He shared her bewilderment, her frustration.
She glanced at Jackson, lifted her skirts, and made her careful way toward the door. “Thank you, Mr. Stewart. You’ve been quite helpful.”
Jackson followed her.
“I’ll help you anytime, young lady. Inany wayyou need.”
Mr. Stewart’s farewell stopped Jackson’s progress. He swung around and stood tall, straightened his jacket, lifted a brow as he slugged his gaze like a fist into the scholar’s face. “Do not think we do not hear the untoward invitation in your words, Mr. Stewart. Miss Smith is a lady and will be treated as such.”
The scholar snorted. “She traipses about with you and another man all over the globe, and you expect me to consider her a lady?”
Gwendolyn strode across the room in a flurry and slapped him on the cheek.
He hissed and raised a hand to the spot as she stood above him like a Valkyrie, eyes blazing, fists ready to do more damage. “You are not the first to make assumptions about me, and you will not be the last. But as we may very well have to face one another socially in the future, I want you to be quite clear on where we stand. I am not a whore. I am a scholar. And when I take a man to my bed it is because I give him my heart as well, something you know nothing of because you do not have one.” She turned on her toes and swept from the room.
Jackson stayed a brief moment more. “My uncle has friends in a variety of surprising places. If you like this living, I suggest you treat Miss Smith with more respect the next time you see her.”
Jackson swung around, knocking over a pile of books, and marched for the door.
“Do you know who she is, boy?”
He stopped, nearly to the doorway.
“Didn’t recognize her at first, but I was in London when it all happened. I wonder what your father would think—”
Jackson left. He didn’t want to hear about her past from any lips other than her own.
She waited outside for him, pacing before the horses, muttering. He could not understand her words, but he knew the tone—pure rage.
He lifted her up to her saddle and helped her fix her skirts then mounted his own horse.
She took off, faster than before and with none of the heart-wrenching joy she’d shown earlier. He followed, leaning low and giving the horse its head. It raced after its companion, across hills and roads, over low bright walls and unexpected ha-has, through trees and out into the open where the crumbling castle rose before them. He stopped right behind her, flinging herself to the ground and reaching up for her. She touched him only enough to dismount the horse and find the ground, then she whipped away from him, out of breath and burning bright.
She stalked away from him, a growing shadow that rolled across the ground as clouds drew heavy and gray across the sun. It would rain, soon. He needed to get her home.
He stretched out a hand toward her. No more. A small offer of comfort. “Gwendolyn—”
She whirled, hands fisted in her skirts. Behind her, the Seastorm Castle tower—ivy-choked with black-eyed windows—rose like a knife into the bleak winter sky. “It is fine. He is not the first man to think such things of me, and he will not be the last.” She stormed into the castle. He followed her inside.
“Have you searched here yet?” she asked. “The castle?”
“No. But it would be a deuced horrid place to hide paper.”
“That is, supposedly, according to two sources, in a leather folio.”
He nodded. “There’s that. I suppose this structure is the source, was the source of my father’s mania, so it makes a certain type of poetic sense that he’d have kept it here.” And Gwendolyn needed the heavy distraction only a challenging problem could provide. “I’ll take the banquet hall over there, and you search the other side.”
The castle was rather small, and the upper floor long since caved in so that you could look up straight to the roof from the ground floor. And through the holes scattered liberally about there, to the sky. He followed the wall from the left side of the door they’d entered through, poking his fingers at lose stones and looking under rotting furniture for false bottoms. Everything proved empty. The roof in the banquet hall had survived better than in other areas, particularly over the large fireplace where his father, years ago, had placed an armchair and rug. Still there now, well maintained, surprisingly. By the gardener? No trunk or furniture to store papers or writing implements, though. No table for writing. He must have only read there… or thought.
Gwendolyn skirted round the opposite side of the room, doing the same as he, making her own methodical approach toward him.
They worked in silence but for birds chirping, the horses whinnying now and then or shaking their manes, jingling the bridles and reins.
They met in the tower. The narrow circular space rose above them.
Jackson kicked at a bit of stone. “I should have the roof fixed. All original materials, if possible, of course. And methods, t—”
“Ask me a question.” Gwendolyn stood in the very center of the tower, arms limp at her sides, her gaze blue and churning like the sea.
