Betina Krahn (6 page)

“She’ll be quakin’ in her scales, a’fore you’re through with her.”

Titus strode out of the Athenaeum Lecture Hall on a tide of congratulatory fustian and male bombast. To hear his esteemed colleagues tell it, he had just been tapped for the greatest honor since the Almighty charged King Arthur with the quest for the Holy—

“There you are!” Sir Parthenay caught up and fell into step beside him as he strode along Cromwell Road. “Well done, my boy.”

“You must be joking,” Titus growled.

“Not at all. Excellent opportunity here. Haven’t seen such interest in marine science since that Verne fellow published that story
Twenty Million Leagues
—”

“Twenty
thousand,”
Titus grumbled. “Submarine boats and rampaging giant squid. Had everyone terrified to stick a toe into the water for fear of being strangulated by a sea monster.”

“Ah, yes.” Sir Parthenay shook his head fondly. “Interesting stuff.” Then he came back to the matter at hand. “Just think. You’ll be away from the rut of routine … sleeping in the fine sea air … not to mention swimming with a very fetching ‘mermaid.’ You know, of course, that Sir Isaac will be green with envy.” When Titus stopped in his tracks, glowering, Sir Parthenay chuckled. Clapping one hand on
the younger man’s shoulder, he hailed a cab with the other. “I’m off to the train station. Have to be back for a meeting, first thing in the morning, or I’d stay over and have dinner with you.” As he swung up into the carriage, he grinned. “Can’t wait to hear your report.”

Titus was left standing on the corner of Cromwell and Gloucester roads, staring after the cab, wondering how in hell he had gotten himself into this mess.

He had come to this wretched “mermaid” meeting with the noblest of intentions: confronting and discrediting a scientific sleight-of-hand artist, a fraud in a tawdry fish tail. He had read her preposterous book and prepared to confront her with its obvious flaws. But from the moment he walked in the door nothing had gone quite as he had anticipated.

He had expected the old boys in the royal societies to fawn, toady, and welcome Celeste Ashton with open arms. They didn’t. He had expected a lively, perhaps even heated, discourse on the scandalous claims and observations made in her book. There wasn’t one. He had planned to lead the attack on her ridiculous notions. He found himself calling a halt to it instead.

His disillusionment had begun at dinner, where he heard exaggerated recountings of passages from her book … stories bearing no semblance to anything she had written … which he found exceedingly strange, since what she
had
written was quite sensational enough. It soon became apparent that only one in ten had ever set eyes on her work, but nine out of ten considered themselves experts on it. Then as the port was passed around for a third time, there was ribald speculation about the young woman herself—conjecture on her worldliness and experience—and on the best way to “clean and scale” a mermaid.

By the time they filed into the auditorium, the “gentlemen of science” were in anything but a gentlemanly mood. Some of the old cods at the back were downright pie-eyed. Their subsequent disrespect and crude, ill-informed questions
were nothing short of an embarrassment to the scientific community.

His irritation with his fellow members’ behavior, however, was equaled by his dismay at the unexpected nature of Miss Ashton herself. In the short time he had studied this “mermaid problem,” he had grown accustomed to picturing her in terms of the sketches in the newspapers … as a leering spinster, a fish-tailed siren of the sea, a voluptuous fishwife, or a bluestocking with webbed feet and the face of a trout.

But this Miss Ashton didn’t look the slightest bit like a cartoon Lorelei or a virago with gills. He closed his eyes and there she was again … just inches from his face … blond and blue-eyed … curvaceous … well-spoken … intrepid beyond imagining. And there he was, again, staring at her … embarrassingly aware of every part of his body in proximity to every part of hers … feeling a peculiar warming in his skin and an alarming itch crawling up his inner thighs.

Just thinking about it, he was starting to feel warm and slightly irritable.

Halting in his tracks, he glanced desperately around and found a cab. Settling back in the worn leather seat, he gripped his knees and took several deep, calming breaths. Never mind how he’d got into this mess—how the hell was he going to get out of it? What was he going to do, stuck for God knew how long—perhaps a whole fortnight—in the seaside lair of the determined and potentially treacherous Miss Ashton?

He took several deep breaths and soon felt calm and reason returning.

He was going to prove her wrong; that was what. He was going to demand that she produce her damnable dolphins and make them do a few tricks. When she failed to do so, he would quickly decamp, hie himself back to Oxford, and write a carefully reasoned and utterly lethal assessment of her lunatic ideas. Before he was through, she would rue the day
she ever stuck her appallingly provocative nose into the hallowed halls of science!

That settled, he relaxed back against the seat and looked out the cab window just as they passed a sign advertising seaside cottages and holidays in Brighton.

Seaside. Her last words to him came rushing back to him, and he found himself instantly back on the edges of his nerves.

“Something to swim in, my arse,” he muttered. “I’m not going anywhere near the damned water.”

ASHTON HOUSE WAS
an old stone manor house built around the ruins of a medieval keep. It had been built atop an ancient stone cairn that was revered by the early people who populated the south of England. It was the air of mysterious history about the place that led Sir Martin Ashton—archaeologist and incurable romantic—to purchase that particular property more than twenty years earlier. But it was what lay just beyond the house that made Sir Martin and his family come to love their home.

To the rear of the sprawling manor, below the rocky cliff that nature had fashioned into a set of broad steps, was a sheltered cove containing a beautiful, sandy beach. And crashing onto the barrier rocks that protected the cove and lapping at the beach was the sea itself.

Broad and mesmerizingly blue … constantly in motion … capricious, secretive, and alluring … the sea was a mystery far deeper than any pile of stones mere humans could erect. It was an unimaginable force with an entitylike will that shaped every bit of land it touched, pounding and tearing away the rock and then gently carrying the pieces back to shore. It filled the air with the taste of salt and the lulling sounds of breaking waves. It colored the daylight, moderated the weather, directed the morning and
evening breezes, and nourished a unique community of sea birds, tidal creatures, and humans who lived by its changeable edge. And it had cast a spell on the mind and heart of the youngest Ashton the first time she set eyes on it.

That bit of magic was renewed each time Celeste stood watching from the top of the cliffs, the widow’s walk on the roof, or the flower garden at the side of the house. This morning, she stood with a basket of freshly gathered flowers, watching the clouds out at sea, drifting over the water’s surface. From here, the water looked serene and the clouds resembled wisps of cotton wool. On each side of the cove, green fields ran to the very edge of the cliffs, and the rocky escarpments below them bore striations of brown, gray, and chalky white. Every texture, every interplay of color, light, and surface, made her feel as if this were the one place on earth that she belonged.

With a sigh, she started for the front doors. She still had a number of things to do before the professor arrived that noon. Halfway to the entrance, she looked up at the house and slowed, seeing the mossy gray stones, the warped and rickety windows, the sagging roof, and crumbling chimneys as her reluctant guest undoubtedly would. It wasn’t an especially inviting picture. But then, the wretched man wasn’t coming to rate the accommodations, she told herself irritably, he was coming to verify her writings about dolphins. And after his pomposity and arrogance at the lecture hall, three days ago, he was fortunate indeed that she didn’t leave him to find his own lodgings.

Holding on to that defiant thought, she hurried through the arched entry doors and stopped in the center hall, where her resolve melted. Pulling a cloth from the pocket of her apron, she hurriedly removed a spiderweb trailing from the stairs to a seldom-moved bench, then gave the carved banister an additional pass before stepping back to evaluate. It was no good. A few fragrant blossoms would never compensate for the creaky old house and threadbare furnishings.

A hint of a memory—a tall form, hot-eyed and somewhat
forbidding—teased her inner senses, setting them on edge, and she quickly suppressed it. He might be a pompous, overbearing, arrogant wretch, but he was a
gentleman
wretch and she dreaded the disdain she was certain to see in his face when he beheld her home. Whatever had possessed her to demand that he come to Ashton House for a whole fortnight?

She sighed. Her instincts. And her instincts were seldom wrong.

As she hurried toward the kitchen stairs, her grandmother called to her from the hallway to the left. Following the blur of white disappearing into the library, she found her grandmother in the middle of the room, bent over a littered work-table on which sat a half-assembled vase and sundry pieces of fired clay.

“Come look!” Lady Sophia beckoned excitedly with the magnifying glass in her hand. “Tell me if you don’t think this is a royal trident.” Shoving a piece of the earthen pot into Celeste’s hands, she pointed to a figure carved into the clay. “See … there …”

Celeste squinted at the image of an elongated, three-pronged spear. “Definitely a trident, Nana, but as to whether—”

“It’s from Poseidon’s temple, of course,” Nana declared, glowing. “It has to be. Look at the elegant lines and the intricate pattern of the glazing. And there are two more just below. You see?
Three
. Poseidon was always associated with the number three.”

“Well, I suppose it could be—” Celeste’s gaze fell from the shard of pottery to her grandmother’s clothes: a loosely draped chiton, fastened at the shoulders with brooches, and a himation draped around her and over one shoulder. “Nana, you’re not dressed!”

“Don’t be silly, dear. I’m wearing clothing,” Lady Sophia said.

“Not regular clothes … from this century.”

“I know, dear, but it’s been years since I wore a corset
and I was thinking …” Her grandmother turned to her with a look of stubborn hopefulness. “If this professor is such an intellectual sort, then he surely must find some of the society’s work on the lost culture of Atlantis rather interesting. And if—”

“Ohhh, no.” Celeste set her flower basket on the littered desk and quickly put her arm through her grandmother’s, ushering her toward the door. “He won’t find your theories interesting, he’ll find them insupportable. According to what Mr. Cherrybottom was able to learn about him, Professor Thorne is narrow-minded, unbending, and notoriously hard-nosed. He’s made something of a career of discrediting and dismantling other people’s ideas.”

She urged her grandmother out the door, down the hall, and up the main staircase, where the old lady slowed and gradually drew her to a halt.

“Celeste, dear …”

“We talked about this, Nana,” she insisted, “and you promised.”

Lady Sophia scowled, then, after a moment, continued on up the stairs. At the doorway to her bedroom, she gave Celeste a searching look. “I know your dolphins mean a great deal to you, dear. They mean a great deal to us in the society, too. But I doubt very much that my wearing a corset and Stifling under layers of petticoats will secure a good report from him for you. If he’s as objectionable a man as you say, then I say … scuttle and sink him!” She waved a dismissing hand. “You don’t need him to continue your work.”

Celeste groaned. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t considered that possibility.

“Nana, he publicly challenged my work … as much as accused me of making up stories. It was humiliating. And if I don’t prove my work is genuine science, everyone will believe he was right. Who would dare publish my work then?” She bit back the question of how they would live if she didn’t publish.

Lady Sophia studied her face, then reluctantly conceded. “I suppose … if it is that important to you.”

“Thank you, Nana.” She gave the old lady a brief hug before heading once again for the stairs. “And remember, no lectures on Atlantis or the Atlantean Society.” She looked back just long enough to see her grandmother nod, then continued down the steps, missing the old lady’s knowing look.

“And I suppose ‘science’ is the reason you’ve been cleaning house all week like Attila the Hun,” Lady Sophia muttered.

O
NCE ON THE
main floor, Celeste paused to recall what she had intended to do and remembered her flower basket. She hurried back to the library to retrieve it and her attention was snagged by the glazed jar taking shape under her grandmother’s expert hands. Nana had an uncanny knack for finding the right pieces and putting them together. Give her a box of jumbled, nondescript bits of pottery and she would resurrect a work of art. It was a remarkable talent. And how poignant that she had come to it so late in life, only after her beloved husband had died.