The Gilded Scarab (20 page)

“Yes! Yes, you could do that. That’s a far more gentleman-like occupation.”

“Daniel, I’ve barely opened my Virgil or Euripides since I came down. What sort of qualifications do I have for teaching? At best I’d end up an usher at one of the minor public schools. One step up from slavery, I suppose. Just.” I choked out a laugh. “Besides, with my luck, I’ll fall in love with the head boy.”

And that, I suspected, would put paid to any attempt on Daniel’s part to urge me into a pedagogical career. I was right. He said, “Ugh!” and did a little more squirming, indicative, along with his pursed lips and slight frown, of him thinking things over and coming to the conclusion he had better not trust the head boy.

He sighed. “But a coffeehouse! I hope you intend to hire someone to do the menial work. Where is it? In a good part of town, I hope?”

“Very near the museum, as it happens.”

He stiffened. “What?”

“In Museum Street, opposi—”

“No! I refuse to allow that!”

I sighed. We had lived through a cautious couple of weeks since that evening at the Long Bar, with both of us taking pains not to offend the other. I wasn’t entirely sure why I was so careful to preserve something I didn’t really want. I hated it, restraining myself all the time. I don’t know what Daniel felt about it. But somehow this resurgence of his tendency to want to control everything did not surprise me.

I merely looked at him, raising an eyebrow.

“No!” he repeated. “I know that coffeehouse. It’s Pearse’s. It is Pearse’s, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t buy that place, Rafe. You can’t. No.”

“My plans for buying it are rather far advanced,” I said.

Well, I’d tossed fuel onto the fire and no mistake! It made a merry blaze. Daniel’s expression and attitude reminded me forcibly of those ancient woodcuts in Foxe’s Martyr book, of recanting heretics demonstrating their devotion to the church by watching all their friends and relations burning alive while waiting their turn for the pyre. Evidently, in Daniel’s eyes, I had thrown around lit lucifers perilously close to large piles of ecclesiastical firewood.

“Without speaking to me about it?” He didn’t add “Traitor, how could you!” in a voice throbbing with outrage and betrayal while stretching out his hand and pointing a shaking forefinger at me. But I suspect he came very close.

He rolled away from me and pushed himself out of bed. It brought home to me that if a man intends to throw a major temper tantrum that involves treading heavily around his bedroom while waving his arms around and shouting, before remembering his landlady and moderating the shouts to a whispered savagery that had to be heard to be believed, then it’s best not to embark on the venture naked. A cock bouncing around on every step detracts from the overall impact. It isn’t dignified.

When he calmed down a little—mainly, I suspect, because I didn’t react—he spoke with more deliberation. “Rafe, you forget who I am!”

“No. No, really. My memory is actually quite acute.”

He took an audible deep breath. I listened hard for the teeth grinding while wondering what on earth had started this off.

“Rafe. No. No, listen. That coffeehouse is right beside the museum.”

Well, yes. I believe I was the first to mention the coffeehouse’s geographical location, and, for that matter, Daniel might have given me the credit of knowing where it was since I was about to sink my entire fortune in it.

So all I said was “Yes.”

He drew a shuddering breath. Any moment now and he’d start tearing at his hair and gibbering. “I am an Aegyptologist. I am at the museum at least every week. I teach at University College, not ten minutes away. You must see it’s impossible.”

I swear I was not deliberately obtuse. I truly didn’t see his point. “I’ve known that for the last six weeks. I live right beside the museum, Daniel, and it hasn’t made a ha’penny’s worth of difference, because we have never met at the museum or the coffeehouse or your college or anywhere near them. We’ve kept everything separate. It has nothing to do with this.” And I waved a hand around his bedroom. “I understand that completely. Of course we need to continue being discreet. But why would that change because I’m shifting my address from the hostel to Museum Street? We didn’t meet at the coffeehouse before I owned it, and we can continue not to meet at it when I do.” I allowed my tone to soften. “Although there is a very neatly fitted out apartment that I’ll be moving into—”

“No! I know the coffeehouse well, and I do go there! I can’t… it’s quite impossible! Look, Rafe, please. Please don’t buy Pearse’s. It’s important to me that you don’t buy it.”

I shook my head. “You’ll have to explain it to me, Daniel. Because I don’t understand.”

He was fairly thrumming with tension, head thrown back, making the lines of his throat hard, muscles taut, his hands curling and uncurling into fists. He started walking again, stiff-legged, his head jerking with every step. “Isn’t it enough that I’m asking this of you?”

In what reality would a demand like that be enough? “You’re asking me to give up my best chance of making my living. I think I’m entitled to know why.”

His hands clenched again. I kept my eye on him, mindful of his excessive reaction in the Long Bar. I wouldn’t hesitate to defend myself, if need be.

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple jumping visibly. When he spoke, he was obviously making an effort to calm himself. “I haven’t been near the coffeehouse for a while, but normally I go there once a week with a friend.” He coughed, flushing. “I don’t know if I mentioned that a few years ago I was friendly with a fellow archaeologist? Friendly, in the same way we are.”

I nodded.

“He’s always gone to Pearse’s, ever since he was a student. He and that old man get along very well. When he and I were together, I went there with him often, and after….” He swallowed again, and his eyes were overbright. The tension bled out into sadness and something I thought might be grief. “He left me, Rafe. His House said he had to get married and produce an heir, and he didn’t argue. He just did it. He said he was sorry but that he had no choice. But of course he had a choice! Everyone has a choice! He chose not to keep what we had.”

It wasn’t that I was unsympathetic. Truly. But I was struggling to find something to say. “I’m sorry, Daniel. That must have been hard. I know it happens a lot, but still. Hard.”

“Yes. Very.” He rubbed at his eyes. “I lost my heart to Ned, but I’ve had to put a brave face on it. Aegyptology is too small a field for me to risk making enemies, especially one with as much influence as Ned. He’s First Heir Gallowglass, you know. We’ve stayed friends, and when he’s here in Londinium, we still meet for luncheon regularly. Oh, merely as friends now, Rafe! There’s no need for jealousy.”

I supposed there was no point in denying any such emotion. I wasn’t in the least jealous. But that name was what really made me sit up and take notice. Ned? How many Aegyptologists were called Ned, were members of House Gallowglass, and went to the coffeehouse? “Ned Winter?”

“You know him! You told me you didn’t know any other Aegyptologists!”

“I don’t know him. But Mr. Pearse has mentioned him. I know he’s excavating in Aegypt right now.” Although Mr. Pearse had neglected to tell me Winter was the Gallowglass First Heir. Of course I would have known that for myself, if I’d ever bothered to look him up in the stud books. A lack of interest in the Houses could occasionally backfire on me.

Daniel watched me from narrowed eyes. He was tensing up again, his mouth whitening as his lips thinned out, and he stood now with his hands on his hips, chest aggressively out. He stared at me directly, unblinking, his face red. His breathing was short and rapid, noisy. I didn’t take any of that as a good sign.

“When Ned comes home at Easter, he’ll want to meet at the coffeehouse. You must see now how impossible it is. You must! How can I possibly be in the same room as both of you?”

Lying on the bed with my legs entangled in the sheets left me too vulnerable. I kicked free of the covers and rolled out of bed—the opposite side to him, just in case. “Well, then, Daniel. The answer is simple. Meet him somewhere else.”

“But we’ve always met at the coffeehouse!”

Good. Grief.

“That’s a habit you can break. You can still keep the separation you want, you know, by going somewhere else for luncheon.”

He stamped his foot. He actually stamped his foot, like a two-year-old defying his nurse. I couldn’t help my jaw dropping.

“But if you own the coffeehouse, you’ll get to meet Ned! I don’t want that to happen. It’s… it’s mortifying! Too horrible to think about.” He ground out the words through his teeth. He stopped and pressed his lips together. He was actually wringing his hands; they writhed over each other, over and over. “If you care about me, Rafe, you’d do as I ask.”

And there it was, like a fist to the gut. Really, I should have seen that one coming.

I took a step backward. “Daniel, I do like you. But what you’re asking here…. This is my best chance of making a living. I’m not qualified for anything else. I only know flying, and that’s been taken away from me. The coffeehouse is my chance to start a new life. And you want to take that away because you’re worried I’ll meet your ex-lover? What possible difference can it make? I’m sure if I do meet him, we will all be polite and civilized. Why ask me to give up this opportunity to make a living? Can’t you see how unreasonable that is?”

His whole body drooped. His mouth turned down, and his eyes were shiny. Despondency was writ large all over him. “If you cared,” he said again.

We stared at each other across the rumpled bed, where half an hour ago we’d had such pleasure.

“No, Daniel. I’m sorry, but I can’t agree with you.”

And really, I didn’t have to say any more. The Lancaster luck ran true when it came to love, and five minutes later, it seemed my reluctant affair of the heart with Daniel was over.

I was sorry that Daniel was in distress. I can’t say I was sorry to be free.

“T
HE
COFFEEHOUSE
is in a perfect location,” Feldane, the land agent, pointed out.

Mr. Pearse sighed audibly and rolled his eyes at me behind the agent’s back. “He’s appointed by House Gallowglass to oversee the lease transfer,” he had said quietly to me, earlier, before the land agent had arrived. “He also has to approve the sale price formally. I’m sorry, Rafe, I know we’ve settled it all between us, but we have no choice but to have the man here for the formalities of agreeing the sale.”

So I nodded, politely, at every one of the agent’s pronouncements. “Yes.”

“Excellent for the tourist trade,” added Feldane.

“I have been a habitué here for three months, sir. The tourists don’t appear to be trading, and never have.”

Mr. Pearse smirked.

The agent had a prissy little mouth. He tightened it until it almost disappeared and made him look as if he had a mouthful of lemons. “The winter months are hardly high season, Captain Lancaster. It’s an excellent development opportunity. The coffeehouse needs a little updating, as you know. And, of course, that is reflected in the price.”

That was a warning shot across the bows, if ever I saw one. I smiled, inclined my head, and joined Mr. Pearse in a little clandestine eye-rolling.

To paeans of praise for every room, Feldane insisted on showing me over the entire building again, ignoring my protests that I’d already been over it with Mr. Pearse. We toured the front end coffeehouse, water closet, the office, coffee roasting room, and furnaces/storeroom on the ground floor—these last in the long back extension that ran down one side of a narrow paved yard—with the agent choosing to pretend I’d never seen any of it before. The office was surprisingly large, fitted with a very nice oak desk. It had one of the newfangled telephones installed, a tall wood candlestick affair with brass ear and mouthpieces. Very grand.

The back premises and upstairs floors were accessed from the street via a small side door and a long hallway between the coffeehouse and the pâtisserie next door. A door from the office led into the hallway, and I was ushered through it and to the upper floors. Both the back door to the yard and the street doors had state-of-the-art security and locking systems, with Cowen flash boxes and automatic daguerreotype cameras to dissuade burglars. It wasn’t likely the Royal Mint could boast anything better. Mr. Pearse had merely shrugged when I’d mentioned it. Feldane waved a hand at the front door system, and did his best, I thought, to divert me from looking at it too closely.

“It connects to the datascope in the office and Mr. Pearse’s living quarters, I believe. Mr. Pearse will show you how it all works. Now then, upstairs we have….”

Yes. Very interesting.

Above the coffeehouse were three floors. The first two had two large rooms immediately above the coffeehouse and a third above the office/storeroom extension. The floors were leased to Rosens and Matthews. They appeared to use the second floor rooms as offices and the third to store packing cases. Well, one packing case, sitting in solitary splendor in a back room.

“An import-export business, as I believe you know,” said Feldane airily when I greeted my future tenants. I knew both of them slightly, of course, from the coffeehouse. Feldane hurried me away before I could ask what they were importing or exporting, since it didn’t look very lucrative. Unless of course, they were importing dust? They could certainly export some and improve the premises a trifle.

Mind you, Mr. Pearse’s flat on the top floor was also a little dingy. The bathroom, with a copper shower and tub and a separate water closet, was on the half-landing between floors. The flat itself consisted of a small room fitted out with a stove, wooden cupboard, large kitchen table, and an ionic-exchange ice box so old it had probably got its initial charge sometime around the Biblical Flood, and two good-sized rooms filled with old-fashioned but substantial furniture. The bedroom at the back held a wardrobe in which I could hide a dozen bodies, were I so inclined, and a four-poster bed so old Queen Elizabeth had probably slept in it. Long, elegant French windows led out onto the flat roof of the back extension. The larger room overlooked the street, and was home to an enormous red velvet sofa of the same species as those in the more ornate rooms at Margrethe’s. Incongruous to see such splendor here. Still, I looked forward to christening both bed and sofa, once I met someone to baptize them with.