Though it wasn’t as if he had a lot of experience to compare this with. The society women he knew liked to gamble and flirt and whisper daring invitations in his ear while their husbands were at other tables. But Raven wasn’t interested in being anyone’s pet again. He preferred to live his life on his own terms.
At the thought, he glanced over to the hourglass and saw the pile of silver sand was higher on the bottom than on the top. Soon he would be back to his life. They were halfway through the third trunk now.
Jane held a ledger out for his inspection. Clamping a wedge of dry toast between her teeth, she pointed to the frayed edge along the center. “Mrf ink bersa bay mrfing.”
“Didn’t quite catch that,” Raven said with a smirk. “Perhaps you should try grunting as a form of communication.” Apparently, it worked for him.
Pulling the toast from her mouth with a tug, he finished the slice.
“I think there’s a page missing,” she clarified without the impediment. “Perhaps more than one.”
“I’ve found that in a few, as well, and stacked them in a separate pile, here.” He gestured to the growing stack of twelve—now thirteen—age-softened leather ledgers.
“Hmm. My uncle must have used the paper to send a missive. Father would often receive correspondences from him on torn scraps of paper.” She flipped the pages back and forth, reading them. “It appears that this ledger was from when he tutored the Wellesley children near the turn of the century. I imagine it could not have been easy for a child in a military family during the French Terror. There’s quite a number of pages missing. Oh, but look here. This is one of those sketches I was telling you about.” She turned it toward him. “It’s a knight’s armet. From my brief perusal of the book of ordinaries, I recall that this sits at the center of the Wellesley family’s crest. Which further cements my belief that we are bound to stumble onto something from the Northcotts as well.”
“Not if we don’t hurry it along,” he said with a glance back to the hourglass.
“Drat,” she muttered and resumed a more frantic search.
An unexpected sense of urgency filled Raven with every grain of sand that fell. There were only a handful of minutes left.
Together they displaced items of no relevance with the detachment of archeologists discarding dirt from a dig site. They skimmed pages, found nothing, then cast each ledger aside. Over and over again.
Raven knew the exact instant that the top of the hourglass was empty. It felt like the jarring jolt of a carriage wheel hitting a rut and stopping dead in its tracks.
With his hands curled over the lip of the trunk, he stared down at the bottom. All that remained atop the cracked leather was a smattering of yellowed letters and torn pages, along with a folded cravat in the corner, tea-stained with age.
But there was no sketch of a raven. Hadn’t been one in any of the trunks.
Pushing away, he stood and left Jane at the edge. His footfalls snapped against the stone tiles as he walked around the conservatory, a gnawing tension gathering in his limbs. To relieve it, he cracked his neck on one side and then the other. He’d known all along that there’d been nothing to find, so it shouldn’t bother him to come up empty handed. And it didn’t bother him, he told himself. Not in the least.
Pausing at the door, he peered beyond the windows to a leaf-scattered view of the garden. A deep exhale emptied his lungs and fogged the glass.
“It isn’t possible,” Jane said, drawing his attention. She reached into the trunk’s abyss to pick up every tiny sliver of paper, her short, rounded nails dragging over the bottom in ever-increasing desperation. “It has to be here.”
“Nothing to fret over. An additional hour of my day is hardly a matter of life or death, and I’d snagged a good nap earlier.”
“But I never forget things that I’ve seen. They’re always in my head. What’s the point of it if I can’t figure out where and when I saw them? And I was so certain.” Her voice was roughened with exhaustion and emotion and she flung a piece of cloth to the floor. “It was all for naught.”
“You’re just tired, that’s all,” he said. “Besides, it doesn’t really matter.”
“Stop saying that. It does matter. I wanted so very much to find something for you.”
The afternoon sun streamed down through the domed ceiling, illuminating the angry tears in her sapphire eyes. And in that instant, Raven believed that it truly did matter to her. Perhaps even more than it did to him.
So when she bowed her head and her kneeling body folded like deflated bagpipes, he knew he couldn’t leave her. Not yet.
“Poor little professor,” he said, not unkindly, and returned to her in a few long strides. “Come now. Don’t let this trouble you. I am eons ahead of you in understanding futility. After a time, you’ll get used to it, like a splinter that’s gone too deep beneath the skin to remove.”
Sinking down beside her, he ran the flat of his hand over her back and peered into the empty trunk. Correction . . . the nearly empty trunk.
Only now did he notice the folded edge of yellowed paper, sticking up from some hidden place near the corner. “Jane.”
“No one deserves to suffer, Raven. No one deserves to feel alone and abandoned. Just thinking about you as a little gray-eyed boy, staring out the window of the orphanage and wondering—”
“Jane,” Raven repeated, taking her by the shoulders.
He fought the urge to roll his eyes as he started to brush the wet rivulets from her cheeks with his thumbs. “Listen to me. You’re overtired and letting your emotions get the better of you. Frankly, I’m disappointed. I never took you for a missish chit. Now, we aren’t going to go any further unless you promise me there’ll be no more tears, hmm?”
She sniffed again and swiped the back of her hand beneath her nose. “But it’s over, regardless.”
He shook his head. “Not quite. The trunk has a false bottom. But I don’t want you to get your—”
Her gaze swerved to the corner. Her lips parted on a gasp. Then she scrambled to retrieve it, diving headlong over the side before he could even finish his sentence.
“—hopes up,” he concluded.
For a long moment, she didn’t say anything. Just simply stared down at the letter.
Bollocks. He shouldn’t have mentioned it. Continuing this wild-goose chase would only leave her feeling more defeated in the end.
“I was wrong,” she said.
Guilt ate at him in gobbling bites like a worm in a cherry. He should have stopped this nonsense before it began. “Like I said, it’s neither here nor there for me. In fact, I don’t even know why I stayed after the sand ran out.”
“No, Raven.” She shook her head, her eyes glittering with unshed tears. “I mean, it wasn’t a drawing I remembered. It must have been a seal.”
Then she turned her wrist to show him the broken red wax, split in a horizontal line. And there, as if it had been taken directly from his flesh, was the bird.
The raven.
Numb with disbelief, he didn’t move at first.
Surely his eyes were playing tricks on him. He truly never expected to find anything and a noticeable tremor shook his hands as he reached for it.