‘I have been to Greece, my dear Miss Silverdale, and I assure you the marbles are in much better hands here in the museum than back there suffering the ravages of time and weather, not to mention possible pillagers.’
‘Apparently they have not survived the ravages of pillagers, Lord Westerby, since they are here in the museum rather than back where they survived some two thousand years of time and weather...’
‘Oh, there you are, Olivia,’ Elspeth called cheerfully from behind them. ‘Do come and look at a lovely urn I have found. I declare I have never seen such exquisite detail; it has given me a marvellous idea for an evening gown. Please excuse us for a few moments, gentlemen.’
Olivia was only too grateful to be drawn away. When they were safely at the other end of the large gallery she sighed.
‘I know, I know. It is merely that he is so very certain of himself. I hate it when people don’t even wonder if they might be wrong.’
‘Dear me. Do you?’
Olivia grinned at Elspeth’s tart response. ‘I am not as opinionated as Lord Westerby.’
‘You might not be as opinionated, but you are far more stubborn. Now behave. You have done exemplarily well for the past hour. One more hour and we shall be done. Is it so very painful?’
‘No, of course not. I love it here. Could we return, just the two of us, at some point? I would love to see everything without the accompanying lectures as Lord Westerby and Lord Barnstable try to outdo themselves in proving their erudition and improving mine.’
‘Of course we may. Now, stroll with me while your temper cools.’
‘Where are the Ladies Barnstable and Westerby and the others?’
‘Resting their weary feet and gossiping on the benches in the small gallery over there. Another group has wandered off to see the Elgin Marbles again. I think they are happy to leave you to the devices of their sons, but I thought it best to come see how you fared.’
‘Thank you for rescuing me. I shall take advantage to seek the withdrawing rooms. You needn’t come with me.’
She did not wait for her cousin’s response, but hurried away. She needed a moment purely alone so she wandered towards the Townley Gallery. She wanted to see the bust of Ramses without receiving another lecture from her hosts.
‘That is the oldest ruse in the book,’ a voice purred behind her and she barely had time to turn before a hand closed on her arm, firmly turning her back to face the large reddish-brown carved granite head and torso of the Egyptian pharaoh. ‘No, don’t turn. This way we are merely two casual viewers of this marvellous specimen of Egyptian history.’
‘What ruse?’ she asked, her heart hammering so hard at the surprise of Lucas’s appearance she was certain it could be heard in the hush of the gallery.
‘The visit to the withdrawing room while the matrons doze on the benches and the men pontificate on the importance of pillaging the treasures of other cultures. You should know better than to argue with people like Barnstable and Westerby. You are more likely to convince our rotund Prince to become a Methodist priest than dislodge those barnacles from their sense of superiority.’
‘Were you spying again, Lord Sinclair?’
‘Hardly. I went by Brook Street to inform you we have a meeting with the widow this afternoon and that you are to have your carriage stop just north of Putney Bridge at five o’clock. When your butler said you were still at the museum I decided to deliver the details of our meeting in person. Something tells me your cousin would not approve of my leaving you another note with details of an assignation which any industrious servant could open.’
‘Probably not,’ she admitted. ‘She is rather sensitive about my dealings.’
‘I sympathise. Ramses the Second was an impressive-looking fellow, no?’
He indicated the statue and she forced her attention to the pharaoh.
‘He looks far too nice for a man with such a dubious reputation.’
‘Most rulers who are remembered tend to have dubious reputations if they are not to leave history indifferent. Having seen some of his larger legacies in Egypt, I can imagine he had to exert quite a bit of force to achieve what he did and made a few enemies into the bargain.’
‘You have been to Egypt as well?’
He smiled at the awe in her voice. ‘We spent many winters there after we moved to Venice. A cousin of mine is a famous antiquarian. Is Egypt also on your list?’
‘Should it be?’
‘Certainly. After Venice, though.’
She shook her head at the absurdity. ‘Neither is likely, unfortunately.’
He remained silent for a moment, then indicated the bust. ‘So. What do you think of the human god and almighty ruler of the two Egypts?’
She turned back to Ramses. ‘He looks rather...sweet.’
‘Sweet,’ he repeated with an edge of disgust.
‘Well, he does. The way his mouth curves just a little. It’s in the eyes, as well.’
‘For heaven’s sake, this man was considered an actual god. He ruled one of the most powerful empires ever to exist and built some of the most enduring monuments ever constructed. I doubt he would have achieved that by being sweet.’
‘But he didn’t build them, did he? He must have had scores or hundreds or even thousands of minions to do that. My ancestors didn’t personally mine the ores that made us wealthy. They paid others to do it. At least I hope they did.’
‘Precisely. And those people weren’t persuaded to risk their lives in the mines because your ancestors were sweet.’
‘True. If you saw any of their portraits the last word you would associate with them is sweet—they look like they might have set the Vandals and Goths running for their mothers. But Ramses would be different, wouldn’t he? If he was regarded as a god, he would want people to consider him a father figure, someone they would want to love and who would love them in turn. I amend my assessment—he looks benevolent, not sweet. Is that more acceptable, my lord? Is that the only reason you came? Have you learnt something new?’
He sighed. ‘Do you ever lower it?’
‘Lower what?’
‘That lance you tout about with you to tilt at windmills. For once put aside your knight’s quest and accept this moment is nothing more than what is called “a visit to a museum” and serves no other purpose but to entertain and perhaps to educate. In that light I will show some of my favourite pieces which are luckily at the opposite end of the galleries from the Barnstables and the Westerbys.’
‘I must return soon or Elspeth will be concerned.’
‘Tell her you became lost.’
She smiled. ‘You have an answer for everything, don’t you?’
‘I could say the same of you. This way...’
Olivia didn’t resist as he guided her towards a series of marble statues. With each amazing creation they passed her mind slowed, emptying of concerns. There were beautiful reliefs of men and animals in silvery marble, statues of women draped in marble gowns of exquisite detail that must have taken years to execute, a host of Roman busts with milky-blank eyes and serious expressions, as if blinded and depressed by being frozen in time.
And it was quiet. Not the quiet of Spinner Street or the hush of the moors in winter, but a silence that amplified the images of a hundred worlds and tales that stretched out from each work of anonymous art.
‘We don’t know their names,’ she blurted out.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The people who created these. Can you imagine? Men, and perhaps even women, with such amazing talent and yet we have no memory of who they were. Invisible people.’
‘Are they? These men, and perhaps women as you say, were probably valued very highly for their skills at the time. You didn’t trust just anyone with your chunks of precious marble and with the decoration of your temples. If you believe in ghosts, imagine what they would feel if they saw people basking in the beauty of their creations thousands of years after their death.’
‘Well, I don’t believe in ghosts any more than you do. But you are probably right; they were unlikely to qualify as invisible.’
‘You often hark back to invisibility though I have no idea why. You are one of the least invisible people I know, Olivia Silverdale.’
‘You needn’t say it with such exasperation, Lord...’
She stopped, her words fading at the sight of a life-sized statue of a naked man clasping a discus poised before the throw, every muscle sculpted into frozen tension. His left hand was resting on the side of his right knee and was missing a finger and somehow that loss made the whole more magnificent and even reassuring, that the two thousand years that passed this statue by cost it only a finger. Like many of the other statues, it was positioned to provide some cover of modesty, but in this case it failed utterly. She stared in amazement at the full-scale depiction of a beautiful, naked male. She held her breath, half-expecting all that tension to be released in a flinging of the discus and then it would straighten and turn to present itself in all its naked glory.
‘I don’t understand society in the least,’ she said at last, her voice hushed in the silence of the gallery. ‘My godmother was once offended because Colin rolled up his sleeves in my presence when we had to rescue Twitch from a bog, yet this is perfectly acceptable? I distinctly saw a matron with two very young women in the previous gallery.’
Lucas inspected the statue, his hand curving over her forearm as if to pull her away, but he didn’t.
‘No doubt she will shield their eyes as they approach, while she looks her fill, of course. For some reason society is less exacting about its expectations from history than it is from its members; another example of hypocrisy and at least this is one we should be grateful for. This statue is called a discobolus. Do you like it?’
‘It is amazing. I wonder if the sculptor’s model looked quite so magnificent or whether he, or she, embellished. I could almost believe his skin would be warm if I touched it.’
‘Why don’t you try? There is no one in the room but us at present. Be daring.’
Be daring.
‘You are quite mad.’
‘In a sense. Go ahead. It is only stone, after all. He won’t bite. Or kick.’
Looking at the sinewy stretch of calf and thigh, the corded tension of the arm and the ridged surface of its chest, she tried to repeat those words. It is only stone. Be daring. Any other thoughts would be fanciful.
Be daring.
She shrugged and extended her hand, intending to touch only the cold marble pedestal. For some reason she reached the ankle bone and it was cold and hard as expected, but instead of drawing away, her fingers clung to the marble, trailing upwards. The glassy grain rasped against her finger pads and without warning another image interposed itself into the space between her and the discus thrower. It was a fictitious image because she could not have seen it or anything like it. It was not the statue, but Lucas. Except his skin was warm and as her hand lingered there the heat expanded through her like burgeoning fire, making it hard to breathe. She watched in utter bemusement as her fingers moved up the statue’s calf, tracing the bulge of muscle, then up over the thigh...
Lucas’s abrupt move caught her off balance. Suddenly she was two steps away from the discus thrower, Lucas’s arms pulling her back firmly against him, her body outlined by his, her bottom pressed hard against his thighs. She felt the soft brush of his lips against the side of her neck just below the ribbon securing her bonnet, his arms close around her breasts and waist, holding her for an agonising second that sent all the heat inwards like raging furies closing in on their prey. Then she was free and he was inspecting the melancholy bust of a woman bursting out of a flower.
She stood there as the room reasserted itself, only moving when an elderly couple she had seen earlier drifted in and, as they caught sight of the discus thrower, hurried through rather precipitously.
‘You are a menace, Miss Silverdale,’ Lucas said without turning.
‘You told me to touch it,’ she replied, as annoyed with him as she was with herself and her unaccountable reaction.
‘I said touch it, not make love to the blasted thing. You’re worse than Pygmalion; at least he only mooned over his statue. At least I think that’s all he did, my Ovid is rusty. Come, you should find your chaperon before I forget again that we are in a public space.’
‘Why? What would you do if we weren’t?’
He turned and she wondered if indeed some ancient magic had infested her through contact with the statue. She did feel daring, powerful...she could feel the blood moving through her, a surge and ebb of life, heat, need. She didn’t want to lower a veil over the powerful sensation of touching him. As frightening as it was, she wanted to cling to it, explore it in her mind. He had felt it, too, at least for that moment. It was obvious in the way he had pulled her to him and in the distance he now set between them, in the grooves of tension bracketing his mouth. His words came back to her. Because I want to bed you... Such urges were probably trivial for a rake but right now she wasn’t bothered by being one of many. Because right now he desired her; she felt that desire like a live flame between them, threatening to burst into a blaze.
‘Were you jealous of Mr Discus Thrower?’ she murmured, moving closer.
‘Olivia...’ His voice held a warning, but the unconscious use of her name was an admission in itself—she noticed he employed it when she crossed a line. Most often it was to warn her away from his affairs, but now she could hear a rough scrape under the liquid sound of her name. But then the cynical smile returned, erasing that momentary bridge.
‘I have not sunk so far as to be jealous of a lump of stone. You should return to your party before they begin to beat the bushes in search of you...’
‘Olivia! I have been looking everywhere for you!’ Elspeth hurried towards them, her mouth falling open as she noticed Lucas. ‘What on earth is going on here, Olivia Silverdale?’
Olivia’s cheeks stung with sudden heat. Thank goodness Elspeth had not seen that brief embrace.
‘Nothing, Elspeth. I became lost on the way back and encountered Lord Sinclair.’
Lucas laughed.
‘An atrocious liar, Miss Silverdale. I think you had best stick to dignified silence and I will remove myself before you are required to make any further implausible excuses. Good day, Lady Phelps. Five o’clock, Miss Silverdale.’
They watched him leave the gallery and Olivia waited for the inevitable.
‘Olivia Silverdale.’ Elspeth’s voice was barely a hiss. ‘We will discuss this later. Right now we must return to the others and you will be as charming as you are capable to Lord Barnstable and Lord Westerby.’
‘Elspeth, I did not arrange to meet him here.’ That at least was the truth.
‘Later. I do not wish to hear his name mentioned until we are home and then perhaps you will explain what madness has possessed you to risk—’ Elspeth cut herself off as they caught sight of Lady Barnstable. ‘Later. Now smile and prove to me you have not completely lost your mind.’
Olivia smiled and knew that, too, was a lie. Her mind, and heart, and all else were well and truly lost.