Page 38 of And Then There Was the One
“Interesting,” Sebastian clarified, with an unhappy twist of his mouth. “And since I’m his secretary, I see all of his correspondence—I know what sorts of cases he’s invited to consult on. I see the desperate people asking him for help. And he’s not interested in any of it—he only cares about who can pay him the most, for the least effort. So he spends a lot of time following the wives of rich men, trying to catch them out in affairs.”
“Is that how he met you?”
Thatdidprovoke a proper smile from him. “No. Only a matter of time, though, darling Georgie.”
This time, however, she noticed the brittle note to his voice as he spoke, and she suddenly had a sneaking suspicion that there was more to the story of his romantic entanglements than she’d yet learned. Which was likely, since she’d not wasted any time at all in leaping to the least flattering conclusions about him, from the moment she’d first met him—was it only two days earlier?
“You know,” she said quietly, before she had time to second-guess the words spilling from her mouth, “I’m beginning to suspect you’re not half as much of a womanizing idiot as you seem determined to convince me you are.”
He glanced at her quickly, looking away again just as fast. “What makes you think so?”
“You’re smarter than you let on,” she said, mulling the matter over in her own mind. “You prattle a lot about beautifulwomen and biscuits and pretend that the only skill you possess is scheduling lunches and sending prettily worded letters, but occasionally you let your guard down. I think there’s more to Sebastian Fletcher-Ford than a playboy who seduces women and wears nice jumpers.”
“You like my jumpers, do you?”
“I think you’re single-handedly keeping half the sheep farmers in England employed.”
“I like to do my part where I can,” he said modestly, flicking at what shewouldhave thought was an invisible speck of dust on his cuff but which, given their current circumstances, might have been entirely real.
“Howdidyou come to work for Fitzgibbons?” she asked curiously, wondering what path had led him to this line of work.
Another pause. He was once again staring straight ahead, his jaw tight, his brow furrowed. She did not expect him to answer her, and yet, after another long moment, he said, “I’m a bit of a disappointment to my family, you know.”
“Are you?” she asked. She hadn’t paused to consider much about what sort of family he came from, other than that it must be posh (the double-barrel surname, the Cambridge education, his general aura).
“Yes. I’m the youngest of three, and my brother and sister are… impressive.”
“Impressive how?”
“Impressive in their accomplishments. My brother is a mathematician. My sister’s a poet, married to an artist. My father’s a classicist at Cambridge. My mother was a suffragette,and still writes articles on women’s rights. The Fletcher-Fords are a famously intellectual set. And then there’s… me.”
“Meaning…?”
He let out a frustrated sigh. “Meaning that I was never half so serious as the rest of them. I liked sports, and flirting with pretty girls—having a good time. Nothing so out of the ordinary, really, but when everyone expects you to be just as brilliant as the rest of the family, and you seem a bit, well,unserious, you quickly realize that you’re seen as a bit of a disappointment.” She was definitely not imagining the bitter note in his voice now. “After a while, it was easier not to fight it. If I was a disappointment because I hadn’t known my entire life path since I was a child, like my brother and sister, then I might as well try to be the best, biggest disappointment I could be.”
“By, perhaps, having affairs with unsuitable women?” she asked shrewdly.
He shrugged. “That, and—well, my marks at Cambridge weren’t anything to write home about. I spent more time with my friends than I did at my studies. I scraped through, but when I finished at university, my parents called me home to the family pile for this absurd dinner at which they sat me down and asked what, precisely, I intended to do with my life. The implication was that I couldn’t hope to be as successful as my siblings. There were all sorts of suggestions—had I considered working at a museum? Or perhaps going on an archaeological dig?”
“An—I beg your pardon?” Georgie asked. She could not imagine the state of his clothing were he to spend his days diggingaway in a pit somewhere under the Mediterranean sun; everything about this image was entirely incongruous.
Sebastian shrugged. “As I said, my father’s a classicist, so he could pull some strings—I expect he thought it was the only way I’d ever find gainful employment.”
“What did you read at Cambridge?” she asked curiously.
“Languages.”
She blinked; had she been given a dozen guesses, she didn’t think she’d have landed on that answer. He did look at her now, and smiled, the dazzling, rakish grin that he seemed to have perfected over the years, although she thought that now, in the candlelight of the dusty cellar, as he sat here with her confessing his secrets into the silence, it looked a bit strained. Perhaps, she thought, it had always looked that way, and she’d simply not been paying enough attention to notice.
“All the better to make my romantic conquests,” he said. “Got to be able to communicate in as many languages as possible. I learned French and Latin at school, then studied Greek and German at Cambridge. I can tell you that studying German at the time didn’t make you enormously popular,” he added dryly, and Georgie nodded, recalling the suspicious treatment that a German couple who’d lived in the village when she was a girl had received during the war, for all that they’d lived in England for forty years by that point.
“In any case,” he added, a bit more quietly now, “it wasn’t muchuseas far as degrees went, if I didn’t want to teach or remain on at Cambridge for a doctorate. I took the Foreign Office exam, but it didn’t work out—I scraped through the written portion, but the oral interview was a disaster. I thinkthey thought I was a bit of an idiot. Turns out what works for making friends at university, or seducing pretty girls—always smiling, always up for a laugh—doesn’t serve you as well when you want powerful men to take you seriously. That was the moment I realized that I might have gone a bit too far at turning myself into someone who would annoy my family. And so when my father mentioned that Fitzgibbons was looking for a secretary, and that he’d recommended me for the role—he’s an old friend of Fitzy’s—I went along with it. I needed something to do, after all, and it was easy enough—no danger that anyone would expect too much of me.” There was an almost embarrassed note to his voice now, and Georgie, who had turned her head to look at him at some point while he was speaking, continued gazing at him now in the soft candlelight. The effect of him—of his face, his hair, his clothing, thatsmile—was lessened in their present circumstances, and yet she found him almost more compelling here, for reasons she couldn’t articulate.
“Do you enjoy the work?” she asked after a long beat of silence.
He shrugged. “It’s an awful lot of paperwork—Fitzgibbons still receives a mountain of correspondence, and is constantly being invited to various ceremonies that he’s only too delighted to attend, since it gives him the chance to puff out his chest and preen and be the great detective. But I’m actually quite organized, and I find it rather satisfying, even if…” He hesitated, and Georgie held her breath, waiting for him to continue. “Even if,” he said, after another couple of seconds, “I wish sometimes that he was still the Delacey Fitzgibbons I thought I was coming to work for. The great detective in truth. I’d liketo helpthatman—like to make myself useful. It’s hardly taxing work these days.”
He sounded a bit glum as he spoke, and Georgie realized that two days ago she would not have thought him remotely interested in any work that might be described as “taxing.”
