Raven knew they weren’t going to find anything. The only reason he’d stayed was to exhaust Jane’s determination on the subject of his mark and the absurd idea that it was related to the Northcott family crest.
It was just a coincidence. An aberration, like seeing faces or shapes in woodgrain or wallpaper flowers. Stare at anything long enough and you might even believe it was actually real. But not him. He wasn’t fool enough to be taken in.
He honored his word, however, and examined the contents of the trunks with diligence and a critical eye. A very critical eye. He didn’t want to give Jane the opportunity to accuse him of being less than thorough and try to cajole him into staying longer.
When they finished here, the search would be over for good. He’d make sure of it.
Even so, it surprised him to find that he and Jane worked well together. They each took one side of the first trunk until there was nothing left, then moved on to the second, sifting through books and ledgers with the same meticulousness.
Occasionally, Raven caught himself reading and absorbing the pages instead of thumbing through them with hurried purpose. Whenever that happened, he schooled his features and cast a surreptitious glance her way. Thankfully, she was always too immersed in her own perusal. It was becoming an onerous task to hide his utter fascination and awe at all this knowledge and literature so close at hand.
A few minutes later, he found himself accidentally and deeply ensconced in A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne when Jane suddenly said, “You may borrow that book, if you like.”
Guilty and embarrassed, he slapped the cover closed and swiftly stacked the slim volume off to the side. “Why would I want to do that?”
After years of earning ridicule, censure and even beatings from being found with a book in his hands, it was ingrained in him to deny any interest at all.
Jane lifted her shoulders in an inconsequential shrug, still perusing her side of the trunk. “You have a certain way of grunting when you find something that interests you.”
“Grunting?”
She nodded while fanning through a book and absently remarked, “A deep, truncated sound at the back of your throat that pushes a short puff of air through your nostrils, like this . . .”
She mimicked it and Raven was caught somewhere in between amusement and insult.
The latter won out. “I don’t grunt.”
“Imagine what you will,” she said dismissively. “You also growl in a certain manner when you’re frustrated and then paw through the pages. This usually happens when you’ve come across one of the ledgers written in French. However, when you stumble across a book you like, you issue that little grunt and hold the cover protectively as you slowly turn the pages.”
Staring at her profile, he felt a rush of unfamiliar discomfiture wash over him. It was as if she could see through him, and she wasn’t even looking his way. Surely, he wasn’t that transparent. He’d never been before.
“And there’s that disbelieving grumble I first heard when I mentioned your brown thread,” she said with a tsk and a sly glance. “Fear not, your secret is safe with me. I won’t tell any of the other scoundrels that you’re not what you seem.”
Damn it all! He glared back at her, but she merely grinned and kept to her examination of the trunk.
Standing, he went to the tea cart and downed the dark brew, the leaves having turned bitter. He picked up a slice of toast and chewed it crossly, wishing she wasn’t so bloody perceptive.
He caught himself grumbling again but stopped short. Then he realized there wasn’t a reason for his foul temper. He’d already revealed his collection to her. So, there was no need to hide his fascination for books. Not with her. Gradually, his irritation faded.
With the ever-present need to be on his guard soothed for the moment, he returned to her side. Wordlessly, he nudged the cup against her shoulder. In response, she issued a pleased hum as she took the tea, sipped and then handed it back to him.
“I just had the most amusing notion,” she began with a quizzical smile. “Surrounded by all these trees and vines, it’s as though we’re in the jungles of Africa with only a single teacup between us. While other explorers might require more pomp and circumstance when breaking their fast, we’d survive quite well like this, I should think.”
She finished her statement by taking his toast. And he had to admit that he agreed with her. It was strange to imagine that sitting on the floor with a high-society deb could feel like the most natural thing in the world.
Though it wasn’t as if he had a lot of experience to compare this with. The society women he knew liked to gamble and flirt and whisper daring invitations in his ear while their husbands were at other tables. But Raven wasn’t interested in being anyone’s pet again. He preferred to live his life on his own terms.
At the thought, he glanced over to the hourglass and saw the pile of silver sand was higher on the bottom than on the top. Soon he would be back to his life. They were halfway through the third trunk now.
Jane held a ledger out for his inspection. Clamping a wedge of dry toast between her teeth, she pointed to the frayed edge along the center. “Mrf ink bersa bay mrfing.”
“Didn’t quite catch that,” Raven said with a smirk. “Perhaps you should try grunting as a form of communication.” Apparently, it worked for him.
Pulling the toast from her mouth with a tug, he finished the slice.
“I think there’s a page missing,” she clarified without the impediment. “Perhaps more than one.”
“I’ve found that in a few, as well, and stacked them in a separate pile, here.” He gestured to the growing stack of twelve—now thirteen—age-softened leather ledgers.
“Hmm. My uncle must have used the paper to send a missive. Father would often receive correspondences from him on torn scraps of paper.” She flipped the pages back and forth, reading them. “It appears that this ledger was from when he tutored the Wellesley children near the turn of the century. I imagine it could not have been easy for a child in a military family during the French Terror. There’s quite a number of pages missing. Oh, but look here. This is one of those sketches I was telling you about.” She turned it toward him. “It’s a knight’s armet. From my brief perusal of the book of ordinaries, I recall that this sits at the center of the Wellesley family’s crest. Which further cements my belief that we are bound to stumble onto something from the Northcotts as well.”
“Not if we don’t hurry it along,” he said with a glance back to the hourglass.
“Drat,” she muttered and resumed a more frantic search.
An unexpected sense of urgency filled Raven with every grain of sand that fell. There were only a handful of minutes left.
Together they displaced items of no relevance with the detachment of archeologists discarding dirt from a dig site. They skimmed pages, found nothing, then cast each ledger aside. Over and over again.
Raven knew the exact instant that the top of the hourglass was empty. It felt like the jarring jolt of a carriage wheel hitting a rut and stopping dead in its tracks.
With his hands curled over the lip of the trunk, he stared down at the bottom. All that remained atop the cracked leather was a smattering of yellowed letters and torn pages, along with a folded cravat in the corner, tea-stained with age.
But there was no sketch of a raven. Hadn’t been one in any of the trunks.
Pushing away, he stood and left Jane at the edge. His footfalls snapped against the stone tiles as he walked around the conservatory, a gnawing tension gathering in his limbs. To relieve it, he cracked his neck on one side and then the other. He’d known all along that there’d been nothing to find, so it shouldn’t bother him to come up empty handed. And it didn’t bother him, he told himself. Not in the least.
Pausing at the door, he peered beyond the windows to a leaf-scattered view of the garden. A deep exhale emptied his lungs and fogged the glass.
“It isn’t possible,” Jane said, drawing his attention. She reached into the trunk’s abyss to pick up every tiny sliver of paper, her short, rounded nails dragging over the bottom in ever-increasing desperation. “It has to be here.”
“Nothing to fret over. An additional hour of my day is hardly a matter of life or death, and I’d snagged a good nap earlier.”
“But I never forget things that I’ve seen. They’re always in my head. What’s the point of it if I can’t figure out where and when I saw them? And I was so certain.” Her voice was roughened with exhaustion and emotion and she flung a piece of cloth to the floor. “It was all for naught.”
“You’re just tired, that’s all,” he said. “Besides, it doesn’t really matter.”
“Stop saying that. It does matter. I wanted so very much to find something for you.”
The afternoon sun streamed down through the domed ceiling, illuminating the angry tears in her sapphire eyes. And in that instant, Raven believed that it truly did matter to her. Perhaps even more than it did to him.
So when she bowed her head and her kneeling body folded like deflated bagpipes, he knew he couldn’t leave her. Not yet.
“Poor little professor,” he said, not unkindly, and returned to her in a few long strides. “Come now. Don’t let this trouble you. I am eons ahead of you in understanding futility. After a time, you’ll get used to it, like a splinter that’s gone too deep beneath the skin to remove.”
Sinking down beside her, he ran the flat of his hand over her back and peered into the empty trunk. Correction . . . the nearly empty trunk.
Only now did he notice the folded edge of yellowed paper, sticking up from some hidden place near the corner. “Jane.”
“No one deserves to suffer, Raven. No one deserves to feel alone and abandoned. Just thinking about you as a little gray-eyed boy, staring out the window of the orphanage and wondering—”
“Jane,” Raven repeated, taking her by the shoulders.
He fought the urge to roll his eyes as he started to brush the wet rivulets from her cheeks with his thumbs. “Listen to me. You’re overtired and letting your emotions get the better of you. Frankly, I’m disappointed. I never took you for a missish chit. Now, we aren’t going to go any further unless you promise me there’ll be no more tears, hmm?”
She sniffed again and swiped the back of her hand beneath her nose. “But it’s over, regardless.”
He shook his head. “Not quite. The trunk has a false bottom. But I don’t want you to get your—”
Her gaze swerved to the corner. Her lips parted on a gasp. Then she scrambled to retrieve it, diving headlong over the side before he could even finish his sentence.
“—hopes up,” he concluded.
For a long moment, she didn’t say anything. Just simply stared down at the letter.
Bollocks. He shouldn’t have mentioned it. Continuing this wild-goose chase would only leave her feeling more defeated in the end.
“I was wrong,” she said.
Guilt ate at him in gobbling bites like a worm in a cherry. He should have stopped this nonsense before it began. “Like I said, it’s neither here nor there for me. In fact, I don’t even know why I stayed after the sand ran out.”
“No, Raven.” She shook her head, her eyes glittering with unshed tears. “I mean, it wasn’t a drawing I remembered. It must have been a seal.”
Then she turned her wrist to show him the broken red wax, split in a horizontal line. And there, as if it had been taken directly from his flesh, was the bird.
The raven.
Numb with disbelief, he didn’t move at first.
Surely his eyes were playing tricks on him. He truly never expected to find anything and a noticeable tremor shook his hands as he reached for it.
“This is the seal from the Northcott family,” she said. “Though, how the identical design came to be on your arm, I do not know.”
Dazedly, he unfolded the letter. He studied the looped scrawl with fascination, the right-sided slant, the spots of ink here and there. Skimming over the page, he tried to piece together the contents but only cursed in frustration. “This is in French. I thought the Northcotts were English.”
“Correct,” Jane said, leaning in to read it with him, her lips moving soundlessly. “Water has made many of the sentences run together, so I cannot read it all. However, the handwriting appears feminine. And from what I gather, this letter is a request to hire a tutor to speak her husband’s native tongue. And here it says”—she gasped and her hand fell atop his sleeve with a squeeze—“it says that she is newly married and would like to speak like a proper English lady before her child is born. And do you see the date?”
Speech failed him at the moment, so he nodded and issued a grunt of affirmation.
1799.
Mr. Mayhew, the beadle in charge of the orphanage, had told him he was abandoned in January of 1800.
Raven had never come this close to finding anything before. But there it was in his grasp—the wax seal that matched the mark on his arm, the letter written just months before he was left on the doorstep, and the surname . . . Northcott.
Was that his name?
Raven’s heart stopped beating. Instead, it rushed in his ears, roaring like a caged animal and he hated it. Bloody hell! He shouldn’t still be wondering about his name. What did he care? He was a grown man, not a child.
Lowering the page, he drew in one breath—two, three. He needed a moment to shut out all the distractions and to gather his reliable cynicism.
So, he stood and focused on his external senses, ignoring the erratic clamor of his heart rising up the constricted path of his throat. Breathing in, he smelled the cool earthiness of freshly watered soil in the pots, the misted leaves on the branches, and the clean, powdery scent of lavender. But those things weren’t helping him. They were far too sweet.
Swallowing, he tasted tea on his tongue and the residual char from the toast. And there was the bitterness he needed. He let it fill him.
Jane’s cool, soft fingers curled over his wrist. A slender furrow had worked its way into the creamy flesh of her brow as she gazed up at him with concern.
The jaded part of him wanted to laugh at the absurdity of her reaction. They were mere strangers, after all. Why should she care what the letter may or may not have revealed? This had no effect on her life whatsoever. And yet . . .
Another, unnamed, part of him wanted to soothe her. To shield her from the inevitable disillusionment that would follow when this turned into nothing. And it would turn into nothing, he was sure.
He shook his head. “There’s no reason to make any ridiculous leaps. It’s merely a letter.”
To prove it, he dropped it down into the trunk again and watched as the weight of the seal carried the page in a downward plunge, like the sail on a sinking ship.
“Raven, this is not a coincidence. You have to realize what this means.” Hands on hips, she stood in front of him like a miniature blockade.
Caught somewhere between amusement and exasperation, he took her by the shoulders. He drew her closer and felt the stiffness in her muscles, the tight coils that had been tormenting her for the past hour. Beneath the heat of his hands, he began massaging them away. “You’re getting ahead of yourself.”
“And you’re trying to dismiss everything we’ve learned.”
“Seems to me that I’m the only one thinking clearly at the moment, instead of rushing to judgment. Just relax, Jane. Let those pixie wings fall to the side. Yes, that’s right. It’s been a long day for both of us,” he crooned, watching her eyes blink drowsily as the tendons and tissues yielded to his tender kneading. Moving along the slender slope, he cupped her nape, his fingertips probing in circular motions. The softest of moans escaped her. The unexpected sound sent a surge of arousal through him and he tried not to wonder what other noises she might make under his hands. “Soon I’ll walk out that door and you’ll only ever think of me in your naughtiest fantasies, like the one I’m having of you right now. Would you like to hear it?”
“You’re just trying to distract me,” she said crossly. “This woman—”
“No. You’re getting all tight-shouldered again. Let it go. I mean it, now.”
He didn’t want to hear any more about the letter or the mark. All he wanted was time to think. He couldn’t take any more of this upheaval.
Cupping her jaw, he gently tilted her head back to give her the hard, unquestioning stare that had warned many a man to keep their distance.
But Raven made the mistake of setting his thumb against the cushion of her lips. His gaze was instantly drawn to the supple pouting flesh that had tempted him from the start.
This spell-casting mouth had gotten him into all sorts of trouble with her silent incantations, brown thread declarations, probing questions, and earth-shattering epiphanies. Not to mention, the tantalizing mouthfuls of lush red jam.
Just the thought of it made his pulse start to riot, his blood running hot. Was it any wonder that he’d reached his limit?
“You may not want to hear it,” she continued, undeterred, “but this woman might very well be your—”
He silenced her with a kiss. Capturing the tender sweetness of her gasp, he finally found the respite he needed.