Page 12 of The Sea Siren of Broadwater Bottom
And then he was gone.
Cassandra was already clucking over her, peeling off her wet clothes layer by layer. “Oh Elissa, are you sure you’re well?”
“I’ll be all right,” Elissa reassured her sister.
And she would be, physically, at least.
But on the inside, she suspected she would never be quite the same.
CHAPTER5
Edward would have ridden home immediately were it not for the lightning. He didn’t mind a bit of rain.
What he very much minded was imposing upon the St. Cyrs. This was his least-favorite part of being a future earl: the way people insisted upon making a fuss.
From his vantage point in the library, he could hear Mr. and Mrs. St. Cyr whispering. It had been determined that Edward must borrow some dry clothes, which he supposed was practical. At present, he could not sit down and was actively dripping upon the floor. But the St. Cyrs were now urgently discussing which of Mr. St. Cyr’s garments were the least offensive, as well as which bedroom would make the most presentable dressing room.
He sighed. He knew exactly what would happen while he was changing. Mrs. St. Cyr would rush to the kitchen and order the sort of meal usually reserved for Christmas and Easter. He cringed to think of them going to such expense on his behalf. Had it been up to him, he would not impose upon their supper, but would spend an hour or two poking around the library, then ride home as soon as the rain let up.
He had always loved Julian St. Cyr’s library. The library at his family estate, Harrington Hall, was designed by Robert Adam in elegant shades of bronze and mint green. All the books were bound in an identical shade of golden-brown calfskin, dusted daily, and alphabetized within an inch of their life.
The St. Cyr library, on the other hand, had stacks of books everywhere, precariously leaning against the wall, each other, and a bust of Socrates complete with a spider dangling from the philosopher’s right ear. The surface of the desk wasn’t visible due to multiple layers of books, most of them still open to whatever page had interested Mr. St. Cyr at the time. The pair of leather wing chairs before the fireplace looked no less inviting for being patched in a few places. Scattered amongst the shelves he saw a broken astrolabe, the capital of an ancient ionic column, and a human skull.
The overall effect was such that if the wizard Merlin had strolled around the corner with his nose buried in a book, he wouldn’t have looked at all out of place. Yes, Edward would very much prefer to pass a couple of hours in here, digging through the shelves for buried treasures.
But if there was one thing he had learned in the course of his twenty-seven years, it was that what one wanted counted for absolutely nothing, at least when one was a future earl. What one was expected to do trumped it every single time.
It took five minutes for the St. Cyrs to formulate a suitable plan. He was led to a tiny bedroom upstairs, next door to the one in which Elissa was having her bath.
He glanced about the room, surmising that it must belong to one of the four St. Cyr daughters, as someone had draped an elaborate trellis of tiny white faux flowers around the window. A plush old chair was positioned beneath the archway—the perfect reading nook. How he wished he could show his little sister, Isabella. She would love something like this for her room. He peered at the thin vines, thinking that he had never seen such delicate silk flowers before, only to discover that both vines and blossoms had been painstakingly cut from paper.
He shook himself and began exchanging his wet clothes for the dry ones he found draped over the back of the chair, which included his own mostly dry coat. As he was buttoning one of the shirt cuffs, something caught his eye on the little shelf over the writing table. It wasRoberti Stephani Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, a book he recognized immediately, having used it daily from age seven to twenty-two.
He knew exactly what the presence ofRoberti Stephani Thesaurus Linguae Latinaemeant.
He was in Elissa’s bedroom.
He strolled over to her desk to see what else she kept readily at hand. Its tiny shelf had room for only a handful of volumes, but there was the Samuel Clarke translation of theIliad(an undisputed classic), Lemprière’sBibliotheca Classica(essential for any scholar), and Parkhurst’sGreek and English Lexicon(exactly what he would have chosen as well, and far superior, in his opinion, to the lexicons of Caryl or Schrevelius.)
He blanched as his eyes fell upon the final book on the little shelf, the one Elissa had chosen to keep in her bedroom, where she had so little space.
It was his own translation ofPrometheus Unbound.
He knew he shouldn’t snoop, but he found himself pulling it from the shelf and flipping through the pages. It looked well-thumbed, with the occasional bent corner, and… was that a tea stain? He could just picture her making her adorableoh dearface as she blotted at the pages, an image that caused the corners of his mouth to curl up.
Edward shuddered as he read a few lines of his work. A part of him had been excited when his tutor assigned him to translate Aeschylus’s lost masterpiece. It had been the talk of the academic world—after being lost for centuries, a Bavarian monk had noticed a moldering folio tucked inside of another book. It proved to be the only surviving copy ofPrometheus Unbound. It picked up where its precursor,Prometheus Bound,left off: with the eponymous Titan chained to a rock for all of eternity, an eagle eating his liver each day, a punishment from Zeus for having dared to give mankind the gift of fire.
The problem was that the manuscript was literally crumbling and therefore incomplete; in particular, the triumphant final scenes in which Prometheus won back his freedom had only a few passages extant. His tutor had come up with what he felt was a brilliant solution: Edward would compose original verse to fill in what was missing.
Now, Edward could translate, and he could write an elegant Greek ode. These tasks were expected of any man who called himself a classicist. But he felt deeply presumptuous putting words in the mouth of the great Aeschylus.
Almost as bad,Prometheus Unboundwas the rare Greek tragedy that had a happy ending. The tone was triumphant. Uplifting. Jubilant, even. And although Edward secretly enjoyed reading such high-spirited works, composing one was entirely out of the question. His own writing was elegant, but sedate. Restrained.Masculine.
But in order to match the extant passages and be true to Aeschylus’s intent, he had been forced to write in increasingly lofty tones that had been entirely unlike himself. And for a man who was so, so careful to guard his innermost feelings, to never show the world anything but the perfect future earl it required him to be… His tutor might as well have asked him to take off his clothing and run naked across Trinity Bridge. That was how exposed he felt.
Edwardhatedwhat he had written, but at least his tutor would be the only person to ever read it.
Or so he had thought.
