Chapter 18

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“ A re you ready to go back in?”

She glanced up from her sketchbook, and the familiar punch hit Leo’s gut when Lillian’s gaze locked on his. Her eyes were the blue the sky might have been, had clouds the color of dirty sheep not covered the Vale of the White Horse.

Lillian Gower grew more lovely each day, and increasingly, the bolt of pleasure that burrowed into his chest at the sight of her tapped into a desperate knot growing there—the knowledge of how much he would lose when she was done with him and returned to London.

She drew a deep, steadying breath, and the muslin neckerchief tucked at her bodice fluttered over her breasts. She dressed sensibly for their days of work, sturdy leather boots, today a printed cotton round gown covered with a thick apron, a cloth bonnet catching up her hair. His mind flashed greedily to the night before, that hair spread over his pillow, her blue eyes hazy with passion, those magnificent breasts flushed pink from his kisses. The way her back arched off the feather mattress when he brought her to the peak of pleasure, the way she choked back a sob-scream so she didn’t wake the house.

Stow it, Westrop. He’d asked, all but begged her to come to his bed, and so she had, and now he was wild for her. Famished. She was a feast, and he could never be sated.

She was growing on him in so many ways, so many tendrils curling and rooting deep. Far too often he caught himself pausing while the men dug to look about, find her sitting on a sarsen or curb stone drawing the countryside, or wandering the vale beyond, studying a new flower. The days she was gone, visiting the Woodffordes or helping Paulina at the Manor, he chafed at her absence as if at an ill-fitting shoe. Those evenings, instead of sitting in the parlor with the others talking about their day or playing games with Augustus, he called her into the library and relished the quiet way she worked on her sketches while he read and jotted notes and studied his maps, the two of them knit together in the glow of the oil lamp, a world unto themselves.

He liked the Caesars immensely, but he liked being with Lillian more.

Best were the nights when she came to him with her chamberstick casting pale light on her skin and her hair in its braid over her shoulder and her feet in the cloth house slippers, muffling her steps. The touches and the pleasure—God, the pleasure, yes—but also when they lay together after, her drowsy in his arms, telling him stories about her life, listening to his. He could see in those tales how a fanciful, dreamy child had grown into a sensible, managing sort of woman, dauntless and determined, but he still caught glimpses of the imaginative, inquisitive girl beneath, raised on open air and freedom.

Her parents had treated her as a creature capable of reason, and she had become so, but she also had a generous, loyal heart along with her level head and keen mind. Leo had come in the past weeks to admire and respect her many talents, and to appreciate her occasional flaws—the stubborn streak a mile wide, like bedrock beneath a sweet burbling stream, and the way she agreed to something she didn’t want to do if it would please another.

Like now. She hated going underground. But she’d gone once before into the small antechamber, at his request, to draw the site before they removed the chalk rubble filling up the passage. And she would go now, to draw what lay beyond, to be at his side as the first humans in hundreds of years to look upon the contents of the cave.

“What’s in there?” she asked, rising to her feet. Jaw taut, fingers taut on her sketchbook, he could see her reluctance, yet she would do this for him, because he asked.

He wanted to pull her to him and wrap his arms tightly about her, pressing her against him until not a feather could fit between them. Until he felt her heart beating inside his body, and he had absorbed all her fear, all her aches, everything that had ever tormented her. What was he doing for her that could possibly repay all she gave him?

“I’m not certain what we’ll find. But if I am correct and it is a barrow, Aubrey and Stukeley, the greatest antiquarians of their age, will spin in their graves.”

He grinned at her, joyed by the mere shape of her face against the cloudy sky, the curves of that delicious body that yielded to him again and again, and at the thought of discovering something new, of proving his theory correct despite the pronouncements that others had made. She managed a smile in return and gave him her hand to help her descend the clump of fallen rock where she’d been sitting, sarsens that had long ago guarded the entrance to the cave, now passing their centuries in quiet slumber as time itself had forgotten their task. Her hand slid into his like a key in a lock, her eye to his hook, something necessary and belonging joined together at last.

“Tell me again why I am doing this.” She clenched his hand as they faced the square of dark leading into the mound of earth, the two sentinel rocks flanking it, one a sharp edge slanting away, the other a curved hump.

“Because the drawings, like your parents said, are crucial to the excavation. I will submit your sketches with my findings to Archaeologia, the journal of the Society of Antiquaries, and hopefully they will find my report substantial enough to merit my nomination into the Society.”

He squeezed her fingers gently. “If my findings are of interest, I will have patrons who will be willing to help me fund other digs, the way Sir Richard Colt Hoare is funding Cunnington and your parents. Your sketches will help others see the site if they cannot travel on their own. And your name will be on the title page, right alongside mine. Drawings supplied by Miss Lillian Gower.”

“My name until I marry,” she said, her voice tense, and the thought tripped and tangled in Leo’s mind. If she married him, she would be Mrs. Gideon Leonidas Westrop. She would have his name. She would be his.

He stood to gain so much, did she wed him. Her skills lent to their shared projects. Her trust in him, her care for him. Her by his side, like this, his sweet, laughing companion at work and at board, and in bed—the pleasures he’d discovered rose about him like a tidal river, swamping his senses. That pleasure like nothing else he’d known.

Married, she would be his to shelter and protect and cherish, all her days and his.

And she would gain—what?

A man with a questionable future, current resources spread thin, prospects unknown until his uncle decided on his heir. A man who had nothing to offer except his devotion and promises, and promises could not be spun into pin money, or meat on the table, or lodgings for her beautiful, clever head.

She deserved more.

She was worth more.

Her fingers gripped his so tightly that he was certain she had stopped up the blood. “Promise me there is not a troll in there,” she said. “Or some wicked Norse elf or ancient god.”

“There is no one, Lillian, my love. If I’m right, it’s a tomb of the Celtic dead. If I’m wrong, it’s nothing but a pile of rubble. If it is a barrow and there is a wraith, I will vanquish it for you.”

“You had to bring up ghosts.” She let go of his hand and slapped her sketchbook to her bosom as if it were the shield by which she would conquer or be carried home upon, like an ancient Spartan princess. “Very well, let us proceed.”

Claudius stood just inside the square chamber, carrying the candle in its lamp. He beckoned them forward.

The floor was thin, hard chalk, the sides and ceiling slabs of great stone. The musty smell lifted Leo’s head, made his chest inflate with a giddy rush; it was the scent of ancient earth, undisturbed. The antechamber had been picked clean ages ago, any treasures carried off in Roman times if not before, but the passage beyond—no one might have seen this since the ancient Celts closed it up with their final prayers and incantations.

It wasn’t treasure he wanted or needed, even if it were the tomb of an ancient king. He wanted the discovery of something new. To be the first to find, and study, and share with the world.

A low passage, about six meters long, extended beyond the door the workers had cleared. The men knelt in a chain, passing wooden buckets of rubble back from the excavators working just ahead. Outside the cave the twins, with Augustus overseeing, poured the buckets onto the piles through which other workers sifted, looking for interesting items. The same chain passed the empty buckets forward along the line to be refilled. When a man grew too tired and cramped, he called for relief and crawled outside for a breath of fresh air, and the line closed around him.

The chip and scrape of the diggers’ tools echoed off the great slabs of stone that lined the passage, where smaller, flat stones fit into the crevices to form a solid wall. The chamber was an ancient, underground processional, built by the same peoples who had erected the stone circles to commune with their gods. No Greek temple, no ziggurat of ancient Babylon could be more impressive.

“Westrop.” She kept her voice a whisper, as if fearing they would be overheard by spirits. “This is truly astounding.”

Carefully she touched the smoothed surface of a massive stone, and his heart swelled further, teasing at its seams. She understood. Claudius was a worthy partner, but he was interested in the engineering and mechanics of the excavation. Lillian had been raised among ruins and the ghosts of past civilizations; she knew what this meant .

“There’s a transept ahead, with two more chambers on either side. We’re not sure yet how far the passage goes.”

“Imagine what it took to move these.” She trailed her hand along the passage wall as if envisioning the crude tools that had hewn these megaliths from the shoulders of the earth, then transported them here to the chalky heaps of the Berkshire Downs.

Leo wanted to lift her hand and place it against his chest so she might slide her palm over him in the same way. He tamped down the impulse.

They reached the cross passage, with workers busy on either side clearing the doorways of rubble. Leo bent his head to keep from banging the stone roof of the passage as he peered forward. Two workers shifted dirt and rubble into buckets, then passed them back to the men in line.

“What have you got so far?”

“The end’s blocked up, guv, with these great stones. I’ll say that’s the end of it, an’ if there is another room beyond, no one wants us folk inside.”

Claudius raised his lamp. “The terminus, do you think?”

“That means the chambers are in a cruciform shape,” Leo said. “But this can’t be early Christian. They built churches and single graves. Not barrows like this.” He lifted a lamp from the floor to peer at the stone wall facing him, its secrets sealed. “Do you know of any appearances of the cruciform predating the Christian period, Lil—Miss Gower?”

She tilted her head to the side, like a little bird about to trill to its mate. “There are some records of ancient Babylonians using the shape for tombs and stele, or so I’ve read. But I cannot say what it meant to them.”

“That would be interesting to pursue. But I think this design alone will interest the Antiquaries already, even if we find nothing?—”

“Found somethin’,” a worker reported, struggling to pull a heavy stone out of a pile of rubble.

Lillian dropped to her knees the same time Leo did, heedless of staining her gown on the dirt floor. He felt the same excitement pulsing from her.

“Weighty thing, this,” the man panted.

Lillian yanked a pair of thick leather gloves from her apron—she’d sewn pockets into it where she stored her tools, a fashion he’d seen her mother sporting at Stonehenge. She helped the men brush the layer of dirt away, revealing a broad rock, large as a dinner plate but deep as a gravy boat, with a smooth depression in the middle.

“It’s so heavy!”

“Too large to carry about easily?—”

“It’s been smoothed—look at the bowl in the middle.”

“A statue of some kind? The beginning of a stone carving?” Leo wondered aloud.

“Naught but a rock,” the worker said, baffled.

Leo sat back on his heels. “But here? What for? Why hide such a thing underground?”

Lillian laughed, and in the dim light, her eyes sparkled. “It’s not simply a rock, gentlemen. I’ve seen something like this before. I’d wager this is a quern stone.”

“A what now,” said the digger.

“Quern, from the Old English term cweorn, the word for corn—never mind. It’s a grindstone. Look for another stone that might go with it,” Lillian instructed. “It may be a smaller rock, or cylindrical in shape. This would have been used to mill grain.”

Leo stripped off a glove and rubbed the rounded surface. “Of course. This feels like millstone grit, much like the stones we use now. I should have realized at once.”

“It not a wonder if you didn’t. It would have been women’s work.” Her eyes fairly danced. She was as thrilled about this discovery as he was.

“But why household goods?” Leo wondered. “They wouldn’t have lived in here. There’s no sign of soot on the walls from fires, no sign of a midden heap for refuse. It could only be?—”

“Grave goods,” she said soberly, reaching the thought at the same time he did.

They both fell to digging. Eventually the workers, who had been toiling for some time, left with Claudius for a respite, and it was just him and Lillian, alone together. Leo scooped with his trowel while Lillian used her pick to pry out larger pieces, turning each over in her hands. He looked over when he heard her swift intake of breath.

“Leo—Look.” She held out her palm and he stared.

He met her eyes. “Arrowhead.”

They studied it together as he brought the lamp closer. “It’s flint, but white—I’ve not seen that before. Flint is usually gray or black, I thought.”

“And look at the brown speckles caught on some of the ridges. I do hope that’s not dried blood.”

“It’s finely chipped. This might have been carved with a heavier stone—or maybe they used bone?”

“It’s so oddly shaped. More a trapezoid than a triangle.”

“It needs a barb to stay in the flesh.” He winked at her horrified expression. “You’re not an archer, I take it? Men’s work.”

He held his hands cupped around hers and her heat reached him, her scent deepened with a tangy note of sweat. His libido flared, as if his passion for her were twined now with his passion for exploration and discovery.

She licked her lips, leaving them wet and moist. Ready for his kiss. “There’s no shaft.”

“Likely rotted away. Unless the placement is ceremonial. Or accidental.”

She placed the arrowhead on her sketchbook and turned with him to the pile, now considerably reduced, a small mound heaped against the back wall of the chamber. They worked in companionable silence, punctuated by the occasional murmur of interest, and a coo from Lillian when he found a piece of a potsherd, curved into a crescent moon.

Lillian took off her gloves and ran her fingers over the short grooves in the hard, dark-gray surface. “Look—it’s decorated.”

“I wonder how big the original pot was, and what it was used for.”

“Cooking, perhaps? It looks as though it’s been blackened.”

“A jewel box for an ancient queen to store her baubles,” he teased.

“Perhaps it is broken because the wife crowned her husband with it when he came home reeking of the pub.”

“I hope your husband will never give you such cause for vexation.”

She turned back to her digging, moving the lamp to illuminate her work area. He tended to his own pile, scooping and pouring, but his awareness of her tickled his skin, like a horse being brushed.

“I haven’t properly thanked you for all you are doing for me,” he said. “I hope your parents don’t resent me for stealing you away. I suspect they rely on you a great deal.”

“They would forget to eat if I didn’t put meals in front of them, so there is that,” Lillian said.

Her lightness tapped on a nerve. Her parents were clearly too wrapped up in their own world to appreciate their gem of a daughter.

The tickle on Leo’s skin turned to a cold sweat. Would he do any better? He tended to get wrapped up in his own concerns as well. He’d never before been responsible for another human being. But with Lillian at his side, he could envision what his life might look like with a companion. She made him want that, if she were the woman at his side.

The silence spooled out, and he could not determine whether it was the companionable sort, or if she were cross with him.

“How is it you have not become an antiquarian as well, raised as you were?”

She regarded a lump of chalk in her hand. The chamber was not small, but it felt close and secret, as if the walls leaned inward, enclosing them.

“I’ve always been fascinated by plants. I’m intrigued by what man has built, and often impressed, but nature’s beauty—that truly calls to me. The intricate and flawless design of an individual flower. How each species is so unique. Function and beauty, balanced together—the poetic ideal.”

She set the clump alongside the other treasures on her sketchbook, her own little trove. “What of you? Were you an antiquarian from a young age?”

“I was. I suppose it was inevitable, given where we lived, so many odd ruins about, loaded with legend and history. Have you heard yet of the Blowing Stone, the sarsen over in Kingstone Lisle? It has perforations all the way through, and when you blow through it in the right way, it makes the most impressive sound. My childhood self was never able to produce it, but they say that’s how King Alfred summoned his troops for the battle of Ashdown.”

She threw him a smile. “The battle that killed the Danish king whom some say is buried here. With his quern stone.”

Leo chuckled. “He would have an iron spear and sword, if this is King Bagsecg. Highworth has a long history as well—it’s recorded in the Domesday book as a Saxon settlement, but I’ve had old gaffers show me traces of Roman artifacts they’ve discovered. It might have been a fort town before Julius Caesar first tried to subdue the Celtic tribes. It’s frustrating that we know so little about them.”

She looked up thoughtfully at the monumental stones enclosing them, a line between her brows. She hated being underground, yet she’d stayed with him for a great length of time—hours, or so it felt.

“Was that your interest, then? The peoples who lived here before the Romans came?”

“Not at first.” He kept scooping, pouring, his mind tracing paths he hadn’t visited in an age. “In my early days, I wanted to be a Saxon warrior or a Viking chieftain. Valiant and fierce. But I soon realized I wasn’t actually interested in war and conquest. My cousins teased me about it, a great deal in fact—neither my brother nor I are the type of rowdy men that the Westrops typically produce.”

“What happened?”

“To make my brother and I different?” His laugh was a short bark, lacking humor. “My father. But he gave me one thing, at least. He took me to the White Horse once, when he was traveling to Wantage on some business. I wasn’t impressed by some chalk scraped out of the ground—I couldn’t tell what shape it was meant to be, and told him so. But then he drove us by Uffington Castle, a huge mound of ramparts within its ditch, and I was entranced. I wanted to know who had built it, what it was for, what it might have looked like in its original state, and I was so baffled when my father could not answer these questions. How could we not know the purpose of something so immense?

“I wanted to know,” he concluded. “And those questions drove me. I didn’t even care when my cousins made fun, or my mother disapproved of my activities, or my father—” No need for the rest.

She sat back on her heels, scratching her hair beneath the cap. “I find it hard to believe your family isn’t proud of you.”

“To them, I haven’t accomplished anything. Joshua, who wants to be a vicar, they can excuse; they imagine an archbishopric for him someday. But an antiquarian—it’s a hobby, not a profession, and not an admirable one. Not virile or manly enough. No drama, no excitement. No service to God and country. Like Rupert.”

His throat closed around a memory, a long-legged Rupert daring him to race across a field where the ram had been penned apart, Rupert leaping the stile like a red deer, then laughing when Leo caught his heel and fell on his face in the blooming meadow.

“I’d like to meet your brother,” Lillian said softly.

Leo pried his trowel into a new pile and loosened the hard-packed dirt. “He’s in Oxford for the summer and not likely to visit, as he enjoys our mother’s management as little as I do. But you could meet the others, if you like. We’ve received an invitation to dine at Waringford Hall. Both of us.”

Her eyes widened. “Your family seat? It’s near here?”

He nodded. “A mile outside Highworth, in Sevenhampton. It’s where I grew up, for the most part. My grandfather liked to have everyone under one roof, the better to supervise their affairs and dictate their actions. My mother has taken up that role now, after my aunt, the marchioness, passed away.”

He felt her gaze brushing his face, like the wings of a butterfly. “They are so close, yet you have not visited already.”

She didn’t press or judge, instead waited until he was ready to explain himself. “They want to meet you, of course.”

She dropped her gaze to the dirt before her. The candle in her lamp jerked on a sudden, invisible current.

“Oh.” She picked at a lump of earth, something whitish and hard. More chalk, he supposed. “And I imagine your uncle wants to speak with you in particular. Are you ready?”

“No.”

She took out her brush and began scraping, that slight frown on her face again. “What do you wish to happen?”

“In truth? I wish for Rupert to show up and laugh at us all for believing the report of his death. My uncle will kill the proverbial fatted calf in celebration, everyone will be relieved that the title will go to someone deserving, and only my mother will be left to fret about how I am frittering my life away in unmanly pursuits, and not marrying and building a family and fortune as I ought to be.” He jabbed his trowel into the earth, though he could shatter something fragile with his spleen.

“And when Rupert does not appear?” she asked softly.

Leo closed his eyes, his forehead throbbing with a sudden pain. “I could see if Joshua wants to inherit. He can’t take the title, not with me alive, but I could sign over the estates and the rest. He’d be more worthy of inheriting than I would.”

“Leo,” she said, and he sensed her question.

How could she find him worthy of her hand, when his family found him worthy of nothing?

“You have to understand. Every member of the Westrop family, as far as I can recall, has been a rakehell and a profligate, but a ne’er-do-well with one focus besides his own pleasure: to build the fortunes of the family. My grandfather earned the elevation to marquess and married an heiress, the daughter of an Oxfordshire drug merchant, quite rich. My uncle, when his elder brother died young, expanded the family fortunes by marrying the daughter of a London cheese merchant, also vastly wealthy.

“My great-aunt was a lady of the chamber to the Countess of Yarmouth, favorite mistress of the second George. My other uncle, Rupert’s father, was a governor in the American colonies before the war. Only my father managed to tarnish, rather than enhance the reputation of the family. My father entered merrily, heedlessly, into one scheme after another, and each drained us of money and respect, rather than the opposite. I suppose that put me on the back foot from the beginning.”

“Leo,” she said, her tone changing.

“It’s not self-pity. It’s fact.” He stabbed at the earth, as if he could strike back at his father, at the burden he had left for his wife and sons. “I don’t believe for a moment my uncle would truly consider me as his heir. If he did, he’d have settled matters already, the instant the news about Rupert reached us. I imagine there’s an entail of some sort, I don’t know the terms, but my uncle could break it if he cared for the legal expense. Or he could cut me out by murdering me. I half expect, should we dine with them, my goblet will be poisoned, like the king’s cup in Hamlet. ”

“Leo,” Lillian said, “I found bones.”