“No,” she rushed. “No, I do not intend for you to give up your life. But that certainly seems to be your expectation of me. To give up what I have, what I want, so that we might be together. Do you expect me to conform to the societal expectation of what a woman should be so that I’ll fit neatly into the world?”
“Well…” He blinked rapidly, wondering why her question suddenly sounded like he wasn’t being at all logical. “Yes.”
She gasped in as if someone had punctured her lungs with a knife, and then breathed out a shaky sigh. “If there’s one thing you’d have learned in a lifetime with me, it’s that I don’t fit neatly anywhere.” She regarded him with infinite sadness, but he could tell he’d not surprised her in the least.
Ramsay fought desperation at the retreat he read in her eyes, and on its heels a fury surged.
“I’m not the one being unreasonable here!” He slapped the ground in frustration. “I simply doona want a mistress or an exile. Ye’ve seen how dangerous this life is.”
“If you want me as a wife, you’ll get everything I am.” She stood, dropping the blanket and snatching up her wrapper. “If we were to marry, I’d take you despite your pride and your perfectionism, not because of it.” She donned the robe in a graceful motion and belted it firmly.
Ramsay didn’t even get the proper chance to mourn the loss of her skin as she continued to set fire to the hopes he’d planted for them, leaving them in ashes. “I’m not perfect, Ramsay. I do indulge in the pleasures life has to offer, and I don’t intend to stop. Life is for living. To enjoy. I’ll not tie my fate to yours if you’re only going to smother me with expectations. I’ll not have it.”
Ramsay stood and stalked forward. He captured her lips with his and kissed her with wild, desperate abandon. He poured all of his need, his will, his desire, and his feeling into her mouth. Hoping it would reach her heart. Wishing she would soften.
When she broke the kiss and turned away, they were both breathing heavily. Her lips were bruised and his felt swollen, along with another part of his anatomy begging for him to give in so he could be inside her again.
“Will ye not yield, Cecelia?” he whispered urgently. “Even for a chance at this?”
She whirled around, all semblance of gentility and kindness wiped away by a stronger emotion than he’d ever seen. Pain, the same pain he’d spied gazing back at him from the mirror.
The kind of pain that eventually turned into rage.
“Why is it I who must yield to your ambitions?” she demanded, slicing her hand through the air. “Because I am a woman? Do you realize how many men have requested me to yield because of my sex? The vicar who raised me. Who imprisoned me because he believed I was at fault for the indiscretions of others.” She paced again, making large, passionate gestures, each word of her refusal a shard of glass embedded in his heart.
“Every professor I ever had asked me to yield my seat, my marks, my chosen passion to a man. Every male student who was forced to sit next to me, or humbled himself to ask me for help in private because my mind was superior to his, only to depose me publicly for being fat, tall, bespectacled, or, worse, unmarried—no, unmarriable.” She said the word with a disgust that pounded the nail into their coffin.
“Because I wore a dress, my existence as an intellectual has been an insult to everyone. They’ve all asked me to be other than I am. Men seem to think that because they must give me their seats on the train, I must yield to them my very identity. Or my choices. My body or, in this case, my entire life.” She marched up to him, looking like Boudicca the warrior queen, proud and angry and determined. “I have not, and I will not, and it is wrong of you to ask,” she said with absolute finality. “Can you not love me, even if I do not yield?”
Ramsay felt himself turning hard. Cold. Building walls against the barrage of her words so he didn’t have to hear them, to wonder if they made sense.
“We have not yet spoken of love,” he said in a voice that would have been inaudible if her nose wasn’t almost touching his.
She stumbled backward, clutching her heart.
He’d driven the knife home.
“I see.” She bent down, gathered her nightgown and turned to take the path back to the house.
“Cecelia.” Ramsay was not a man who chased a woman, but he did it for her. He did his best to explain. That he knew best. That she could not ask him to return to nothing. “I am who I am every bit as much as ye are. Who am I if not the Lord Chief Justice of the High Court? What achievements could ye take pride in? What do I have to offer ye if not my position? My reputation? My principles and my pride?”
Her steps faltered, and her chin touched her shoulder. “Those are excellent questions,” she said stiffly. “You’ll have to find the answers yourself before we discuss this again.”
As she walked away with her back straight Ramsay already knew the answers.
Nothing. He had nothing to give her because he’d been born nothing. Hollow.
Empty.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Will you not play with me, Cecelia?”
Phoebe’s voice was generally dear and sweet, but it reached an octave the next afternoon that penetrated Cecelia’s tearful headache and tried her apparently finite reserves of patience.
“I’m sorry, darling, but it’s imperative that I finish this.” Perhaps if she’d slept rather than sobbed, she might feel differently, but alas, she endeavored to solve this situation with ever more haste so she could run away—no, not away, but back. Back to London.
To her life.
She could not stay here with Ramsay. Not after last night. Not after how many times she thought about abandoning everything, her ideals, her needs, her responsibilities, and her pride to fall back into his arms.
“But you finished that book yesterday,” Phoebe said with a plaintive whine. “Why have you started it over?”
Because she had to have missed something. She stared down at the coding text index, scanning the first page for any hint of a clue that might show her where to start so she didn’t have to read the whole blasted thing again.
“Can you not rest? Just for a bit?” Phoebe pressed, laying her doll over the open page. “I’ll let you be Fanny de Beaufort, even though she’s more beautiful than Frances Bacon.”
All the cogs and wheels of Cecelia’s thoughts ground to a halt as the girl’s compassionate offer plucked something out of her brain. She leaved through the index back to A through D.
B. Bacon. The Baconian cipher.
And not too far beneath … Beaufort!
Cecelia flipped to the corresponding chapter. The Beaufort cipher was a polyalphabetic grid where one must have the key word to unencrypt language.
Holy God. The hint had been the dolls’ names all along.
Cecelia slid off her chair and knelt in front of Phoebe, caressing the doll. “Darling, did Henrietta ever tell you why she named Frances and Fanny?” she asked. “Did she ever mention a key?”
Phoebe shook her head.
No, she wouldn’t, would she? Henrietta had been too canny and careful to leave anything so important to the memory of a child.