“I was certain we were all going to die of some strange spinning brain fever.”
“Well, I felt like that again tonight,” she admitted and her cheeks grew hot. “What do you think it could mean? Part of me fears that it is a warning from my mind to steer clear of him. But the other part wants to spin around in circles and laugh.”
Ellie closed her eyes on a fretful sigh. “I think you should avoid anything that makes your head spin. It almost always means something dire is about to happen.”
Chapter 8
Jane was sure nothing calamitous or scandalous would happen with a little more research. Certainly not when she was at home. Therefore, the instant she stepped inside her parents’ Palladian mansion in Westbourne Green, she went straight to work.
The library at Holly House was a towering, rectangular room, surrounded by an inaccessible upper gallery with walls merely painted to look like an upper library arcade. Mother was fond of trompe l’oeil and had hired artists to paint false representations of reality all throughout the house.
In Jane’s opinion, anything that looked like a bookshelf ought to be an actual bookshelf. She’d thought so even as a child, when she’d built a rickety ladder—her first contraption—to take her five-year-old self all the way to the wrought iron catwalk.
To this day, there remained a broken arched pediment above the far window and a crescent-shaped scar on her shin from her first failed attempt.
With her third attempt that same year, she’d succeeded. She’d gained the platform but then came to the disconcerting realization that her construction skills were sorely lacking when her ladder collapsed, leaving her stranded.
Thankfully, her uncle had dropped by for a visit and found her. He’d suggested that, perhaps, her time was better served by expanding her mind in reading the books instead of building shelves for them. And, over the years that followed, she’d read every tome in this space cover to cover, finding the answers to many of life’s mysteries.
Just not all of them.
Now, amidst the rows and stacks, she tried to find another. Her memory flashed with a picture of the mark on Raven’s arm. Then it flashed again with the sketch in a book, of a bird surrounded by a wavy-edged circle.
But in which book had she seen this particular raven?
Unsure, she simply took every title remotely ornithological.
Piling them on the trolley that she’d built when she was eight, she made her way to the opposite end of the house. But the old cart heaved and squealed under the immense mound of research. It was like walking with a stubborn pig on a leash who kept digging his back hooves into the floor. She simply pulled harder, tugging the beast along the variegated marble floor. She passed several oddly placed murals in the main hall, each marking her mother’s brief interests.
First came the Parthenon flanked by pilasters, when having a folly in the south garden simply wasn’t enough. Then came a landscape meadow of sheep, from Mother’s brief knitting period. The third was a sea of silver-capped waves with gulls flying overhead, before holidays in Brighton had lost their appeal. And the most recent was a desert pyramid, commissioned after Lord and Lady Hollybrook returned from their tour this summer.
They’d left Jane and the horde behind, of course. Traveling with one’s children simply wasn’t de rigueur and they always abided by popular opinion.
Unfortunately for them, their plain, bookish, and odd daughter was decidedly out of fashion. While she was accomplished in many areas, they weren’t the right areas.
A debutante needed to demonstrate to society—and her future husband—that she would be a graceful ornament for any man’s arm, an asset in his home. She should be wholesome, modest, and delight others with scintillating conversation, as long as it was about art, music, or the weather.
A debutante never spoke of scientific matters, ideas for inventions, or writing a book. Therefore, Jane would never be truly accomplished. At least, not according to the ton’s standards and not her parents’ either.
Tucking that thought away as she always did, Jane took a right turn at Egypt and steered the cart down the arched vestibule between the main house and the conservatory rotunda.
Inside, the air was cool and fresh and humid. She drew in a deep, invigorating breath and felt every ounce of exhaustion lift from her shoulders, floating up to the misty glass of the domed ceiling.
Beyond the eastern wall of mullioned windows and past the winding canal, she saw the dawn slumbering on the horizon beneath downy bands of coverlet-clouds in shades of apricot and lavender. Pastel light crept in through thousands of diamond-shaped panes to brush the eager leaves that overlapped the narrow stone path within the conservatory. And as she tugged the cart along, a plethora of potted flowers, plants, climbing vines and trees—which she’d cultivated herself—now greeted her, brushing against her shoulders and cheeks.
This jungle was her real home, the place where she had spent many a happy hour, deep in her studies.
The foliage opened up to a glade, where her desk waited. Leaving the cart, she deposited her reticule on a grayed and stained trestle table that was cluttered with vials, jars, gallipots and even a Leyden jar. Then she flitted around the semicircular clearing, lighting lamps and adding kindling to the embers beneath the curfew in a small cast iron closed-stove.
But when she turned back to the cart to begin her hunt for the raven, she stopped short.
The pile was puzzlingly small. It had been much larger when she’d left the library, she was sure.
In that same instant, the aged butler appeared in the doorway, his arms overladen with the books that must have fallen during her lengthy trek through the house.
“Good morning, Miss Jane. Up early with your research again?” he asked without any inflection in his tone or alteration in his ever-grave expression. And yet, for most of her life, Jane had a sense that there was a wealth of untapped mirth hidden deep in his jowls.
Mr. Miggins was a somber man of established years with gently rounded shoulders under his black livery. He wore his hair styled in a comb-over of dull gray hair streaked with white that, regretfully, reminded her of bird droppings on a statue. Of course, she’d never told him that. He’d always been kind and patient with her and the horde.
“Actually, I haven’t been to sleep yet,” she confessed, knowing that he would keep her secret. “The evening filled me with a dizzying array of new questions and I’m not certain I’ll ever be able to close my eyes again unless I find the answers.”
“I’ve no doubt you will,” he said with his usual unblinking certainty that she’d always found comforting. He shuffled down the slope and proceeded to stack the books on the cart again.
Already skimming through the pages of the first one, she paused briefly as a new curiosity formed in her mind. “Mr. Miggins, suppose you were an orphaned boy. Wouldn’t the foundling home have assigned you a Christian name and a surname?”
Familiar with her random odd observations, he answered without question. “I should think so, miss.”
“Then, what might be a reason not to accept the surname?”
He continued his task, carefully arranging the books in an orderly pile. After a moment, he said, “Perhaps I’d be waiting to know who I truly am. Every man deserves to know his own origins in order to make a name for himself.”