Wrapped (15 page)

“Where to this time?” I asked, bracing myself.

“Just into the Channel, off the Belgian coast,” he said. I cast my eyes to my lap, afraid of showing my disappointment that he was in fact heading straight for the coming storm.

“I see.”

He nodded. “The next few days could well spell the future for us all.”

My thoughts drifted back to my conversation with Deacon and Caedmon. I thought to tell David the whole story; I knew he’d scold me less than Father and possibly gain as much joy from hearing of my adventure as I had in learning of his.

But the time wasn’t right. And with David only home for such a brief visit, I began to doubt that the time was right to tell Father, either. I knew that as soon as Father learned what I’d discovered, he’d be bound to work as quickly as he could. And if David had to go in the morning, a few hours more couldn’t hurt. We could have one evening without the distractions and obligations of war to simply enjoy having David home.

I must have mused too long. David leaned forward to catch my eye. “I wish you wouldn’t worry,” he said. “You should be happy. That’s why we’re out there. To keep the likes of you safe from harm, so all you need to do is worry about not falling into the prince’s lap at your debut.”

I groaned. “Don’t remind me.”

He smiled. “Though I confess it is a fate more fraught with peril than the life of a navy man.”

“I just don’t suppose I’m terribly excited about all of it. I often feel as though I’m performing my duty, nothing more. Like you joining the navy.”

“I suppose a choice between the clergy and the navy really is no choice at all.” He laughed. “Duty calls one way or another.”

“I just imagined I might be happier about it when the time came.”

David considered this. “I don’t see my life that way. It’s been hard, sure, but I get to sail, see the world, do something that matters, maybe even make a pile of prize money—”

“Pirate,” I mumbled, smiling in spite of myself.

“No more pirate than a debutante who marries solely for position or wealth,” he said.

“Quite,” I said formally, a little stung. “But he hasn’t even proposed or spoken to Father. Nothing is settled.”

David took my hand. “I shouldn’t tease you,” he said. “I’m lucky that the things I like best are all part of my life at sea. I only hope you’ll at least reach for the same satisfaction in the life you choose.”

“But even second sons have more choices to make than daughters.” Tears stung my eyes.

“True enough,” he said, squeezing my hand. “But—Agnes, look at me.” His voice softened as he leaned round to catch my eye. “I think there is a place for each of us where our duties and passions can coexist.”

I said nothing as a tear slipped down my cheek.

“Just don’t give up on finding both,” he said. “Maybe even with Showalter. He seems a good sort.”

I nodded. He was a good sort. “I’m just not sure I’m ready is all.”

“Where’s the fun in being ready? I wasn’t
ready
for sea. And I had no idea how much I’d love the life until after I’d been aboard ship awhile. Maybe it will be the same with you and your choice. Maybe you’ll grow to love your lot after you’ve set sail.”

I prayed David was right, both for my sake and for Showalter’s.

Chapter Thirteen

After feting David with a dinner laden with roast potatoes, fresh vegetables, pastries, and other favorites deprived him at sea, we retired to the garden. In addition to Showalter, two of David’s Eton friends living in London joined us. The three of them laughed raucously as they smoked near the lilacs. Mother and Father sat on the patio, content. Rupert nursed a glass of brandy (his fifth at my last count). I hoped he was stewing in the knowledge that he was a worm for having done so little with his life in comparison to his younger brother.

Though I’d have given anything just to sit next to David and take comfort in how near he was to us, it fell to me to entertain Showalter. We strolled the garden path, exchanging a comment with Mother or Father when we came near, sometimes pausing to listen to one of David’s friends recount some mischief they stirred up at school.

“May I say again how lovely you look tonight, Agnes?” Showalter asked me.

I smiled as sincerely as I could. “You may,” I said, but I was painfully aware that he was simply saying so because he had run out of conversation. Still, it never stopped him from nattering on. He truly did love the sound of his own voice, truly did appear to love an audience, even if it was only an audience of one. His chatter was diverting enough—his observations on the plants in the garden were astute, his musings on the stars we could see through the treetops overhead were entertaining, but they required nothing of me but an appreciative expression and perhaps a well-timed question here or there to keep him going.

I was doing as David asked, giving Showalter as much of the benefit of the doubt as I could. And I found him as agreeable as ever. But something was missing.

It was so very different talking with this man—a man who’d known my family for years—than it was talking to Caedmon, whom I’d known barely a week.

It was not the first unbidden comparison that sprang to mind wherein Lord Showalter fell short of his unknown rival.

“I do hope you’ll allow me the pleasure of the first dance at the ball next Saturday?”

I looked down. “It’s over a week away,” I said. “I hardly think my card will be full. . . .”

He smiled. “Just so. You promise you’ll save me at least one?”

I nodded, again a little pleased about how it felt to be pursued. Even if I sat out half the dances that night, someone had already asked me for the first. But Showalter was not done with his compliments.

“First balls, then the world!” he said grandly. “You’ll steal the heart of every man on the Continent when you finally make the tour one day.”

“I’d rather they simply understand me. I do so hope that my Greek proves adequate. I’ve had no practice speaking,” I told him. While I was confident in my reading and writing abilities, having taught myself after exhausting my language tutors in German, Italian, French, and Spanish and that kindly old rabbi Father unearthed to help me with Hebrew, there had been no suitable tutors for Greek or Hindi, and my progress suffered for it.

“I’ll never understand the point of learning all those languages,” Lord Showalter said. “You can easily pick up a translator anywhere we might go.”

My toe caught on a corner of one of the flagstones. But the word I’d just heard him utter was even more jarring.
We.
It was the closest he’d come to declaring himself. My heart made an odd flutter, but for all the wrong reasons—I felt as though the garden was closing in on me, and something like panic rose in my chest.

What was I doing? It had been fun to play the debutante, to flirt a bit, to think that I had managed (with Mother’s help, of course) to win the affections of someone as perfect as Showalter. But now that it appeared I’d succeeded, now that he was signaling me so openly, it made me acutely aware of what I really was: a girl in a lady’s dress, a girl who’d been pretending
too well
, a girl who would now suffer for it, and possibly cause a perfectly good man to suffer in the bargain.

I silently prayed that Mother hadn’t overheard his slip.

Showalter offered me a steadying hand as he went on, “I hear that even in Egypt, most of the natives speak enough English or French to translate for outsiders.”

“Translators muddy things,” I said, unable to voice what I really meant. I resented that the life I lived—that the world women were allowed to live in—was often little more than a translated, simplified version of the world belonging to my brothers, my father, to Showalter.

“All this assumes anyone will even be able to make the tour as before,” I added.

He sighed. “I’m sure your husband, whoever the lucky man might be”—he paused and smiled sideways at me—“will be unable to deny you such a trip, whether Napoleon is firing cannon shot over Vienna or not.”

I flushed, then sought refuge in safer topics than possible marriages. “The war does seem interminable, does it not?”

“Yes, well, I have a feeling all that unpleasant business of war will sort itself out very soon somehow.”

I almost laughed aloud. If only he knew just how unpleasant things threatened to become. Resurrected armies of the dead . . . domination by Napoleon.

“Then perhaps we can rest easier knowing that David won’t be hurling himself aboard enemy ships.”

He laughed. “And the trade routes will open back up properly. It will be better for all of us—on both sides of the Channel,” he said. “And some even suggest that a peace—however it is achieved—would result in shared scholarship on Egypt and the artifacts.”

“For now, I suppose we’ll have to settle for our unwrappings and visits to the museum,” I said, feeling compelled to respond in some way.

“And we’ll make that trip very soon,” he supplied. “Your mother and I settled on Thursday morning. You’ll luncheon with me at my home afterward.”

A whole morning? With just my mother and Lord Showalter? Then lunch? We’d be hours, hours I should have been using to sneak away and see to the search for the standard. Hours wherein I’d feel the same mixture of nerves and regret that I felt now. “How nice,” I managed to say.

“There are a number of new acquisitions at the museum,” he said genially. “When was the last time you visited?”

I hesitated before letting the lie slip past my lips. “Years ago. Even then I found myself torn—”

“Torn?”

I nodded. “As marvelous as the museum is, part of me can only wonder if the items belong in the places they originated, to the people whose ancestors created them.”

“Agnes Wilkins!” he teased. “You harbor dangerous sentiments!”

I looked at him, alarmed. But he grinned, then leaned closer to whisper. “If it comes to light that the daughter of a prominent member of the House of Lords harbors such anti-imperialist views . . .”

“You are mocking me,” I said, smirking. So he had a sense of humor after all. I realized that I couldn’t stop myself from checking off his attributes, that I couldn’t keep from cataloging what I liked and didn’t like about the man, that despite my reservations, I couldn’t think of him as anything other than a suitor.

He shrugged. “Think what you like, Miss Wilkins. But politics aside, I rather believe having the place brought to you rather than enduring the dust is infinitely better. Did you know that one of my associates just made a journey to a dig site outside Memphis and was forced to ride a camel? Really, I can’t imagine perching atop one of those spitting beasts.”

“Riding a camel? I think it sounds marvelous,” I said, adding with another smirk, “provided I was clear of the spitting end.”

“I’d like to see some of those curators at the museum on a camel.”

“Have they been quite cross with you?” I asked as casually as I could manage, avoiding his eye, looking toward the tree line, where the first of the evening’s fireflies had begun to flicker.

“Hmm?”

“About the mummy we unwrapped by mistake?”

“Oh, that! Well, they worked themselves up, as if I’d intentionally taken the wrong specimen. But I paid for them both, so they can’t be too indignant. Unless they start charging admission in that place, they need men like me to keep them going.”

I watched one light blink on and off, tracing its slow path across the shadow of an elm. It felt dangerous, this questioning, even if there was no way Showalter could know the real reason for my curiosity. I took a steadying breath and asked my next question.

“And were they quite satisfied that all the items from the wrappings had been restored?”

I felt the arm he’d extended to me at the outset of our stroll stiffen ever so slightly. “I believe so,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

The firefly I’d been following with my eye seemed to hover in place, flashing more rapidly now, not moving across the trees, as if it were stuck fast in a spiderweb. I hesitated, wishing I had Deacon or even my father to advise me on how to proceed. I chose my words carefully.

“I only ask because I wonder if your guests were the only ones with access to the body.”

“What are you suggesting?” he asked, leaning around to try and catch my eye. I looked quickly to his face and then back to the firefly stuck in the web.

“Simply that even in the finest households, servants are tempted by the attractions of wealth.”

He stopped to stare at me. “You really are a
curious
girl,” he said.

I realized that I might have pushed too far. That the limb I’d decided to venture out on was growing less sturdy the farther I climbed. Over my shoulder, I heard Rupert snort at something David said and found my excuse. Widening my eyes to look as innocent as possible, I turned my face to Showalter. “At breakfast this morning, Rupert and I were talking. And he’s always accusing our servants of misconduct. I suppose his suspicion is catching. Particularly with things as they’ve been lately.”

“Doesn’t hurt to be careful, I suppose.” His tone was once again cheerful.