Betina Krahn (32 page)

To that end, he made reservations to dine at the Athenaeum Club in St. James that evening. The atmosphere there was always intellectual and restrained and the food was good
by his standards. Most important, there would be nothing there to remind him of the sea or Celeste.

He sent his coat and trousers down to be pressed and had the porter bring him a paper to read while he waited. Thankfully, there was nothing in it about mermaids or dolphins. He examined every inch of every page; he would have seen it if it were there. Feeling considerably more himself, he changed his shirt, dressed, and had the doorman call him a cab.

T
HE
A
THENAEUM
C
LUB
, in the Pall Mall, was the most aesthetic gentleman’s club in London, both in its classical architecture and in the intellectual bent of its members. Its serious tone and impressive subscription list made membership in the Athenaeum a sought-after commodity in academic circles. Titus had received notice of his election to the club at about the same time he was invited to join the Royal Oceanographic Society and was gratified to be able to call himself a member.

The dining room was only half full when he arrived, and he was seated promptly with a pair of older members. The wine was exceptional, the food acceptable, and the company forgettable. It was a mercifully dull interlude, until he strolled into the long drawing room and found himself being hailed from the far end by none other than Sir Gregory Finnes, the general secretary of the Royal Zoological Society. Portly, thick-whiskered Sir Gregory waved to him and, when Titus hesitated, barreled down the length of the room to seize him by the arm and drag him back to a small group of society members clustered around a tray of drinks. He was soon greeted, seated, treated to a glass of vintage port.

“What say—did you ‘clean and scale’ the Lady Mermaid, Thorny old boy?” Sir Gregory demanded with a wine-warmed grin.

“Details, man!” Sir Thomas Edelson ordered, giving the table a thump.

“Did you teach her a thing or two?” the dapper Herbert Margrove asked with a sly smile. “Or did she teach you?”

Titus looked from face to avid face, in the group clustered around him, and felt his stomach tightening. “I spent a fortnight at Ashton House, yes. And I do have a report for the secretaries of the societies.”

“Well, then, make it, man, make it!” Sir Gregory said, grinning. “Unless, of course, it is something better told over a hand of cards and a bottle of scotch—in which case, we should move this gathering to the bar at White’s and have at it!”

The others laughed and the heavy aromas of wine and old cigars blended powerfully in the stuffy atmosphere.

“I was able to verify virtually every aspect of her work … with the possible exception of the frequency of the dolphins’ behaviors. Frequency was not within the scope of my charge, I felt, given the limited time available.”

They stared at him as if he’d just spoken in a rare Albanian dialect.

“Beg pardon?” Sir Gregory gave a short laugh and glanced at the others. “I thought I heard you say you
verified
her work.”

“I did say that,” Titus answered. “That was my task, was it not? To determine the truthfulness of her claims? Well, I did so.”

“Good God,” Sir Thomas said, in genuine shock, “I think he means it.”

“Surely not,” Margrove insisted. “That blond bit of fluff?”

“That choice piece of muslin … swimming in the ocean … riding around on the backs of dolphins?” Sir Gregory snorted. “Impossible.”

“Not on the
backs
of dolphins,” Titus said. “She merely swam
with
the creatures. Interesting sight. I observed her swimming submerged with the creatures for two and three minutes at a time. She has taught one to jump a hoop and to
play fetch with a cork float. Prospero even lets her stand on his head and launches her out of the water into dives.”

“Prospero?” Sir Gregory said, scowling.

“One of the dolphin’s names,” he responded, feeling them shifting focus now to scrutinize him.

“On a
first-name basis
with the beasts, are you, Thorne?” Sir Thomas glanced at Margrove and Sir Gregory.

Titus looked from one wine-reddened face to another, sensing that more depended on his answer than he realized. “Actually, the names are as good a way as any to refer to the specimens. One has to be able to tell the creatures apart and identify them somehow … in order to keep track of which dolphin does what.”

“Sounds as if you were quite thorough in your investigations,” Sir Gregory observed.

Then Margrove snatched up his glass of port and swirled some around in his mouth before asking, “And what position were you in when you made your
quite thorough
observations, Thorne? Vertical or
horizontal?”

His interrogators all thought that remark quite witty and went off in spasms of laughter. Titus felt his face heating and gripped the stem of his glass tighter.

“If you’re asking how I acquired my opinion of her work … I’m afraid I had to swim for it,” he said with hard-won aplomb. “That too was in my charge, I believe: repeating her methods and observations personally.”

They sobered and studied him, clearly displeased by his answers. His full report, when it was tendered, would please them even less. It hadn’t occurred to him that his professional credibility and integrity as a researcher might be called into question, for simply reporting the
truth
.

“Well, of course. You discharged your obligation. We all credit that,” Sir Thomas said very deliberately, looking to the others. “Verified the woman’s claims in the sum and the particulars. Report made … eh, Finnes?”

Sir Gregory caught his intent and nodded judiciously. “Report made and duly noted.” Then he burst into a grin
and sat forward like an eager schoolboy. “Now give us the slick and skinny of it, Thorne. Did she practice her special ‘breath-holding’ techniques on you?”

“What did the minx wear to swim in?”

“How intimately did you
probe
her knowledge of ‘mating behaviors’?”

“Gentlemen, really.” He forced a smile while scrambling mentally for a way to answer without revealing his irritation or further inflaming their imaginations. “Like my colleagues at Cardinal College, you seem to see a potential for adventure in everything. The reality of my stay was far more mundane than it might sound. For the first three days all I did was sit around in a boat and on a dock, watching Miss Ashton calling the beasts. As to what she wore swimming … she employed a rather unflattering smocklike garment in my presence. And however knowledgeable she may be about dolphin mating habits”—he steeled himself to appear un-fazed by the final topic—“she appears to have had little opportunity to expand her field of inquiry to humans. Her grandmother and a passel of aged family friends avidly supervise her time and activities.”

Disappointment darkened their expressions. But they continued to ask questions and he continued to relate a judiciously censored account of his experiences at Ashton House. He admitted his early doubts about her leaky boat and makeshift tin drum. He told of his astonishment at seeing her swim with the creatures by holding on to them and at seeing her leap and dive with them. By the time he got to his own firsthand experiences and impressions, his three inquisitors were scowling in open irritation.

“So, in short, you intend to write that this Ashton creature’s observations are true,” Sir Gregory summarized.

“I must report what I saw,” Titus answered tautly, his tension turning to anger at the intimation that he would—or
should
—consider doing otherwise. There was a pregnant pause.

“Well, where’s the harm in that?” Margrove poured himself
another glass of port and spoke with a patronizing air. “I mean, after all … just what did he see? A woman who swims like a fish. While uncommon, such a thing is hardly remarkable. And a dolphin swimming around with a bit of cork in its mouth … there’s nothing earth-shattering about that. A dog will grab onto a bone and run with it, and we certainly don’t call that science. Swimming around in the ocean, watching dolphins play a bit of ‘rumpy-pumpy’ … it hardly
proves
anything, does it?”

“I say. Leave it to Margrove to put it all in perspective,” Sir Thomas said with relief. “Interesting little episode. Fodder for the penny press, certainly, but hardly
science
. By all means, Thorny old boy, you must write about it. Put it in perspective for the masses, and put this clever-nell ‘mermaid’ in her proper place.”

By the time he exited the club, twenty minutes later, Titus was ready to take something apart … preferably something very large and made of brick. His muscles were aching, his shoulders swollen, his fists clenched, and his jaw ached from keeping it clamped against a dozen furious responses that very nearly escaped him. He had come within a hairsbreadth of laying Margrove out flat on the drawingroom floor. The wretch had smirked and suggested he was remiss in not investigating what sort of noises mermaids made when they got “stuck” in the tail.

These were men at the top of his field, in authoritative and highly prestigious positions. He had begun that sticky interview believing he could ill afford to antagonize them, and their skeptical attitude toward him reinforced his instinctive caution. But their sneering insinuations and leering quips offended his most fundamental sense of decency and eroded his respect for them as men and as scholars. Nothing intelligent or worthwhile, they believed, could come from anyone wearing
skirts
. Their attitude was so arrogant and unrepentant that it truly appalled him.

Unbidden, Celeste had risen in his mind. Out of hand, they dismissed her ingenuity, integrity, and strength of character.
They didn’t know the first thing about her or her work, but they were positive, even insistent, that she was a greedy, loose-living female who would wheedle, bribe, and seduce to get what she wanted. For all their degrees and honors and high-minded talk of scholarship, they were more than eager to violate the first principles of inquiry … discounting even the possibility of truth in a work if it was authored by someone who did not fit their notion of an “acceptable” researcher. A woman.

He stopped on the street in the deepening gloom, watching people hurrying by in pairs … realizing that nearly one of every two was a woman. It struck him forcefully that fully half of the human race was female. What were the mathematical odds that
all
of them had substandard or defective brains?

He shoved his hands into his pockets and struck off for Knightsbridge, hoping to walk off some of the angry energy generated in him by that infuriating exchange. It was somewhere along Piccadilly that it hit him with the force of a runaway milk wagon:
two weeks ago, he had not only admired them, he had agreed with them!

T
HE WAVES LAPPED
gently around Celeste as she waded into the cove waters and stood, watching her dolphins jump and frolic nearby. The rise and fall of the water against her skin reminded her of Titus’s touch, of the rhythms of his breathing and his walk, of his body moving against hers. It had been more than a week since he left and, still, she looked up at the sound of footsteps, expecting to see him, still held her breath at each distant sound, desperate to hear his voice, still prayed that she would wake up and find that his leaving was only a dream.

But it wasn’t and she didn’t wake up. She paced her room and stared off into space and sailed halfway to Plymouth and ate a whole bowl of Maria’s chocolate-cake batter. She swam until her body ached, read books from Brighton’s lending
library until she was bleary-eyed, and walked all the way to Cardamon with the last of their money to pay the butcher’s bill. Each evening, she sat silent at the dinner table, avoiding her disappointment in Nana and her anger at the disastrous effects on her life of the Atlanteans’ lunatic ideas. Each night, in the quiet darkness, she wrapped her arms around a pillow and released her tears into it.

He wasn’t coming back.

It was a simple fact. And she was much too rational to ignore facts.

Her heart might be sore and empty, she told herself sternly, but the rest of her was still functional. She couldn’t go on this way, wanting, aching for something that had passed forever out of her reach. She had work to do … dolphins to observe … another book to write … bills to pay. If the events of that fateful night had taught her anything, they had taught her that there was no one to depend on but herself.

S
QUARING HER SHOULDERS
, she gave the whistle she wore around her neck three short, hard blows. Several dolphins responded and she gave each a stroke and a murmur of greeting before singling out two dolphins to work with.

“Hello, Prospero, old boy.” She stroked her favorite dolphin’s head and gave him a good rubbing under his bony “chin.” He rolled back and forth in the water as if reveling in the attention. “At least I have you, don’t I?”

Unbidden, the memory of Titus meeting Prospero rose in her mind. The consternation he had shown when Prospero spat water at him … the joy that shone in his eyes when he began to look at Prospero and the others as individual beings rather than just “specimens” …

Banishing those bittersweet thoughts, she sent Prospero out to make a circuit of the cove while she turned her attention to little Titan. He and his friend Edgar were the first dolphin babies she had seen at close range and she was curious
to find out how quickly he would pick up the behaviors Prospero, Ariel, and the others had learned. It was a tribute to the dolphins’ acceptance of her that she was allowed to play alone with young Titan.

She brought out her bag of tricks, which included cork floats and hoops and a leather ball that was filled with air for surface play. She was just introducing Titan to the float when Prospero darted in to give the little dolphin a nudge from below that sent him tumbling. When Prospero stuck his head out of the water with his impudent dolphin grin, she waved him off.

“Leave us alone for a while, Prospero,” she ordered. “I need to find out how quickly Titan can learn this.” She introduced the float to Titan and Prospero darted in again, this time grabbing the float and racing off with it.