Outrageously Yours

by Allison Chase

  It was time, he decided, to get on with it. And he would do so alone, risking only his own life to learn once and for all if matter could be manipulated, or if he had hallucinated the entire incident that nearly killed him last winter.

  Or perhaps, as Errol had once accused, he had a strange penchant for flirting with death. If so, he was damned determined not to share that penchant with Ivy.

  Reaching in, he lifted out the six electromagnets one by one, straining a little under the weight of each. Next he assembled the stands and set the apparatus into position.

  Before lighting the fire that would heat the vat of water, he double-checked the configuration of his magnets. He had set up the first three close to the generator. Two faced each other, while the third sat perpendicular to them, facing away from the generator but attached by wires to the power source.

  When the current began to flow, the confluence of these three magnets would create an energy stream powerful enough to thrust what he called a particle beam—matter broken down into its most basic elements—across an open space, to be collected and reassembled by the second arrangement of electromagnets some fifteen feet away. Or so he hoped.

  He lit the furnace. Minutes later, the water began to bubble. He turned the wheel, opening the preliminary valve at the top of the vat. Steam shot through the copper duct. Stepping down, he went to the second valve and placed his hand on the duct to monitor the vibrations of the mounting energy. Another minute . . . several more seconds . . . three, two, one—he flipped the lever.

  Current sparked through the generator’s coils. The pistons began to bob. The center beam tipped from side to side, first slowly, then building in speed. The bellowslike compressor pumped and the wheel rotated, spilling the charge onto the wires coiled about the first of the magnetic disks. It, too, began to rotate, and all three octagons began to hum. Moments later, the sound echoed from the magnets across the room. Waves of energy pulsated from the apparatus until the floor and walls wavered like a heat-baked road.

  Straightening, Simon released his hold on the lever. The currents stirred his hair and clothing like a storm-charged breeze. His skin crawled as if with an army of ants. He took three deep breaths meant to fortify his stamina and bolster his courage. Holding the last of those breaths, he crossed to the space between the magnetic disks, and stepped into the energy stream.

  Blinding light flashed. Like a closing fist, the current engulfed him. The floor beneath him shifted violently and fell away, leaving him to the mercy of the flow. Voltage ripped through his nerves and ligaments, searching out each particle of his essence and fusing with it. Pain such as he had known only once before in his life became the entirety of his world.

  Then his physical self gave way, dissolving, merging with his equally intangible surroundings. The pain drained away like a dissipating storm. All sensation ebbed.

  Darkness. Silence. Nothingness. Like death.

  Then another burst of light and a brutal slam to his body let Simon know he was still very much alive. But as agony seeped through every part of him, he wondered for how much longer.

  Reaching the gallery at the top of the main staircase, Ivy found Mrs. Walsh surrounded by a gaggle of nervous footmen. They stood with their ears tilted toward the ceiling, brows raised in alarm. From the tower room high above them another thunderous bang sounded, followed by a succession of sizzling bursts.

  “Why are you all standing here? Did you not hear that? Don’t you realize Lord Harrow could be hurt?”

  The servants traded worried glances, uncertain shrugs. The tallest footman, Daniel, shook his head. “We’re strictly forbidden from ever entering Lord Harrow’s laboratory, sir.”

  “Are you daft? Something exploded up there.” Ivy gripped the man’s liveried coat sleeve. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to prevent you from entering in the event he lay dying.”

  Mrs. Walsh’s formidable bulk wedged between Ivy and the befuddled footman; she removed Ivy’s hand from his arm. “Lord Harrow was most explicit in his instructions. It is not for us to interpret his orders. Besides, this is not the first time we have heard such racket from the tower. I assure you, sir, his lordship has always emerged unscathed.”

  Ivy backed away from them. “You’re all mad. I’m going up.”

  No one moved to stop her. She was halfway up the spiraling stairs when a painful stitch in her side forced her to slow her pace. Nearly doubled over, she kept going, gripping the railing to tug herself along. With a final burst of energy she rushed to the top and all but collapsed against the closed door. A curious vibration shook the wood beneath her fingertips. A spark snapped her hand as she clutched the knob. Gasping, she pushed her way inside.

  A waft of energy struck her physically. Gauzy billows of smoke drifted through the room, while small flames danced around the generator. Sparks crackled within the conducting coils before fizzling out. The generator’s wheel turned lazily before winding to a stop. A deadly quiet blanketed the room.

  Coughing from the smoke, Ivy hopped about to stamp out the flames. “Simon? Simon, where are you?”

  Near the generator and several yards beyond it, the familiar black shapes of the electromagnets, along with the poles and brackets that had formed their stands, littered the floor. Then she spotted Simon. On the floor beneath the north window, he lay facedown, his arms and legs sprawled.

  “Simon!” Ivy went down on her knees beside him. She clasped his shoulders, refusing to let go even when electricity prickled up her arms. As she lifted him an inch or two, his arms moved limply against the floor. With a heave she rolled him over onto his back. His face was white, his lips ashen. His hair stood wildly on end. “Simon? Oh, good Lord . . .”

  She pressed her ear to his chest and perceived a faint, unsteady beat. Straightening, she held her hand in front of his nose . . . and felt nothing against her fingers.

  Fearful panic pounded through her. With both hands flat to his chest she pushed, once, twice, thrice, each time with a forceful command to his heart to beat, his lungs to fill. A sudden notion prompted her to press her mouth to his. She breathed into him, hoping to coax his lungs back to life. She did that several times, then scooted on her bottom to resume pushing on his chest.

  “Simon, come back.” She slapped his cheeks. “Come back, damn you!”

  His features contorted. The breath he attempted to drag in tangled in his throat and erupted in a fit of coughing. His hands flew to his neckcloth. Gasping, he sputtered as he attempted to wrestle the knot free.

  Ivy pushed his hands away. “Let me.”

  Furiously she dug her fingers into the knot. At the same time, Simon gripped the edges of his waistcoat and yanked the buttons open. With little pings several bounced along the floor. His cravat came loose. Ivy slid the linen from around his collar and dropped it beside her.

  Simon reached to tug his collar open. Then his arm fell across his eyes.

  “Oh, God . . . better.” His voice was a painful rasp. “Either . . . I’m dead . . . and you are an angel . . . or ...” One eye flickered open. “Ned?”

  “Yes. Yes, it’s Ned.” Flooding relief brimmed hotly from her eyes and squeezed her throat. “And you are very much alive, thank heaven.”

  “Where . . . am I?” He struggled to sit up, only to fall prone again.

  Ivy pressed her hands to his shoulders. “Don’t try to move. Not yet.”

  He gripped her wrist. “Tell me where I am.”

  “You’re in your laboratory, of course.” A sob accompanied her impatient reply.

  “No . . . where . . . where in the lab?” Brows tightly knit, he turned his head from side to side. He wasn’t making sense; the explosion had left him dazed. Wiping her eyes, Ivy pushed to her feet.

  “Wait here.” She hurried to the shelf where Simon kept glasses and a decanter of brandy. When she returned to him, she slipped an arm beneath his head and held the snifter to his lips. “Drink some of this. Oh, Simon, what on earth did you do to yourself?”

&
nbsp; He sputtered, but quickly regained control. The spirits brought a flood of color to his face. Blinking, he leaned back against her. “Galileo’s teeth, did it work?”

  “Did what work?”

  “Am I whole?” He ran a hand over his chest.

  “Of course you’re whole, but I fear you must be delirious.” She held up three fingers in front of his face. “How many do you see?”

  Ignoring the question, he pushed unsteadily upright. Her heart flip-flopped when he twisted round and flashed her a devastating grin. He grasped her hand. “My experiment, Ivy. It worked. It wasn’t an accident this time.”

  “This time? What happened to you when it was an accident?”

  “Trust me, you don’t wish to know. Ah, Ivy ...” His expression suddenly rueful, he squeezed her hand. “However much you wish me to continue calling you Ned, I find I cannot. Not anymore. As extraordinary an assistant as you are, you are no less a woman, and it would be wrong and highly dangerous for me to lose sight of that fact. You do understand, don’t you?”

  She did not, nor did she see the connection between his brush with death and his sudden insistence on recognizing her gender. And what dangers, specifically, did he mean, those of his laboratory or those of their mutual passion?

  “I should have been here with you,” she insisted. “But I suppose it was my fault. Had I agreed to accompany you, you might not have been hurt.”

  “Yes, but with you here I would not have tested the process.”

  In frustration she tossed her hands in the air. “If I am so extraordinary an assistant, stop treating me as though I’m a delicate flower that needs protecting.”

  He regarded her with no small amount of bewilderment. “Do you think I’d have subjected a male assistant to the untested dangers of my experiment?”

  Her anger receded a fraction. “Wouldn’t you have?”

  “Of course not. Or, perhaps at one time I might have, but I’ve learned much this week. I’m not quite the curmudgeon I was at the outset.”

  “You were rather curmudgeonly the day you set your challenge.”

  “And you were splendid with your courageous hand-raising. But never mind that.” His arms went suddenly around her, cutting off her breath with surprising strength. “Ivy, do you know what today means?”

  “No. I still haven’t the faintest inkling of what happened here.” As much as she savored the heat of his embrace, she pushed him away far enough to get a good look at him. Flushed excitement had replaced his pallor.

  “Help me up and I’ll explain.” After setting the brandy glass on the floor, he leaned a hand on her shoulder. She wrapped an arm about his waist and half hauled him to his feet. He pressed his free hand to his chest and frowned. “Still a bit erratic.”

  “Your heart?” With a lick of panic, she pushed his hand from his chest and placed her ear over his heart. “It’s racing wildly. Simon, we need to summon a physician.”

  “Later.” He surveyed the strewn magnets. “Quite the mess, but no permanent damage, I shouldn’t think.”

  “What about the damage to you? You’re taking this much too lightly.”

  His pensive expression told her he wasn’t listening. He was surveying the space between the two sets of toppled equipment. “Galileo’s teeth. First I was there.” He pointed across the room to his generator. “And then I was here, where you found me.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised that the blast would have propelled you all that way, but—”

  “It wasn’t the blast. At least not in the manner you mean.” With his arm draped around her shoulders, his trembling excitement flowed into her and raised new concerns that he was far from all right. Especially when he said, “I was conveyed, Ivy, by means of electroportation.”

  Chapter 13

  “Electro-what?”

  Surely Ivy had heard Simon wrong. Either that, or the explosion had left him more addled than she had feared. She cupped a hand to his cheek, then to his forehead. But for a lingering sheen of moisture, he felt normal, warm and alive. Even so, she considered hastening to the speaking tube and requesting that Mrs. Walsh summon a doctor.

  “Electroportation,” Simon repeated. “You understand how the telegraph works, don’t you?”

  “Electrical impulses travel along wires from one location to another.”

  “Correct. Electroportation is a term I coined for a process combining the simple technology of the telegraph with the molecular process of electrolysis, wherein solid mass is broken down into its individual particles, dispersed, transported, and reassembled. In this case, I was transported and reassembled several yards from where I started.”

  “Simon!” Stepping out from his one-armed embrace, she gripped his shoulders and gave him a shake. “What you are describing isn’t possible. The explosion has left you confused.”

  “There was no explosion.” He grinned. “What you heard was the force of matter being manipulated.” He staggered toward his generator and ran his hands over his disheveled hair. “The coils will need to be replaced, but all the rest fared well enough. Next time—”

  “What are you saying? There can be no next time. You nearly blew yourself up. Do you wish to incinerate yourself, the entire house, and everyone in it?”

  His look of elation faded. “Ivy, today was no accident. It was a re-creation of a process that produced a similar phenomenon last winter. You see, I’d been toying with Faraday’s theory of electrical lines of force, and the notion that the direction of currents can be manipulated to create a power field that would remain active even after cutting off the source of electricity. I decided to use lightning as that source, and with my electromagnets I attempted to—”

  A cold fear shimmied down her spine. “You are mad....”

  His laughter did little to dissuade her. “It might appear so, but what happened next is extraordinary. Thinking I had at least a few minutes before the storm arrived overheard, I decided to make some adjustments to the positioning of the magnets. Lightning unexpectedly struck, and I was caught in the power surge.”

  “But you’d be dead....”

  “Yes, if I’d been struck directly, but I wasn’t. As it was, in a manner of speaking, I did cease to exist, at least in the tangible world. My mind—my thoughts—remained intact, but the rest of me became one with the electrified field, transported from one end to the other, and deposited whole again. Not long after that, I began building my generator.”

  When her growing alarm rendered her mute, he grasped her upper arms and deposited a crushing, enthusiastic kiss on her lips. “Don’t you see, Ivy? This discovery changes everything we thought we knew about solid matter. It proves that nothing truly is solid, that our world is made up of intermingling particles that can be manipulated in ways we never before imagined.”

  “Simon ...” She in turn grasped his arms tight in an attempt to anchor him in reality. “You are not thinking clearly. Which is understandable under the circumstances. But believe me when I say that what you are suggesting is not possible. Solid is solid.” She stomped her foot twice against the floor. “We cannot walk through walls, nor can our corporeal selves be disassembled and reassembled in other places.”

  “Let me prove it to you.”

  “No. I won’t let you do that to yourself again.” She released him and pulled away. “It’s madness.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. Twice in one day might be pressing my luck. Tomorrow, then. You’ll see that I’m telling you the truth.”

  “No, Simon. I won’t allow you to prove anything to me.”

  A decision came in a burst of clarity, while the rest of her, most especially her heart, felt disconnected and numb, perceiving only a promise of future pain. All this time she had feared being sent away for her own good. Not once had she considered that she might have to leave for his good, to prevent him from harming himself.

  “Whether or not your theory holds merit,” she said quietly, “your actions nearly resulted in your death....”


  Her breath seized up in her throat. Ah, the pain was not so distant after all. She struggled past it, holding up a hand when Simon seemed about to speak. “I am sorry, but I will not be a party to your self-destruction.” She headed for the doorway.

  “Where are you going?”

  Into town first, to appeal to his colleagues and see if they might be able to talk sense into him. Then . . . she supposed she’d go home. She certainly couldn’t stay here, where her very presence encouraged him to take unthinkable risks.

  Without turning back to face him, she paused on the threshold. “I am going downstairs to pack my things.”

  Her reply met with silence, and she hurried down the steps.

  Simon watched Ivy go, believing that in another moment she’d grasp the magnitude of his discovery and turn back around. He knew she would reappear in the doorway. He waited. Just another moment . . . she’d be back. . . .

  Her descending footsteps echoed from the tower. Simon frowned.

  Several more seconds ticked by, each one eating away at both his exuberance and his confidence. What he had done wrong? To be sure, he had frightened her, and perhaps he deserved her rebuke for that, but she had also turned her back on the phenomenon that had been the driving force of his existence these many months.

  He had been so certain she would celebrate his success. How could she, a scientist in her own right, simply walk away? The answer hovered like the remaining steam drifting over the floorboards. She hadn’t believed him.

  It was a possibility he hadn’t considered.

  Crestfallen, he turned to examine his generator. The process had left the coils charred, the pistons pitted, the luster of the crankshaft and wheel dulled. His spirits plunged. Galileo’s teeth, what if she was right, and he had only imagined being transported across the room?

  Or . . . what if either way, it didn’t matter? He’d been accused more than once in the course of his career of tilting at windmills. He had always ignored the charge, but for the first time now he pondered whether he’d been chasing a useless dream. Did it matter that he managed to transport himself fifteen feet across a room? He could far more easily have walked those fifteen feet, and with less wear on his body. How could such a process ever be practical?