Had he been the one to get it all wrong all along?
Chapter Twenty-One
Dig Day 803: one brooch, fourteen shards of pottery—or perhaps it was thirteen? Or even sixteen...
It had been an odd day. So odd that even at this late hour she wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. There were so many things to think about. So much indecision it was all sending her mad. She didn’t have all the answers—but what she did know with complete certainty was that she needed Max.
‘Of course, Miranda was the worst kind of seductress.’ After two evenings left to their own devices while the men played billiards, they had exhausted all conversation about the charade they were performing for the antiquarians and had resorted to discussing the one thing that inextricably bound them.
Him.
‘Such a practised flirt never walked the earth before. All those calculated, heated glances, the rehearsed grace, the confident allure and that classical, effortless beauty... She was used to men dissolving in a puddle at her feet. She had been declared an Incomparable two Seasons before and wielded that title with brutal and well-aimed precision. Every man wanted her, so it was hardly a surprise she snared my brother. He didn’t stand a chance against all her obvious charms.’
It was all well and good hating Miranda on principle, but that didn’t help Effie’s cause on a practical level. If Miranda was the sort of woman he went for, she had little in her own arsenal to compete with the memory. Effie wasn’t a seductress or an Incomparable or in possession of classical and effortless beauty. She knew she was considered pretty, as that had been a frequent compliment over the years before her odd personality and manner sent the gentleman who had hastily bestowed the compliment running the obligatory mile to get away from her.
She certainly wasn’t graceful, was woefully incapable of flirting and the less said about her lack of grace the better. It didn’t bode well for her quest to convince Max they should be more than friends. ‘He must have loved her a great deal.’
Eleanor scoffed and shook her head. ‘He might think he did, but that wasn’t love. It was lust. With a healthy dash of one-upmanship. Pure and simple.’ Eleanor drained the last dregs of her fourth sherry and waved the empty glass around. ‘The trouble with my brother is he has always been competitive. He cannot stop himself. Miranda wastheprize every bachelor in London wanted to win and he made it his mission to hoist the trophy. And the fool had no clue she made it easy for him because he was a trophy, too. The handsome, decorated naval hero who just happened to be in line to inherit all this alongside an earldom.’
She stifled a yawn and leaned closer. ‘It all happened too fast, if you ask me.’
‘Really?’
‘He was given extended shore leave while his ship was in dry dock at Portsmouth, fresh from the Battle of Vis and sporting a shiny new victor’s medal to make the ladies swoon, and he arrived in London to a hero’s welcome. Obviously, that set him a notch above all her battalions of eager suitors and she played him like a fiddle. It was a whirlwind romance.’ The whirlwind was a little slurred, but Effie was in no mood to judge. Poor Eleanor had performed a minor miracle in their absence today and had served a veritable banquet for dinner. It was a testament to her strong character she wasn’t swigging the stuff directly from the bottle. Something Effie was sorely tempted to do to simply calm her nerves.
‘How fast a whirlwind was it?’ Not that Effie really needed to know. She was intimidated enough by the seductive Miranda already without knowing how swiftly she had captured Max’s heart.
‘Fast. He proposed after only three weeks.’ Effie had known him for a good seven and had only achieved two kisses. Or one kiss and an over-excited bumping of faces in a confined space. And she still had no earthly idea where she stood. ‘The pair of them were the talk of the ballrooms, which suited her very well and wherever he went the men slapped him on the back and congratulated him on his impressive conquest. Then he got deployed to the Americas and she got to play the tragically stoic heroine as she waved him off from the dock. Miranda wept such pretty tears while she waved that exquisite silk handkerchief. I always distrusted that about her. When I cry, my entire face collapses. I look as though I’ve been smashed in the face with a shovel.’
‘So do I.’
‘And there is no shame in that, Effie. Those are real tears. Everything about Miranda was fake. Calculated. With my cynical hat on, I would even go as far as saying she’d been out for two Seasons and, with no wealthy duke on the horizon, the sands of time were running out. There is only so long one can be an Incomparable before the bloom fades from the rose.’
‘There is?’ The world of ballrooms and Seasons and society was a mystery to her. Her academic father had also thought them frivolous and with no mother figure in her life, or even a distant Nithercott aunt somewhere, there was nobody around to organise one. All she had been to were a couple of faculty dances at Cambridge and the local assembly. Neither of which she had bothered attending in years because she had nobody to attend them with.
‘She was four and twenty! That isoldfor a debutante.’ Which made Effie positively ancient by comparison. Yet another blow to her fragile confidence. How exactly was she supposed to compete with all that?
Eleanor yawned again as the clock chimed midnight. ‘I suppose we should call it a night. The gentlemen are clearly having too much boisterous fun to be rejoining us any time soon and I have to be up at the crack of dawn. And so do you. But we can chalk today up as a success though, can’t we?’
‘Indeed. A resounding success.’ Effie supposed she should mark it up as a triumph. After a long day of digging Percy was beside himself for finding the brooch, Lord Denby was clearly impressed with everything despite his naturally pessimistic character and, because his crony was, so was Lord Whittlesey, therefore Effie should have been delighted the eminent antiquarians all agreed she—or rather Max—had discovered something amazing. Doubting Denby had also sent her sketches of the shield to the printers by express to ensure they were added to the article alongside an additional couple of paragraphs—ostensibly hastily written by Max as well—to ensure everything was included before they published it for the world. But she was too distracted to give much of a care, truth be told. Distracted by all her racing thoughts and feelings. All churned up by that phenomenal kiss yesterday and vehemently refusing to go away.
She and Max hadn’t discussed it. There hadn’t been either the time or the opportunity, entirely thanks to the visiting antiquarians who had monopolised them since breakfast. It had been hard to concentrate on the task at hand when her mind was so full of him and desperately wondering if there was, or could ever be, a them.
What exactly did that kiss mean?
Because to her it already meant something more than lust. It had made her begin to crave things from Max which went beyond a kiss and her overactive mind was determined to plan the next few years rather than the next few hours. Racing ahead again before reality could catch it up.
‘Only another full day to get through and we can wave them off from the doorstep.’ The sands of time were clearly running out for Effie, too. She would leave hot on the heels of the antiquarians and, at this rate, without the promised third kiss she had been craving since last night or any clue how Max felt about her. ‘And we’ll be reading your work in that funny-sounding journal and you’ll be the talk of the antiquarian world.’
‘Well, Max will.’ A sacrifice she had accepted for the sake of knowledge when she had signed his name instead of hers. That didn’t make it any easier to swallow and the blatant unfairness of the world still galled.
‘But you will know it is yours and so do we. Perhaps in a few years, when times have changed, you will get the credit you deserve. Max will tell them the truth when the time comes, so you do not need to worry on that score. He might have abysmal taste in fiancées, but he is an honourable man to his core.’
He was. And a frustratingly difficult one to read.
Effie saw Eleanor to her door and then retreated into her own room to wait. No matter what time the dratted game of billiards finished, or how exhausted she felt from a day spent largely on edge, she needed to talk to Max alone to assess the lay of the land. She needed to know where she stood, although after her conversation with his sister, the spectre of Miranda now hovered ominously. How exactly was she supposed to compete with that?
She stared at her reflection in the dressing table mirror and tried to ignore her racing pulse.
