“You do?”
“Your mother would marry you to some dreary, dry vicar or other in a heartbeat and be satisfied. Mine has such high ambitions for me, nothing less than a duke will do. Why would I care for a high-ranking aristocrat? I can’t think why Mama imagines I would be happy in some drafty mausoleum of a house with dusty ancestors staring down at me from all the walls.”
“I think it’s a little harsh to paint all vicars with the same brush. Some are really quite … personable.”
Clemmie gasped.
“Gracious, one has caught your eye already! For pity’s sake, Hecate, you surely cannot see yourself as a vicar’s wife!”
“I do not! I’m only pointing out that, well, you are wrong to cast them all in the same light.”
“Same brush, same light … nothing changes what would be required of you! Worthy works, visiting the poor, hours spent consoling widows … Really, Hecate, you might as well marry the bally cathedral.”
Hecate opened her mouth to protest but thought better of it. How could she explain, even to someone who knew her so well, that the strongest argument in favor of her marrying this particular vicar would be precisely that: that she would be able to stay at the cathedral. As his wife she would live in the cloisters and might be permitted to continue to assist in the library. While she had never wanted to marry, even she had to admit to herself that John Forsyth was the first person who offered the possibility to satisfy her mother’s plans for her while also allowing her some freedom to follow her own life interests. She did not, however, expect Clemmie to understand. As far as her friend was concerned, a good marriage, a family, a secure place in society, these were things that mattered.
“Anyway”—Clemmie was smiling broadly now—“Phileas will be at the ball. Now, there’s a husband for you, Hecate. No, do not tell me I am wrong. I might end up an old spinster thanks to my mother’s unreasonable expectations, but I will see you happily installed in Kynaston Farm surrounded by a gaggle of red-haired children, running rings round a very happy Phileas. Just see if I don’t.”
Hecate arrived home to find her mother and Charlie in the drawing room. Despite the warmth of the day a fire burned in the hearth and she could smell the menthol infusion her mother insisted on subjecting her brother to.
“Where is Father?” she asked, pausing to lean over Charlie as he sat at a table working on his ship in a bottle. She hugged him, pleased to see him up and about and looking quite well.
“Hecate, you’re not helping!” he complained good-naturedly, holding up a stick in tweezers. “I have to keep my hand steady.”
“Forgive me,” she said, stepping back, smiling at him. “I should hate to delay the construction of—What is it this time, The Beagle?”
“HMS Victory,” he corrected her. “I’m going to put Admiral Nelson right … there,” he said, picking up a magnifying glass to identify the spot.
Her mother looked up from her sewing. “What on earth is that on your dress?”
Hecate glanced down and saw what her mother had noticed; a pink stain on her bodice, showing up rather markedly against the blue fabric. She rubbed at it with a thumb.
“Oh, don’t worry. It’s only ice cream.”
“Ice cream?”
“Clementine took me to the most wonderful place. You’d love it, Charlie. It’s called an ice cream parlor and they sell nothing else.”
“Just ice cream!” His eyes widened.
Her mother narrowed hers. “And were you, perhaps, required to catch it as it was thrown to you? I cannot imagine how else you come to be covered in the stuff.”
“Hardly covered, Mother. I only dropped a little. Everyone did. The sun was making it melt so quickly.”
“The su— You were eating it out of doors? In the street?”
“At a darling little table set on a terrace outside a café. All completely respectable, I promise. Now, where is Father?”
Beatrice turned back to her mending. “He is in the attic. He went up there over an hour ago in search of some bone or other. He mentioned the museum.”
The attic was Edward Cavendish’s place of retreat. His study, while very much his own domain and not somewhere his wife would linger, was nevertheless accessible, positioned as it was on the ground floor, only a few brisk strides from the drawing room. When he wished to put himself beyond the reach of domestic interruptions, it was to the attic that he fled.
Hecate climbed the broad wooden staircase and then took the narrower, creaking one that led to the top floor of the house. Here were rooms that another family might have given over to the housing of servants. The Cavendishes’ staff, however, lived out. Stella, the maid, and Mrs. Evans—known always simply as Cook—arrived six mornings a week and left after supper each day. So it was that the rooms that shouldered the roof of the house, their ceilings sloping, were entirely at the disposal of Mr. Cavendish, so that he might store his treasures. And what treasures they were, at least to him and to his daughter.
Hecate followed the sounds of rummaging, passing through the first room and using the interconnecting door that led to the second. The spaces were arranged with boxes and crates and cupboards forming blocks, so that narrow paths ran between them. The stacks were too high to see over, and the fading light of the day falling through the skylight windows set into the roof was largely obscured. Gas had not been piped to the attic, Mrs. Cavendish deeming it an unnecessary expense, so that now Hecate had to fumble through gloom, moving toward the sounds of her father’s search in the far room.
“Ah, the worker bee returns to the hive!” He greeted her without looking up, certain the only person who would venture to the attic would be his daughter. He was sorting through a crate of small, wooden boxes, lifting the lid of each to check the contents, his endeavors illuminated by the light of a large brass lamp set down on a trunk to his right.
“Mother said you were hunting for a bone.”
He straightened up then, turning to look at her, his unlit pipe clenched between his teeth. “Yes. A thigh bone, in fact. Or, more accurately, several of them.”
“Goodness! What creature can have so many?”
“A family of desert gerbils. Pachyuromys duprasi. Small fellows. Given to hopping about at great speed, more than anything resembling rotund, miniature kangaroos.”
“And they are destined for the museum?”
“They are if I can find the elusive little creatures. I know they came back with all the lesser artifacts from the 1872 dig in Mesopotamia, and I am certain this is the right collection. Alas the ink on the labels has let me down so that I am required to look inside every box. See? Here … nothing but smudges.”
Hecate took one of the boxes from him and examined the blue marks on it. “How sad, to become nothing more than part of a lesser collection of things in an unmarked receptacle, so far from home.”
“Don’t let that romantic imagination of yours do the gerbils down. Their cousins would no doubt have been eaten by snakes. How’s that for an ending? No, these will have a future, in a curious way. Mr. Squires will feature them in his Egyptian display and knowledge and understanding of the fat-tailed gerbil, to give them their common name, will be increased.” He patted his pockets in search of his tobacco pouch, failed to find it, and sucked instead on the empty pipe. “Now tell me, does your work continue well at the library?”
“Oh yes, it really is the most fascinating place, Father. Only…”
“Only…?”
“I fear I will be an old woman before Reverend Thomas allows me anywhere near the more valuable books.”
