When Colin spoke, his voice was very carefully controlled. “Are you breaking up with me?”
“No!” I said, so vehemently that a bird whirled out of a nearby tree, shimmying past us in a whirr of feathers. “No. I want us to stay together. If we can. I just can’t—”
How to say it? Around us, the sun was shining and the birds were chirping and the actors acting, but I was stuck in my own private Hades, sorting through my personal pile of pomegranate seeds.
I held out my hands to Colin, willing him to understand. “I can’t make myself entirely dependent on you. It’s not fair to you, either. I don’t want you to feel burdened by me or feel like you couldn’t do what you would otherwise do because I’m around.”
“What if I want you around?” he said.
It was so tempting, so incredibly tempting. Long days in the library, fall drifting into winter, cold winter nights together in the den, mulled wine and chips at the Heavy Hart, occasional trips into London to see an exhibit or get dressed up and go out with his friends or mine. I could see it all playing out before me, an entire life in a snow globe, a picture of perfect domesticity.
At least, that’s how it looked from there. But would it be? I didn’t think Colin would let me pay rent. And even if he did, what cash did I have coming in without a teaching job? I’d be dependent on him from everything from the files I was reading to the roof over my head. And if we broke up—not a happy thought, but one that had to be considered—I would have lost a year of teaching, a year of positioning myself for the job market. I would be thought of as “that girl who stayed in England for a guy,” and, even though England was where my documents were, even though I might produce a better dissertation for it, I would be taken less seriously as a scholar because of it. Such is the way of the world.
I bit down on my lower lip. “But do you want me around twenty-four seven? Twelve months a year?”
Colin’s silence was all the answer I needed. I felt something ache a little inside, but there was no going back now. This was the right decision for both of us, no matter how painful it might be in the short term.
“You see?” I said. “It’s too much too soon.”
I watched him rub his thumb against his index finger. That was another Colin gesture, another thing I would miss when I was back in my tiny apartment in Cambridge, alone, listening to the radiator clank, wondering what I had been thinking.
He didn’t argue with me. Instead, he said in a low voice, “Will you stay for the rest of the summer?”
“If you’ll still have me.”
He held out his arms to me and I went into them, leaning my head against my favorite spot on his chest, wrapping my arms around his waist in that dent that seemed to have been made just for them. Colin leaned his cheek against the top of my head.
“We’ll work it out,” he said into my hair.
“It’s only for one semester,” I said to the pocket of his shirt. “I could come back in the spring. If you still want me then.”
Colin lifted his head. I wiggled back just enough to look at him. He was thinking, the wheels turning. Tentatively, he said, “I’ve never been to Cambridge—your Cambridge.”
Something pinched in my chest. Or maybe it unpinched. I could feel the tears tickling the back of my eyes, threatening to fall, but they were the right kind of tears, the kind that happen when someone does something that touches you too deeply for mere thanks. I knew what it was to him to leave Selwick Hall, even for a little while. It was his project, his baby, his distraction from all those personal demons of which I was only just beginning have an inkling. I couldn’t imagine Colin away from England for too long, but…a visit would be nice. A visit would help bridge the gap. If he came to Cambridge in the fall and I came back to England around Christmas, between us, we might actually be able to make this work.
It was a far cry from the heady euphoria of the early days of our relationship, but, for the first time, I really believed that what we had might be real, that it might last.
I swallowed the lump at the back of my throat and smiled mistily up at him. Through the tears, I saw him wreathed in rainbows—not an image he would thank me for, my practical, down-to-earth Colin.
“I could show you around,” I offered softly. “It’s pretty nasty in winter, but you’re used to that. And there’s something nice about all that snowy brick right around Christmas.”
With a crooked finger, he moved a stray strand of hair out of my eyes, very gently, as though I might break otherwise. “You can show me your microfilm readers.”
“Everyone’s favorite tourist destination,” I agreed, and we smiled foolishly at each other, happy just to be together, with the sun beaming down on our bare heads and pots of flowers in artificial bloom all around us. In the gardens, someone was playing a harpsichord, a simple and beautiful melody.
Some men. Not my Colin.
“Will you be okay going away?” I asked. “With Jeremy treasure hunting?”
Colin made a face. “I can deal with Jeremy.”
“Is there any truth to this whole treasure thing?” I asked.
“Honestly?” Colin looked out over the scene playing out below. “Probably not.”
Hmm. This was Colin. If the answer was no, he would have just said no.
Emboldened by our new accord, I leaned over to get a look at his face. “You think there is, don’t you?”
Colin’s face twisted. “Well…I looked for it as a boy. I didn’t find anything.”
“Yes,” I said, “but you’re older and wiser now. And you have me.”
Colin’s eyes crinkled. “Yes, and we know there’s just one thing for which I’d want you.”
I looked at him from under my lashes, aiming for sultry and missing by a mile. “We can talk about that later.”
Colin mustered a perfunctory leer, but his mind was obviously elsewhere. “Do you know…” he began.
I knew many things, but I didn’t think he needed to hear the entirety of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales right at just this moment.
“Mmm-hmm?” I said encouragingly.
He looked to me as if for approval, half excited, half sheepish. In other words, endearingly boyish. “The best way to stop Jeremy might be to try to find it first. If it exists, that is. It probably doesn’t. But saying hypothetically that it did…”
“We might hypothetically try to find it.”
“Are you in?” He held out a hand, palm up.
I settled my hand in his and felt his fingers close around mine. “Us against Jeremy? He doesn’t have a chance.”
“With you on my side,” Colin said softly, and what I saw in his eyes made my knees feel like goo, “how can I possibly lose?”
In a few moments, I would go inside and e-mail Blackburn and tell him I was taking the head TF job. In four months, I would be back in Cambridge. But for now…It was only May. We had the entire summer before us.
With the two of us together, what couldn’t we achieve? Right then, I would have been willing to volunteer us for moving mountains.
I grinned recklessly at Colin. “Let the games begin.”
Historical Note
The best part about writing historical fiction is that the strangest bits are usually true. Submarines in the Napoleonic Wars might sound like something straight out of Jules Verne, but, in fact, Robert Fulton (primarily recognizable from grade school textbooks as the inventor of the steamboat) did do his best to hawk a submarine, named the
