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“She understood the necessity! She resented what made the necessity necessary.” Elfreda gulped as Papa’s brows lowered. But if he’d read through Grandmama’s diaries, as well as her poems, he’d know that she’d kept accounts and disapproved of her husband’s spending.
Grandpapa had drained the family coffers carting full-grown oaks from Wiltshire to plant in his own sacred grove. Printing one thousand gilt-edged, lavishly illustrated copies of his final book, Druid Temples and Their Origins. Nobody had ever bought one. They’d been stacked for decades in the gatehouse.
“You presume to understand?” Papa gripped the collar of his greatcoat with both hands. “You?”
Elfreda held her tongue.
After a long moment, Papa’s glare drifted away from her, toward the windows, which rattled with wind and rain.
“I resent that glorified fishmonger,” he growled. “John Redmayne. He’s to blame. He swore he’d preserve the abbey. Instead, he built his crass, common-rate manor right on top of it. And now his grandson, the scheming Major, comes sniffing around my property. Mark me. He’s a fox, and a fox always leads with his nose. He wants this hall. He wants to smother it with stucco, and carpets, and wallpapers. Destroy its character and change its name.”
“That will never happen,” soothed Elfreda. Despite herself, she pictured Georgina with her fox-colored hair slinking through the house.
“Never.” Papa agreed, but his glare was all for her again. “He won’t. He can’t. Remember that. Should he prevail with you, I shall raise my voice to declare to one and all, I have no such daughter.”
Disquiet swept through her. It was horrible to hear Papa disavow her, even hypothetically, even knowing he misperceived the Major’s threat in every way.
She shifted, restless, poised to tell him he’d met the other Redmayne, the more dreadful one, the girl, but something held her back, the desire to spare his pride, and spare herself his outburst.
Surely not the desire to protect Georgina.
“He will not prevail,” she murmured. “I will always be your daughter.”
Papa’s expression softened. “Yes, child. And I would not part with you, even to a man more worthy. You know you have my preference among your sisters.”
He’d said as much before, many times, and in the past, she’d reveled in his regard, and felt its rightness. It meant he recognized her as cut from the same cloth.
Tonight, she felt her disquiet increase.
She had to give herself a mental shove to regain her focus. She shuffled the papers again. These papers deserved her attention, and his.
“This section.” She cleared her throat. “This section about the wretched heathen men. It says they made their camp not a mile from the abbey. They left behind a hoard, and two nuns discovered it. They hid it again, fearing the army would return. What if it’s still there? A hoard, Papa. Imagine the objects.”
In the little silence that followed, she perused Papa’s person for hints of excitement. The tilt of his head was promising.
He reached out and tugged the papers from her hands. He walked closer to the nearest candle, and for a long, tense moment, he read.
Finally, he looked up.
“Drivel. Rubbish. Balderdash.”
Elfreda’s teeth sank into her lower lip. She felt her heart bump each rib on its painful descent toward her stomach.
“Your face is long as a parsnip.” Papa gave a sudden laugh. “Well, I have news that will put more apple in your cheeks. William Aubin-Aubrey is coming to Derbyshire. I had a letter this afternoon. He praised the diagrams of the tumuli in Two Dissertations. And promised to back me for president.”
“Mr. Aubin-Aubrey praised the diagrams?” Elfreda’s hands clapped together. William Aubin-Aubrey was known as the Barrow Prince. He was one of the younger Fellows, a man with a true genius for antiquity, the author of the book she kept on her bedside table, Sepulchral Anecdotes. And he’d praised the diagrams—her diagrams! For she’d drawn almost all of them, the ones in her dissertation, and most of the ones in Papa’s.
“Will you tell him about the camp on the bluff?” Her face was all apples now. “Papa, will he dig with us?”
Papa tossed Grandmama’s papers onto the library table. “He plans to open barrows in the Peak. I’ve been invited to go with him, and I’d intended to extend the invitation to you. But if you’d rather chase after figments, you are welcome to stay here and swoon over pebbles and nuns.”
“It wasn’t a pebble.” Elfreda heard the pleading note in her voice. “And Mr. Aubin-Aubrey will—”
“Here.” Papa strode across the room and tugged a book from the shelf. “Take this, to cleanse your mind. I will test your declensions in the morning.”
The book was Edward Thwaites’s Grammatica Anglo-Saxonica.
Elfreda took it. But when the clock chimed midnight, she crept into the library and retrieved Grandmama’s papers, and it was those papers she read, until her candle stub burned out.
