now,” he added, “I’ll be working for we three. That’s a powerful incentive.”

He felt her shoulders relax, her eyes close, as she leaned against him. “We three,” she said slowly, as though testing the words on her tongue.

Gavin ran his thumb soothingly along the long line of her neck. “A family. Our family. We’ll be happy as grigs, just you see.”

He could see her struggling with her conscience. “It won’t be legal.”

Gavin rested his hands on her waist, thicker now than it had been two months before. His child was there, under all those layers of wool and linen. The law be damned; the three of them belonged together, just as in the days of old Adam, before lawyers and clerics and the whole damnable apparatus of gentility.

“What’s the law, in matters such as these?” he demanded. “Your kind worries about parish registers and bits of paper. In the rest of the world, there’s many a marriage dissolved by a bit of shoe leather and time, and no one the worse for it.”

Imogen looked at him doubtfully, and Gavin knew that this was an idea that had never occurred to her before. She hadn’t grown up as he had, in a world where such matters were more fluid, where there wasn’t the money or energy to worry about such trivialities as legality.

Gavin redoubled his efforts. “What will they care for such things in America or Australia? If we say we’re husband and wife, we shall be. And so we shall be,” he said more forcefully, “where it matters. Can you tell me you ever felt like this about Grantham?”

The wind whistled through the bare branches around them, sere and cold. Imogen drew her heavy shawl more firmly around her. “No. It was a young girl’s fancy, an illusion, and I knew it for such within the year.” Her mouth twisted wryly. “I thought love was all high romance and courtly words. I never thought of all the days and days and days to follow.”

From the sound of it, those days had been long ones.

“I’ve little in the way of courtly words to offer you,” said Gavin honestly. “And even less in the way of high romance. Just my devotion and the work of my hands.”

Put that way, it sounded like precious little. Gavin shifted from one foot to the other, the frost crackling on the ground beneath his feet.

But Imogen didn’t turn away. Instead, she took a step forward, towards him. “You do yourself too little credit. Words can mislead, but this—” She looked up at him, her heart in her eyes. “Whenever I’m with you, I feel as though I’ve come home after a long journey. You are hearth and harbor to me.”

A cold hearth and a choppy harbor at the moment, but Gavin wasn’t about to quibble.

With a crooked smile Imogen said, “It was easier when I could tell myself that you were just another passing fancy.”

Gavin felt the world go still around him. “But now?”

“You are all I’ll ever want,” Imogen said simply. As she spoke, her voice gathered strength. “I love you, through and through, every part of you.”

Gavin could hardly speak through the lump in his throat. “Even the shabby bits?”

“Especially the shabby bits,” she said firmly, and somehow they were in each other’s arms, rocking from side to side, laughing with elation and fear, clinging to each other with all their might.

Gavin wrapped his arms firmly around her, resting his cheek against her brow, hardly daring to believe his luck, to have found the one woman in the world made just for him. “Then—you’ll come away with me?”

Imogen glanced over her shoulder at the house, the chimneys just visible through the bare branches of the trees. “Evie will be married in a month,” she said. “Once she’s married and in Lisbon, my scandal can’t touch her—or not enough to matter.”

Fairness prompted Gavin to say, “I can’t offer you anything like this, at least, not at first. You won’t miss it?”

“This house?” The curl of Imogen’s lip was answer enough. “This has never been a home to me.” Her expression lightened. “But if I had never married Arthur, I should never have met you.”

“In that case,” said Gavin, “I’ll try to think kindly of him—although it will be difficult until I have you safely to myself!”

His father always had said that the Lord worked in mysterious ways. Of course, he’d usually been in his cups when he said it and looking for someone to thrash, but the sentiment held just the same.

He wouldn’t be a father as his father had been. No matter how they had to scramble at first, he’d see his wife—for his wife she would be, in his eyes and the eyes of the world—and child safe and well, and no matter how little they had, they would always, always know how he cherished them.

“We will be happy together,” Gavin said fiercely. “I promise you that. It may not always be easy, but I will do everything in my power to make you happy.” Switching abruptly to practical matters, he said, “When is your Miss Evie’s wedding?”

“Soon,” said Imogen. “The eleventh of January.”

He hated to wait that long, but he knew better than to ask Imogen to leave before her stepdaughter was safely wed. “Then we leave on the twelfth. You’ll not need to bring much with you, just what you can fit into a portmanteau. I’ll see to all the arrangements.”

There was a faraway expression in her eyes. “A new life in a new land,” she said, testing it out. Her lips quirked in a lopsided smile. “It’s rather like something out of a Shakespeare play. Without the shipwreck.”

“Please God, no shipwrecks,” said Gavin.

He’d never had the stomach for the sea. It didn’t sing in his blood as it did with some. But it was a necessary evil to making a life with his Imogen and their child.

He placed his hand over her stomach, on the place where he assumed their child must be, beneath the wide swell of her skirts. “Whatever comes, we face it together.”

Imogen set her hand lightly over his. “Together,” she echoed. It felt like a pact. Reluctantly, she drew back. “It will most likely be safest if we don’t meet again until then.”