The landlady turned her head. “They said yes!”
Suddenly, a small crowd of people in nightclothes and dressing gowns swarmed the corridor, all with paper in hand and questions bursting excitedly from their lips. Do you think the caladrius is in Hathersage? How can I become an opthologist like you? When are you getting married?
Beth and Devon signed their names, and smiled, and provided the kind of opaque responses professors are skilled at giving when they don’t have a clue how to answer. After some ten minutes, every item was autographed, the caladrius declared practically a native of the village, Devon’s physique contemplated almost to the degree of tape measures being produced, and the crowd shuffled away, leaving Beth to sag against the doorframe while Devon rubbed his face wearily.
“Come now, let’s get you properly settled,” the landlady said with a beckoning gesture. As Devon turned away to get the suitcases, she leaned closer to Beth. “Don’t worry, dear, discretion is our motto at Chattering Elm Cottage. I won’t breathe a word about your being here. By the way, do you have plans for a big church wedding? Or perhaps an intimate ceremony in a garden?”
Beth could practically see the headline in tomorrow’s newspaper. She managed not to sigh. “Conjecture on the potential connubial eventualities of our currently emergent relational situation in all its frangibility would be inadvisably precipitate and, to any perspicacious individual, contraindicated by prudence. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Er…” The landlady’s expression fell slack.
Devon stepped into the dazed silence, carrying both suitcases. “Shall we?” he asked, nodding toward the corridor.
They were led downstairs to a room near the back of the house. It proved to be warm and comfortable, lit by gas lamps and smelling of freshly laundered sheets.
It was also clearly the bedroom of a child.
“My daughter was happy to volunteer her room for the night,” the landlady said as they stared at the toys cluttering the edges of the room, the frilly pink curtains, and the bedspread printed with kittens and butterflies. Beth felt herself lose most of her color, at least half her appetite, and every last fragment of her sexual desire.
“Thank you,” she said as good manners marched triumphantly back into her brain (wiping their feet first, of course). Visions of Devon pinning her against a wall and expertly denuding her of her virginity skulked away to weep quietly in a dark corner of her subconscious.
“I’ll bring you a supper tray, shall I?” the landlady suggested. “It’s bangers and mash tonight.”
Devon muttered something that sounded suspiciously like not anymore, it’s not, but the landlady only smiled obliviously and dashed off, newspaper pressed against her heart, leaving the ornithologists drooping more than blackbirds in a rainstorm.
Chapter Eighteen
Ornithology is not all running around with nets. Sometimes you need to sit quietly and watch a bird’s heart unfurl before its wings do.
Birds Through a Sherry Glass, H.A. Quirm
The night’s breeze intensified, lamenting the clouded moon in a low, aching voice that made the lamplight tremble. Beth and Devon sat cross-legged on the child’s bed, eating dinner from plates in their laps. Beth had turned shy, so they managed no more than a halting conversation about the food and weather until Devon could hardly breathe from boredom.
“I suppose your childhood bedroom looked like this,” he said, just for something to discuss that did not involve squalls or sausages. But it was apparently the worst comment he could have made, judging from Beth’s suddenly blanched expression.
“Not exactly,” she murmured. Setting aside her mostly empty plate, she rubbed her hands against her thighs, staring so intently at the wall beyond Devon’s shoulder that he might have supposed the caladrius perched there.
A gentleman would have changed the subject. And Devon really wanted to believe he had at least a few gentlemanlike attributes somewhere inside him, even if they looked like a ruined temple half-lost behind rotting vines. But he’d also spent many of his formative years in America, where changing the subject just when things were finally getting interesting would have led to most of the country’s history not happening.
“Oh?” he asked, and putting a bite of sausage in his mouth, he just looked at her, waiting for an answer. He’d done the same thing often enough with his students to be confident it would work—and sure enough, after a fraught moment, she surrendered.
“I was sent to boarding school in Surrey when I was five. Youngest student, most clever, et cetera. That meant a dormitory bedroom, of course. Altogether without frills, and not a dab of pink anywhere in sight.”
She became occupied with a loose thread on her dress, and Devon could hear in the brittle silence all the things she’d omitted from her tale, the grief and loneliness and struggle. He speared another sausage bite and said as he lifted it to his mouth, “Plenty of birds, though, I imagine.”
That made her smile, as he hoped it would. “Oh yes, birds everywhere. Surrey is a treasure trove of them.” She sighed happily, her gaze softening as she remembered. Then she blinked, turning that heavenly look on him, and any control Devon felt he had over the conversation completely unraveled, becoming a tangle of emotion deep inside his heart.
“Your eyes are like a sky spun by wild and beautiful wings,” he said.
She stared at him with alarmed confusion. “My eyes are spinning?”
He grinned. “No, spun as in weaving, magic weav— I’m trying to be charming here.”
And while she blushed endearingly and almost ripped the loose thread right out of her dress, he took their plates and tilted until he could set them on the bedside cabinet. Straightening again, he leaned forward and kissed her.
She stiffened for the smallest moment but did not pull away, and as he coaxed her lips apart, everything in her eased, soft, warm, and trembling on the same verge of sexual desperation where he was trying to balance as well. They couldn’t attend to it in a child’s bed, however; not even he was that depraved. So he ended the kiss gently and pressed his mouth instead against her forehead, making her sigh.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he whispered, moving away—
And she caught him, her ink-stained fingers clutching his arms with an ornithologist’s strength. “It’s a cold night,” she said. “Logic dictates we share the bed. If we remain clothed, it will be quite safe.”
He raised an eyebrow at that. “Darling, someone should have included at least a little of the humanities in your education.”
“I trust you,” she insisted, proving that he’d corrupted her indeed, considering she was able to say something so villainous. His wretched, malnourished heart dropped to its knees and began weeping. He flinched, trying not to leap off the bed and run screaming into the night.
“It’s cold,” she repeated, her voice hushed. And Devon heard it then—what she really meant. What she hid behind her nice manners and apologies. The same thing he hid behind his cynicism: deep loneliness and longing for affinity.
People called him a genius, but he didn’t see it that way. He certainly didn’t feel superior to anyone. It was only that his brain seemed to operate on a different, far less comfortable frequency than others’. Talk to them about a bird in flight and they’d describe wings, but he’d learned not to say anything about lift-induced vortices and ballistic trajectories, or the exhilaration of his soul as he watched fire-breathing eagles or plain seagulls take to the sky. Even other ornithologists ran out of interest after a while. So he moved through the world in a constant state of dissatisfaction, looking for some kind of connection by making people laugh, and rescuing them from dangerous birds, and having a lot of sex. It never worked, though, because he was only giving a small part of himself, and no one asked for more. Except his professors, of course—they could not get enough of his passion for learning. But they also spent years trying to extinguish his playfulness, so it was really just the same coin, different side. And while his cousins, Gabriel and Amelia, could follow the sharp angles of his thoughts, he’d scarcely seen them since being sent to America at fourteen. Besides, neither of them cared about birds, the heart of his heart.
Beth was the first person he’d met who truly spoke his language. Her presence made the world finally slide into place for him. She was beautiful, unconsciously sexy, and he was drawn to that, of course, but it was only a minor part of how he felt. His attraction to her was so intensely intellectual it affected his very brain function, until it seemed like he walked for her, breathed for her, got hard just hearing her say the words mandibular rostrum.
With a sigh, he gathered her into his arms. “Let’s be warm together, then,” he said, and laid them down together on the bed. Some wriggling ensued, some kicking of feet, as they pushed the bedding back, then hauled it up again to cover them. It was provoking, to say the least, but the laughter was what really got to him, the comradeship as they wrangled blankets and squirmed on pillows and tried to arrange their clothes. Intellectualism gave way to sweet goofiness, and by the time they settled together, Devon reckoned he’d never been so aroused. But Beth was lavender-scented softness in his arms, and he wanted that more than sexual release. He wanted her, his clever angel, his rival, his friend.
Besides, no man could comfortably make love to a woman with that row of china-faced, ringleted dolls smiling menacingly down at him from the shelf beside the bed.
At last, quiet, and nestled together in more cozy warmth than was actually pleasant, they looked at each other in the amber lamplight. The world seemed to melt away. Devon could not have said exactly what he saw in Beth’s eyes that kept him absorbed, only that it felt like everything.
