Midsummer Moon by Laura Kinsale Read Free Book Online Page B

the cottage. Certain that he would be occupied for an hour with Theo, she slipped downstairs for a solitary lunch. Somehow she didn't want to talk to Thaddeus. Not today. Not when he would ask questions. Questions like who her visitor was and why they had left the table in the middle of dinner and why the bed in Uncle Dorian's room was mussed and why her own was not.
    She frowned at the marmalade-covered breakfast plate that lay abandoned on the dining room table. There was a trail of jam across the wood that ended at a tented napkin. The napkin emitted a faint crunching sound. Merlin lifted the material. Beneath it, the hedgehog rolled up, clutching the last of a jam-covered slice of bacon.
    "I'm not going to take it,” she assured the little animal softly. “You can open your eyes, silly."
    The hedgehog ignored her. She replaced the napkin. After a moment the modest crunching resumed.
    Merlin sliced herself bread and cheese and sat down. All morning she'd been occupied, lost in struts and stabilizers. It had come as a profound relief to put her mind to familiar puzzles, to slide easily into the elegant world of numbers, of theories, where questions had answers, if one only thought hard enough.
    Now, emerging from that comforting trance, she was aware of the silence of the empty house. Her own breathing was the loudest sound she heard. It seemed to Merlin to ache, that silence. It made her throat fill up with pointless tears.
    She stared blindly at the jumble of discarded junk that filled the corners of the dining room. Leaning against the wall beneath the window was a kite she had begun months ago. The framework was there, the short tail and the smooth, silken body, carefully modeled after a hawk's wings curved in the downbeat of flight. She knew the kite would fly. Beautifully. What she didn't know was why.
    Her gaze drifted lazily past the kite to the half-finished anemometer she'd copied from a diagram by Sir Francis Beaufort. The little twirling cups would measure wind speed. There were a pair of them—why she'd made two, she couldn't remember, but a thought hung like a tickle at the back of her mind.
    She rose. For a few minutes she stood frowning down at the kite and the anemometers. Then abruptly she grabbed them up and spread the kite across the table. After a frenzied search for tools, she bent over the kite and began to work, her mind empty of everything but her sudden purpose.
    A half hour later, she was ready. The kite's pure curve sprouted new decoration: the two anemometers, one each mounted above and below the wings, and a tall pole, salvaged from the great-hall and attached at the apex. A string was centered lower, near where a bird's legs would have been. Half an hour of concentration had produced a pulley that would control the angle of the kite relative to the pole to Merlin's satisfaction.
    She maneuvered the unwieldy apparatus out the door and down the passage, stopping only to stuff a notebook and pencil into her apron pocket. As she stepped into the yard, a stray breeze caught the kite. The anemometers spun.
    Merlin watched them, one above the other, and gave a little squeal of excitement. The wind in the dooryard gusted and died, but she knew where it would be blowing more steadily. She tucked the kite under her arm and trotted out the garden gate, headed for higher, open ground.
    It was almost dark when she found her way home, dragging the pole and the kite behind her. She was utterly happy and exhausted. Her notebook was filled with observations, with every variation of wing and wind speed. She'd scribbled down equations, crossed them out and scratched in more. She'd watched the birds and with her new knowledge seen things she'd never really seen before—the arc of a soaring wing and the changing angle of a feathered curve as a buzzard came to rest in a tree. The exhilaration of discovery carried her into the dooryard and past the carriage before she even noticed it was there.
    It was Ransom's