Seven Minutes in Heaven

by Eloisa James

  “I wasn’t bored!” Lizzie cried. “The talk was funny, even if it was by Mr. Gumwater! I learned—”

  “There’s no need to repeat what you learned,” Ward said, cutting her off.

  “You are being protective to a fault,” Eugenia observed. “The subject of the lecture was chemistry. Some people may not believe young ladies capable of comprehending scientific concepts, but I hope you are not among them.”

  “In fact, Lizzie is showing all too much comprehension,” Ward said grimly. He turned away, as if he couldn’t look at her any longer. “Otis, I think it would be best if you and Lizzie made your farewells to Mrs. Snowe now, and returned to the nursery. You can take your supper there.”

  “I don’t want to!” Lizzie protested.

  Ward’s jaw tightened.

  “It is Mrs. Snowe’s last meal with us,” Lizzie added, jutting out her stubborn little chin.

  Apparently, the “tent-talk”—whatever that was—had been the last straw. Eugenia felt a burst of pure rage at the idea that her sins were so egregious that she was no longer invited to dine with the children, but she choked it back.

  “You and I have not seen the last of each other,” she promised Lizzie. “I shall ask Mr. Reeve to allow you to pay me a visit in London. Would you like that?”

  “Yes, I would!” Lizzie exclaimed. “Do you truly have to leave, Mrs. Snowe?” Her mouth wobbled.

  “Indeed I must,” Eugenia smiled, although her cheeks felt stiff. “My father is waiting for me.”

  She saw the pain that streaked through Lizzie’s eyes, and pulled her into an embrace. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m truly sorry about your father, Lizzie.”

  “Miss Midge said that all things have their season. She said my father is in heaven.”

  Hopefully Miss Midge, for all her failures when it came to evening prayers, had provided some comfort. Eugenia gave Lizzie another squeeze, then went to Otis, hugged him, and gave Jarvis a little pat.

  “I thought we were to take supper with you,” Otis complained.

  “Ruby will bring you supper in the nursery,” Ward said. His eyes were flinty.

  The butler held the door open for the children and was turning to go when Ward stopped him.

  “Gumwater,” he said, “would you be so kind as to summarize the content of your tent-talk? Mrs. Snowe somehow did not catch the essence.”

  “I regret I was unaware that any women were present,” Gumwater said, his tone plummy with ill-disguised disdain. “Until afterwards, of course. There were those who felt only women of a certain class would attend a tent-talk, but I gave them your name, Mrs. Snowe, and assured them you were a widow of good standing.”

  “You cannot imagine how distressed the unfavorable judgment of your acquaintances makes me feel,” Eugenia remarked.

  “The talk wasn’t intended for ladies,” Gumwater said, flashing her a look of potent dislike. “No tent-talk is.”

  Eugenia skewered him with a gaze that she had learned at her father’s knee, a stare that spoke to generations of aristocrats as ancestors. It made it clear that she was capable of summoning a servant to have a commoner’s head cut off.

  Or at least, she would have been three hundred years before.

  “What, exactly, is a ‘tent-talk’? I understood from the placard outside that you were offering a lecture on ‘chemistry in proof of the scientific sublime.’ Furthermore, no one barred me and Miss Darcy from entering.”

  Gumwater cleared his throat. “I was expounding on the benefits of chemistry. Teaching the local men about the composition of water.”

  “You were billed as ‘diffuser of useful knowledge’; what, pray tell, has that to do with the composition of water?”

  “I have a gift for humor,” the butler said, his bushy eyebrows twitching madly. “It was my free afternoon.”

  “Give us a précis of the content,” Ward said.

  “It’s the way I teach it. So that it sticks in men’s brains, as most are simple-minded.”

  “I fully understand that most men have simple minds,” Eugenia agreed.

  “I put it in terms of relationships. Hydrogen is like nitrogen, a dependent friend of oxygen, continually forsaken for new favorites.”

  Eugenia had the strange feeling that she was performing in a Punch and Judy show, but without lines. What on earth could be offensive about hydrogen?

  “Come to the point, Gumwater,” Ward said, folding his arms over his chest.

  Suddenly Eugenia remembered a phrase from the tent that was followed by a roar of male laughter and Lizzie’s body shaking with giggles. At the time, it had seemed innocuous, but . . .

  “I suppose that you explained chemical relations by drawing an analogy to intimate matters,” she stated.

  Gumwater nodded. “The connection between oxygen and hydrogen is much more friendly in the state of water.” He coughed. “It takes two hydrogen atoms to satisfy an oxygen atom.”

  Her father would say Gumwater was a prick, Eugenia thought. A woman-hating prick, who probably thought she shouldn’t know that word, and never mind it went back to the time of Shakespeare. “In other words, you turned the chemical composition of water into a jest about the difficulty of satisfying a woman?”

  “The men always laugh when I explain what it would take to see water split up,” Gumwater elaborated. “It wasn’t meant for a young lady. I’ve never had a woman enter the tent before and certainly no governess would bring her charge to something meant only for men, as is a tent-talk.”

  Ward had stood silently through this entire exchange. Now he indicated the door with a jerk of his head.

  He said nothing until Gumwater left, at which point he turned to her. “Why in God’s name did you enter that tent? Even if you didn’t understand the aim of a ‘tent-talk,’ surely you noticed that the audience was entirely male?”

  “If scientific information were not viewed as the sole province of men,” Eugenia snapped, “you might well find more women inadvertently wandering into what was actually a ribald harangue.”

  “Educational principles aside, I would like to know why you exposed my little sister to a vulgar, if not lewd, performance.”

  “I had no such intention,” Eugenia said, drawing composure around her like a suit of armor. “I am truly sorry that I didn’t recognize the true nature of your butler’s so-called lecture. Lizzie has a thirst for knowledge that should be nurtured, but obviously I chose the wrong venue.”

  “As I have repeatedly told you, Lizzie is a young lady,” Ward stated, his arms locked over his chest.

  Anger swept through her with the same burning ferocity with which she had experienced desire the night before. “I am fully aware of Lizzie’s place in society,” she said, fighting to keep her voice from rising. “I see no reason why her status should preclude scientific knowledge. When I was a girl, I especially enjoyed learning mathematics.”

  “If you’ll excuse my bluntness, Eugenia, that is irrelevant. Lizzie will be raised in a house without strumpets, or the other lamentable aspects of your upbringing, which is precisely why I came to Snowe’s Registry in the first place.”

  Eugenia flinched. She hadn’t expected to have her confidences thrown back at her; she’d never told anyone but Andrew about the courtesans in her father’s house. “We are in agreement on that point,” she said, striving for composure.

  “Then why did you bring my sister into a tent full of men enjoying a string of lewd jests? You, who train governesses, you took my sister to see a debauched tent-talk.” Ward was furious—and rightly so.

  She had made a mistake, and she’d learned long ago to acknowledge her mistakes. She would apologize again.

  “There are instinctual rules that govern polite society.” He raked a hand through his hair, frustrated. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

  How could he possibly think she was ignorant of the rules of polite society? Her power to grant a family a governess was linked to the children’s success in ma
rriage. It was as if he still thought she was a former governess—but she’d clarified her rank, she was sure of it.

  “A lady would never have dreamed of entering that tent, and if under some misapprehension she were to enter and see the audience, she would remove herself immediately,” he went on. “Yet you sat unmoved while my little sister absorbed jests alluding to three people in one bed. Not to mention an illuminating disquisition on watery froth, Mrs. Snowe. In short, my sister is now curious about the composition of semen, as well as unusual erotic combinations!”

  Eugenia forgot her resolution to apologize. “Your sister, Mr. Reeve, was already in possession of far more knowledge of adult life than are most children her age,” she pointed out. “Need I remind you of your mother’s friendship with the charmingly named Mr. Burger—which friendship her children had been instructed never to mention?”

  “My intent is to help them forget their unfortunate childhood, not deepen their knowledge of dissolute behavior.”

  “I had no intention of teaching your sister immorality!”

  “Let me repeat: what were you doing in the goddamned tent while she was learning it?”

  “I have apologized for that, and I will apologize again,” Eugenia said, pulling herself together. “I was very wrong to enter that tent. I was not paying attention to your butler’s sordid lecture, and I freely acknowledge that I should have been.”

  “What in the bloody hell were you doing?” This was a shout.

  Eugenia shouted right back. “Thinking about you, about us!”

  His face went utterly expressionless, stony. “Us?”

  “Yes, us!” she cried. “I was wondering why you had taken yourself off with Otis, why you were acting so strangely, why you had said—” She stopped.

  “Had said what?”

  Her breath was rasping in her chest. “Nothing,” she said, her voice quieting. “Why you had said nothing. About us.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  In the silence that followed, Eugenia discovered that she was clinging to the back of a chair for support. Ward’s arms unfolded and his lips tightened into a line before he walked over to stand beside her.

  “I apologize,” he said, looking into her eyes. “This is my fault for not being more clear at the beginning of our intimacies. Our affaire.”

  Affaire. So that was what it was.

  All it was.

  She couldn’t delude herself that she hadn’t known. She had always known.

  “You were perfectly clear,” Eugenia said, chin up. She refused to betray any sign of the devastation she felt. The trembling, however, she couldn’t hide: she was shaking slightly from head to foot. “You begged me to stay with you a fortnight.”

  “A man does, in the throes of passion.”

  That was unforgivable.

  But at the same time, she caught a glimpse of something in his eyes. This wasn’t the man who had coaxed her into the water, who had celebrated making love by eating trifle at midnight. This was someone different.

  The thought steadied her.

  They had made love.

  “Our intimacies were not merely the throes of passion,” she said, making up her mind. She had blazed trails by starting her own business; she might as well confound another preconception, to wit, that a woman must not speak of love before a man proposed marriage. She would speak the truth.

  Ward said nothing.

  “I am in love with you,” Eugenia said, meeting his eyes. “I believe you are in love with me as well.”

  Just as the silence grew unbearable, he said, “I am terribly sorry to disappoint you, Eugenia.”

  It was as if he taken out a pistol and shot her in the leg. Not a fatal blow, but pain tore through her all the same. The worst of it was that his voice was genuinely regretful.

  “I see,” she managed.

  He turned away, clearly giving her time to collect herself. Eugenia clenched her hand on the back of the chair with such force that her knuckles turned white with strain.

  Standing with his back to her, gazing out the window, Ward cleared his throat. “Even if I felt more for you, I could not keep a mistress in the house with my siblings. I was very wrong to countenance these two weeks.”

  Taking a breath felt like inhaling fire.

  Felt more for her? He could go to hell.

  “I am not your mistress,” she said, fierce and low. “That would imply a financial exchange between us. I have been your guest, and helped with the children with no thought of recompense.”

  He turned back and put his hand over hers again. “Forgive me, a lover.”

  It was patently obvious to her that he had never considered marriage. He was using the term “lover” as a sop to her feelings. Back in the carriage when he first abducted her, he had offered “courtesies” between friends, never to be mentioned again. Why hadn’t she listened to him?

  “Do you mean that you did not think of me as someone to marry,” she asked, shaping the words carefully, “or that you did not think of me as a doxy owing to my giving myself to you with such . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Such joy,” Ward said, that disconcerting flash of emotion in his eyes again. “We took pleasure in each other, and there’s nothing wrong with that, Eugenia. But the world has intervened, and now we must go our separate ways.”

  “I see.”

  He hesitated. “Even if I had—if I wished to offer you marriage, I cannot.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to answer.

  “I must marry someone who will make up for my irregular birth and launch Lizzie into the ton. My wife must be a model of conventional behavior. If I marry, my wife has to be a paragon.”

  She swallowed hard. It wasn’t as if his words were surprising.

  “In the ancient phrase, she must be a lady to the manner born,” he continued, his hand tightening over hers. “You are all that is ladylike, Eugenia, but there is an incalculable part of being a lady—an instinctual part—that cannot be learned. My stepmother would never have entered that tent, let alone taken a seat among a crowd of guffawing men.”

  “To the manner born?” She not only understood society’s manners better than most, but she was born in a manor!

  Apparently he had lied when he said that he knew her status. She nearly snapped back a précis of her family tree, but she stopped.

  It was irrelevant.

  What Ward was really saying was that she wasn’t ladylike enough. That meant he didn’t respect or love her, the Eugenia who started Snowe’s Registry.

  If she informed him of her pedigree—that she was not merely gentry, but a peeress, one of the highest in the land—she might be able to convince him that her family’s position in society meant she could successfully launch Lizzie on the marriage market.

  But there was no persuading a man to love you, the real you.

  Right. She had to push back her hurt and fury, and find the strength to be polite.

  “Your sister is eager to learn about the natural world,” she said, withdrawing her hand from under his. “You would do well to encourage her, Ward, no matter how unconventional her studies might seem.”

  His face was expressionless, closed off to all feeling. “Thank you for the advice, but I mean to avoid pushing her toward further eccentricities. She’s already talking of opening an emporium and has learned to bellow strings of curses. Ladies don’t curse.”

  Funny. A string of curses was the only thing going through her head.

  Ward took a breath, and she steeled herself.

  Surely there wasn’t more?

  There was more.

  “I blame myself,” he said, looking at her with compassion and regret—a combination that made her nearly choke with rage. “I never should have brought a lover into a household with children. I had to send the children to the nursery tonight because I realized that Lizzie has grown overly fond of you.”

  “I was fond of some of the courtesans I knew as a child,” Eugenia said. He’d alread
y decided she was irredeemable; she might as well shock him further. “I learned much from them. One young woman named Augusta, for example, locked her lover inside a closet until he agreed to have her carriage relined in canary-yellow satin.”

  Instead of looking appalled, he looked even more sympathetic. As if he pitied her.

  It was time to retire. Thank God for her training—because no matter what Ward thought of her, she was a lady who had been presented to the queen. Several times, in fact.

  As if from afar, she watched herself curtsy, step forward and kiss Ward’s cheek, saying all the right things about taking a small meal in her chamber. She apologized yet again, and mentioned her hope of remaining in the children’s lives.

  With a touch of self-deprecation, she promised that if he would entrust his sister to her on a visit to London, she would never again to expose Lizzie to science.

  She played her part, but Ward didn’t play his. He stood silently and said nothing in response to her charming remarks about the children.

  She curtsied again, the sharp, organized part of her brain assuring herself that Ward could not keep her from Lizzie when the time came for her debut.

  Thinking of that, she paused in the doorway and turned. “When you marry, please do introduce me to your wife. This”—she waved her hand in the air—“shall never be mentioned again between us, as you specified two weeks ago. I trust you to make certain your household doesn’t breathe a word.”

  She waited. Still he said nothing. “I would ask you to have a word with Gumwater in particular.” She didn’t bother to keep her disdain out of her voice. “But what I really mean to say is that I would be happy to help your wife in any capacity with Lizzie’s debut.”

  He still didn’t answer, so she slipped out the door and closed it behind her.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Monday, June 15, 1801

  Eugenia had been awake all night. She spent hours reeling between fits of burning tears and equally intense bouts of rage, imagining scenes in which she threw heavy objects at Ward’s head.