Hidden Paradise

chapter TWENTY-ONE



Mac

Come with me, Mac. What a wonderfully suggestive choice of words. He arranged himself as discreetly as he could beneath his linen napkin and then stood to hand her from the table. Couples were rising now, the men—or at least those who knew the correct etiquette, which was most of them—leaping to their feet if any woman nearby looked as though she was going to stand.

He abandoned the relative safety of the linen napkin and the cover of the tablecloth, swirled the tails of his coat as he stood—he rather liked dressing this way although it embarrassed him that he did—and did his best to ignore Chris’s lewd wink. The guests had about fifteen minutes to get out of the footmen’s way as they cleared and disassembled the huge table and transferred the sugar sculpture to the sideboard. Chris and Peter ushered the crowd to the other side of the house, where the musicians were now set up on a dais, and let the guests admire the decorations and the restoration work.

“I should be honest with you,” Lou said as they strolled through the gathering. “I’m planning to sleep with someone else tonight.”

“Words an Austen heroine probably never spoke,” he said, trying to make a joke of it and not let his disappointment show. Well, he’d blown it, he knew that. It was too late. But it didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy her company. And he was touched by how excited she was about this recent discovery, whatever it was, probably something entirely geeky about the history of the house.

They headed away from the crowd and into the east wing of the house, toward Paint Boys territory. “They’re not here,” she said as they came to a padlocked door. “But they won’t mind.”

She twirled the combination lock and pushed the door open, flipping on a light switch. The room was part office, part laboratory; he’d interviewed them a few days ago here, and found a solid core of knowledge beneath Simon and Jon’s silly, flitty exteriors. Now paint cans, ladders, drop cloths and other equipment were stacked neatly in one corner and a door stood open to an adjoining room.

She grabbed his hand. “Look what we found!”

He, busy staring at her breasts in the first decent light he’d encountered so far this evening, said, “Are those your nipples?”

“Who else’s do you think they’d be? Look, Mac. They got some of the plaster down. Do you see?”

The small room was a horrible mess, a great pile of plaster and rubble on a drop cloth over a sink, unpleasant-looking iron pipes exposed. In the stone walls, three arched doorways were revealed, bricked in. “Uh, very nice. Sorry, Lou, I’m not a historian.”

“It’s a conservatory,” she said with great patience. “These were probably triple hung windows that reached all the way to the floor. You’d have plants in pots in here, jasmine or orange and lemon trees, maybe, and when the weather was warm you could put them outside to catch the sun. Beneath this flooring there are probably flagstones. And that fireplace behind you was a stove. Isn’t it gorgeous!”

“It’s great,” he said, moved by her excitement. “Will Peter and Chris restore it?”

“Absolutely. They’re after funding for an initiative to make this wing of Paradise an educational center and hire some staff.” She ran her fingertips through the pile of debris over the sink, coming up with a small white object. “Part of a clay pipe. We’re pretty sure the rebuild happened by the time our only house map was drawn up in 1841 and this pipe can date it fairly accurately. I’ll bag it up and then we can get back to the ball.”

She led the way back into the other room where she plucked a plastic baggie from a box and stowed the pipe inside. She marked the outside of the bag with the name of the room—the disaster area was already named the Conservatory, he noted—and wrote a quick note on a small sheet of paper, which she explained was acid free, with her name and the date, and which wall the item had come from. The folded note inside the sealed bag, she placed it in a large plastic tray that already held other treasures (even if they looked like garbage) from the wall—some bits of corroded metal and a fragment of blue-and-white china.

He didn’t care if she was f*cking someone else tonight. They wouldn’t see her like this, thrilled by the fabric of the house, brushing dust from her fingers and gazing at the artifacts as though they were a golden treasure trove.

“Lou,” he said. “I have to kiss you.”

“Oh, Mac,” she said, and came into his arms in a rush, knocking her headdress slightly askew, her hands coming up to his face. Maybe it was excitement over this discovery and she was kissing him because she couldn’t kiss what looked like a demolition zone, but he’d take what he could get.

He had missed her, he’d missed her feel and taste and scent, and she held his jaw, fingertips directing his mouth to hers, her lips soft against his. Her tongue touched his and he hardened immediately, wanting her skirts up—and her breasts, how could he forget those? He pressed a nipple against his palm, so hard and sweet. She wore nothing under that damned sexy gown, and he had a finger up her leg and inside her—real crass, but her excited whimper and wetness told him she didn’t mind a bit.

But then she slapped at him, pushing him away, one hand grabbing at her head. “No! Oh, no! Stop!”

“What?”

She fell to her knees on the wooden floor, clawing at the floorboard like a madwoman. “Oh, no!” she said again.

“Honey, tell me what’s wrong.”

“My necklace!”

“I didn’t think you were wearing one.”

“On my headdress. I put my necklace on it and it’s fallen off. It’s gone between the floorboards. Julian gave it to me.” She looked around wildly and wiped her face with her hand, leaving a smear of plaster dust. “Get me the crowbar.”

Get me the crowbar. Not the most romantic words ever spoken to him, and his iron-hard erection would probably serve just as well, but he grabbed a crowbar from the tools hung on the wall. He offered to help, but she waved him away, and set to prying up the wooden floorboard. “The Paint Boys will be mad at me,” she said, heaving at it with a screech of nails. “I should have asked them to do this.”

He watched her, rather enjoying the sight of a Regency lady wielding a crowbar—nicely toned arms, he noted—and bent to help lift the floorboard aside. “Wait,” he said, and spread his handkerchief on the floor for her to kneel on.

“Thanks.” She was already delving into the dark space and let out a sneeze. “Centuries of dust.” Her hand emerged with a handful of garbage, the gold chain and ruby shining in its midst.

“What the hell’s that?” he said.

She backed off his handkerchief, still on her knees, and spread the trash over the clean white linen. “Probably a rat’s nest.”

His first reaction was to say “yuk,” but she looked as though she’d found the Holy Grail. She touched the stuff with her fingertips, very delicately, and his hard-on, which had subsided a little, surprised him by coming back full force.

“Look,” she said.

He looked. A tangle of hair or straw, a scrap of fabric, something black and wrinkled he couldn’t identify, and a scrap of paper with writing on it.

“What’s the black thing?” he said.

“Probably a piece of mummified fruit, like a piece of orange peel. Something organic, it might even be leather. Look, Mac. Just look.”

“I’m looking,” he said, but wondering why she found it so exciting. It must be something like the bricked-in arches that he just didn’t have an instinct for.

Still gazing at her prize, she said, “On the table to your left. White cotton gloves. And one of those plastic bags with a side pocket.”

He handed her all she asked for. She slipped on the gloves and pushed the hair, or whatever the fibrous stuff was, aside with one finger to reveal the piece of paper. “Don’t you recognize this, Mac?”

He reached out to touch it, but she snapped, “No! Get some gloves on!”

As he slipped on a pair of gloves—best to humor the lady under the circumstances—she carefully lifted the handkerchief and its gruesome contents onto the table. She picked her necklace clear and fastened it around her neck. “Look,” she said, her voice full of awe. She was crying, not as she had before when she thought she’d lost her necklace, but as though intensely moved. “Don’t you recognize that writing?”

He squinted at the few words in black ink—hardly faded, he thought, probably since it had been hidden in the dark so long—and it did look vaguely familiar.

“There’s a signature,” she said. “Initials.”

JA

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“It’s hers,” she said. “It’s how she signed her letters.”

He broke the silence by reading the writing. “‘Passion I bear for you’—at least, I guess it’s you even though the U is missing. And ‘inconstancy you have.’ Strong words.”

“I think there’s an E before it. ‘The inconstancy,’ maybe? A handwriting expert would be able to tell. And of course whatever the full sentence was depends on the size of the piece of paper she used, and…so many things.”

She prodded at the piece of fabric, mustard-yellow-and-blue pattern on a buff background. “Probably an Indian cotton block print. Someone should be able to date that. Look how fresh the colors are. It’s amazing, Mac. It’s a time capsule. This could change everything we know about Austen.”

He couldn’t resist his own growing excitement. “Give me an exclusive, Lou,” he blurted.

“What? Oh, yes. Sure. Sorry, I forgot you’re a journalist. It could be years. Paper, ink, handwriting analysis will have to be done, DNA testing—”

“DNA?” he said. But then he realized the stuff he’d thought was straw was tied with a blackened ribbon.

“The dye from the ribbon has deteriorated, and it or something else has altered the chemical structure, but I’m fairly sure this is human hair. Her hair. Or maybe his—she was returning her unfaithful lover’s lock of hair.” She shook her head. “Okay, let’s think, Mac. We can’t tell anyone about this. Not even Peter and Chris, for the moment. I need to call my dissertation advisor. She’s the best person I can think of to talk about it, figure out how to move forward. But let’s get it bagged up first.”

She slid everything into the plastic bag and frowned in annoyance. “They don’t even have a tray for the underfloor of this room.” She slipped off her gloves and reached for one of the sheets of acid-free paper. “We’ll measure where it lay from the southeast corner of the room. But first let’s get this floorboard back.”

Since he seemed to have been delegated to her assistant, he quite happily hammered the floorboard home while she crawled around with a tape measure, getting her beautiful gown quite dusty in the process. She wrote a huge amount of notes on the paper before sealing it into the pouch on the side of the bag and then placed it into a cardboard box. The box, with her name written on it, went into a file cabinet.

She kicked dust over the floorboard, treading it in so that it looked indistinguishable from the rest of the floor.

“Okay,” she said, brushing at her skirts. “You’re pretty dirty, too. We’d better get ourselves cleaned up, and, oh goodness, I think I’ve stood Peter up for the first dance.” She shook her head. “Oh, what the hell. This is huge, Mac. Just huge. It’s going to change everything. For you, for me—”

He loved her like this, the ardent scholar, the seeker of truth.

Hell, he loved her.

“For us?” he couldn’t resist but ask.

“We’ll be colleagues,” she said, looking at him hesitantly. “We’ll see.”

It was better than absolutely not, so he’d take it.

She glanced at the file cabinet. “I think it should be safe here.”

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“Press. They’re all over the house and I don’t want the Paint Boys finding it if they do any tours or interviews on the restoration. It should be kept stable, but it’s fine for now.” She closed the file cabinet door. “You’ve hardly said a word. Are you okay?”

“I love you,” he said. He didn’t mean to tell her, not here, like this. Not after he’d screwed things up with her and she’d gone and f*cked Rob—he was pretty sure that was who it was, unless she was planning to cavort with the Paint Boys. But she had said she was sleeping with “someone else,” singular. But anyway… “I love you, Lou.”

Her usual worried expression returned. “I can’t—”

“No,” he hurried to say, before she could go on, “it’s not fair of me, not after this. It’s the wrong time.” He picked up the handkerchief, shaking it out, not really wanting to fold it back into his pockets after it had housed a rat’s nest, even one with possible major literary associations. “Just know that whoever this other guy is, I’ll beat the shit out of him if he hurts you or doesn’t treat you right. Turn around, and I’ll swipe the dust off you.”

She was the one who fell silent now, other than directing him to a box of wipes which they used to clean their faces—she had a smear of plaster dust on her nose and a gray smudge of dirt on her chin and he wasn’t much better.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to rain on your parade.”

“You’re not. I’m just sorry I can’t— Well, that things went wrong for us.”

“Me, too.”

They inspected each other under the harsh fluorescent light. She insisted they give their hands a final cleansing with the wipes, and then they agreed they were clean enough for candlelight.

Lou gave one more longing glance at the file cabinet and they left the room, clicking the lock closed.

“So,” he said as they walked back toward the ball, “Rob’s a bit young for you, isn’t he?”

“I like him. He’s smart, kind and sexy.”

So am I. “Well, if that’s what you want.”

“It is.”

Back off, Salazar. He tried to turn his thoughts to the story, when he could break it, how, who he could offer it to. He should talk to Peter and Chris, when Lou was okay with sharing this with them, persuade them to put the money up to rush the DNA tests. This is huge. He could probably get a job anywhere after this if he handled it right. He and Lou, they’d make a good team.

“Who do you think Jane’s guy was?” he asked her.

“Shh!” she looked around as though paparazzi lurked in the paneling. “There must be some sort of documentation from local diaries or collections of letters, who was visiting whom at the time. On the other hand, those have never come up to confirm any of the traditional beliefs that Austen stayed here, either. If she was writing to him, he might have had no connections with the area. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t any of the usual candidates, certainly not Tom Lefroy who was too early. I think pop culture has blown that flirtation way out of proportion.”

“Except that Lefroy said he was in love with her.”

“Sure, years later when she was a famous authoress. Wouldn’t you have claimed you were in love with her? And I don’t think it was the Reverend Blackall, the clergyman she may have fallen in love with in Devon, for instance, when she was in her late twenties.”

“Why not?”

“Gut instinct. I know clergymen were very worldly, but ‘passion’ and ‘inconstancy’—as you said, strong language. It suggests something bad, a betrayal, like Marianne and Willoughby. And it may have been the sort of letter you write and then tear up. Or a false start—the back was blank. Paper was very expensive then. You filled every scrap when you wrote.”

“Why did it survive, then?”

She shrugged and looked troubled for a moment. “I guess she tore it up and threw it into a fireplace that was unlit. But the rat got there before the housemaid. Mac, you’re a pretty tough guy, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Why?”

She grinned, wicked and disarming. “Well, you may have noticed I was rather insistent about using those antibacterial wipes.”

“So?”

“The black thing I told you might be orange peel or leather had a tail. It was probably a dead baby rat.”

His stomach turned. “Oh, my God. I think I’m going to throw up.” He tore the handkerchief from his pocket and threw it away as far as he could. “You knew that all along?”

“Sure. I didn’t want to gross you out.”

“You’ve grossed me out now. That’s disgusting.”

They could hear the musicians now and see the dancers, most of whom were following the steps far better than they ever did.

She was laughing like a fool.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re absolutely certain you’re going to sleep with Rob tonight?”

She smiled up at him and nodded. “I promised to teach him all about oral sex.”

“Oh, my God. First the rat and now this. This is going beyond normal revenge.” He shook his head and took a deep breath. “Lou, I’m about to say something to you that no Austen hero ever said.”

“Yeah?”

“You said you were interested in a threesome.”

“I don’t know if interested is the right word.”

“Oh, what the f*ck. Let me join you and Rob, Lou. Have both of us, and to hell with it.”