Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

L eo considered pulling his hair as he regarded the papers before him, but having cut it in the Titus style, he settled with raking his fingers over his scalp, trying to settle his rushing brain.

Everything was happening at once. In mere days, plans which had been stalled for months had suddenly tumbled into place.

Suppliers he’d not heard from in weeks had suddenly sent the last of his shipments, completing the list of equipment he needed. Contacts who had worked before in Uffington and the Vale of the White Horse sent lists of names of reliable local men they’d hired. Members of the Society of Antiquaries wrote or called on him to share techniques, advice, recommendations, and stories. The solicitor finally answered his letter promising to inquire about premises to let in Ashbury or Compton Beauchamp while Leo worked.

He knew what was happening. It wasn’t that his ruling planets had suddenly aligned in a benign aspect or the ancient gods were smiling on him. Rumor had spread on its winged boots that Leo Westrop, aspiring antiquarian, had engaged to marry one of those Gowers.

Peter Gower had cut his teeth on excavations at Pompeii, learning from military engineers running disciplined digs. Alida Gower knew more about early Christian churches in Wales than anyone else writing on them. With this wealth of expertise supposedly at his disposal, Leo was finally being taken seriously, and everyone was willing to back his plans.

He’d been so busy organizing his operation and handling correspondence that he hadn’t seen Lillian Gower in nearly a week. And instead of diminishing in his memory, the need to see her again kept growing. Had he completely lost his head over a pair of blue eyes, dimples, and exquisite breasts? Had he really instructed the girl to ravish him?

He’d promised himself he could call on her when the big pieces of his plans were in place, but one enormous element was still missing. He didn’t have permission to excavate.

The summer season was upon them. The spring rains were over and the frost was out of the ground. He should have had his dig plotted and the first layer of soil up already, with an assistant hired to catalogue his finds. His trunks were packed and waiting. He only needed the landowner’s permission, and then his enterprise could begin—the first dig he’d planned and would oversee on his own, the first step in what he hoped would be a long and respectable career and his entry into the Society of Antiquaries.

Barrington said he’d be happy if Leo dug up whatever he wanted, only splitting with him if he found a cache of Roman coins or a Saxon hoard, but Craven owned the land around Wayland Smith’s Cave. Craven hadn’t responded to his letters, and before he could go pining after beautiful botanists, Leo needed to run the baron to ground.

Abuse me utterly , he’d implored her. He was the Westrop who prided himself on discipline and restraint. What had he been thinking?

His mother swept into the library, nose in the air, a fold of embroidery in her hand. Lady Mary rarely went about without some task to which she could apply herself while she fretted over what the servants were or were not doing, or how her sons had disappointed her this time.

“You haven’t answered a single invitation.” She eyed the stack of cards and vellum the butler kept delivering.

Society also wondered what Leo had been thinking, given the number of people who now wanted him at their soirees, evenings of dinner or cards, musical performances, or garden parties. He’d been a wonder when Rupert’s sudden, shocking death left him in line for the Waringford title. Now, watching one of the Season’s most promising heirs attach himself to a woman of no great family, wealth, or beauty was better entertainment than Astley’s Circus for the haut ton.

His mother made no secret that she thought he’d taken leave of his senses. His family already feared he wouldn’t amount to anything, given his decision to steer away from the military and the law and his utter unfitness for the clergy—he couldn’t reconcile himself to the doctrine. Leo was a heathen, as near a pagan as they came, his only religion the stoicism of the early Romans and the love of proper proportions held by the early Greeks. His brother Joshua, who was entering the clergy, harbored no ambition either, having firmly declared his aspirations to be a quiet country rector and read books all day.

“I have been otherwise occupied.” Leo pushed the invitations aside.

“I knew it,” his mother huffed. “You chose that girl only to vex me.”

“Of course not,” Leo said. “I chose her on her own merits.”

His mother sank into a chair—the one Lillian had occupied the night he found her in his library. “What merits can you possibly detect?”

Those eyes the color of forget-me-nots, as if he could forget her, now. The smirk of that satiny mouth. The wildflower allure of her, the taste of lemon on his lips after that kiss, as brief as a butterfly’s touch. The mushroom blonde hair that was as soft as silk against his skin. Her breasts—sweet heaven, her breasts. Just the thought of her shape made him glad he sat behind the large desk. How many times he’d traced in his mind’s eye the serpentine curve of her bosom and waist and hips. How many times he’d imagined tracing that path with his hands. And his mouth. She’d taste sweet as a Persian apple.

God have mercy, his mother was in the room.

“She’s quite intelligent.”

If she knew the languages she’d teased him about knowing, she was far ahead of the common run of female. If she could read Latin—and he suspected she could make out a title or two—she was top of a class of gentleman’s daughters generally not taught more than would make them ornamental wives, agreeable hostesses, and capable mothers.

If she had prepared a publication, she was in a class all her own. Even if it was nothing more than an insipid collection of the average floral watercolors that young women of genteel breeding were expected to paint.

He had agreed to help her publish to secure her hand, or the pretense of claiming her hand, to protect him from exactly this: his mother’s predatory plans. It wasn’t the bargain he’d expected her to drive, but he’d agreed.

How soon could he ask what he wanted of her in return?

“I’d say intelligence hardly recommends her. It’s not a generally admired quality in a female.” Lady Mary pursed her lips in a frown. “I’ve asked around, Gideon. There’s no money in that family.”

“Her uncle, great-uncle, is a baronet.”

“Who lives off a tiny farm or two on the fringes of Wales. You’ve made a terrible mistake. Miss Ponsonby?—”

“Would be an even worse mistake.”

He flushed. Was he admitting Lillian was a mistake? No. She’d be ruined when she jilted him, of course. Even if it was the lady’s idea, society was unkind to those who broke their engagements, especially if the match had seemed to offer her nothing but inconceivable advantages.

But she’d agreed to extend the ruse, and she’d agreed to do the jilting. As if she didn’t fear in the least the slings and arrows that might be thrown at her. She was not in the common run of females at all.

“She’ll shame you. Poor, plain, nothing to recommend her.” His mother waved at the stack of invitations. “Best you haven’t accepted any. They only want to laugh at you.”

Heat prickled his neck at the thought of anyone laughing at Miss Gower. Lillian, with her sparkling eyes, the authoritative way she mapped out her uncle’s garden and organized his library. Her taste for olives and her knowledge of how to propagate Brunswick figs.

The innocent way she’d talked of breeding and reproduction and fertilization. Her breasts had brushed his chest when she rose up to kiss him—she must have noticed, too—and the contact felled him like a tree. He’d been a struck flint, at attention over one brief kiss and the brush of those exquisite breasts. As if he were a green boy.

He was trying hard not to live in those moments when only a few layers of cotton had separated her bottom from his face. He had too much work to do.

He focused on Barrington’s letter, open on his desk. “I won’t have anyone laughing at her.”

His mother raised one brow in that supercilious manner he hated. “Indeed? So you don’t think our friends won’t find it amusing when you offer for a girl, then leave her for months to dig in the dirt and ghastly tombs. While she dangles after you here, and everyone asks her how she persuaded the presumptive heir to a marquess to lower himself to court an antiquarian’s daughter.”

That was exactly what he’d asked her to agree to, a selfish request. The kind thing would be to free her from their agreement before he left.

And watch his association with the Gowers, which had smoothed his path so significantly, go away.

His mother wasn’t finished. “I won’t give you any money for your frivolous endeavors, you know. Not a groat. And I’m sure that your uncle feels the same.”

“I will supply my own funding, madame.”

Though what he would do when his savings ran out, Leo didn’t know. He didn’t have reliable income of his own. He lived off a tiny annuity that his father had not managed to squander before he died, because his canny mother had tied it up in funds that made it impossible for her wastrel husband to spend it on gambling debts. Leo typically had just enough to pay his tailor and the fee for his clubs. He’d saved some by lodging at Westrop House instead of finding bachelor quarters, which would have afforded him a degree of independence from his mother’s iron-fisted control.

There was also the negligible allowance from his uncle. How irritating it was to be a gentleman and not permitted to turn his hand to trade. If he married an heiress, as his grandfather and uncle had done, he’d have endless reserves from which to supply his expeditions.

Lillian wasn’t an heiress. But if the Gowers were seen to be backing his expedition, credit would easily be extended to him.

“I see nothing lowering in my association with Lillian,” Leo said.

His mother rose, crumpling her embroidery in her fist. “You will. And when you are caught in the trap of your own making, I can only say I told you so.”

After that exchange, Leo had no inclination to dine at home. With Joshua deciding to stay in Oxford for the summer with his tutor and access to the libraries, a solitary dinner with his mother would be as comfortable as the inquisition interviewing a heretic. Westrop House was a gloomy place now that his uncle had removed his family to Waringford Hall, using the excuse of his bereavement to leave his seat in Lords before the closing of Parliament. His lordship needed time to absorb the shock that Rupert, the dashing soldier and the nephew he’d admired, had been stolen away by the cruel hand of fate, leaving for his heirs the issue of Leo’s father, the brother whom the marquess had least liked.

Leo was not sure anyone had liked Gideon Westrop, excepting the man himself and, at various times, his many mistresses.

It was too late to accept an invitation to dine elsewhere, and far too late to stroll over to Gower House to see what progress Lillian had made in cataloguing her uncle’s library, how she was getting on with her fig cuttings, or whether her trees were bearing fruit. Leo should be tracking down Craven, not dancing attendance on a female. He was a man of sense and discipline. He needed to act it.

Brooks it would be then. The Society of Dilettanti still tended to congregate at the club, and there he could find like-minded friends to engage in conversation, and who might give him some manly advice.

He hired a chair to take him to St. James Street and admired the many layers of London as they passed before him. Leo preferred the neoclassical style to the thick, gloomy bricks of the medieval, but his favorite parts of London were where one could see the bones of the older city beneath.

He liked Tower Hill and walking the remnant of the Roman wall that had surrounded Londinium. It fascinated him to think what lay beneath the medieval outlines of the city. Camden, the great antiquarian of the Elizabethan age, claimed there had been a temple to Diana on the high ground of St. Paul’s, but Leo imagined an even earlier monument, built by the people who had lived here before the Romans came. Legends said they had been giants, given the size of the standing stones they erected and the enormous mounds they left behind.

What might be concealed within those ancient hills? His hands itched to dig beneath the centuries of commerce and industry, find a window into the lives of humans in earlier times. They could tell stories of a history that went back further than anyone knew. He just had to get inside .

His chair weaved through the crowd in Seven Dials, where the famous sundial column had been removed and every building fronting the six crossing streets boasted a pub. The place hadn’t become what its builders had hoped, another Covent Garden to bring the wealthy and their money; instead the Dials seemed to be dwindling into a slum. Leo in his brushed, tailored clothing would make a prime target for pickpockets, though the most expensive item on him was his coat.

He might be a man about town, but he was not a man of means. The Westrop family had an ancient lineage but not ancient fortunes. He had a feeling Lillian Gower would not care, but many other a girl who’d been targeting him might have reconsidered if she knew the state of his pockets.

His chair hurried him down St. Martin’s Lane, past the rebuilt church with its spire piercing the sky, and Charing with its Eleanor Cross, crumbling beneath the weight of five centuries of wear. Leo knew the story from chat among the antiquarians: Edward Longshanks had built a series of crosses to mark the places where his beloved wife’s funeral procession rested as she was brought back to Westminster Abbey. Leo generally looked past such monuments; they were nothing but effusions of sentiment, and he was interested in more robust representations of human life, the battle for day-to-day existence, and the philosophies that kept humans clinging to their fragile thread of existence.

But Eleanor of Castile, Leo recalled, had been her husband Edward I’s constant companion throughout his reign, all his progresses and challenges and trials. What must that be like, to have a wife who was not just the keeper of the domestic flame, a petulant goddess a man must placate with gifts and occasional pats of affection, but a true helpmeet in all one’s endeavors? He’d never met such a woman, had never imagined one existed.

For a moment a vision touched Leo’s mind. A canvas tent on the British hillside, sheltering his trunks of tools. Lillian standing beside him at a folding table, peering at a find as he dusted off the dirt, her expression of wonder matching his own. Her hair shining in a shaft of sunlight, her eyes as light and vast as the sky. Her lips soft and yielding beneath his as he bent to kiss her.

He shook his head as his chair turned onto Pall Mall. Someone hailed him as he passed Carlton House, Prince George’s opulent palace.

“Yoo hoo! Mr. Westrop! But is Miss Gower not with you?”

Leo waved in acknowledgement to the matron, trying to remember the name of the daughter she’d thrust under his nose. By the saints, was he expected to dance attendance on his fiancée at every moment? His arrangement with Lillian was supposed to buy him liberty, not steal it.

The chair stopped before Brooks, a Palladian edifice of yellow brick and Portland stone with columns harkening back to a civilization that was ancient before the Romans had conquered it. He paid his fare and ascended the staircase to the first floor.

Men sat grouped around several of the green-covered tables in the Grand Subscription Room, but Leo declined the invitations to join a hand of whist or the circle ringing the hazard table. He didn’t have money to gamble away, and his father’s example had taught him that cards, or betting of any kind, was not a reliable way to put money in his purse. He made his way through the grand room with its patterned carpet, red velvet curtains shielding noise from the street outside, and entered the drawing room beyond, where another fire burned in the fireplace and another crystal chandelier dangled from the vaulted ceiling, twin to the one in the next room. Slouched in one of the armchairs was the top of a tousled head of curls that he recognized.

“It’s in the book. Ten pounds that she’ll jilt me by Midsummer,” Daniel Rowland said gloomily. “That’s still a month away yet. Want to put down twelve she’ll do it sooner?”

“You haven’t come round to the idea of the match?” Leo seated himself in the chair opposite his friend.

Daniel tossed the newspaper he held to the small table between them. “The more my mother praises it, the less inclined I find myself to put my leg in the shackle. Suppose that makes me an unfilial bastard.”

Leo tried to call to mind the features of Daniel’s intended. Her grandfather was a perfumier; her father had used the proceeds to buy himself a gentleman’s estate. Daniel was studying to be a barrister, but he came from a distinguished line of clerics. His interests were medieval, so later than Leo’s, but he was a good bloke all the same. At twenty, however, he simply wasn’t ready to fall in line with his mother’s matrimonial schemes.

“You’ll be a rich bastard do you marry her, which I imagine is your mother’s chief aim,” Leo said.

“At least your mother was lining up comely ones for you.” Daniel squinted at him, which told Leo his friend might be several drinks into his wallowing. “Until you pitched them all over for someone plain, just to spite her.” He grinned. “Have to hand it to you, old man. You spiked her wheels but good. Wish I’d thought of it.”

Leo twitched. Lillian wasn’t plain; did his friend require spectacles? She was a luscious Venus in a crowd of starveling nymphets. It was the hand of providence that had her standing next to the refreshment table when his panicked gaze swept his mother’s drawing room. He couldn’t think of anyone he’d be better pleased to have foisted a falsely motivated engagement on.

“Do you ever think about it, though?” Leo studied the shelf of books against the wall, wondering if anything interesting had been added to the inventory.

“Think about how to free myself of the yoke?”

“Think about putting your neck in it.”

There was no point in entertaining fantasies. Leo hadn’t the means to support a wife. There was no future with Lillian, not until he had established his career and had income and funding.

Or his uncle granted his new heir an estate, and an income to go with it. Leo pushed the thought away.

Daniel sighed. “A wife, buxom at bed and board, obliged to pay the marital debt? Would save having to woo the opera dancers. But then she’ll produce children, and I’ll have to support them, too.”

An image flashed across Leo’s mind of himself as a child, screaming with laughter as he was carried on the shoulders of his uncle. Not the marquess, but the brother next older than Leo’s father, the laughing soldier who had produced Rupert and then gone away to the American colonies and, so it was said, produced more children with a native woman there.

A child of his own. A son to carry on his own shoulders, laughing. A small daughter gazing up at him with enormous Delft blue eyes. Lillian with her proper woman’s curves, carrying a child on her hip as she peered into one of Leo’s trenches. The idea lit a fire in his gullet.

Daniel picked up his empty glass and peered into it. “Why her, though? Out of anyone.”

“Why Lillian Gower?” Leo stretched out his legs. He could take Daniel into his confidence; though several years younger than Leo, the boy wasn’t a teller of tales.

“Her parents are well-known antiquarians. They have excavated in Wiltshire before. They’re at Stonehenge right now, with Cunnington. I hear Sir Richard Colt Hoare is funding that effort.” Sir Richard, already a member of the Society of Antiquaries, was the one who had acquired Glastonbury Tor and was attempting to rebuild it. The things possible when one inherited a banking fortune.

“Sounds like they could pull some strings for you.”

Leo pulled fingers through his hair. “I might ask them to. I need Craven’s permission to dig around Uffington and the Vale of the White Horse. He owns all the land thereabout, including Ashdown. Don’t suppose you know where his lordship is hiding himself these days?”

“Lord Craven? He was just made aide-de-camp to the king.” Daniel set down his glass. “Suppose he’s kicking his heels around London, at least until Parliament closes and the pomp and ceremony are done. Probably out tonight, at one of those dos all you big wigs go to.”

Leo dug in his coat for the invitation his mother had pressed on him before he left. “I haven’t responded that you’re attending, but you ought to make an appearance, to stave off talk that you’ve gone mad,” she’d said, peeved. “But do come home first to change into breeches. You can hardly show up to Highcastle House in pantaloons.”

Portman Square lay in Mary-le-Bone; it would be a mile and a half back to Bloomsbury and Westrop House, then a mile and a half again in silk breeches and an evening cravat. Leo weighed the disgrace of showing up shabby against the risk of missing Craven. His mother would bring the London coach for her own comfort, so he would have transportation home.

It would be one more night of not seeing Lillian. Of not discussing how long this arrangement of theirs was supposed to last.

“Care to join me and the big wigs? No doubt the maidens would be happy for another young buck, especially if there’s dancing.”

Daniel brightened. “D’you suppose, if I do go and gallant about with others, it’ll make Miss Lewton jilt me all the sooner?”

“Not too much gallanting, if you please. I’m already on the wrong foot with the Highcastles, and I need to make friends with Craven before I start digging holes in his monuments.”

Daniel receded into his seat and repossessed himself of the discarded paper. “You’re a bore, old man.”

“So I’ve been told.”

Would Lillian think so? Leo’s restraint as an adult had been hard-won from a youth in which Leo feared he had the temperament that would lead him into his father’s excesses. He would deny himself to the point of starvation—to the point of humorlessness, if need be—before he became so selfish not to care how his frivolity injured others.

Daniel clucked his tongue. “Still, I like your odds in the book a lot better than mine.”

“What odds?”

Daniel jerked a thumb in the general direction of the betting book, which was kept in the subscription room. All the clubs had one, and the bets in the Brooks book, like those elsewhere, ranged from the ridiculous to the obscene.

“You’ve got less than a fortnight before she cuts you loose.”

Leo located the book and a haze of panic clouded his vision as he read the bet, then the amendments that had been scribbled in below. That Miss Gower would end her betrothal to Mr. Westrop in a fortnight. That he would end things in ten days. That Miss Gower would jilt him in a sennight.

An entry from earlier that day conjectured that the entire arrangement was a farce, and all would become clear at the Highcastle soiree that night.

Leo clenched his hands into a fist, his palms sweating. She couldn’t jilt him yet; he’d lose all the momentum he had gained in finally carrying out his plans. Without the Gower name to sanction his undertaking, he’d be right back to where he had been.

He couldn’t let his time with Lillian end before it had even begun.