Virgin Star (24 page)

In a moment of self-discovery Shalyn finished it in a whisper: "1 hate from hate away she threw, And sav'd my life, saying1—'Not you.' "

Shalyn stared up at Seanessy in total awe, bewilderment, and no small amount of discomfort. Awe that he could, would recite Shakespeare, bewilderment that she had the same unlikely talent, and discomfort because this had so altered her view of him as to render her blissfully speechless for a long moment.

Then suddenly: "Number one hundred and forty-five. I remember it. The last lines are so sweet ..."

Seanessy grinned down at her, pleased, and she returned the look, dazed. Shakespeare had always worked magic for him: during those days as a young man at Oxford when, for a number of years, he had been surrounded by no one but blue-bloods, nothing lifted a lady's silk skirts quite like Shakespeare's sonnets, and while he quickly forgot those generous and accommodating women, he never forgot the sonnets. He loved singing them almost as much as gaining the favors they aroused. Until now. Until Shalyn.

"So," he said, trying hard to concentrate, "Shakespeare heads the long list of favorite works. High-minded stuff. Which is your favorite sonnet?"

The question was asked as his hand brushed over her forehead, stirring something in her and making her uncomfortably aware of his hard body over hers. He kept his weight from her but the brush of his shirt teased her bare skin and his belt buckle pressed against her stomach while a fleeting memory danced through her mind.

A black enamel box filled with treasures: two books, one of them of Shakespeare's sonnets, a seashell, and a ring. She tried to seize the gossamer vision, cling to the fragile glance into the mysteriousness of her missing past, but it vanished.

"Seanessy ..."

"What?" he asked, forgetting the question, forgetting everything as his gaze caressed her breasts. Oh, Lord. It occurred to him that while she had a maddening innocence about her, a beguiling ignorance of the effect of her comeliness, she did not have a young maid's modesty. Nudity brought her no shame, and there was something so fascinating and alluring and maddening about that ...

Shalyn closed her eyes and tried to steel herself against the physical havoc he wreaked upon her senses. How did he do this to her? He could turn her insides to a simmering pot of hot stew by nothing more than walking into the same room as she. Toss in a poet's sweet song, and she was not only his willing victim, but an eager one. The most disconcerting aspect of the dilemma was: "I still want to kill you."

A knock sounded and Charles announced the doctor from behind the door.

Sean closed his eyes briefly, trying to quiet his sudden laughter and temper the rage of his pulse. He just didn't know what to do with her! There was but one way out: he'd ask Butcher to take him outside and shoot him.

Of course, he could put her picture in the paper. . An excellent idea, the perfect solution. A grin spread over his face. He released her all at once as he bounded off the bed.

Shalyn sat up, drawing the folds of the robe tight about her neck. Flushed, breathless, she felt her galloping heart beneath her hands at her chest. What a beast he was! Except for his Shakespeare, and how she did love his Shakespeare, but except for that, he was an insufferable, maddening—

Seanessy opened the door to Dr. Thomas Rush.

With a polite "Good day" and an obsequious bow, Dr. Rush shook hands briefly with Seanessy. Consumed by his thoughts, Seanessy hardly noticed how the doctor's intelligent gaze traveled quickly from him, past the beautiful young woman who was his patient, to fix eagerly on the Britannia hanging on the wall opposite the bed above the marble hearth. A loosened neck cloth hung by a plain gold pin that seemed to be slipping as he nodded, his eyes shining with pleasure while he stared. His dark waistcoat was unbuttoned down the front of his short, stocky frame to show a similarly unbuttoned brocaded vest. He let drop a large black bag.

"I am in absolute awe, Captain," he first said, removing the kerchief. "Your man was kind enough to show me the downstairs gallery. A fine Rembrandt! Two Rubens and more Hogarths than the National Gallery!" He moved closer, wiping the kerchief to his forehead. "And this, this is—"

"A Britannia," Seanessy supplied, but watched as Shalyn reached a trembling hand to smooth her disheveled hair.

A neat well-trimmed beard bobbed as the doctor nodded. "In a private collection!" Emotion rose in his face as he stared at the pictorial representation of India offering Britannia plates filled with jewels and strings of pearls, and China waiting to present her porcelain and tea. Mercury and Father Thames looked on the proceedings, while an East Indiaman appeared in the middle, symbolizing the treasure fleet.

"Captain Seanessy," he began, obviously thrilled, "I had heard your private collection rivaled the best: Your house holds some of England's greatest treasures. Yes, yes." He nodded, marveling. "You know I did a year at the National Academy."

"I did not." Seanessy pretended some mild surprise at the information,: while watching Shalyn seated stiffly, demurely on the bed. That was until he noticed her eyes. If looks could kill, he wouldn't need Butcher to do him the favor.

The doctor was nodding, quite unable to turn away from the painting. "Yes indeed. One glorious year." He chuckled. "Until my money ran out. My father, may God rest his cruel soul, refused to release my annum until I gave up my harebrained notion of painting and agreed to his course of Oxford and medicine."

Sean smiled at this. "There's no greater tyrant than a determined father."

"Yes, yes, quite so. Well, well, it worked out for the best in the end. It seems I have the necessary passion for painting and yet little of the necessary talent. Now where in heaven's name did you get this?"

'That? The East India Office at Severndrog. Bought for sixty pounds."

Shock marked the doctor's gaze, followed by the humor of it. "No, that cannot be?"

"I'm afraid it is," Sean replied. "The result of two drunken officers who had no idea what they were handing me."

A hand came over the doctor's breast as if he was experiencing sudden heart palpitations, and he was. "That sixty pounds could buy such priceless beauty!"

She looked up to focus on these proceedings. She too had admired the painting, its beauty nearly overcoming her objections. "But it is a fatally flawed beauty after all," she said boldly, staring off at the kneeling forms of India and China. "Only an Englishman would imagine the supplication of China and India to Britannia—two nations as great as, if not much greater than, their mistress Britannia."

Dr. Rush could not hide his surprise; Seanessy did not even fry to. "Greater?" The doctor decided to humor the beautiful young woman, who he realized must be his patient. "In what way can you imagine it?"

"In many ways," she said, the need to explain the obvious point interrupting the dark circles of her thoughts for the moment. "China and India are far greater in size and population, and much, much longer and richer in histories. English history only goes back to Arthur and the turn of the millennium. The Emperor of China has fish older than that! Why, there are books written in Chinese that were brought by way of India, and these books are said to date from four thousand years ago!"

A long silence followed the remark.

She first took the surprised silence unkindly, as a bigoted Englishman's response to an enlightened, worldly view, but abruptly a ringing started in her ears and her face flushed as it occurred to her that while she could not recall her name, she knew a good deal about Oriental and Indian history. She knew without a doubt the name of the Emperor of China and the Sultan of Brunei. She knew the Rajah of Sarawak.

Her amber eyes found Seanessy's. '

"Are you remembering things?"

"No and yes." Frustration and confusion vied equally on her distressed face. "I can remember history, places, things I know. I remember almost every book I have read. I can name a dozen Indian rajahs and a half-dozen seaports in the Straits of Malacca. Yet 'tis so strange, I cannot picture people in my mind. I cannot say how I know, when or where I lived there, who was with me ..."

Dr. Rush retrieved his large bag and approached the bed where she sat. "I was told you suffer complete memory loss? That you could not say your name? Hmm?"

She closed her eyes, both hands pressing her head. "No." She shook her head. "No. I try and I try but it's as if I never knew. Captain Seanessy and his men call me Shalyn."

"Well, that's a pretty name." He set his large black bag on a table and opened it. Gentle hands came to the side of her head, turning it to better see the bump. "Does it hurt, my dear?"

"No. A little sore, but that is all."

He proceeded to examine her. Eyeglass to his eye, he examined her head, neck, and eyes. "So far so good. Yes, yes." He parted her hair to examine her skull, reminiscing out loud in an engaging gentle-tone. "My word! You do so remind me of a lady I used to admire—she had your same dark eyes and brows with rich gold hair." His gaze fell over the length of it and he added, "Though not nearly so long."

She looked up and appeared interested.

"Oh my, but Hanna was quite beautiful and so richly talented; I think half of her father's students had debilitating crushes on her."

"Her father's students?"

"You see, her father was Sir Gideon Brackton, the pioneering, and I must say brilliant, just brilliant, surgeon at the academy then. Quite famous." He chuckled with fondness. "Miss Hanna Brackton caused quite a scandal when it was learned she was the artist who drew the diagrams for her father's anatomy class."

Seanessy stood over the doctor like an anxious parent. He realized of course that the doctor chatted for a good cause, to ease her obvious distress, that the trick was working. Seemingly without guile, he managed to draw Shalyn's thoughts from his careful examination.

She never even wondered whether it was proper to inquire as to the nature of the diagrams; it was not in her nature to restrain her curiosity, which the doctor had been counting on. "What kind of diagrams were they?"

"Well, to be quite frank, diagrams of human anatomy, pictures that she could only have made by attending her father's dissections of human corpses. Does that upset you, my dear? No? Well, you are more enlightened than most. Half of society refused her, despite her family's connections. And she didn't seem to care at all. I remember once she laughed at what she called 'those old stuffed corsets!'"

The next sound drew Seanessy's keen interest; her laughter was light, carefree, girlish, as enchanting as a siren's call. He loved her laughter in the instant. The doctor chuckled with her, and it was obvious his entire manner was richly, marvelously contrived for the sole purpose of setting his patients at ease.

"What happened to her?"

"Oh, she married one of her father's students. A young man. He came after me. I can't remember his name. Stiler? No, that wasn't it. Well, I heard he had accepted a commission with the King's navy. Hanna moved her young daughter to the countryside as I remember. That’s the last I heard. I've often wondered what became of her. Such a free and gay spirit..."

Withdrawing a magnifying glass, Dr. Rush proceeded to examine Shalyn's eyes, using a magnifying glass and making her look this way and that from the side, talking to her all the while. The good man answered her surprising interest in the subject of dissection, its usefulness, and the legal problems. He explained how the law forbade the taking of any cadavers from consecrated ground, which left the academy only the occasional hanged prisoners to dissect. "And they are always pickled from drink and diseased, the very worst subjects ..."

The doctor went on to describe what constituted a fine stiff, causing Seanessy a bemused smile. He knew no other woman who would be able, much less willing, to entertain a doctor's discussion of the worth of cadavers, let alone a woman with an apparent interest in the morbid subject.

"Buddhists," she said, "do not believe in any inherent value of a corpse; indeed any physical desecration unless it touches the spirit is not a crime. Once you are dead, the body is physical matter, unworthy of enlightened concern."

"Is that so?" He looked at her queerly and then with humor. "Would there were more Buddhists on the boards at the academy..."

Dr. Rush reached a point in his examination where his sensibilities made him look at Seanessy pointedly. "Perhaps it would be wise to protect the lady's modesty? Yes?"

Seanessy did not oblige the doctor, except to turn around. Before Shalyn, he would have thought the need ridiculous, that his wealth of jaded experience had taken him a thousand hard years from titillation. Now the last thing he wanted to see was that robe off her shoulders. A clenched fist took hold of the dresser as if for support, as he began a series of extremely difficult mathematical calculations in his mind, stopping only when the humor of his situation made him grin boyishly.