Betina Krahn (23 page)

“Oh, so you want to play, eh?”

She directed a retaliatory splash at the dolphin. But by this time, Titus was already halfway to the beach.

“See here, I don’t bother you when you’re playing with Ariel or Echo,” Celeste muttered. “Now shove off!”

She went after Titus. By the time she reached him he had already donned his shirt and collected his shoes and stockings.

“I suppose I should thank you,” he said, giving a shiver in the light breeze.

“Tomorrow, Professor,” she said. “After you’ve had your second lesson.”

She saw his shoulders ease and realized she had just answered a question he hadn’t known how to ask. Taking a deep breath, he gazed intently at her and offered her his given name. “Titus. Call me Titus.”

“Titus,” she repeated, pleased but feeling the need for more reassurance. “You do believe in my work, now, don’t you? I mean, you’ve seen Prospero and me with your own two eyes.”

“There can be no question that you have had significant experience with a dolphin,” he said, ushering her toward the house. “It is clear you’ve developed a strong bond with the creature.”

“But …” She supplied the exception she heard coming in his words.

“But you’ve also made a number of claims about dolphin interactions …”

She stopped on the path, folded her arms, and glared at him. “Ever the skeptic,” she charged, stung by his answer after what he had seen and what they had shared just moments
ago. “You’ll get your proof, Titus Thorne. I promise you. I only hope you’ll be up to handling it when it comes.”

P. T. B
ENTLEY LEFT
before breakfast the next morning, with no one but Stephan there to see him off. But Edgar Cherrybottom delayed his departure until he’d had yet another look at Celeste’s dolphin. After breakfast, she took Titus out to the middle of the cove in the boat, with Cherrybottom looking on from the dock, and once again made introductions between man and beast.

Prospero bobbed his head, at Celeste’s urging, and rose up out of the water enough to offer a polite flipper. Warily, Titus put his hand out to “shake,” but after a brief touch, Prospero sank back into the water with a splash, rocking the boat. Celeste called him back to the boat for Titus to pet and the dolphin finally turned onto his side and let himself be stroked.

“It’s so smooth,” Titus said with surprise. “And cool.” Then he felt the dolphin’s flipper and broke into a boyish grin. “It feels like a sleek, hard rubber,” he observed. “Most of the ones I’ve seen have been limp and—” He shoved that memory aside and stroked Prospero’s side. Celeste explained that the rake marks on his skin had probably come from other dolphins.

“They play and tussle with their mouths open … sometimes nip each other in the process. It can leave nasty marks. The males are sometimes aggressive with each other. But they often travel in pairs and I’ve seen them work together … help each other mate.” She reddened under his shocked scrutiny, then hurriedly gave a sharp whistle and tapped the edge of the boat. Prospero dove into the water headfirst, presenting his tail flukes for inspection. Titus touched the flukes and traced their nicked edges. Then Prospero swam off and came up a few yards away, producing a series of clicks and screeches.

“He wants to play,” Celeste said, looking around in the
bottom of the boat for one of the painted floats she had brought from the boathouse. She tossed it as far as she could in the water. Prospero submerged and went for it.

“How do you know he’s playing?” Titus asked.

“I cannot think of any other purpose such behavior could serve.”

They watched raptly as the dolphin seized the pear-shaped float and rose half out of the water. With a jerk of his head, Prospero tossed the float some distance away, retrieved it, and threw it again.

“When his friends aren’t around, he plays ‘fetch’ with me.” She laughed. “When we’re in the water together and I throw it, he retrieves. When he throws it, it’s my job to bring it back. If I forget and leave it out in the cove, he and the others will play a game of ‘keep away’ with it.”

After a while Prospero grew bored with his toy and just let it bob on the surface of the water. She gave a sharp whistle and rattled a metal bucket and the dolphin raced just under the surface to the boat. She knelt and leaned over the side to talk to the creature.

“One of the Bass brothers heard you were back and came by this morning with some treats,” she said to him. “Are you ready?” She stuck her hand into the bucket and came up with a couple of small, silvery herring. Prospero made a series of laughterlike sounds and opened his mouth in a gaping grin. She tossed the fish into Prospero’s mouth, then shaded her eyes and looked up at Titus.

“Want to try giving him a treat?” He hesitated and she added: “It will probably make him your friend for life.”

“The beast has teeth. A bloody headful of large, pointed teeth,” he pointed out.

“Which he uses only for grabbing. From what I can tell, dolphins rarely eat anything they can’t swallow whole.”

“Feeding is
my
area of expertise, thank you, and you would bloody well be surprised what sorts of things I’ve found in—”

“Well, I’ve seen dolphins feeding in the wild for some
years now, and I’ve yet to see one snap at anything attached to a human.” She realized they were treading on delicate ground and held up a hand to call a truce. “There is a way to settle this. When you’re ready, you’ll come diving with me and see for yourself. Now”—she stuffed a fish into his hand—“make Prospero your friend.”

He gave the fish in his hand a dubious look. Then, following her instruction, he held it up by the tail. Prospero came alert and opened his mouth, with its big, pink tongue and jaws lined with conical teeth. Titus tossed him the fish, and he caught and swallowed it.

“Good! Very good!” she called out. Titus couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or the dolphin.

His jaw dropped when Celeste leaned over the side of the boat with her lips pursed, and the dolphin rose up to meet her mouth with the end of his beak.

“Good Lord—you just—just—” He seemed unable to say it.

“Go on,” she said, giving his shoulder a shove. “Let him kiss you, too.”

He seemed to find his voice. “The hell I will.”

“Go on—don’t be a stuffed shirt,” she chided.

“Absolutely not. I am a scientist, a professor, an expert on marine … the very idea is perverted. Imagine if it got out I was seen
kissing
a fish!”

Prospero settled the argument for them. He rose up out of the water toward Titus and sprayed him with a huge mouthful of water. Titus blinked and wiped his dripping face, clearly affronted. Celeste fell over in the boat laughing. When she could finally get her breath, she struggled up to meet his outrage with strained sobriety.

“I don’t think he really wanted to kiss you, either.”

C
HERRYBOTTOM LEFT JUST
after luncheon. Lady Sophia retired to her library to work on her current artifact, and Celeste took Titus for a walk along the cliffs above the cove.
Near the farthest point of land, they encountered several standing stones in a flower-strewn field. Titus was drawn instantly to the large, upright rocks, examining them from all sides, running his hands over their weathered surfaces.

“Fascinating. Old standing stones, like the henge on the plain at Salisbury,” he said. “I didn’t realize there were such stones in this area.”

“There are a few,” she said, looking a bit uncomfortable. “My grandfather was quite interested in them. He wondered if they might be connected to the history of Atlantis. I don’t think he ever formed definite conclusions about it.”

Her grandmother, however, had … as she well knew. To Nana these stones—in fact, all standing stones in Britain—were proof that Britain had once been an outer province of the great civilization of Atlantis.

“I brought you here to see the view.” She pointed out the Bass brothers’ dock in the distance, the church steeple of the village of Cardamon, nestled in a wrinkle of green velvet, and the fishing boats plying the deeper waters of the larger bay. It was all wrapped in an idyllic summer haze.

“It’s beautiful. The sort of place everyone should have fond, childhood memories of,” he said, seeming a thousand miles away.

“Where were you brought up, Titus? Tell me about your home,” she said, leaning back against one of the stones and enjoying the warmth it radiated.

“I wasn’t exactly ‘brought up,’ as you put it. At about seven years, I was sent away to school, where I simply ‘grew.’” His face darkened as he stared out to sea and into memory. “Woolen undershirts, breaking ice on the basin to wash of a morning, porridge twice a day until fourth form … lining up for the weekly dose of castor oil. The one good thing about the place was old Fenstermacher. He taught Latin and rhetoric, and an occasional bit of humanity with stories from his wayward youth. Quite a fossil, we all thought. But he made life there bearable.”

“When did your parents die? Was it when you were seven?”

Still looking out to sea, he took a slow breath. “My mother died not long after I was born. It was my father who died when I was seven. We were out in a boat, when—” He halted and looked out to sea.

“A boat?” She came alert. “Your father died in a boating accident?”

“A sudden squall. The storm blinded us and whipped the waves into a fury. He tied me to the mast while he tried to … a rogue wave broke over the boat and I saw him fighting to hang on … to live … and watched him being dragged under by a wave. One minute he was there and the next …” He abruptly pushed off from the stone and started for the path. “Shouldn’t we get back?”

Frowning, she watched him fleeing both the memories and the revelation of them. His reason for hating the water was suddenly all too clear. His father died at sea, before his eyes, when he was seven years old. She thought of her parents, of how she couldn’t understand why they were never coming back to her. She could only imagine the anguish that not only losing his father but actually seeing him swept overboard must have caused.

Then, as if that weren’t enough of a horror, he was promptly sent away to a strict, regimented public school, where his bewildered heart was ignored, his anguished face lost in a sea of faces … housed in a cold dormitory, fed porridge twice a day, and probably caned for the slightest infraction of rules. No watercolor lessons, no collecting shells, no cocoa and stories at bedtime, no toasty warm rugs by the fire on rainy days … no Nana’s hugs …

She followed for a moment, then veered from the path toward the cliff. “This way,” she called, beckoning. “A shortcut down to the beach.”

When he peered uncertainly at the narrow path, she seized his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Time for your swimming lesson.”

This time, she had brought blankets and towels and her voluminous smock. While removing her skirt and blouse, she looked up to find him wearing a formfitting gray combination garment made of knitted wool. It had short sleeves and legs that ended midthigh.

“I’ve decided to swim in my Jaegers,” he said, lifting his chin.

“Very practical,” she said, feeling her cheeks reddening, and something in her veins began to hum. It was all she could do to make herself look away.

Once they were in the water, she had him repeat last night’s lesson, substituting clouds for stars as a focus for concentration. It took less time and coaxing for him to begin to relax. She stayed with him for a while with her hand under him, watching his body floating, memorizing the broad mounds of his chest, the ridges of his ribs, and the elegant taper of his long, muscular legs. Then she changed her hold on him to cradle his head and surreptitiously slid her fingers through his hair as it spread in the water like a dark halo.

She finally withdrew and allowed him to float by himself. When he began to kick his feet and move his arms back and forth, sculling about, she couldn’t help feeling proud that he’d come so far in so short a time.

Titus was just getting comfortable with floating facedown in the water, when something crashed violently into the water nearby, and he and Celeste both came up coughing and sputtering.

“What the—”

Titus reeled and staggered back, blinking and wiping his face, trying to clear his vision. Celeste stood several feet away, scowling down at the still-swirling water. Up, out of the middle of that disturbance, came a gray bottle-shaped beak with a grinning dolphin attached.

“You really are the most ill-mannered creature,” she told Prospero. Little chastened, he gave a series of laughs like crows, bobbed his head, and then swam off toward the middle of the cove. He disappeared, then a moment later he was
back, leaping through the air, headed straight for them. They separated and scrambled back, just as he landed between them with a monumental splash.

“I think he’s bored,” Celeste said apologetically. “If the others were here, he wouldn’t bother us at all. Perhaps I’d better swim with him a while.”

It took some time for Prospero to spend his excess energy, but he finally calmed and came to the shallows with her to let Titus finally have a closer look.

Being in the water with the dolphin was an altogether different experience than being in a boat beside one, Titus learned. Prospero was at least three feet longer than him and probably outweighed him by two hundred pounds. Titus watched that sleek dorsal fin cutting the surface, remembered bony jaws filled with teeth, and felt his stomach knotting as the dolphin swam around him. Twice, Prospero chose the moment he passed Titus to exhale, blowing air and water and who-knew-what all over him.

“That’s the second time he’s done that,” he said crossly, wiping his face and ducking under the water to wash off. “What does he have against me? I’ve never done a thing to him. How could I? I just met the blasted beast!”

Celeste grinned at Titus’s righteous indignation. “Ill-mannered and unreasonable of him, I know. One would certainly expect a higher standard of conduct from a dolphin.” She folded her arms as she waited for that to sink in.

“Expecting logic of a mere animal,” she said wryly. “Really, Titus … those ‘scientist daydreams’ of yours.”