Ah, Colin.
Dodging through the obstacle course of glass display cases, I shook my head at my own foolishness. If I turned into a useless blob of goo every time I thought of him, how was I ever going to maintain a coherent conversation for the duration of dinner?
Every time I relaxed my concentration, there I was again, off in daydream land, in a glorious summer landscape with a man as perfect and plastic as a Ken doll. I knew I was being absurd. Outside, it was late November, bitter cold November, only three days after Thanksgiving. Yet, in my daydreams, we strolled hand in hand beneath a gentle June sun while the birds chirped away in the trees above. In real life, one of them would probably crap on his head. So much for romance.
Logically, I knew that the man was just as imaginary as the scene. The Colin I knew — or, rather, the Colin I had met, since I couldn't really presume to know him at all, despite a rather intense acquaintance to date — was far from perfect. In fact, he was mercurial to the point of being schizophrenic, warm and flirty one minute, cold and distant the next. When I'd first met him, he'd practically bitten my head off for having the nerve to accept his aunt's invitation to go through the family archives; the next thing I knew, he was refilling my champagne glass and looking at me in a way that made me go all wobbly (although four glasses of champagne will do that to a girl).
At least he'd had an excellent excuse for his most recent Jekyll and Hyde performance. What I'd thought was a case of Colin simply blowing me off because of, well, me, turned out to be a panicked rush to Italy, where his mother was unconscious in a hospital after a particularly nasty car accident. I hadn't even realized Colin had a mother.
Naturally, I knew he must have had one at some point (yes, we all took sixth-grade bio class), but in novels, heroes never seem to have parents, at least not living, breathing ones who get sick or have accidents. Occasionally they have parent issues, but the parents are always conveniently off somewhere to stage left, usually dead. Can you imagine Mr. Rochester trying to explain to his mother how he burned the house down? Or Mr. Darcy promising his mother he won't marry that hideous Bingley girl? I rest my case.
Even writing off Colin's last mood swing, I still hadn't found out just why he had reacted quite so violently to my excursions into his family's archives. Most of the hypotheses that occurred to me were far too ridiculous to countenance. Even if Colin's great-great-grandparents had founded a sort of spy school on the family estate, there was no way that the family could have remained continuously in the spying business since the Napoleonic Wars.
Could they? My notions of modern espionage had a lot to do with James Bond movies, complete with low-slung cars, talking watches, and women in bikinis with breasts like helium balloons. Colin drove a Range Rover and wore a Timex. As for the helium balloons, let's just say that if that's what Colin was looking for, he wouldn't be going out to dinner with me.
Occupied by these fruitful speculations, I managed to make my way through the series of linked rooms that led to the back of the house, which petered out into a narrow corridor: Someone had painted the walls a utilitarian white that somehow managed to look more depressing than an outright gray.
There was a door with a big sign on it that read PRIVATE in all capital letters in four languages (presumably, if you didn't speak English, German, French, or Japanese, this prohibition didn't apply to you), with a rope strung across the entrance for emphasis. I cleverly deduced that that was not the door I was looking for.
An anemic red arrow pointed visitors down a narrow flight of stairs with shiny reflective tape beginning to peel back from the treads. Clutching the warped handrail, I picked my way carefully down and came straight up against — the bathrooms. The little stick figures were unmistakable.
Next to them, however, a plain white door had been marked with the word REFERENCE. It was just the tiniest bit ajar, presumably for ventilation rather than hospitality. I pushed the door the rest of the way open and made my way in, the heels of my boots slapping hollowly across the linoleum floor.
In contrast to all the gilt and rosewood upstairs, the reference room wasn't a very impressive setup. The room was small and square, furnished with two rickety aluminum folding tables, each supplied with four equally rickety folding chairs with hard plastic seats. Padding might have encouraged people to linger. At the far end of the room, a small counter, not unlike those in drugstores, separated the reference room from the archives beyond. Through the gap I caught a tantalizing glimpse of utilitarian metal shelves piled with a variety of acid-free boxes and big black binders.
At the desk, a man in a hot pink T-shirt guarded the gap. I use the word "guarded" loosely. He was so deeply absorbed in whatever he was reading that I could have vaulted over the desk without his noticing me. The thought was tempting, but that kindergarten training dies hard. I didn't vault. Instead I coughed. When that didn't work, I coughed again. Loudly. I was afraid I was going to have to resort to more drastic measures — like sneezing — but the third cough finally broke through his literary absorption. As he hoisted himself up, I took a peek at his reading material. It was a copy of Hello! magazine, open to a fine showing of airbrushed celebrities.
Somehow, I didn't think this was the archivist. In fact, I had a pretty shrewd guess as to who he was.
"I believe we spoke on the phone," I said.
Clearly, he also remembered our conversation fondly. His face went from lascivious to hostile in the space of a second. "Oh. You."
So much for being a goodwill ambassador for America, or whatever else it is that the Fulbright people expect you to do. Fortunately, my grant was a Clive fellowship, not a Fulbright, so I was off the hook. As far as I could tell, Mr. Clive had harbored no pretensions about his grantees fostering international amity.
That being the case, I felt no guilt at all about saying crisply, "I'm here to see the papers of Sebastian, Lord Vaughn."
The boy gave me a look as though to say, "You would." Levering himself up with obvious effort, he trudged wearily off into the blazing desert sands, five hundred miles across rugged terrain, to the metal shelves right behind the desk. There, he made a great show of studying the labels on the binders.
"That's Vaughn, v-a-u-g-h-n," I said helpfully. "Sebastian, Lord Vaughn."
"Which one?" asked Pink Shirt dourly.
It had never occurred to me that there might be other Sebastian, Lord Vaughns floating around. "There's more than one?"
"1768 or 1903?"
It was a bit like ordering a hamburger. "1768."
After a moment, his head popped back around again. "Do you want the 1790 box, the 1800 box, or" — his head ducked back down for a moment — "the everything else box?"
Next, he was going to ask me if I wanted fries with that. I made my choice, and the 1800 box was duly shoved into my hands. The tape on one end bore a label that descriptively stated, "Seb'n, Ld. Vn., Misc. Docs. 1800–1810."
I began to wonder if the archivist actually existed, or if they just pretended they had one for the sake of show. Not only was that one of the less convincing classificatory systems I had ever encountered, there had been no effort made to put the contents of the box in any sort of order; small notebooks, loose papers, and packets of letters were all jumbled, one on top of the other. Given that Vaughn had lived well into the reign of Victoria, my hunch was that the everything else box wasn't so-called because there wasn't much there for the next forty years of his life, but simply because no one had gotten around to sorting through it yet.