“You’ve forgottenJermynMerryhew!” Ariana reminded him. “He would have been marquess when his father died instead of that distant relative who crept in to take everything.”
“There wasn’t much to take.”
“Stop harping on irrelevancies! The point is, Jermyn dillydallied about marrying, assuming he’d liveto a good age, and then popped off from eating bad shellfish.”
“I don’t like shellfish.”
“As a result,” Ariana persisted, “my friend Hermione lost her home. If Jermyn had done as he ought and married and had a son, all would have been well.”
“If, if, if! If I had younger brothers, you wouldn’t be raking me over the coals.” Then he looked uncomfortably at his mother.
“Don’t be crestfallen, dear. I would have welcomed more children, but God did not provide. In this case we must trust in his benevolence.”
“We should be able to trust in Norris’s good sense.”
“Then we should be able to trust your willingness to sacrifice in the cause.”
Her brother’s triumphant smirk made Ariana want to hit him, which wasn’t unusual. Only eighteen months lay between them, but she was the older and he the male and heir. There’d been rivalry between them all their lives. Typical of Norris to extend it into a matter of life and death.
Mother and brother were now both looking at her.
“It’s not up to me,” she protested. “Only you can produce the necessary heir, Norris. Can you truly bear the thought of Uncle Paul succeeding you? Can you? He’d evict Mama from her home, and then loot Boxstall of everything of value to throw away at the gaming tables. He might even find a way to break the entail and sell it entire.”
“That might be the best outcome,” Lady Langton said sadly. “I could abide our home belonging to another, but I would very much dislike to see it pillaged.”
Ariana hurried to sit beside her and take her intoher arms. “Neither will happen, Mama. I promise. We only need Norris to marry.”
“Which now lies in your hands,” her brother said, arms folded.
Ariana knew the signs. He was generally of an amiable disposition, but he could be intolerably stubborn. Tears wouldn’t move him, and she’d hate to try them. He heeded their mother, however, so Ariana decided to leave the field to her. She rose, saying, “I will leave you to come to your senses,” and made as dignified an exit as she could when tears of fear and frustration threatened.
She paused in the corridor to blow her nose. How could her brother be soblind? Boxstall was so beautiful and full of treasures, but above all, it was their home. This part of the upstairs corridor was open to the hall below, with its gleaming wooden floor and walls loaded with paintings purchased by her ancestors, every picture an old friend.
Many were of little significance or value, but there were a Poussin, a Rembrandt, and a Rubens. She and her father had sometimes talked of turning one or two rooms into galleries in order to show off the best pieces.
Thought of her father turned her steps toward the library, their favorite haunt. Neither Norris nor her mother was bookish, so that had been their special place. Once she’d closed the door behind her, she was surrounded by the comforting scent and presence of books, but also by the ambience of sadness that had haunted the room for her since her father’s death two years ago.
From her earliest years she’d spent time here with him exploring the wonderful world of books. He’d purchased some specifically for the illustrations that would please a child, but as she’d grown, she’d become his true companion on the literary explorations he’d so loved.
Papa had never had the slightest desire to travel and had even resented his times in London attending Parliament. However, when he’d visited London, he’d always returned with a carriage full of books on foreign lands and he and she had plunged into new journeys.
His particular treasures were always works about foreign parts in the past—Greece, Persia, India, and recently Egypt. He especially liked books that contained illustrations that reconstructed ruins in their glory days.
“See,” he would say to her as they explored new acquisitions. “If we traveled to Greece, we could only see crumbling ruins, but here we can visit Athens in all its grandeur.”
If he couldn’t find a drawn reconstruction, he’d commission one. Some he’d had hung in frames around the house, but he’d displayed others here in a specially made glass-topped case.
Ariana went to it now to change the picture—a daily ritual she’d taken over when her father died. She looked through the folio, chose a print of the temple of Apollo in Corinth, and exchanged it for the one in the case.
Had that temple ever looked like that? Had the priests and worshippers been exactly as shown? It didn’t matter. Her father had found all ruins sad and distressing. He’d spoken of rebuilding medieval Boxstall Priory from the mossy remnants of stone walls, but it had always been too challenging a project. Instead he’d planted trees to screen it from view.
She sadly turned the large globe on which they’d traced their travels, and stroked a hand along the map table, where they’d spread charts to mark a particular journey. She’d not had the heart to do that since he’d been gone. In truth, she’d abandoned most of their sharedexplorations and concentrated on the Egyptian ones, for they were the ones that had most captured her imagination.
They had all the volumes to date of theDescription de l’Égypte, written by French scholars who’d accompanied Napoleon on his Egyptian campaigns. Her father had commissioned a monumental pedestal stand able to hold one of the twelve volumes open, and the rest closed beneath. Each book was a yard tall and three-quarters of a yard wide, but packed with wonderful illustrations and descriptions.
There were more volumes to come, but each was expensive and she wasn’t sure Norris would purchase them. If not, she would. Her portion was ample. Suddenly it hit her that if her brother died without a son, she’d lose not only her home but access to this library. In fact, the library would cease to be.
Until this moment the imagined loss had been of the earldom’s houses and estates. She’d accepted that the contents would also go, but not the books. This wonderful collection would be shipped off to an auction house and scattered to the wind. TheDescription de l’Égyptewould be the first to go, because it would command a high price. Each volume had been printed in a limited edition of one thousand copies.
