‘You are a scholar too?’ Elinor began to gather up her things, stuffing pencils, charcoal and paints into the battered leather satchel and swinging it over her shoulder. ‘I am joining her now, if you would care to accompany me.’
‘Let’s just say I have an interest in antiquities.’ He removed the easel from her hands, folded its legs up, lashed the straps around it with a competence that suggested he used one himself, and tucked it under his arm. There was a short struggle for possession of the stool, which he won, and for the parasol, which Elinor retained. ‘You are staying in Vezelay?’
‘Yes, we have been here seven days now. We are making our way down through France, visiting a number of the finer early cathedrals. Mama intends that we will remain at Vezelay for several weeks yet. Merci, monsieur.’ She smiled and nodded to the verger, who was wielding a broom and stirring up the gritty dust in the porch. ‘Sweeping seems pointless, he would be better employed on the roof with a tarpaulin.’
She dropped a coin into the outstretched hand of the beggar by the door and headed diagonally across the open space before the basilica, glancing up at her companion as she did so. ‘We have lodgings just down the hill here.’
There was something vaguely familiar about him, although she could not place it. It certainly made him easy to talk to. Normally Miss Ravenhurst would have contented herself with a polite inclination of the head and a murmured good day when she came across a male countryman to whom she had not been introduced. It would never have occurred to her to invite one back to their lodgings to meet Mama.
Perhaps it was the red hair, somewhat extinguished now as he clapped his hat back on his head. Being one of the red-headed Ravenhursts, she saw a less spectacular version of it every time she looked in the glass. It was generally considered to be a handicap in a lady, although if hers was less a good match for a chestnut horse and more the flame of well-polished mahogany by firelight as his was, she might have felt more reconciled to it. He seemed to have avoided freckles as well, she noticed with envy, but then, his skin was not as fair as hers was.
‘Here we are.’ It was only a few minutes’ walk down the steep main street, although it always took rather longer to toil back up the slippery cobbles to the basilica. The door was on the latch and she pushed it open, calling, ‘Mama? Are you at home? We have a visitor.’
‘In here, Elinor.’ She followed her mother’s voice through into the parlour, leaving her belongings on the hall bench and gesturing to the tall man to put the easel and stool down, too. At the sight of him, Lady James Ravenhurst rose to her feet from behind the table, its chequered cloth strewn with papers and books.
‘Mama, this gentleman is a scholar of antiquities who wishes to meet—’
‘Theophilus!’ Lady James lifted her quizzing glass to her eye and stared, for once clearly out of countenance.
Elinor stared, too. ‘Cousin Theo?’ Her disgraceful and disgraced cousin Theo? Here? ‘I haven’t seen you for years.’
‘Not since I was twelve, fifteen years ago,’ he agreed. ‘You must have been about seven. I wondered if it was you, Cousin Elinor.’
‘The hair, I suppose,’ she said, resigned to it being her most memorable feature. ‘I was ten,’ she added, ruthlessly honest. It was nice of him to pretend he thought she was only twenty-two now, and not an on-the-shelf spinster of almost twenty-six.
‘What are you doing here, Theophilus? I understood from your mama that you were undertaking the Grand Tour.’ Lady James gestured impatiently towards the chairs set around the stone hearth. ‘Sit.’
‘I am, you will agree, Aunt Louisa, somewhat old to be undertaking the Tour with a tutor to bear-lead me.’ Theo waited until the two women were seated, then took the remaining chair, crossing one long leg over the other and clasping his hands together. He appeared quite tame and domesticated, although a trifle large. If Elinor had imagined a dangerous rakehell, which she had been informed her cousin was, he would not look like this.
‘Mama uses the Tour as code for sent abroad in disgrace,’ he continued. ‘I am earning my living, avoiding English tourists and generally managing to keep my doings from the ears of my sainted papa.’
‘Your father, even if Bishop of Wessex, may not be a saint,’ his aunt said tartly, ‘but you have certainly tried his patience over the years, Theophilus. Where were you when the Corsican Monster returned from exile last year, might I ask?’
‘Oh, here in France. I became a Swedish merchant for the duration of the troubles. I found it interfered very little with my business.’
Elinor found she was grappling with unsettling emotions. Of course, she was pleased to see her cousin. Any cousin. The Ravenhursts were a large and friendly clan. But something—the memory of that unsettling little voice in her head, perhaps?—replaced the calm contentment that was her usual internal state with a cold knot in her stomach. If she did not know better, she would think it disappointment.
‘What are you frowning about, Elinor?’ her mother enquired. ‘Nothing is more productive of lines on the forehead.’
‘A slight headache, that is all, Mama.’ She had met an intelligent, attractive man—Theo was certainly that, even if he was not exactly handsome—and he turned out not to be an intriguing stranger, but one of the Ravenhurst clan. A relative. So what was there to be disappointed about in that, other than the fact he would treat her like they all did, as Mama’s bluestocking assistant? An hour ago she would have said she wanted a man to talk to about as badly as she wanted to be back in London, sitting with the wallflowers in the chaperons’ corner through yet another hideous Season.
Whatever Cousin Theo’s business was, it appeared to be flourishing. She might not know much about fashion, but she knew quality when she saw it, and his boots, his breeches and the deceptively simple cut of his riding coat all whispered money in the most discreet manner.
‘Did you say business, Theophilus?’ Mama, as usual ignoring her own advice, was frowning at him now. ‘You are not in trade, I trust?’
‘One has to live, Aunt Louisa.’ He smiled at her. Elinor noticed her mother’s lips purse; he had almost seduced an answering smile out of her. ‘My parents, no doubt rightly, feel that at the age of twenty-seven I should be gainfully employed and cut off my allowance some time ago.’
‘But trade! There are any number of perfectly eligible professions for the grandson of the Duke of Allington.’
‘My father has informed me that I enter the church over his dead body. It is also his opinion that I was born to be hanged and therefore a career in the law is ineligible. I find I have a fixed objection to killing people unless absolutely necessary, which eliminates the army and the navy.’
‘Politics? The government?’ Elinor suggested, smiling as much at her mother’s expression as Theo’s catalogue of excuses.
‘I am also allergic to humbug.’
Lady James ignored this levity. ‘What sort of trade?’
‘Art and antiquities. I find I have a good eye. I prefer the small and the portable, of course.’
‘Why of course?’ Careless of deportment, Elinor twisted round on her seat to face him fully.
‘It is easier to get an emerald necklace or a small enamelled reliquary past a customs post or over a mountain pass than a twelve-foot canvas or six foot of marble nude on a plinth.’ The twinkle in his eyes invited her to share in his amusement at the picture he conjured up.
‘You are involved in smuggling?’ his aunt asked sharply.
‘In the aftermath of the late wars, there is a great deal of what might be loosely described as art knocking about the Continent, and not all of it has a clear title. Naturally, if it sparkles, then government officials want it.’ Theo shrugged. ‘I prefer to keep it and sell it on myself, or act as an agent for a