Impossible was the right word. Because she’d attracted the same gawking derision that she always drew. Like everyone else, Oliver could not look away. But unlike everyone else, he suspected he had an entirely different reason.
He liked her. More than liked her, if he were honest. If he let himself, his mind would stray idly to the pins in her hair, little enameled flowers in every garish color of the rainbow dangling from gold chains. He’d find himself thinking idly about taking them out, of sliding his hands through the soft silk of her hair, of stealing that kiss he’d almost taken.
Temptation, he reminded himself, was best conquered by avoidance.
She raised her head and caught him looking. And then—before he could turn away from her—she smiled and gave him a wink. He felt it all the way down his spine. His groin contracted in answer.
He should have known that wouldn’t be the end of it.
She found him a few hours later. “Mr. Cromwell,” she said, a glint of humor in her eyes.
“Miss Fairchild,” he heard himself reply, but even that hint of playfulness was too much. She smiled. He’d joked once that he feared her gown might be contagious, but it was her smile that was catching.
It caught him now. He felt hooked by it, no desire to do anything except smile back at her.
“Miss Fairfield,” he said in a low voice, “I had thought us in agreement. We aren’t doing this. It’s impossible.”
“Agreement?” she whispered back. “You said. I held my tongue. That is not agreement.”
He hadn’t stopped smiling.
“Then I shall remedy that immediately. Jane, we mustn’t do this. We mustn’t be…friends.”
Friends. That hadn’t been friendship that had made him touch her cheek the last time they’d been alone together. Worse than that. He was a little susceptible to her, to be sure, but he knew the way she looked at him. The way she smiled when she saw him. She was vulnerable, and he could remember her saying, I am too desperate to be angry.
“Something has changed.” She lifted her chin and looked him in the eyes. “Everything has changed.” She moved her head as she spoke, and the lamplight sparkled off the multihued flowers in her hair.
“Oh?” he heard himself say.
She smiled, a fierce, hot smile. One that seemed to set something burning deep inside him in response. She leaned in. “If you think that I’m going to let Bradenton win, you’re vastly mistaken.”
“I have no intention of letting him win,” Oliver said stiffly. “But—”
“Do you think you’re squabbling with him over me?” She smiled more brightly. “Oh, no, Mr. Marshall. You’re wrong. I’m squabbling with him over you.”
He swallowed.
“You think me dry tinder,” Jane said, “vulnerable to the slightest spark. You’re afraid to send me up in flames because you think that once I am burnt out, there will be nothing left but desolation.”
She looked up at him as if daring him to contradict her. He couldn’t. He’d thought something very much like that just a moment ago. But the look on her face was brighter than any he’d ever seen, and he felt something coil in him in anticipation.
“I have something to tell you,” she whispered, and he leaned in to hear her secret. “I am not a blight. I am not a pestilence. And I refuse to be a piece sacrificed for the greater glory of your game.”
She wasn’t touching him. So why did it seem as if she was? He could almost feel the phantom pressure of her hand against his chest, the heat of her breath on his lips. He could almost taste the scent of her, that light twist of lavender. He felt as if she’d shoved him off-center, and he couldn’t quite find his balance.
“You are not any of those things,” he said. “What are you, then?”
“I am ablaze,” she told him. And then she smiled and gave him a curtsy. She swirled on her heel, leaving him staring after her.
Her words shouldn’t have made any sense, but as she turned, the many-colored gauzes of her overskirts fluttered behind her in the lamplight. It put him in mind of a prism, grabbing hold of the light and splitting it into all the colors of the rainbow. She was…ablaze.
He watched her go, and all his worries and second thoughts about temptation went up in flame. With that, he wasn’t just giving into temptation; he was inviting it over for tea.
Yes, some deep part of him thought. That’s done it.
What it was that had been done, he didn’t know. He could make no sense of it, so he watched her for the rest of the evening, trying to figure out what had just transpired. Or maybe… Maybe he just watched her.
He watched her laugh in the corner with the Johnson twins. He watched her talking to the other men, who seemed not to have noticed her transformation to phoenix. He even watched her talking to Bradenton, smiling while the man ground his teeth.
The marquess looked up from her and saw Oliver from across the room. The expression in his eyes spoke with a cold, whispering intent.
Oliver gave him no response.
Bradenton found him a few moments later. “In nine days,” he said. “I’m having guests over. Canterly, Ellisford, Carleton—you recognize the names, I take it. My friends in Parliament will be here. I’ll be introducing Hapford to them.”
Bradenton looked across the room to the place where Jane stood. Oliver could hear her laugh all the way over here.
“Maybe once I wanted you to prove something about yourself.” His gaze hardened. “Maybe I still do. But mostly, I just want to see her pulled down.” He shook his head, turning back to Oliver. “Do it, Marshall. If you do it before everyone leaves, I’ll bring them around.”
Oliver’s future. This vote. Everything he’d ever dreamed off, offered up to him so easily, yet at such a price.
Weighed against that was the image of Jane. Of her bright, brilliant smile. God, he felt sick.
I am ablaze.
Fire washed away sickness. Oliver didn’t smile. He didn’t look Bradenton in the eye. He simply shrugged. “Nine days, then. If that’s what I have.”
The next morning came on a wash of gray clouds. Oliver awoke with the memory of the previous night in his head—like a dream, gauzy and insubstantial, the sort of thing that could not really have happened.
He sat up. He was in a spare room in his cousin’s house. He waited for his head to clear. And instead of dissipating into impossible nothingness, as dreams were wont to do, his recollection solidified, memory after memory coming atop each other. Jane’s smile. Her gown. The look on her face as she’d smiled and said, I am ablaze.
God. What was he going to do?
A knock sounded on his door. “Are you ready?”
It was his cousin. Yesterday, he’d foolishly agreed to accompany Sebastian on his morning ramble. Oliver rubbed his eyes, looked out the window. It was early yet, dawn still combing gray fingers of mist through the fields. From the back window, he could see fog stretching over the River Cam and the fields beyond.
“Hurry up, Oliver,” Sebastian called.
“It’s not fair,” Oliver responded. “Why is my cousin the only rake I know who likes getting up in the morning?”
The only sound that came in response was Sebastian’s laughter.
It took half an hour to get dressed and leave. The mist was beginning to burn off in the early sunlight, and a bird called somewhere. But for the first few minutes of the walk, it was too cold to do anything but tread briskly, rubbing gloved hands together, until the exercise brought its own warmth. They crossed the Cam, went up the backs of the colleges, and wandered out into the fields before Sebastian spoke.
“Are you going to finally tell me what you’re up to?”
“Here? I told you already. Bradenton—”
“Hang Bradenton,” Sebastian said. “I never liked him anyway. That’s not what I mean.”
Oliver quirked up his mouth, perplexed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t mean your Miss Fairfield, either.” Sebastian si
ghed. “I’m talking about something far more important. The most important thing, if you will, the center of the universe, Copernicus be damned.” He smiled broadly. “I’m talking about me.”
Oliver glanced at Sebastian. His parents had told him about his sire when he was young. They’d described his half-brother, living in a grand house with a less-than useful father. Oliver had known all about Robert.
He hadn’t known about his cousin Sebastian until he was twelve years old.
The Duke of Clermont’s elder sister had married an industrialist in a desperate—and as far as Oliver could tell, futile—attempt to fill the Clermont family coffers. Sebastian Malheur was the result of that marriage. He was dark-haired and handsome, and he smiled at everyone. He had always been up to mischief when they’d been in school together. And somehow, that had never changed.
This sort of charming boast was precisely the sort of thing that Sebastian did best. Oliver was never sure what his cousin believed because he was so rarely serious.
Sebastian was smiling. “You keep asking me open-ended questions such as, ‘How are you?’ and ‘Are you really delighted to hear…’ All this stuff about my feelings. I thought I would give you the opportunity to be direct. You act like I’m going to die. Why are you doing that?”
Some things never changed, but…
Oliver sighed. “It’s your letters. Since I was heading down here anyway, Robert asked me to see how you were doing.”
“My letters.” Sebastian looked around as if expecting some Greek chorus to pop up and serenade him in explanation. “What have I been doing wrong in my letters?”
“I don’t know.” Oliver shrugged. “But Robert says there is something wrong with them. That you’re not yourself. And you know how he is. He’s always right about those things. He’ll never figure out what’s wrong on his own, or how to fix it—but he knows when something is off. And he says that you don’t sound happy.”
Sebastian beamed beatifically. It seemed like a ridiculous charge to make with the early morning sun touching his cousin’s face.
“Not happy?” Sebastian said. “Why wouldn’t I be happy? I’ve achieved the sort of success that most men only dream of. I have set all of England—indeed, the entire world—on its ear. I’ve wrought mischief of the highest order, and the lovely thing is that I am demonstrably, provably right. So tell me, Oliver, under those circumstances, why wouldn’t I be happy?”
Oliver glanced at his cousin and then shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “But in all that lovely, long speech just now, the one thing you never said was that you were happy.”
Sebastian looked at him, and then gave a wry shake of his head. “Minnie,” he said, as if that were an explanation. “Robert married her, and now the two of you are parsing language for all the meaning you can shake out of it. It’s a good thing she’s not here, because if she were, she’d see what wasn’t happening. You’re an amateur.”
“What isn’t happening?” Oliver asked.
Sebastian ignored him. “Let us suppose for the sake of argument that you are correct. I am deeply wounded and unhappy to my toes, but I don’t want to explain why.” He smiled as he spoke, as if to show how ridiculous the notion was. “Wouldn’t we all be better off assuming that I had reasons for that choice and respecting them?”
“Maybe,” said Oliver slowly. “But… I feel as if you aren’t really yourself lately. There’s something different about you.”
“Again, assuming that you are right,” Sebastian said, “you won’t make me feel any better by telling me how miserable I appear to be.”
“Very well, then,” Oliver said. “Have it your way. This is just like old times.” They walked on down the path, past a yard where a farmer’s daughter was feeding geese, past a man carrying water in yokes about his neck.
“What did you mean back then,” Oliver said finally, “about what wasn’t happening?”
“So many things aren’t happening,” Sebastian said airily. “I’m not flying. You aren’t turning to gold when I touch you. I have yet to strike a deal with the devil.”
“If you want to tell me something, you should come out and say it.”
“Here’s the thing.” Sebastian looked serious. “If I had signed a Faustian contract in blood, so to speak, it probably would have a clause that enjoined me from speaking. So let me just say this. Being me…is not as amusing as it once was.”
Oliver could believe that. Fame had come quickly to Sebastian. It was not so long in the past he’d been just another indulgently wealthy man, born of good family with no reason to exert himself. He’d done what indulgently wealthy men of good family so often did—he’d sampled the ladies of town and developed a bit of a name for himself as a hedonist.
Yes, he was clever. And he had always been riotously funny. But if someone had asked Oliver a decade ago what Sebastian would do with his life, he would never—not in a million years—have guessed that his friend would achieve fame in the natural sciences.
And then quite out of the blue, Sebastian had published a paper on snapdragons, of all things. It had been well received; he’d put out another paper six months later on peas, and then another a few months later regarding lettuce.
A mere three months after the bit on lettuce, Sebastian had announced that what he had discovered was not a few oddities to be noted about the breeding of flowers and vegetables but a system—a system demonstrating that traits were passed down from progenitor to child in a systematic fashion, one that could be predicted mathematically.
This, Sebastian had said, served as a measuring stick. One could use it to determine what random chance would unleash on offspring—and one could therefore see how nature deviated from random chance. If it differed significantly, Sebastian had argued, in response to changing conditions, it would prove Mr. Darwin right.
He could not have published a more inflammatory piece. That paper had contained four examples demonstrating how nature had deviated from random chance. And that was the moment when Sebastian Malheur had stopped being seen as a mildly eccentric scientist with hedonistic tendencies. He’d become a heretic and a heathen.
“I worry about you,” Oliver finally said. “I worry about you a great deal, Sebastian.”
“Well, worry more productively.” Sebastian spoke decisively. “I don’t need any of your pity. In fact—”
“Ah, indeed!” called a voice behind them. “Mr. Malheur? Is that you, Mr. Malheur? Hallooo!”
Sebastian turned and saw a man shuffling toward them at something half between a walk and a jog. He waved an arm at Sebastian in greeting.
“Who is that?” Sebastian squinted and swore under his breath. “Whoever he is, I don’t want to speak to him. Hide me, Oliver.”
Oliver looked around. There was nothing but the path they walked on, marking its way alongside the river and ankle-high grasses. The landscape was punctuated by a few scrubby bushes, but was empty of anything that could serve as cover. “He’s already seen you. You can’t hide.”
“Pretend I’ve turned into a tree?” Sebastian shrugged. “I would do a very good job pretending. I promise.”
The other man was practically on top of them. He tripped down the last section of the path, breathing hard.
“Mr. Malheur!” he said. “I’ve been looking for you ever since last we spoke. I’ve sent you messages—did you not receive them?”
“I receive a great many messages.” Sebastian frowned at the man. “Who are you again?”
“Fairfield,” the man said. “Mr. Titus Fairfield.”
Oliver blinked and examined the man once again. Fairfield. It was a common enough name. It could have been a coincidence. On the other hand…
Mr. Fairfield reached up to wipe his handkerchief across his sweating brow. “Of course I don’t expect you to remember me. Of course not. I am a gentleman who resides here in Cambridge.” He smiled—a weak smile that looked as if it were out of practice. “A gentleman, yes. No need to work, although from ti
me to time I take on a promising student as tutor.” He nodded at them both.
A private tutor taking on only one student, instead of a team? He couldn’t have been much good.
Sebastian must have thought so, too, because he gave a little half-sigh.
“I make it a point to keep my time open, so that I might live the life of the mind. Like you.” Mr. Fairfield drew himself up a little uncertainly. “A little like you.”
Sebastian caught Oliver’s eye, and twitched his lip.
“Your work,” Mr. Fairfield said after an awkward silence, “your work—it has absolutely confused me and left me in wonder. I have thought of nothing else, since last I saw your talk. The implications, Mr. Malheur, the implications! For politics, for government, for economy.”
Sebastian simply looked at Mr. Fairfield. “I didn’t realize that my work on snapdragons had an implication for politics and economy.”
“I have not quite grasped it,” he said. “You are my superior in knowledge here. But doesn’t it follow that if there is some inherited basis for evolution we might as a species triumph? Ought you not put your mind to that?”
Sebastian’s answering smile was sharp as a knife. “What, with a managed breeding program amongst humans?”
Fairfield blinked.
“That’s what I would have to do. Breeding humans is far more difficult than propagating snapdragons. As a general rule, humans prefer to breed themselves without outside direction. I myself have that preference. I’d hate to impose it on others.”
Fairfield frowned. “You could pay…”
“You’re the tutor in law. Is it now legal to pay people for intercourse?”
“Ah. A good point. I see. That does make things difficult.” Fairfield frowned. “This needs more thought, more thought indeed. Perhaps we might meet to discuss it?”