Betina Krahn (31 page)

“
HE’S LEAVING
,”
STEPHAN
wheezed out, leaning heavily on the door handle of Celeste’s room the next morning. “The professor … going … right away.”

The clock in the entry hall hadn’t even struck eight o’clock, the next morning, and already calamity was descending on Ashton House. Celeste rushed down the stairs, her hands trembling as she tried to put combs in her hair. She stopped dead at the bottom of the steps, staring at the valise sitting by the front door. He really was leaving? She pressed a hand over her heart, feeling an awful sense of emptiness.

Titus was standing by the seaward-facing windows in the drawing room, looking out over the cove. The early-morning light spread around him like a golden fan, highlighting his dark form and even darker mood. He turned when she entered, squared his shoulders, and tugged his vest down into place.

She couldn’t keep the edge of distress from her voice. “You’re leaving?”

“I am,” he said with emphatic calm. “I came here to verify your observations of dolphins and I have certainly done that. There is no need to prolong my presence here. And I do have a position … duties and obligations.”

“I don’t want you to go”—she tried to meet his gaze but he avoided that contact and she shrank a bit more inside—“away angry. The ‘joining’ they performed—it’s not a real marriage, or valid or binding in any way. You’re not—we’re not—obligated to anything.”

“I understand the situation,” he said stiffly. “I assure you that it will have no impact on my estimate of your work or your competence.”

“And the dolphins. I’ve seen Nana and her friends conduct their dolphin ceremony before, but it never worked until last night. I’ve never seen that many dolphins together in one place, before. And the way they rose up out of the water … I haven’t a clue what it means. I know all of this must be confusing.”

“Confusing?” He gave a short, hard laugh. “Confusing? It’s nothing short of
confounding!
I came here on a simple scientific mission to verify a few observations, and last night I found myself half naked on the beach in the dead of night, being sung to by a group of senile, torch-wielding old people in togas … who proclaimed me the second coming of Adam, wrapped me in seaweed, and married me off to their Sacred Virgin in some pagan ceremony … after which I was witness to what very well may have been the world’s first ‘fish ballet’ … which, I learned afterward, was intended to somehow induce in me the gift of fluency in ‘dolphinese’ so that I could learn the secrets of a three-thousand-year-old civilization and then charge off to save the world from disease, deprivation, and depravity!” He ran both hands back through his hair, tugging on it as if considering tearing it out.

“You make it sound so … crazy,” she said in a small voice.

“Do you think it sounds sane? Or perhaps it’s me that’s gone around the bend—which wouldn’t surprise me in the least, after a fortnight in this place. I can’t be sure of anything just now—up or down, day or night, land or water—I haven’t a clue what’s real and what’s not any more! I have to
get away from here or risk losing what is left of my mental faculties!”

There he halted, staring down at the misery in her face and feeling it migrating into his own heart. He wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms and hold her until all of the pain and uncertainty faded and there was nothing left in the world but the feel of her and—

He gritted his teeth and backed away, retrieving his hat and gloves from a nearby table. “I will make a verbal report as soon as possible to the secretaries of the two royal societies, confirming your research. I expect to have a full copy of my written assessment on Edgar Cherrybottom’s desk by month’s end.”

She looked up at him with her heart in her eyes, but he was already in motion. He paused briefly by the door. For a moment it seemed he would speak, but he turned and strode out in silence.

She reached the front step in time to watch him climb into the cart with Ned and see the pony lurch into motion. Arguments and denials battled for expression, and she watched in mute anguish as the cart swayed down the rutted drive. It was some time before she could clear her vision and her throat.

“But what about our ‘collaboration’?”

“H
E’S GONE
?” R
EVEREND
A
LTARBRIGHT
asked breathlessly, as he, Daniel Tucker, the Bass brothers, and Ned Caldwell clambered out of the smith’s cart the moment it stopped, and made straight for the steps.

“He left this morning,” Lady Sophia said anxiously. She, Penelope, Anabelle, and the brigadier had seen them coming from an upstairs window and hurried down to meet them at the front doors.

“Said ‘is propers pretty as ye please, an’ wus out the door like a scalded hound,” Anabelle said, with dark emphasis on the word “hound.”

Sophia led the group into the dining room, where Stephan was laying out plates on the sideboard and lighting the warmer under the coffee server. The society members settled into the chairs around the table, looking forlorn, indeed. They were so preoccupied, in fact, that they actually failed to notice the smells of buttered crumpets and cinnamon-rich muffins wafting from the sideboard.

“What do we do now? This isn’t turning out at all as we planned,” the reverend said, seeming both surprised and distressed by the fact.

“Is it possible we got the wrong Man of Earth?” Penelope asked.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Sophia said, shaking her head. “Celeste is absolutely mad about him. And we couldn’t have found a bigger ‘landlubber’ in six counties—he said so himself. No, he’s our Man of Earth, all right.”

Silence descended for a time as they each wrestled privately with their dashed hopes and the failure of their long-awaited revelations.

“Well, what the prophecy says has to happen, right?” Daniel Tucker looked around the table. “And if it’s going to happen, then he’ll be back.”

That brought them to attention and they looked at the little haberdasher.

“Won’t he?” he said.

No one had an immediate answer but the question caused a number of heads to rise and brows to furrow in speculation.

“Is it possible,” the reverend said thoughtfully, “that we may have expected too much too soon? I mean, it may take a while for things to develop. The prophecy says what will happen, not necessarily when or how.”

“Mebee we rushed ’em a bit?” Anabelle asked, looking around the table. “They wus only just married up, an’ folks take a while to settle in. Mebee it was too much … expectin’ their ears ’ould open up after only one good hard—”

“Mebee,” Hiram interrupted, “they’ll have to
learn
that dolphin talk.”

“ ’At could take a right good bit ‘o time,” Bernard said, nodding earnestly.

“Took dashed near forever for me to get on with that Latin business,” the brigadier put in. “Pesky things, declensions. Demmed lot of trouble.”

Sophia brightened and her eyes began to dart over visions in her mind. “You know, Daniel and the reverend may be right. It’s just possible that we’ve misjudged the timing of it all. You all saw them together … he’s mad about Celeste. Yes … the more I think on it, the more certain I am. He just needs some time to sort out his thoughts and start to long for her.” She straightened in her chair, seeming confident once again that things in her corner of the universe were proceeding according to plan. “He’ll be back.” Then she glanced at the sideboard. “Now would anyone care for some breakfast? I see Maria has made her lovely cinnamon buns …”

S
MOKE DENSE ENOUGH
to bring tears to his eyes, steam whistles so piercing they made him wince, the booming yells of porters that could be heard all up and down the platform, the genteel shoving and umbrella pokes that had to be endured in the rush for the best seats … Titus had never been so glad to be miserable in his life.

The train station at Paddington was bustling and noisy and reassuringly hectic. The ride up from Brighton had been filled with families heading back to the city after a holiday by the sea; even in first class restless and annoying children were rampaging about, underfoot and climbing on every available seat and surface. What did people pay nannies for, anyway? He grumbled and buried his nose deeper in the newspaper he was trying in vain to read.

He categorically refused to let the little wretches remind him of that day in the cove with the children and the dolphins
and Titan and Celeste with her smock buttoned up all the way to the neck and her hair coming out of her braid. Nor did he allow the
shushing
of the wind, when he stepped out onto the rear platform of the car for a little air, to remind him of the continuous slosh and slap of waves against a beach. And in Paddington Station, while purchasing a ticket for his trip to Oxford a few days hence, he forbade himself the memory of dolphins’ squeals and screeches when he got stuck next to an excessively fashionable woman with a horrendous, high-pitched laugh.

He was doing very well, thank you, at not recalling anything that had happened to him in the last two weeks … until he boarded an omnibus bound for Knightsbridge and had to ride on top. A few seats down he spotted a young girl with yellow hair that glowed like spun gold in the sunlight and felt his eyes begin to burn and a surge of pure anguish erupt in his chest. Suddenly he was struggling for breath.

Stumbling from the omnibus at Harrods, he managed to navigate the familiar streets of Knightsbridge and to locate the venerable Bolton Arms Hotel, where Cardinal College faculty always stayed when in London. The desk clerk greeted him, registered him, and with a wince of concern, asked if he was feeling “quite all right.” He produced a taut facsimile of a smile.

“Of course. Never better.”

If only that had been true when he had tipped the porter and closed the door to his room. Then, he crumpled over as if his guts were killing him and groaned until he grew lucid enough to be shocked by the sound of his own pain.

Falling into a stuffed chair, he clasped his stomach and tried to breathe, tried to reassert some control over the pain. For the first time in his life he couldn’t do it; as he sat there in the chair, writhing, he realized frantically that he had no way to fight it. The more he tried to resist, the more painful it became. Exhausted from the tension and pain, and terrified by the maelstrom of emotion that accompanied it, he finally heard a whisper in his mind: “Let it wash over you, let
it do what pain must do.” Groping toward that bit of hope, he surrendered, letting it wash over him, searing his chest, clearing away the clutter to expose his conflicted soul.

He began to breathe again, slowly, painfully, as if his lungs—the whole inside of him—were raw. Sweating and exhausted, he lurched to the bed and fell facedown across it. He didn’t know who or what he was. He couldn’t even tell what was real any more, and Celeste and what had happened to him at Ashton House were to blame. The conflict between the things he experienced with her, in that place, and his usual understanding of the world had built a dangerous tension within him.

Everything in his life had been based on solid logic and intellect, and everything in his work, on impersonal manipulation of scientific data and specimens. But in her world, there were few boundaries between personal and objective, between investigation and encounter. She didn’t “do” her work, she lived it. It was a way of being and thinking so far outside the sphere of his own experience, that he had no frame of reference to deal with it.

He certainly had tried at first … forcing each experience through the grid of his intellect, dissecting, categorizing, and cataloging it in his neatly ordered mind. But eventually, there were too many experiences, too compelling to all fit inside the narrow confines he allotted them. They began to spill over, then to take over. Before long he was wandering around in an intellectual fog, drunk with sensation, greedy for new sights, sounds, experiences, and pleasures … no longer able to discriminate between what was fact and what was created out of the tantalizing attraction between him and Celeste.

The thought of her sent a wave of longing through him that renewed the hurting in his gut. Was that the source of the pain? Wanting her? He had never before had someone to talk to the way he could talk to her, never before trusted someone with the terrors of his heart and shared the shame of his fears. He had never experienced tender and playful
physical pleasures the way he had with her. She hugged him, held him, laughed with him, teased him, listened to him … even when he was as boring as mold on pudding. She had excited every nerve in his sensation-starved body and satisfied every impulse to sensual exploration and discovery he possessed.

He rolled onto his back and laid his arm across his forehead. Staring up at the ceiling, he began to admit more of his surroundings to his awareness, and heard the sounds of vehicles and horses and people in the street outside the window. She suddenly seemed a thousand miles away. She belonged to another man in another life … to someone he could never really be.

He knew well what he was, had known for years. He was a scientist, a professor, a man of letters … steeped in tradition and connected to every touchstone of scientific correctness that existed. He was a detail picker, a carcass poker, a quintessential “laboratory man.” One short, idyllic stay at the seaside with a bright, delectably uninhibited young woman couldn’t change all that.

He had to put the memories of her and his time with her away; not to be opened until someday far in the future, when they would be so faded and brittle that they wouldn’t have the power to wound him any more.

Rising, he washed his face and penned a note to Sir Parthenay and the rest of the faculty, saying he was in London and intended to complete his written report on “the dolphin matter” and drop in on the secretaries of the royal societies before returning to Oxford. Purposeful activity made him feel considerably better. It would take some time, no doubt, for this new emotionalism of his to fade, but he had no doubt that it would happen. He just had to get this writing over and return to his routine as quickly as possible.