That Summer: A Novel (27 page)

She considered. “As long as they’re at least a hundred years old.”

“Good.” Nick shifted forward, and Julia thought he meant to stand up.

But he didn’t. He stayed where he was, his eyes resting gravely on her face.

“I’m all right,” Julia said. “Really.”

“I know,” he said, and leaned forward to brush her lips with his.

SIXTEEN

Herne Hill, 2009

Nick’s kiss was light, undemanding.

For a few happy moments Julia’s brain shut down, leaving her to float on sensation alone: the gentle touch of his lips, the warmth of his palm against her cheek, the heavenly sensation of being cradled, cared for, the cushions of the sofa soft against her back, Nick’s shirtfront crisp against her hands.

She wasn’t aware of having reached out to him until he pulled back, just a nose length away. There was a fine dusting of blond hair on his jaw, like gold dust. She wondered if she touched it whether it would be soft or scratchy.

“Hi,” he said softly, not moving. His blue eyes were intent on her face, watching her, waiting for her reaction.

It would be so easy to slide her hands up from his chest to his shoulders, to lean back against the cushions and draw him with her, back into that pleasant floatiness, where neither the recent nor the long dead past mattered, just two bodies—and, from the feel of it through the thin, linen shirt, his was a very attractive body.

So easy. But she didn’t trust herself right now. She felt off-kilter, unsure of her own emotions. Seizing on an easy excuse, Julia heard her own voice saying, hoarse and breathless, “What about Natalie?”

Nick blinked and blinked again. “Natalie?”

Should she take it as a compliment that he sounded quite so befuddled? “Your best friend’s sister. Tall, brunette, gorgeous?” Madly in love with you?

Nick sat back. “I know who she is,” he said in a tone of understandable irritation. “What I don’t understand is what the—what she has to do with this.”

This? Julia decided not to explore that. That way madness lay. She hitched herself up to a more vertical sitting position. “It can’t have escaped your notice that Natalie has a huge thing for you. I don’t want to”—Julia almost said
tread on her turf
but quickly amended it to—“hurt her.”

“Trust me,” said Nick flatly. “It’s not her heart that would be bruised.”

“That’s pretty presumptuous.” Julia was offended on Natalie’s behalf. She didn’t even particularly like Natalie. But it was easier to be offended for Natalie than tussle with her own feelings, so she waded merrily in on Natalie’s behalf. “Have you seen the way she looks at you? The girl has a class A crush on you.”

Nick drove his fingers through his hair. “Natalie doesn’t have a crush on me, as you so eloquently put it; she has a crush on the idea of me. She wouldn’t know what to do with me if she had me.”

Well, then. Julia folded her arms across her chest. “You just keep telling yourself that, big boy.”

Nick pressed his eyes shut and then opened them again. “I didn’t mean it that way.” His gaze, as his eyes met Julia’s, was disconcertingly frank. “Look, I’m not even sure how to explain it.”

“There’s no need,” said Julia hastily. She was confused enough as it was; she didn’t need him going all likable on her again.

“No?” Nick arched a brow. “Andrew is the best bloke in the world—and Natalie used to be such a decent kid.”

Ouch, thought Julia. Decent kid? That was the kiss of death if ever she’d heard it.

Oblivious, Nick went on. “But her mother’s gone and filled her head with all these ideas about my aristocratic connections—and it’s not like that,” he added forcefully. “I’m not like that. My family are normal people. Barking mad, the lot of them, but otherwise normal.”

Tentatively, Julia leaned an elbow against the back of the couch. “What
was
all that stuff about if you had your rights? Cousin Caroline made it sound like you were the lost heir to the royal family or something like that.”

Nick smiled grimly. “Not even near something like that. One of my ancestors did a favor for Charles the Second back when he was in exile—probably helped smuggle a woman into his rooms—and was rewarded with a title for his pains. Viscount Loring.”

Julia raised her brows in mock awe. “Snazzy.”

“And that, as they say, was that. My ancestors went on being generally charming and not particularly interesting until the beginning of the last century, when my great-grandfather created rather a fuss by running off with an actress.” Nick pursed his lips. “Which, given the origin of the family title, seemed rather an appropriate way for it to end. As James the Fifth of Scotland said, ‘It came with a wench, it shall gang with a wench.’ I paraphrase, of course.”

It all sounded strangely familiar. Not the James V bit, but the viscount running off with an actress. Julia remembered that pile of old
Tatlers
in the back bedroom, the ones she had so guiltily devoured, such a strange and foreign world, debutantes and bolters and errant viscounts. It had been all over the front of one issue.…

Julia sat up so abruptly that the couch springs creaked. “Wait, that was your family? ‘Viscount Runs Off with Gaiety Girl’?”

Nick looked at her strangely.

Julia shrugged, saying a little sheepishly, “I found a pile of 1920s magazines when I was cleaning out one of the back bedrooms.”

“Don’t you know better than to believe everything you read in the papers?” Nick breathed out a long-suffering sigh. “She wasn’t a Gaiety Girl; she was an actress, from an acting family. She got her start playing Cordelia. Although she did perform in some pretty risqué comedies in the twenties. That’s how my great-grandfather met her. Met her, fell for her, shacked up with her, and, eventually, married her.”

It all sounded pretty tame by modern standards. “I didn’t realize they could un-title people for things like that.”

Nick’s lips quivered. “Un-title?”

Julia waved a hand, feeling strangely buoyant. Something about that glint in Nick’s eye … “Or whatever you call it.”

“Whatever you call it,” Nick agreed. “And they can’t. There’s no removing titles for inappropriate liaisons, or half the House of Lords would be out on their ear. No. It’s … a bit more complicated than that.”

Julia burrowed down into the cushions. “I don’t have any snooker to watch.”

Nick acknowledged the point with a nod. “It’s not all that exciting, mostly just a legal tangle. My great-grandmother was something of a Bohemian. She didn’t believe in marriage as an institution, love should be free.… So my grandfather was born out of wedlock. At some point, she must have relented, because they were married in time for my great-aunts to be legitimate, but … Too late for Grandfather.”

Julia had hung out with enough lawyers to pick up some of the lingo. “If they were married after, wouldn’t that solve the problem? Retroactive legitimation?”

“Not back then.” The answer was immediate and authoritative. “The law changed in 1926, but that was three years too late for my grandfather. And all the rest of their children were girls. So the title went the way of the dodo.”

“That sucks,” said Julia eloquently.

Nick shrugged. “I don’t miss it. I don’t think my great-grandfather did, either. It saves a lot of bother from title hunters.”

Like Natalie? “What about the rest of your family?” said Julia quickly. “Did they mind?”

A slight reminiscent smile curved Nick’s lips. “The only one who minded was my grandfather. He was a conventional old soul, for all that he was practically raised at the stage door. In his heart of hearts, he would have rather liked to be a viscount. He wouldn’t say so, of course. But he did his best to get back on the straight and narrow, married a baronet’s daughter from an unimpeachable county family—and then discovered that she had a secret passion for poetry.”

“Reading it?” Julia asked, charmed.

“No, writing it.” She could hear the laughter in his voice, laughter and love underneath it. “Granny used to have monthly readings. Salons, she called them. She’d dress up in flowing draperies and recite, while striking positions. It was atrocious. But everyone suffered through them and would tell her how wonderful it all was, because she was otherwise such a lovely person—and she played a very good hand of bridge.”

“What did your grandfather think?”

Nick’s expression softened. “He adored her. If she had taken up the ukulele, he would have been the first one sitting there in the front row, applauding.”

Julia’s throat felt suddenly tight. “They sound wonderful,” she said.

She’d never known her grandparents on either side, and while she’d never felt the lack of it before, now she wondered what it would have been like to have that kind of family. Maybe the retelling made it rosier; maybe there would have been discontent and disagreements. But it would have been nice to have known.

“And your parents—I mean your father?” she amended quickly, remembering what Nick had told her about his mother. “What’s he like?”

“Dad?” Nick overlooked her slip. “He’s an actor. He did some stage stuff in his youth, but now it’s mostly bit parts in costume dramas. That’s how he met my mother,” he added. “He did a brief—and not very successful—stint in LA.”

“Blood will tell?” said Julia lightly. “Your actress great-grandmother’s talent coming through?”

Nick snorted. “Hardly. I bolloxed my star turn as Bottom in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
back at school. And it’s hard to make an arse out of yourself when you’re already wearing an ass’s head.”

She laughed, as he had intended her to, but as their laughter faded their eyes met and the tension that his family stories had kept at bay rose again between them. A dozen phrases ran through Julia’s mind, only to be discarded again.

“Well,” she said awkwardly, just as Nick began, “Julia, I—”

They both broke off. “You first,” Nick said.

Julia chickened out. She fussed with her cuffs. “I was just going to say that we haven’t made much headway on the attic.”

“No, we haven’t.” For a moment, he looked at her, and she thought he might say something more. Whatever it was, he thought better of it. In one fluid movement, he rose from the couch and held out a hand to her. “Shall we?”

“Yes, thanks.” Julia put her hand in his and let him help her up.

His hand tightened briefly around hers before he released it. “All right now?” he asked softly.

“All right”? Not exactly the term she would have used. “Confused as all hell” was more like it. But he had, she thought, swallowing a slightly hysterical laugh, succeeded admirably in getting her mind off her mother.

“Yes, perfectly, fine,” Julia babbled, shoving her hair back behind her ears. “There are a whole bunch of little rooms in the back, all crammed with stuff. It will probably go faster if we each pick a different room. Maybe we start at the very back and work forward? I’m guessing the older stuff is probably pushed farther back.”

“All right,” he said, and if he was amused he had the courtesy not to show it. “Let’s split up and reconvene in—an hour?”

“Sounds good to me,” said Julia. She pushed open a door at random, revealing an ancient iron bedstead and cheap chest of drawers, all piled with a depressing jumble of decomposing cardboard boxes, smelling heavily of must. She paused in the doorway, her palm against the old wood. “Holler if you find anything good.”

“Who knows?” Nick’s slow smile did unfair things to her nervous system. “Maybe we’ll find Imogen Grantham’s diary.”

Herne Hill, 1849

“Vittoria, Vittoria!”

The gaslight glinted prettily off Evie’s golden curls as she stood by the pianoforte, warbling an Italian aria. Sophie Sturgis, accompanying her, was at least half a beat behind, and Evie’s Italian pronunciation could, at the kindest, be termed “eccentric,” but the audience called for an encore all the same.

Sitting on a settee a few yards away, Imogen smiled encouragingly at Evie and then hastily pulled in her feet as two of the younger Sturgises came careening around the side of the sofa, the one in pursuit of the other.

“Gently, my loves, gently!” called Mrs. Sturgis, without leaving her own comfortable chair. For a moment, the two children, eight and six, were the very picture of innocence—before running whooping into the next room.

Imogen suppressed a smile and turned to her left, ready to share her thoughts with Gavin—only to remember that it was Ned Sturgis on the couch beside her, not Gavin.

Fortunate for her that Ned’s dazzled eyes were fixed on Evie. Imogen dropped her eyes to her hands, fighting a curious sense of dislocation. It scared her how dependent she had become upon Gavin, how flat and dull everything felt without him, as though she were only alive in those stolen hours and everything else a curious dream.

When, really, it ought to be quite the other way around.

Arthur wasn’t with her tonight. He had a dinner at his club, but that was no matter. Just a comfortable family party, Mrs. Sturgis had said, no need to stand on ceremony, and Ned would see Imogen and Evie escorted safely back. Imogen had no doubt Ned would, nor any doubts as to why his mother had organized the party; the young man appeared to be head over heels over Evie. Imogen suspected this evening was something of an audition, to see how well Evie would fit within the boisterous Sturgis family circle. The fact that Evie was entirely unaware of this could only stand to her credit with Mr. and Mrs. Sturgis.

Evie was in deep conversation with Sophie Sturgis over the sheet music piled high on a table by the piano.

Imogen took a deep breath and recalled herself to her duty as guest. “Your sister plays very prettily,” she said to Ned Sturgis.

“Hmm, pardon? Oh. Yes, yes, she does.” Poor boy, he was so obviously flustered, caught out in a moment of reverie. The whiskers he had so proudly cultivated only made him look younger still. Manfully he offered back, “Miss Evie sings like an angel.”

Miss Evie sang like a not very well-trained seventeen-year-old girl, but Imogen appreciated the accolade all the same. “Perhaps you ought to tell her so yourself,” she suggested gently.