“Really?” Tess asked.
“Indeed. And I can only gather that you haven’t read that particular play, Miss Essex, or you would express a stronger astonishment. Believe me, I was near to tears with the tedium of it, but yon fiancé of mine simply yawned a few times.”
Miss Pythian-Adams looked the very picture of the sweet romantic heroine of any number of gothic novels. Except she didn’t speak like one. “Am I to be married to that illiterate and quick-tempered oaf, or is there any chance that your sister would prefer the duty herself?”
“But if you don’t wish to marry Lord Maitland,” Tess said, carefully sidestepping the issue of Imogen’s passionate desire to tie herself to that same illiterate oaf, “why on earth don’t you simply break off your engagement? My understanding is that a young lady can end an engagement without reproof.”
Miss Pythian-Adams had a crooked little smile. “Not when the future groom’s mother holds the mortgage on one’s father’s estate.”
“But I thought you were an heiress!” Tess cried.
“I am. I stand to inherit a bequest from my grandmother upon my marriage, but since the world is designed as it is, that inheritance will benefit my husband, not my father. Unfortunately, Lady Clarice has the upper hand.”
“Goodness.”
“I thought that if I rained culture down on Lord Maitland, he would break off the engagement. My family could claim the mortgage back as a settlement in lieu of a breach-of-marriage contract, and all would be well. But unfortunately even the most ignoble and conceited expressions of culture that I drum up to bore the son appear to enthrall his mother.”
“Hello!” a voice called down to them. Mr. Felton was standing at the edge of the room, flanked by their guardian and Lady Clarice herself.
Miss Pythian-Adams gave Tess a meaningful glance. “Watch,” she said, hardly moving her lips. Then she threw open her arms. “Welcome, Friends, Romans, Countrymen!”
“Ah,” Mr. Felton said dryly. “Julius Caesar.”
Lady Clarice turned faintly pink with excitement. “You always know precisely the right thing to say, Miss Pythian-Adams!” she cried down at them. “I feel more intelligent just listening to you. Shall we come down? Is there anything of interest, of cultural interest, down there in that little pit? A vase, perhaps?”
“I’m afraid not,” Miss Pythian-Adams replied, beginning to clamber up the tumbled rock. Mr. Felton immediately descended to help her to a higher elevation. As soon as he deposited Miss Pythian-Adams on the grass, he returned to the room, presumably to give Tess the same help.
Tess suddenly felt as if the little chamber had shrunk. Felton seemed to fill the space entirely, his broad shoulders almost brushing hers as he bent to examine the hole for piped water that Miss Pythian-Adams had discovered.
“I would surmise this is a bath,” he remarked.
“We reached the same conclusion,” Tess said, wondering if she should clamber back up the rocks. The others had moved away, and she could hear their voices echoing around the ruins. But…she stayed.
He was prowling around the small room, poking at protruding rocks with his polished mahogany cane. Tess felt, quite irrationally, as if there wasn’t quite enough air to breathe in that small chamber. How in the world had a group of Romans sat around without their clothing, in such a confined space?
Why, if he were unclothed…
“Miss Pythian-Adams thinks that this may have been a steam room,” she said, as much to push away the foolish images leaping to her mind as anything.
“Indeed,” he said noncommittally. “I suppose she may well be right. One might imagine that this stone piece here was designed for a person to lie upon.”
They both stared for a moment at a stone ledge along the side of the room, quite covered with mossy green.
Color leaped into Tess’s cheeks at the thought. “We must join the others,” she said, picking up her skirts, preparatory to scrambling up the rockslide.
Mr. Felton had a faint smile on his face. “I didn’t mean to alarm you, Miss Essex.”
How she disliked men who always faced the world with a noncommittal expression! One might even prefer Lord Maitland’s sulky little pouts to Felton’s lack of expression. “I am not alarmed,” Tess said, nevertheless backing up. He was such a large man. He was walking toward her, and there was something about that smile…
“Because I can only imagine,” he said, stopping just before her, “that Scottish lasses react precisely the same as English young ladies to a mere suggestion of the bedchamber.”
He clearly intended to fluster her. So apparently behind that sardonic face was the wish to unnerve young women. How charming.
“Oh, not in the least,” she snapped. “I adore historical sites. One can just imagine the Romans reclining and—”
“Eating grapes?” he suggested. He was very close to her now. His hair had been blown by the breeze: it didn’t lie so strictly along his head but was almost standing up, glowing wheat-colored strands curling in all directions.
“Of course. Eating grapes and writing poetry. All—all those things Romans did.” Given their lack of schooling, the only things she knew about Romans was that when they weren’t marching around in armor, they ate grapes naked, presumably while listening to all that poetry Annabel loved so much. She certainly wasn’t going to mention specific poems. Or naked grape eating. Or—
And the glint in Mr. Felton’s eye suggested that he knew just what she was thinking. Tess could feel herself growing a bit pink, but she didn’t move.
“Poetry?” he asked. “What Roman poets do you particularly enjoy?”
Was he mocking her? Tess raised her chin. “Catullus is an esteemed poet of the ancient world.”
“What a remarkable governess you must have had,” Mr. Felton remarked, looking genuinely surprised.
Tess was silent. They’d had, of course, no governess. But at some point she and Annabel had decided that they must read the books in their papa’s library before he sold every one. Otherwise, they would be as ignorant as savages if they ever did get to England to have the season Papa was always promising them.
“I would be surprised to find that an educated young woman had read Virgil,” Mr. Felton said, “but Catullus!”
In the face of his astonishment, Tess felt compelled to explain. “His name begins with ‘C.’Annabel and I formed the idea of reading my father’s library; I’m afraid that we did not reach as far as the ‘V’s.”
Mr. Felton seemed mightily amused by this. “So how far did you and Miss Annabel reach in the alphabet?”
Tess frowned at him. “It wasn’t only Annabel and me; all four of us read the works together. And we reached H.”
“No Shakespeare?” Felton asked.
Tess nodded. “He fell under ‘C’ for Collected Works.”
Felton laughed. He really was standing uncomfortably close to her. “My favorite poem by Catullus begins like this, although I doubt very much that a proper young lady like yourself has read this particular verse. You inquire how many kisses of yours would be enough.”
Tess felt herself growing rosy. His head was bending toward hers with all the brazen shamelessness of a naked Roman. She ought to push him away. To scream, to—