Outrageously Yours

by Allison Chase

  With one hand he caught her coat sleeve and with the other he swung the door closed. It shut with a resounding bang he’d have preferred not to have caused, but it couldn’t be helped. With equal measures of defiance and hurt, Ivy resisted the pressure of his grasp. With the best of intentions he played the bully, pressing her to the wall beside the door and trapping her there with the weight of his body.

  “Listen to me,” he said urgently. Her scent filled his being, and he fought to keep his thoughts from tumbling into the oblivion of desire. “All I meant was that we must be careful not to be found out. Not to alert Errol to the fact that you are not who you claim to be. For heaven’s sake, would you allow yourself to be ruined for all time?”

  She turned her face away from his seeking lips. “A bit late to worry about that, no?”

  “Damn it, Ivy ...” Cupping her cheeks, he turned her to him. He meant only to reason with her, but her pursed lips proved too great a temptation.

  He covered her mouth, his own mouth hard and stiff with an anger he couldn’t fully define. Yes, she was being stubborn, deliberately misunderstanding his meaning. But she was also presenting him with the perfect opportunity to end this unwanted relationship or whatever it should be termed. For they had committed indiscretions, several times over, despite numerous vows to the contrary. Why couldn’t he feel the wrongness of their actions? Why didn’t he simply open the door and walk away?

  Unable to answer his own questions, he went on kissing her, drowning in her scent and taste and warmth, caught up in his roiling, dogged need to have her in his arms. So intent was he on drinking her in that he couldn’t quite identify the moment when she stopped fighting him, slid her arms around his neck, and began kissing him back.

  Footsteps out in the hall broke them apart. Ivy’s eyes were burning and wild, as turbulent as the blood rushing through Simon’s veins. She tugged her coat into place, fingered her neckcloth. Simon straightened his waistcoat, smoothed a hand over his hair. The footsteps passed by her door, and they both sighed with relief.

  Simon took her face gently in his hands and ran the pads of his thumbs across her lips. “God help me for wanting you as much as I do.”

  “And me for knowing what I want and doing just the opposite.” She covered his hands with her own, held them there a moment as if to memorize the feel of them against her, then slid them from her face and released him. Her arms at her sides, she straightened her spine with a brave little toss of her curls. “I’m sorry I acted the shrew. Be assured that you have done nothing I haven’t wished you to do. But you are also correct. With your friend here, we can no longer indulge our fancies. What about the consortium? Is it to proceed at Windgate Priory as planned?”

  The speed with which she transformed from angry lover to efficient assistant took him aback. Part of him felt loath to let their quarrel go. He’d rather bicker with her than return to polite words and passionless manners. He’d have preferred enmity and resentment to courtesy and the damned deference that restored them to their proper social stations.

  He reached for the doorknob. “There has been no change in plans for the consortium. To be sure, Yates’s passing will hang heavy over the event, but the Royal Society representatives and a score of scientists are on their way to Windgate Priory even as we speak.”

  “Then I shall be ready to leave whenever you say the word.”

  He thanked her, and left the room with a lingering wretchedness that nearly choked him.

  Chapter 20

  At the sight of the young man coming through Alistair Granville’s wide-open front doors, Ivy hurried down the remainder of the staircase and bounced to a halt in front of him. “Lowbry. I’m so glad you’re here. I don’t know how I’d have endured it otherwise.”

  “Ivers.” The good-looking Jasper Lowbry dropped the valise he carried, strode forward, and caught her up in a quick bear hug. “It won’t be the same without poor Yates,” he said as he released her.

  “Is Preston Ascot coming?” she asked.

  “He should be here soon.”

  Jasper’s mouth dropped open as he took in Windgate Priory’s elaborate entry hall. Activity buzzed around them. Through the wide doorway into the equally elaborate and enormous ballroom, a steady stream of servants, scientists, and their assistants busily filed in and out.

  Ivy stepped back to survey the man whom she considered, against all propriety, to be her friend—her companion in academia and now in grief as well. Behind him, two footmen in the Windgate gold-upon-chestnut livery struggled at either end of a trunk; they were attempting to carry it over the threshold without upending the heavy piece or crashing it into the doorframe.

  At a loud thunk, Jasper glowered at them. “Careful with that. It contains delicate instrumentation.”

  The servants rolled their eyes and crossed the hall to the staircase.

  “Leave the luggage to them and come with me.” Ivy very nearly grasped Jasper’s wrist, remembering in time that men didn’t tug each other along in bursts of exuberance. Instead she gestured him to follow her into the ballroom.

  Sunlight streamed through the room’s towering windows, reflecting on the polished parquet floor and on the array of gadgets and equipment, large and small, ranged along the perimeters.

  “Criminy ...” Jasper twisted his head this way and that.

  Even Ivy continued to marvel at the sights, though she had been here for several days now. She, Simon, and Errol had been the first to arrive, when the ballroom had been cavernous and full of echoes. Members of the consortium had arrived daily since then. Now the ballroom resembled a workshop of fantastical wonders and the manor itself an exceedingly lavish men’s club, for other than cooks and maidservants, Ivy was the only woman.

  Like an excited child, Jasper kept raising a hand to point. “Look at that . . . and that!”

  The first item to which he referred, a steel and iron tabletop contraption consisting of various-sized wheels connected by belts and pulleys, gave off a rat-a-tat-tat as the man standing behind it gave the crankshaft several turns. Spools rotated, and as a vertical rod bobbed up and down, a needle poked in and out of a length of a blue woolen fabric, emblazoning it with a trail of ivory stitching.

  The man who watched intently over the process had deep-set eyes and a high domed forehead framed by wild shanks of hair that curled to his shoulders. After every few turns of the crankshaft, he stopped to make adjustments.

  “That is Elias Howe. He’s an American,” Ivy explained. “No one in his home country was willing to help fund his project, so Mr. Howe sold nearly all of his worldly possessions and traveled across the Atlantic in hopes of enjoying a more welcoming reception from his English counterparts.”

  His brows knitting in perplexity, Jasper studied the man and his invention. “What on earth is he doing?”

  “Sewing, of course.”

  The young man’s eyes went wide with astonishment. “A device that sews. Remarkable. I wonder....” He approached Elias Howe and extended his hand. “Jasper Lowbry, sir.”

  The whirring and click-clicking of the machine wound to a halt as Elias Howe accepted Jasper’s handshake. “Pleasure to meet you, my boy. Your field?”

  “Physics, sir. Electromagnetism, specifically. Cambridge University.” Jasper gestured at Howe’s sewing machine. “This is quite a work of mechanical physics you have here, sir. I can’t help but wonder if you’ve considered how it might function if hooked up to a voltaic cell.”

  With an indulgent smile the older man held up a hand. “One step at a time, son. Still got to work out the bugs.”

  “Bugs?”

  “Sure. Haven’t quite figured out how to prevent the thread from tangling and breaking, and the fabric from pulling and rumpling. And then there’s that bit of my thumb I’ll never have back.” He held up the gouged appendage and chuckled, then patted the crankshaft. “This here’s just a prototype, but five or ten years from now don’t be surprised to find rows of my automatic stitchers lined
up in every textile factory across two continents. A suit of clothes like you’re wearing won’t take more than a day or two to make.”

  “A day or two,” Jasper murmured as he and Ivy proceeded through the ballroom. “I’m not certain I like that notion. Seems a bit tawdry for a gentleman’s clothing to be tossed together so hastily.”

  Ivy nodded her agreement and slowed as another member of the consortium caught Jasper’s attention. This man’s balding head kept disappearing and appearing from behind the wooden boxlike contraption he had set upon a tripod. A lens encased in a several-inch-long brass cylinder extended from one side, pointing outward into the room.

  “I know what this is,” Jasper said before Ivy could speak. “A camera, yes?”

  The man poked his head up again and fixed his gaze on Jasper. He seemed always to frown, Ivy noted, not in anger or perplexity, but in pensiveness, as though caught up in the intricacies of some elusive puzzle.

  “Are you a chemist, sir?” the man demanded.

  “Er, no, a physicist,” Jasper replied, “or at least I shall be once I’ve completed my education.”

  “Mr. Lowbry,” Ivy interjected, “I’d like you to meet Mr. William Fox Talbot, who is, by the way, a former Cambridge student. Mr. Talbot, Mr. Jasper Lowbry, of St. John’s College.”

  “St. John’s, eh? I was a Trinity man myself.” Talbot didn’t extend a hand, Ivy only now realized, because both of his were covered by white cotton gloves. He held them away from his body, as if they might drip some invisible but damaging substance on his coat. “You claim to be familiar with the process of photogenic drawing, do you, my young sir?”

  “I’ve . . . er . . . heard of it.” Jasper seemed taken aback by the other man’s curtness, but quickly recovered his poise. “Hasn’t a man named Louis Daguerre developed a—”

  “Bah! What does that Frenchman know, with his unwieldy copper plates?” Talbot motioned Jasper closer. “See here. I’m developing a process whereby plain paper is made chemically light-sensitive and produces something no one has thought of before.”

  “And what would that be, sir?” Jasper asked politely.

  “A calotype,” Talbot declared with a triumphant flourish. “It is the process whereby an image in negative is burned into the paper and can be used to produce copies of the original over and over again.”

  “Ingenious,” Jasper proclaimed, to which the other man nodded vigorously and then resumed tinkering with his box.

  Jasper and Ivy continued their perusal of the consortium exhibits. Not all the projects were as easily identified as Mr. Howe’s and Mr. Talbot’s, nor were their creators as loquacious. One bespectacled man who barely reached Ivy’s shoulder claimed to have invented a device for predicting the weather, but he declined to elaborate further on his smoking jumble of pumps and gears.

  They saw electrogenerators and electromagnets, though none that compared in size with Simon’s. Ivy thought of his giant electromagnets, still packed in their crates, which Simon had instructed the footman to deliver up to his bedchamber upon their arrival here. Would he unpack them? Would he dare demonstrate his astounding and dangerous electroportation process?

  If he had reached a decision, he hadn’t shown any inclination to share it with her. Ivy told herself his reticence was due to Errol Quincy’s constant presence, and to the other scientists who had arrived daily. They both knew Ivy could ill afford even the slightest mishap that might reveal her gender. But it hurt, this distance between them. She missed him dreadfully, missed his smiles, the feel of his arms, and the rumble of his voice beneath her ear.

  As she and Jasper walked, she gave her head a shake to banish her melancholy. Simon’s generator, with its steam-producing furnace and vat, occupied the entire back wall of the ballroom, and was by far the largest apparatus there. Side by side, she and Jasper contemplated the mysterious shapes tightly covered in black sheeting. At least, what lay beneath remained a mystery to Jasper and every other man in the room. Ivy could have diagrammed and named every component by heart.

  “Tomorrow night,” Jasper said with feeling.

  Ivy clapped his shoulder. “Yes, my friend, tomorrow night Lord Harrow will start up his generator, and I promise you, it will be truly splendid to behold.”

  “And with it, Dean Rivers and I shall demonstrate his project, and it, too, shall be splendid to behold.”

  But Ivy only half heard him. For as she turned to retreat back through the room, a sight in the doorway spread frissons of panic through her.

  “I have been to the Three Horseshoes three times now, and the innkeeper denies having seen any sign of her.” Simon released an oath of frustration that garnered him sympathetic looks from the men seated around him in Alistair’s library. They had the room to themselves, an advantage of being well acquainted with the home’s owner. “Where could Gwendolyn be hiding?”

  As soon as he and Ivy had returned from their latest ride into the village, Simon’s friends—Alistair, Ben, Errol, and even Colin—had joined him here in a show of support. Simon hadn’t hesitated before airing his disappointment in front of Colin. Only a few short days ago, he would probably not have been so open, but the death of young Spencer Yates had taught him that life was too short to hold grudges.

  Besides, whatever had occurred last winter, Colin had expressed sincere remorse on countless occasions; Simon decided it was time to let go of his hostility.

  Sitting in the wing chair, Errol absently twirled his walking stick between his frail hands. “Have you considered the possibility that Gwen never left London?”

  Colin looked up at that but said nothing. Though he appeared to be paying close attention to everything Simon said, he’d been uncharacteristically quiet since they’d all entered the room. He sat half sprawled in his chair, long legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles, a slight frown tugging at his brow. Simon guessed the circumstances made him uncomfortable with the conversation, or perhaps he feared that voicing his opinion might result in a demand that he leave the room.

  Simon returned his attention to Errol’s suggestion and shook his head. “As of yesterday I’ve heard from both of her friends who are presently staying in town. She isn’t with either of them.”

  “One or both could be lying about her whereabouts.” With a graceful motion Alistair stretched an arm along the carved back of the settee. “You know how women are when it comes to their bonnes amies.”

  “I did consider that,” Simon admitted. “But I also believe both girls would fear their monarch’s retribution more than they feel compelled to protect their friend. Harboring a fugitive of the queen’s household would put their own positions in serious jeopardy.”

  “I must agree, all the more so because this monarch happens to be a woman.” Ben let out a low groan as he stood and stretched his limbs. Lately, his boyhood injury seemed to be manifesting itself. Simon had never thought of Ben as old, surely nowhere near as elderly as Errol. But while the dean of natural philosophies would soon be fifty, his body appeared a decade older.

  Ben ambled to the window and glanced out, then turned back to them, the daylight silhouetting the permanent hunch left by a falling rafter some thirty-odd years ago. “There’s nothing a woman fears more than another of her sex.”

  Colin seemed about to disagree. His gaze snapped from Ben to Simon, then sank to the floor. The hairs on Simon’s nape bristled. Was Colin thinking that Gwendolyn feared nothing more than her unreasonable brother?

  He shoved the thought away. It was time he stopped assuming the worst about his former best friend and started figuring out how to win back his sister’s regard.

  Alistair gave a light chuckle at Ben’s last words. Smoothing a hand over his carefully coiffed hair, he angled a pensive look at Simon. “You put a lot of store in this assistant of yours, taking him into your confidence about Gwendolyn.”

  Simon didn’t want anyone taking an undue interest in Ivy, so in an offhand manner he said, “Why not? The boy’s got sharp eyes and a
keen mind, and he’s been known to perceive details I miss.”

  The men parted soon after, and Simon made his way down to the ground floor to find Ivy, who had returned to the ballroom earlier. Her joy in meeting the scientists and watching them prepare for the demonstrations was infectious, and Simon was glad she’d found something to distract her from thoughts of Spencer Yates’s death.

  He reached the bottom steps just as an impeccably dressed dark-haired fellow hauled Ivy from the ballroom and along the main corridor by her elbow. The scoundrel was no one Simon recognized, and therefore could not be a member of the consortium.

  Who was he, then, and what the devil did he want with Ivy?

  Jasper Lowbry hovered in the ballroom doorway, staring after Ivy and her captor in perplexity. Simon paused long enough to question the youth.

  “I haven’t the foggiest who that is, my lord. He simply strode up to Ned, seized his arm, and declared that they had matters to discuss. When I attempted to follow, he stilled me with a look I’ve only ever seen at the back entrances of gaming hells. I can’t explain it, but for the briefest instant I feared for my life.”

  Simon burst into motion. Ivy and the stranger had turned into the dining hall, but when he entered the long room, he discovered it empty. A butler’s chamber lay beyond, and a contentious clash of voices led Simon to it. Careful to silence his footsteps, he crept close to the doorway.

  “You are returning to London with me at once.”

  “That is impossible. Victoria sent me—”

  “Victoria had no right to endanger you this way.”

  “She needs me here, just as she needed Laurel in Bath last spring.” The triumphant note in Ivy’s response implied that she believed she had just won the argument.

  Her adversary didn’t agree. “Laurel was nearly killed in Bath. More than once. Which is why I am here. There are things we haven’t told you, and it’s time you knew the truth.”