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Her curiosity and excitement extinguished immediately, and the schoolmistress was back—calm, blank and faintly disapproving. He could have kicked himself for his petty rejection. He was definitely off form.
‘Shall I have Pruitt bring us some tea? My temper can be measured in direct opposition to my hunger.’ It wasn’t much of an apology, but her mouth relaxed a little as he went to tug at the bell pull.
‘You remind me of Hugh.’
‘Who is Hugh?’
‘My brother. We could tell the hour by his temper when he was a boy. If we had not fed him by five we did not need the clock to chime the hour. But once fed he was an angel for precisely another three hours. Mama always said it was because his mind was so hard at work. He is quite brilliant.’
‘I don’t have that excuse, unfortunately. How many of you are there?’
‘Five. Myself, Susan, Edmund, Anne and Hugh.’
‘You are the eldest? Never mind, don’t bother answering. Of course you are.’
‘Why of course?’
‘I recognise the symptoms. You are natural shepherds—everything into its proper slot.’
‘Ah. Did your brother herd you?’
‘Not for many years. Lucas knows when to abandon a lost cause, a very useful characteristic in an older sibling.’
‘I wish he would tell me how. My siblings inform me I am terribly managing.’
‘Perhaps I should have a word with them instead. Teach them a trick or two to herd the shepherd. Behind your back, of course.’
‘I don’t believe they need your help, Mr Sinclair. They are enough of a handful without your dubious advice. Now, as you said, we should return to these stacks or we shall never be done.’
Her shift in humour was so swift he was caught off guard.
‘Did I upset you? It was just idle nonsense. I would not really do that, you know.’
She shrugged and returned to her armchair. Chase took the book of hours and leaned across the desk to place it by her hand.
‘Keep this. My cousin would have liked you to have it.’
She shook her head and pushed the book back towards him. It was another dismissal, but it made him all the more determined to restore her to good humour. He didn’t like the ease with which she slipped back into her shell and he certainly didn’t like being the cause of it.
‘Take it. Please.’
He could see her weakening, but her eyes darted to the stacks of books on the table.
‘I could not take something so precious, but perhaps... No.’
‘What is it you would like?’
‘I see he has two sets of the Desert Boy novels—the one on the table and the one on the shelves over there. Perhaps I could have one... They are my siblings’ favourite books and I thought...’
‘You could have both if you like. One for your family and the other for you to have here at Huxley.’
‘Oh, but I won’t be—’ Her words stopped as if dropped off a cliff. Then she gathered herself. ‘One set will do, Mr Sinclair. My siblings will be very grateful.’
He watched her, unable to shake a sense of unease about her. And so he did what he always did when he was on shaky ground—he went digging.
‘How old are your siblings?’
Wistfulness warred with reserve on her expressive face. Even her features were a study in contrasts—her eyebrows and long eyelashes were several shades darker than her hair, accentuating the faintly exotic slant of her eyes, and her lower lip was a lush counterpoint to a thin and very precise upper lip. She wasn’t traditionally pretty, but there was something fascinating about her face, a play of contrasts that caught and held the viewer’s interest; like a painting he didn’t understand but instinctively liked.
‘Susan is twenty-two and Edmund almost eighteen, and Anne seventeen and Hugh is fourteen,’ she replied, her voice still curt.
‘Are you worried about them?’
She kept her gaze on the book, her long fingers riffling through the pages.
‘They have never been without me before. And then there is Aunt Florence.’
‘Your aunt is minding them? Then surely you need not worry.’
‘They are probably minding her, rather. She is a darling, but she can be as bad as my mother for daydreaming. I do not know how useful she will be if anything happens.’
‘Perhaps you underestimate them. I find it hard to believe siblings of yours are not also intelligent and resourceful. They must grow up eventually, you know.’
She finally looked up.
‘Next you will say I am mollycoddling them or...or something worse.’
‘No, I will say you probably need time away from them more than they need time away from you. Though I would have recommended a rather more relaxing venue than Aunt Ermy’s domain.’
Her mouth wavered between annoyance and amusement.
‘That does leave quite a few possibilities in between,’ she replied and he smiled at her lowering of arms.
‘Just about anywhere else, in fact. So, where would you go if you could go anywhere?’
Her gaze became wistful again as they settled on the Desert Boy books. ‘I wish I could disappear into the leaves of one of these books. Or perhaps...there.’ She turned to the framed picture on the wall. It was one Sam painted for Huxley many years ago—a view of the Nile from the cliffs above Qetara, the sails of the feluccas blushing in the sunset and the shores stubbly with papyrus reeds.
‘I hesitate to ruin your daydream with anything akin to reality, but Egypt is hardly relaxing. Sam, my sister, nearly sat on a scorpion while painting that. She probably would have if poor Edge hadn’t spotted it and pushed her away.’
‘Goodness. Who or what is poor Edge?’
‘He’s the nephew of Huxley’s antiquarian partner, Poppy Carmichael, and a good friend of ours until we all left to join the army during the war. His name is Lord Edgerton, to be precise, but Sam enjoyed vexing him by devising less-than-complimentary variations on his name and her favourite was Lord Stay-Away-from-the-Edge because he was always telling her to be careful, so we all began calling him Edge. He loved ancient Egypt and the antiquities as much as Poppy and Huxley. Show him a tomb and you’d lose him for the rest of the day. He had a habit of saving Sam when she tumbled into trouble, which was often, and thereby thoroughly putting up her back. In short, that picture is a lovely lie.’
‘But you love it. Egypt.’
‘Yes, but not for its relaxing qualities. Some of my best memories are from the years we spent in Egypt. Huxley was my mother’s cousin and it was through him that she met my father. When my father...died...we stayed with my grandmother in Venice, but one day Huxley appeared and swept us all off to Egypt. My mother’s family tried to object because she had been quite ill, but, since he was our guardian along with my paternal uncle, he carried the day. Until I joined the army, I spent my time between Venice and Egypt which were both a definite improvement on Sinclair Hall. But hardly relaxing.’
He cringed a little—his answer was more revealing than intended and her clever honey-brown eyes focused on him with curiosity. They were more honey than brown, a tawny swirl that made him think of the sweet-honey-and-nut baklava cakes Mrs Carmichael used to bribe them back to the house come evening.
He could see the questions bubbling inside her, but then her mouth turned prim again, curiosity reined in.
‘Well, perhaps that is what I want, too. Exciting can still be relaxing if it is different from what one knows.’
‘That is true. Perhaps you shall go to Egypt one day after all.’
She laughed, but there was such resignation in the sound he felt an instinctive surge of pity.
‘Don’t dismiss the possibility. Who knows? Perhaps a distant relative will demand you accompany her and her seventeen pugs on a voyage to the orient.’
‘Seventeen? Must it be seventeen?’
‘It must. In fact, you will set out with seventeen, but there might well be a few more by the time you arrive.’
She burst into laughter.
‘A pug harem. It sounds even more tiring than managing Whitworth.’
‘Adventure is often tiring. But if it is calm you seek, I could find you a post acting as governess to the heir to Shaykh Abd al-Walid, Prince of the White Desert.’
‘Being a governess isn’t at all calm. Before my... We once had a governess and, believe me, the poor woman was run ragged between us.’
‘This is not a household of sardonic and argumentative Walshes hiding under prim veneers, but a single, indolent and very plump little boy who can be appeased with sweetmeats and who naps most of the day.’
‘He sounds rather like a cat.’
‘Not like my sister-in-law’s cat. Inky is the size of a bear cub and, though she has a sweet tooth, she is definitely not indolent.’
‘Then I shall stick to my plump charge, though I doubt even someone as silver-tongued as you could convince a prince to employ someone as unqualified as I.’
‘You underestimate me, Miss Walsh. I have more skills than my silver tongue and as a servant of the Crown I can be...convincing.’
The laughter in her eyes was suddenly tinged with speculation.
‘Are you a servant of the Crown?’
‘Aren’t we all?’ he riposted.
As if she sensed his evasion, her eyes fell from his and she went back to her seat, sinking into it with an abruptness that made her skirts billow for a moment.
‘This is all amusing, but rather silly. I am unlikely to leave Whitworth so there is no point in dreaming of Egypt.’
‘You mean Huxley.’
‘What?’
‘You said you are unlikely to leave Whitworth.’
Her cheeks turned as pink as the sunset in Sam’s painting.
‘Of course. I meant...it was a figure of speech. I am still not accustomed... You know what I meant. In any case, they are both a long way from Egypt...’
The squeak of the gallery door interrupted her and Chase pushed to his feet in annoyance as a footman entered with a generously stacked tea tray.
No doubt the servants were told to keep them supplied with refreshments so they did not leave Huxley’s wing unless absolutely necessary, he thought.
Ermy’s campaign to separate Miss Walsh from Henry was clearly underway.
Chapter Five (#ue50fdf6f-7dac-5c95-9e86-65b699c50dce)
Stop staring, Ellie. Yes, Chase Sinclair is a well-favoured man, but that is no reason to discard one’s dignity. Keep your eyes on your task. Well favoured, hah! He’s beautiful. Just look at him.
For the hundredth time in the last several days Ellie did just that.
And for the hundredth time she forced her gaze back to her task, thoroughly disgusted with herself.
He was leaning over some papers, his hand deep in his dark hair, his forehead resting on his palm. The sharp lines of his profile were already etched in her mind: the groove at the side of his mouth that curved when he smiled, the fan of his lashes, long and dark and curving just a little at the end. How ridiculous was it that she knew precisely how a man’s eyelashes curved?
Even Susan, who leapt from infatuation to infatuation as if they were stepping stones across a stream, could not be so silly.
Though to be fair, after what she’d dealt with these past five years, Ellie considered she was long overdue some foolishness. It was only unfortunate that her first infatuation, if that was what it was, had to alight on someone like Mr Sinclair. But that, too, wasn’t surprising. She had never spent so much time alone with any man other than family or Henry and his father, and she had certainly never met anyone as impressive as Chase Sinclair. She disliked the thought that she was joining the ranks of probably all-too-numerous females infatuated with this admittedly impressive specimen of manhood.
She couldn’t’ even blame him for it. He wasn’t even doing anything to merit his dubious reputation. For a rake he was sadly un-rakish and she could see now why Dru and Fen treated him with such ease.
The worst was that she felt comfortable with him. Aside from her stupid propensity to stare at him, she did not feel in least awkward in his presence.
It felt as natural and as right as being alone and that was...peculiar.
He made her laugh with his nonsense, inventing ever more creative scenarios to account for her sudden travel to Egypt—moving on from pugs and plump princes to becoming a famous artist commissioned to paint a portrait of Muhammad Ali’s favourite horse. On another occasion she’d been beguiled into an ascension of a hot air balloon and was swept all the way eastwards, only to become stuck on the tip of the pyramid.
She’d even managed to concoct a few plots of her own, but they were never as exotic as his, running aground on objections before they even made it out of her mouth.
In between work and nonsense, he ensured there was always a supply of tea and didn’t even complain when she couldn’t resist reading sections aloud from the notebooks she was slowly but steadily putting into the correct order.
In short, he treated her with his own peculiar combination of irreverence and respect which, had she not been foolish enough to conceive this girlish tendre for him, would have made her completely comfortable in his company.
But it only made it worse.
She would just have to ensure she gave him no reason to suspect. And, even more importantly, gave Lady Ermintrude no reason to suspect it. Ellie did not want to give her the satisfaction of knowing her machinations in forcing her into Chase’s company had borne fruit. In any case he would likely leave soon, she reminded herself sternly.
Although he did not appear to be hurried, Tubbs, his valet, had already packed all the cabinets in the Ghoulish Gallery—gone were the gelatinous amphibians and carved beetles and statuettes, and this morning two trunks appeared in the study, clearly ready to receive the books and papers they were reviewing.
And Chase would not be the only one leaving soon—she knew she must face the harsh reality that, with all the best will in the world, Henry had overestimated Huxley’s financial position. His plan to save Whitworth was proving just as unrealistic as pugs and hot air balloons. It was time to face the truth.
But she wasn’t ready. Not to leave.
Ready or not, Ellie Walsh—you will return to Whitworth and try to save what can be saved just as you will recover from this foolishness, she told herself resolutely, opening the next notebook on her stack.
Or perhaps not.
