‘That is not in Papa’s skill set.’
She wheeled away and began to pirouette across the floor, and after a moment Emilia emerged draped in tinsel. When Ben had gone and Emilia was bent over the saucepan of cider, adding things and tasting, he took the opportunity to say, so casually that anyone listening would assume he had not been testing it out for some time to see how it would be received, a trick which was definitely within his skill set, ‘I might attend this meeting of yours tomorrow with Dr Mark. When he did the translation for me, I mentioned, in gratitude for his excellent work, that I would be willing to help out with some of his field trips—if he needed some additional funding.’ She brought two glasses of her concoction to the table and he sniffed his suspiciously. ‘What is this?’ Her eyebrow rose sceptically. He accepted the admonishment: there probably was no alcohol he hadn’t already drunk, so pretending to be fussy now was a little hypocritical. ‘So? You would be happy for me to attend?’ It had not escaped his notice that she had not responded at all to the admission that he was interfering (as she might see it) in her life. It surprised him to see a trait he habitually deployed mirrored now in this girl. Her thoughts were entirely veiled from him.
Finally, she smiled as she blew across her drink to cool it slightly, the aromatic scents of cinnamon and orange and the enticing smell of rum mixed with the cider reaching him as she did. ‘My memories of Dad are fading. I think if I’d stayed in the States, you know, carried on at school there, same town, maybe even our house, I’d have more. But everything is so different now I guess it’s inevitable that that old life seems more and more like a dream.’
Aleksey wasn’t too sure he liked where this was going, but buried his concern in his glass, feigning distaste and fishing out small floating objects he wasn’t actually thinking about at all. A finger came to rest on the back of his hand, stilling him. ‘I mostly remember his care for me: how he swung me up into his arms when I was tired, or how he wrapped me up when I was cold. Made me wear my seatbelt. He shouted at me once to stop me running into the street. It never really made me feel special though—I think I took it all for granted. But now there’s you. You have absolutely no reason to do anything for me, do you? It wasn’t your fault we crashed in that plane. It wasn’t your fault those awful men wanted me. And yet, from the first, every step of my way, you’ve shaped and eased my life, as if Iwasyour responsibility. As if youoweme something. Do you know what I think?’ He raised his eyes from the murky liquid. She smirked at his expression. ‘I think you see yourself in me. You would like to take eighteen-year-old you and give him my life, but you can’t, so you’re giving it to me instead.’
He mulled over his response to this for quite a while before asking cautiously, ‘If I am, is that a good or a bad thing?’
She rose and leaned across the table, kissing him, laughing openly at his faux scowl. ‘Oh, it’s good. I loved my dad, but as a child loves: entirely taking him for granted, assuming such care was just the norm. You, however, I love with the very conscious decision of my heart—which is how you say you choose to love, isn’t it?’
He relaxed into his chair and put his feet back up, taking a long swallow of the extremely potent mulled cider. ‘Ben’s nuts are burning, I believe. You are extremely remiss, Emilia Ivanovna—for one so unfathomably wise.’
* * *
Chapter Nine
The next day, while he was eating breakfast with Ben and Emilia before they left for their trip to Cornwall, she got a text. She frowned for a moment as she read it and then showed it to him. Professor Mark had changed the location of the meeting. Instead of holding it at his house in Kelly Bray, he’d booked the conference room in a hotel in Plymouth near the train station. There was no explanation for this sudden change, just an apology and the expression of hope everyone could still make it. Short notice hardly covered it. It didn’t affect them, as they practically had to drive past this new location to get to the bridge over to Cornwall, but still. Ben, who had plucked the phone from them, commented as he read,
‘I’m kinda not surprised. If he’s expecting students to come it makes sense, doesn’t it? They’d probably come by train. Do you remember how far off the beaten track his house was?’
Aleksey shrugged and turned to Emilia. ‘Then you will not get to see where Ben tried to kill me.’
Ben snorted quietly to himself. ‘If I ever tried to do that, it would be more spectacular than a minor prang in the car.’
Aleksey grinned, picturing it: an epic, final battle between them. Then he wrinkled his nose at the likely outcome. Emilia was busy texting a friend and ignoring them, so he stretched out his foot and rested it on Ben’s. Ben leaned back in his seat and gave him a private smile.
When she’d finished messaging, Emilia began toying with her food, quiet and thoughtful. Aleksey was watching her whilst pretending to read his paper. She was clearly put out. He let his mind drift over the proposed day—or what had been the planned day: drive to Cornwall, park at the pub, walk up to the house, meeting, quick trip up to… He rewound a little and went back to the walking up to the house part, and cursed. As this was all in his head, he gave himself free rein and called himself an idiot at the same time. Even he had noticed how pretty the white house was, set squarely within its garden, with a gate leading out onto the moors behind. And he was not one for calling houses pretty. They were architecturally interesting or they were badly designed. Yes, obviouslyhishouses were exempt from these limited assessments, and could therefore also be termed anachronistic or even have their own living spirit, but that aside, calling a house pretty had been a surprising lapse of his otherwise rational, common-sense attitude to everything. He’d been seduced by its perfect symmetry and clean lines but also, he suspected, by the foxgloves, which had flourished with abandon in the rich Cornish soil. Maybe it had been the honeysuckle embracing the white stone walls. Possibly the lupins. It was excessively annoying that he even knew what these flowers were now—the major downside of owning a sub-tropical island and installing as his admiral of the fleet a man who had a ludicrously extensive knowledge of landlubber things no sailor worth his salt had any right to.
However, he was fairly sure now why Emilia was disappointed by Professor Mark’s text. He wasn’t as mean as to attribute the wish to see the delightful one’s home as heronlyreason for wanting to go to a planning meeting during her Christmas holidays, but once the suspicion crept into his mind, it was hard to dislodge. Had the blond wonder boy suspected this as well? Rethought invitinganystudents, but especiallyEmiliato his house? He snorted quietly to himself but covered with a cough. He reckoned he’d just worked out why the venue had been changed. Yes, despite the hubris and vaunting boast, the professor had apparently seen the kernel of truth that lay at the heart of his threat: if he interfered with Emilia in any way at all, encouraged her in any way at all other than as her intellectual mentor, he’d kill him.
When they arrived at the specified hotel on the Hoe, he was excessively annoyed to discover that the actual reason for the change of location was down to the number of people who’d elected to attend—far too many for one impossibly well-situated drawing room overlooking the moors with a casement window fringed by honeysuckle. He preferred the idea that he still carried the awesome presence of Aleksey Primakov into any and all of his interactions, despite at the same time professing to be a new man and not wanting to be his old self at all. A slightly contradictory stance, he admitted. But he allowed himself some slack inside his own head, the only place Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen couldn’t entirely—
‘Hey, look, isn’t that your girlfriend?’
Snapping out of his irritating thoughts at Ben’s question, he shuddered—not at the suggestion that the distant figure of a woman jogging up the steps from the promenade was Morwenna Eames, which obviously it wasn’t, but at the bitter December wind that was sweeping across Plymouth Hoe as they stood outside the conference room to allow him a last cigarette before everything kicked off. The windswept wonder was setting out cups. Emilia was helping him fill plates with biscuits. She appeared to be making Roman numerals with chocolate fingers.
‘Huh. Why’s she here? That’s weird. Look.’
He ignored Ben’s nudge. More to the point, Aleksey reckoned, was why were they there? A house had bedrooms, and therefore his close monitoring presence had been more than justified. But here… Then he recalled the definition of hotel…and swiftly revised his earlier assessment that this trip out in the freezing cold had been a complete waste of time.
‘You? What the hell are you doing here?’ He blinked. The shivering, dishevelled woman was addressing him.
Morwenna Eames. Before he could think up a suitable response to her pointedly rude greeting, Mark came out of the side door of the meeting room and was hugging her. They began chatting to each other in their familiar gibberish. As his interest in this language had stopped with thefuck offhe’d learnt especially to say to her, he elbowed Ben into the warmth of the meeting room and whispered, ‘This is extremely odd, no?’
Ben was fishing in his overcoat pocket for the car keys and replied in the same hushed tone, ‘Why?’
Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen was so frustrating sometimes. ‘Why? Why do you think? Her turning up like this? Why is she here?’
‘Dunno. Ask her. But she’s a local Scilly historian? Writes stuff about stuff? Like this kinda thing? Come on, let’s go find a café to wait in. I’m starving.’
‘No, I am here to attend the meeting. You know this.’
Ben tilted his head on one side a little, regarding him with his otherworldly green gaze. ‘You wanted to come to the meeting so Emilia wouldn’t be in his house with him. You thought no one else would turn up and they’d have been left alone together. Then your weird brain went straight to what we would have done in those exact circumstances—on tables, or the floor, probably both before we found a bed—and then you wanted to kill something, presumably him, but remembered just in time that that was theoldyou.’
He couldn’t really deny any of this and curled his lip at the glint in Ben’s eyes. Then he realised this spark probably wasn’t from fond affection but from laughing at him, and so turned his expression into a full-on scowl. But Ben only returned a grin of success and stood closer, brushing arms. He was about to suggest to Ben that they make use of the fact that hotels did indeed have bedrooms when Morwenna Eames caught his eye. She wasn’t staring at them, but at Emilia. Slightly wide-eyed, her hand had paused in mid-air where she’d started to pull a chair out, and she seemed utterly fixated on the girl as Emilia continued arranging the biscuits on plates—she was making a slightly wobbly fifteen.
He couldn’t recall whether Emilia had ever accompanied him and Molly into the bookshop before, and concluded that perhaps she hadn’t—that this was therefore the first time they’d met. Before he could work through the implications of the woman’s startled look, Ben, being his annoyingly nice self, had finished pulling the chair out for her. She laughed lightly, thanked him, and sat down, beginning then a vigorous rummage in a large handbag she was carrying.
