The Sherbrooke Series Novels 1-5 (159 page)

Teeny said, “There is no reason for you to be mad about all the blood on your head, Miss Helen. I will be upset for both of us. It’s real blood, Miss Helen. Let me call in the physician.”

“I’m not mad, Teeny, you are. Now listen to me. I would have to be dead before I would let Ozzie anywhere near my person.”

“But you have said that he never tries to kill people.”

“Yes, that is true, but he fancies himself in love with me. No, he cannot come near me. Come now and help me wash my hair. We’ll get the blood out, don’t worry.”

Yes, Helen knew what she had done. What she had done three times. And it had been glorious. She cursed herself as she walked down the stairs to dinner.

Luther and Eleanor were home in the stables, having returned even later than she and Lord Beecham had, which was why, her father told her, no one had been in the least concerned.

“What were those damned horses doing if they didn’t come back here after they threw us?” Lord Beecham asked the table at large as he felt the rich turtle soup slide all hot and tangy down his throat. Was that a hint of lemon he tasted?

Helen cleared her throat and said to the potatoes on her fork, “They were probably taking shelter, just as you and I were, Lord Beecham. Don’t worry, Father. I can see you puffing up to worry in the worst way. I drank the warmed champagne and it cleared my head to such a degree that the past three hours could never have happened.”

She looked Lord Beecham straight in the eye. “Indeed, those three hours are fast becoming a blur in my mind. Yes, now all I remember is Lord Beecham and me riding away from here to Dereham. Then everything is a complete blur. There must have been rain, since we came back wet, but for all the in-between?

“It is gone from my mind and my memory. Now, everything is as it was. Nothing is any different. Nothing at all.”

Lord Beecham should have heard that with relieved ears. But he didn’t. He didn’t know why, but it enraged him. She wanted to forget he had given her immense pleasure three times? He cursed into his soup.

Helen rose when she finished her dinner. She looked directly at her father. “I am going to bed now. I hope you and Lord Beecham will excuse me. Whatever happened this afternoon has made me very tired.

“Lord Beecham, I will see you in the morning. If it isn’t raining, we can once again endeavor to reach Dereham.”

What was he to say? What he wanted to do was push back his chair, rise slowly, never taking his eyes off her, walk to where she stood, and put his hands around her white neck. He didn’t know how hard he would squeeze. Certainly hard enough to gain her attention, curse her. He flexed impotent fingers as he watched her leave the dining room. She was dressed in soft gray silk down that draped very nicely over that delicious white body of hers.

He had made love to her three times, given her his all, actually more than his all, simply because, for no reason he could fathom, she had hauled it out of him. She had completely possessed him, emptied him, and now she wanted to forget it?

Not if he had anything to say about it.

He and Lord Prith played whist. Lord Prith talked about how his sweet little Nell was the very picture of her soft, very gentle mother. If it had not been for Flock hovering close, Lord Beecham would have choked to death on his brandy.

He lost sixty pounds and had drunk too much delicious smuggled French brandy by the time Flock fetched his lordship for their evening walk.

“D
AMN YOUR EYES, HELEN, you will talk to me about this. Women always love to talk after making love to the point of rendering a man insensible. Usually a woman starts chattering immediately, when the man is lying there, felled, still utterly witless. I will admit that our surroundings yesterday were perhaps not all that inspiring, and thus you wished to wait to talk everything to death and in great detail. Now it is time. We are in pleasant surroundings. Now you may speak to me.”

Nothing from Helen.

He persevered. “You may now feel free to thrash everything over, Helen. You may complain about certain minor digressions or perhaps omissions.”

But Helen, curse her beautiful eyes, began whistling.

He jerked on Luther’s reins, and his horse reared back, nearly unseating him. He turned to her and yelled, “Damn you, stop that. All right. I will accept that just perhaps not everything that happened between us was necessarily perfect during those hours yesterday that you are claiming to forget.”

“Goodness, Spenser, whatever are you talking about?”

He ignored that bit of goading. He was a reasonable man. Sometimes a woman needed to be eased into spilling her innards. She had to trust a man, know that he admired her, particularly if she wished to praise him. Of course she knew he believed she was utterly delicious. She also knew, damn her, that he’d given her wondrous pleasure. He could still feel her hot breath in his mouth when she moaned her climax. He had felt it to his toes. His breathing hitched for a moment. Perhaps she was just embarrassed to tell him how spectacular a lover he was. That had to be it. “If you wish to speak of how immensely well suited we are, you may do so now. I will listen. I will attend you.”

Helen continued to whistle. A robin redbreast answered from a maple tree to the side of the country road. Rage was building up inside him, nice, bubbling rage, but still he held his voice calm, the epitome of male reason.“Listen to me. We are alone, there is no more bloody rain today, the sun is shining down quite brightly on our heads, our horses are clipping along at a fine rate, and I am ready to listen to you.

“It is all right, Helen. I understand you now. You want me to wrap every pleasurable thing we did yesterday all up in a poetic and soulful package.”

She gave him a look of female amusement, a look that could shrivel a man’s manhood. “Since we did not do anything at all yesterday afternoon—at least nothing worth mentioning that I can remember—then you may take all your soulful packages and dump them in a ditch.”

“You will stop trying to enrage me. This so-called memory lapse of yours is laughable. When I take a woman, she never forgets it. Never. If I ever take a woman three times, her life changes utterly.”

Curse her all the way to China, she laughed. She looked over at him and laughed. He pulsed with rage.

Then, suddenly, she stopped her laughter and looked all sorts of bored, even indifferent. She looked down at her tan leather riding gloves that had Eleanor’s reins wrapped loosely around them, looked down at her black riding boots that could have been polished to a brighter shine, but she didn’t have a valet like Nettle, so what was she to do? She looked all too ready to continue with her show of bored indifference.

He was ready to leap off Luther’s back and take her to the ground and—his mind balked at what followed then. She turned to look at him again and said in an unruffled, calm voice that reeked of martyred female patience, of which there was no other kind in his experience, “There is no need for you to sulk, Lord Beecham. You should learn how to control your wounded male vanity.”

“Damn you, my name is Spenser.”

“Very well, Spenser, I will use your given name until you behave like an ass—again.”

“Helen, do you want me to throw you to the ground and show you yet again that my taking you—three times, mind you—was one of the greatest experiences in your damned provincial life?”

“Goodness,” she said, shaking her head at him, her tranquil self still firmly in place, and rubbing his nose in it, “you certainly have an exalted opinion of yourself, Lord Beecham. I wish that you would simply forget all that nonsense of yesterday and strive to remember that you are my partner, not my lover.”

“I want to be both. I am both. There is no reason to discontinue either one or the other, particularly the other. I want to continue what we started. I regret that you were struck on the head by some falling roof, that you were wet through to your bones, that the rotted wooden floor wasn’t quite as comfortable as a bed, but all of that aside, regardless, you enjoyed yourself immensely. Three times. And I was the man to give you all that pleasure.”

“Yes, I did, and so you were. So what?”

So
what?
He could but stare at her, his brain at half-mast. No woman had ever said that to him in his male adult life.

So what?
She had actually said
so what?

He was primed to yell. He stopped himself. He drew a deep, steadying breath. He even smiled at her as he said, “That was quite amusing. What do you mean, ‘So what’?”

“I mean, sir, that yesterday afternoon was a very short amount of time when one but considers the possible age of the universe, for example. It was barely a spit in the ocean of time.

“You and I are involved, sir, but not in a trivial sort of enterprise. We, sir, are involved in a mystical quest. We were only temporarily derailed because of the weather. The weather is lovely this morning so there is nothing else to distract us.

“Pay attention to the road, Lord Beecham. Luther has an eye on that delicious thick goosegrass over there.”

“Luther,” he said very quietly to his horse, “you will not act like a bloody woman and hare off on your own, particularly with me on your back.”

His horse snorted and Helen laughed.

There were times when a man had no other viable choice but to cozy up to defeat. Lord Beecham cozied up for the remainder of their ride to Dereham.

 

Vicar Lockleer Gilliam, a distinguished gentleman of fine parts who was also a father of two grown children and a widower pursued by every unmarried lady over forty years of age in his flock, ducked his head into his own small study, which currently housed his brother’s manuscripts and books, a nobleman who had studied at Oxford with his brother, and Miss Helen Mayberry, a strapping young woman he would have courted with all the passion in his soul if only she had not been only eight years old twenty years before.

Lord Beecham and Miss Helen Mayberry were both absorbed in what they were doing—namely, poring over those old parchments, mainly shaking their heads because they had not yet succeeded in finding what they were searching for. Dust had formed a light sun-streaked film in the air.

Helen was on her knees in front of a huge parchment manuscript spread out on the lovely Flemish carpet given to the vicar by Lady Winfred Althorpe, who was now, thankfully, remarried. “This isn’t it,” she said. “It’s close, but not close enough.”

Lord Beecham looked over. “Yes, it is close. It’s Aramaic.”

“A cup of tea, my dear?”

“That would be marvelous, Mr. Gilliam,” she said, blinking up at him. “You are very kind. Oh, dear, look at all the dust we’ve raised in here.”

He waved her back when she started to get up. “No, you two remain doing what you’re doing. I will see Cook about the tea.”

Thirty minutes later, their empty teacups set aside, Lord Beecham shouted, “I’ve got it, Helen. Eureka, I’ve got it!”

She was on her feet in an instant. He was bending over the vicar’s desk, a very old vellum book open in front of him.

“What is it?”

He looked up at her, his dark eyes even darker now with excitement. There was no indolent, world-weary nobleman in his look now. Lord Beecham was fascinated, he was exhilarated. He was, in short, thrilled to his toes.

“I’ve found it. I’m sure of it. Look, Helen, just look, and tell me if you don’t think this is it.”

She looked over his shoulder. She hummed while studying the script. “I think so,” she said. “See that strange-looking figure that is repeated many times? It’s identical. What is the language?”

“It’s called Pahlavi. The alphabet developed from the Aramaic, which is why it looked so similar. Pahlavi was the writing system of the Persians around the beginning of the second century B.C. It lasted until the advent of Islam toward the seventh century A.D. The Avesta—that’s the Zoroastrian sacred book—is written in a form of Pahlavi called Avestan. Oh, God, Helen, this is just amazing. To find something like this—” He broke off, gave her a big grin, and clasped her around the waist. He lifted her over his head and swung her around. “We found it. Imagine: Pahlavi, a language so old that it has long been gone from this earth. Just to say the word makes me want to laugh and shout. Think about it: someone actually wrote the leather scroll more than a thousand years ago and we have it here with us, today, in modern times.”

He let her down, kissed her mouth, then immediately released her. He was soon bending over the text before him.

She stared at him for a moment, then looked down at the book with the strange writing that was surely identical to the writing on the leather scroll. He was talking to himself as he trailed his long fingers lovingly over the words.

“Tell me about it,” she said. “Can you translate our leather scroll?”

“I’m going to try my damnedest. It will be difficult, very difficult, because it was the Pahlavi custom to use Aramaic words to represent Pahlavi words. So take our word “king.” It’s
shah
in Pahlavi, but it’s spelled exactly like the Aramaic word
malka
. And the thing is, you have to read the Aramaic word and translate it instantly into Pahlavi, and read it as
shah
. So you’re always having to go back and forth in your mind to find the right words. It makes it very difficult to translate, much less simply read. But I can do it, Helen. Given enough time, I can translate the leather scroll.”