“Murchison?He took on Murchison?”
“Man’s a fool, Mallet.Can’t see a grasping mushroom when one ripens in front of him.”
Bile curdled in Andrew’s belly.Murchison.He wanted to cast up his accounts on the tabletop.“Tell me again exactly what he said.Selby I mean, notthat snake Murchison.”
Dunning breathed deeply, “I don’t see how it would help.”
“Tell me again.Exactly.”
“‘Can’t have my reputation sullied.I worked long and hard for it.If the man can’t keep his mind above trivia, he shall not be part of my great work.’”Dunning mimicked Selby.He repeated, “‘My great work.’Prancing pony thinks he’s Plato himself.”
“Trivia?”
“Praxilla.Can’t say how he found out.Old Featheringham perhaps.”
“Murchison.”
“How’s that?”
“Murchison,” Andrew repeated with greater confidence.“I saw him at the library that day.He must have bribed Featheringham.”
“Just the sort to do it.Lots of the lazy ones think they can get librarians to do their work for them.”Dunning’s brow furrowed.“Sorry, Mallet.Selby’s a prig.”
“Tell me again what he said.”
“Which thing?Took an assistant?”
“The rest.Did he really call Praxilla trivial?”
“Puce.Turned puce at the thought.”
Murderous rage froze Andrew with ice-cold intensity.Selby dismissed five months of Andrew’s work and ten years of Georgiana’s life as trivia.Hands clenched as if to squeeze the puce neck of the arrogant old windbag.
Three hours later Andrew remembered Georgiana’s letter, carried it to the study, and lay it next to the completed manuscript.
Rereading it didn’t improve the words.“It will be more difficult to correspond from Mountview.”she had written.She should have said “impossible.”The duchess, that scorpion, has had her in her poisonous clutches for weeks.
“These are the last of the translations,” she wrote.Georgiana declared the translations finished.Andrew thought of the commentaries.His parts were complete, but they needed her approval.
He read the next line.“The work approaches an end, and that saddens me.”Saddens her?He almost choked on his anger.The end of their partnership loomed in front of him, and allshe had to say was that it saddened her?
She told him they would talk when the work was done.It was done, and yet she stayed at Mountview.
Damn it woman, what do you want from me?
He could do nothing without further word from Georgiana.Now he had no work from Selby either, nothing to banish Georgiana’s ghost, the ghost that paced his book-lined study, gesticulating and peppering him with questions.
Andrew poured brandy in a glass and drank it down to banish the image, and another image replaced it—Georgiana looking sidelong at his bedroom with another question in her eyes.
Andrew commanded men.He bent unruly partisans to do England’s bidding.He outwitted two French colonels and survived the hell of interrogation with honor intact, but he couldn’t bend Georgiana.He couldn’t even write to her.She was at Mountview, and he sat like a pensioner waiting some scrap of attention from Lady Bountiful.
I’ll be damned if I sit here any longer and wait while her miserable family finds excuses to isolate her again.Only one choice remained.
“Harley!You rogue, get up here.We need to pack.”
* * *
“On the contrary.She is lovely, and quite articulate.”
