“Who are you? You look like a prig.”
“Aprig?”
“Yes, one of those eternally displeased sort of people who has just discovered they accidentally stepped on a slug. You carry the same sort of expression.” Then she paused and gasped. “Oh! Your eyes! They are most peculiar.” She stood on tiptoe to gaze deeper into his eyes, latching onto his arm for balance. There it was again, that smell of lavender and something else that reminded him of a meadow and fresh linen drying under the summer sun. It unsettled him immensely. “One appears to be green, and the other blue! Framed by dark, dramatic lashes. How extraordinary! Particularly in combination with that pale skin and dark hair.” She tilted her head aside as she studied him.
“It is alusus naturae,” he replied testily, since he wasn’t quite certain where she was heading. “It’s Latin and means ‘whim of nature’. It is the way I was born.”
“I know. I am not stupid. A lost elven prince with a touch oflusus naturae,” she replied dreamily. He’d evidently been promoted from prig to elven prince within a matter of minutes, but he wasn’t certain whether that was really a compliment. If itwas, it did not last long. “Or else some lost city swell mistaking these beautiful ruins for Almack’s Assembly Rooms,” she added.
Down his status came again to what she, no doubt, regarded as the most deplorable species of London gentlemen.
“And you look like a homeless milkmaid who’s lost her cows.” He removed her hand from his arm and took a step back.
“A homeless milkm—” She pulled herself up haughtily. “See here, sir.” Her hand waved at the ruins behind her, and at the tower, from the top of which, apparently, she must have fallen. “Thetondoesn’t assemble here, as surely you must have noticed by now.”
She nodded at his outfit. “This is not a ballroom, nor is it a Bow Street club.” She eyed him rudely, presumably taking in his breeches, his fashionably cut coat and carefully starched cravat, travelling down to his Hessian boots, and up again.
Unnerved by her frank appraisal, he tugged at his well-tailored coat, flicked away a leaf of grass on his sleeve, and picked up his hat, which had fallen to the ground. He dusted it off with his hand and set it back on his head.
“I was taking a walk,” he informed her stiffly. “Not that this is any of your business.”
“Ah. So it is you who must be trespassing, but as opposed to you, I won’t hold it against you. After all, if you hadn’t been where you were, just now, I daresay I’d be dead as Yorick’s skull.” She paused as if rethinking her words. “Or worse. I could have remained here half alive, with my head only partly smashed, in an immobile state, unable to call for help. Night would fall and when the full moon stood at its zenith, the wolves would howl and come hither from their lair; they would stalk through the forest, ravenously hungry, looking for prey, looking for food, looking for anything at all…” A shudder racked her body, but he had the sudden suspicion that it was rather one of morbid enjoyment.
“Wolves have been extinct since the days of the Tudors,” he said laconically. “You’d be hard-pressed to find one in all of Britain.”
She waved him away. “If not wolves, then bears.”
He scoffed. “There are no bears either. Not since the Saxons.”
She sniffed. “It is immaterial. Werewolves, then.”
“Were-what?”
She nodded. “Most certainly. It must be werewolves that live here. Especially here. In these forests, amongst these ruins. At night, when the ghosts, ghouls, and vampires come out…”
“Vampires?”
“Naturally. This area swarms with them. There’s a hidden, forgotten graveyard here somewhere, isn’t there?” She leaned forward with a stage whisper, “A vampire graveyard! Which is why I decided to climb the stairs to the tower to get a better view of the area to see whether I could find it. I thought I’d be able to see it easier from the top of that tower.” She waved at the decrepit stone tower that was the only construct which remained of the ruin that had once been an abbey. No one in their right mind would climb that tower unless they harboured a death wish. “I saw something in the distance that could’ve been a hidden graveyard, but then I leaned out a tad too far, my foot slipped and, err...”
The girl was mad. Entirely beyond all hope. Most certainly, she was.
“Let me see whether I understood this correctly. You climbed this tower, this ruinous pile of stone, to see whether you could find a hidden graveyard? Because you expected to find werewolves and vampires there? Did you read too many novels? By that woman...” He snapped his fingers several times in succession. “What was her name? Radcliffe. She writes utter balderdash.”
She mumbled something.
He leaned forward. “I did not catch that.”
“I said, it appears to have been that way.” She overenunciated each word. “And Radcliffe is all the crack, by the by. But of course, a man like you would never understand that.” She sniffed.
“A man like me?” he echoed.
She nodded solemnly. “Yes. Name me the title of the book you last read.”
He scowled. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“That is because you don’t read.” She nodded to herself as if she’d unriddled his personality, and somehow that irked him more than any of the other nonsense she’d uttered so far.
“Institutiones Juris Naturalis,” he grated forth between clenched teeth, then regretted having allowed her to nettle him. He should have just walked off without comment. “That was the last book I read.”
