Page 43 of The Traitor
“How do you know?”
“This chair still holds your body heat.”
Said in all innocence, while Sebastian’s body heat decided to focus behind his falls.
“Why do you come to the library when you can’t sleep, Milly Danforth? You’ve told me reading confounds you late at night.”
She glanced up sharply, probably to see if he was insulting her. He wished he were, wished it wasn’t curiosity driving his question.
“I like to smell the books. They remind me of my aunts’ cottage.”
This admission was made as she tidied up the mess Sebastian had created on the desk’s surface. She capped the inkwell, set the quill pen in its stand, straightened his papers, and otherwise put to rights the implements of reading and writing that had caused her so much frustration in life.
“You say your aunts did well with their lavender. Did they start their seedlings in frames?”
The fire was giving off more heat, but also light, and that light played with the highlights in Miss Danforth’s hair and put a sheen on her paisley silk shawl.
“They started new plants from cuttings, not seedlings. Aunt Hy said cuttings worked better, and no, the frames were too hot for young plants.”
“What do you mean, too hot?”
She opened the ink and dipped the pen. He liked the look of her there, among his things, the pen in her hand.
“The frames are filled with fresh horse manure, and it holds heat for weeks. Aunt said it was too much heat, and too wet.”
“What has wet to do with it?”
And was this the real reason she’d come through the cold, dark house? To practice her letters when nobody would be about?
“Lavender is tough—the bugs don’t go near it, the blights and rots and such seldom bother it, but too much rain, and it falters.”
“Rainbothers it?” And here he’d been lavishing water on his plants, thinking to foster luxuriant growth.
She dipped the pen again. “The wetter our summers, the less the lavender grew.”
How could he have not known this? How could all those stalwart plant enthusiasts at the Society not have passed this along to him? How could his grandparents, who’d known everything about their herbs, not have imparted this signal fact?
Madam Agronomist looked up from her penmanship. “You are angry. Do not be angry at the plants, St. Clair. Would you like your seat back?”
“You lied to me, Milly Danforth. You did not come down here to sniff books. You came down here to write your name.”
And she hadn’t let Sebastian’s presence stop her.
“One can do both. You are not my conscience, St. Clair. Hadn’t you best go up to bed? One hears you clattering out of the mews before the sun is even up.”
Did one? Didonelisten for him clattering out of the mews at such an hour?
He took his time, wandering about the room, though his objective was quite, quite fixed.
“If a man wants to gallop his horse, the early hours are the only ones suited to it. The sun comes up earlier and earlier this time of year, and the park grows crowded.”
She went back to her letters, but Sebastian was certain in his bones she was monitoring his progress as he took Byron down then replaced him on the shelf.
“You should speak to her ladyship about the jewels, sir. She is vexed with you for wasting good coin on them.”
Sebastian paused to study the fire, which was roaring along tidily.
“They are not her jewels. They are the St. Clair jewels, and she pawned them because I was off larking about in the south of France rather than tending to the duties I was conceived and born to take up.”
