Page 6 of Margins of Love
He searched for the precious books he remembered on the shelves, closing his eyes, refusing to imagine which antique translations Lady Bustle-Smith had pawned off for her nasty daughter with the piercing cold face, the Devil’s spawn. He wondered how much it cost his family when Allison danced away each spring and how much of his family fortune had gone into paying for Allison’s season last year and the ones before.
His mood plummeted when he was unable to find the volume he was searching for. He leaned his back against one of the shelves, slumping his head to his chest. If only he’d asked his mother’s closest confidante for the most precious tomes in the library. He should have spoken up to educate her. He should have guarded the late Earl’s collectibles out of respect for the ancient poets, if not for the late Earl’s collection itself. But he had been trained not to speak up. On the contrary, he was trained to float through the ton and keep his head low, feed his desirable reputation, and fuel the family’s business.
The flicker of a candle caught his eyes. A small female was hunched over a book.
He stepped forward and saw the frame of a delicate girl. She was readingthebook. And she was writing in it! She was defiling the precious story and etching her mark on Fave’s soul. He stormed closer and pulled the book from under her elbow, causing her to make a long streak with… was that a fountain pen? How had she gotten hold of one?
Fave grabbed the book to inspect the damage.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I beg your pardon?” Her self-righteous tone and raised eyebrows stirred something inside him. She was infuriatingly beautiful, and she looked unaware that she had been marking up a rare book from the late King’s private collection.
The air grew thin, and the wick of the candles crackled with faint light.
Fave seethed through pursed lips. “This is a collectible. An antique Virgil translated by Charles—”
“Charles De La Rue, I know. Or else I would not be reading it now, would I?” she snapped.
“What, pray tell, could you possibly have been writing in,” he paused, curled his tongue over his front teeth to control his temper for she was a lady after all, “a precious antique, the finest one in this collection, if I may add?”
She straightened her back, and his eyes fell to her narrow frame. She took a deep breath, seemingly weighing her words as if not to waste them on him. As she inhaled, her chest rose, and Fave’s glance sank to her bosom. He shook his head to avert that line of thought.
“If you must know, not that you could appreciate it, there are some irregularities in the dactylic hexameter verse.” Her vaguely disrespectful tone irked him, although he could not explain why. “I have a theory that they were placed there for emphasis, not in error. I was marking them to share—”
“In the section where Dido realizes that she has fallen in love with Aeneas and stabs herself upon a pyre with Aeneas’ sword,” he finished, resuming his inspection of the book, entranced by the classical beauty of the stories he had read so many times before.
The girl’s eyes widened, and she nodded excitedly. “Yes, she predicts the rift between her people and—”
“Hannibal! The verse invokes the military strategist, foreshadowing when Jupiter sends Mercury to remind Aeneas of his duty and—”
“He breaks Dido’s heart,” she said. Fave was overcome with warmth and glee. Only a kindred spirit would be capable of deciphering the verse’s subliminal messages.
Their eyes connected as if a spider had spun an invisible web to link their minds. In synchrony, they said, “And turns the energy of love into the energy of war.”
“Pity, that,” she said, lowering her gaze.
Candlelight shimmered in the fairy hairs that escaped her coiffure, reflecting in the warmest tones of brown and gold, captivating him as only a brown topaz normally could. But there was nothing ordinary about this girl or this moment.
“Pity that you defiled a rare collectible,” he said.
“Did I?”
He could not help but chuckle at her naïvety. Was that a shadow of guilt in her eyes? “I was going to say it’s a pity that the lovers could not reconcile their fates,” Fave said.
The smile slipped off her face.
When he caught her eyes, a color somewhere between green and brown, and sparkling like water in the sun, the rare book became suddenly only that, a book. His belly flopped and he was overcome with a new, heady feeling. He liked it.
“Why did you do it?” he asked, trying to return her gaze to his.
“I used to write in books, send them to my grandparents, and they would send them back with notes. That was how we communicated. I learned much from them. It is an old habit now, I suppose.” She wrung her fingers.
“You are certainly not old enough to haveoldhabits,” he said flirtatiously, forgetting to be angry.
She blushed.
“I am twenty. Almost,” she whispered.
