The Luckiest Lady in London

by Sherry Thomas

“Trying to time a particular lesson.”

  She noticed only then that the standing blackboard to the side of the desk was full of equations and that he held a watch in his hand—he seemed to have already devoted a monumental number of hours to these not-yet-begun lessons. The awful tug at her heart was one of both pain and painful pleasure.

  “And does this particular lesson require you to study the weather?” she said, trying not to betray the more turbulent of her emotions.

  “It might, when you are solving problems at the board.” He pointed to the bigger blackboard that hung on the wall.

  She approached the newly repainted blackboard and examined its currently spotless surface. When she solved those future problems, would he be standing next to her, his scent of summer rain distracting her from what she needed to do?

  It was some time before she realized that she had put her hand on the blackboard to feel its texture, in a motion that might be termed a caress. In the silence, there was only the pitter-patter of the rain and his irregular intakes of breath.

  She pressed her lips together and dropped her hand. Without turning around, she asked the question that had troubled her for days. “When we spoke in the gallery some time ago, you said something about your mother. That she did not quite understand that, in her wrath, she was punishing herself as well.”

  A beat of silence. “What of it?”

  “She was punishing herself as well, you said. So whom else did she punish?”

  A longer stretch of silence. “She would have preferred to punish her father, I believe, for forcing her into a marriage she did not want. But he died almost before her honeymoon ended, so it was my father who bore the brunt of her anger, for his mistake of taking his suit to her father when she’d already refused him.”

  She picked up a piece of chalk from the trough beneath the blackboard. “What did she do? Ignore him?”

  He sighed. “Has anyone ever told you that you are an immensely good person, my love? That your idea of punishment amounts to no more than a pointed spurning? My father’s punishment was the belief my mother instilled in him that I was most likely not his flesh and blood—an idea made plausible by the fact that I resembled him not at all.”

  She clutched the chalk in her hand. She could not accept cruelty of such magnitude, of deploying one’s own child as an instrument of vengeance.

  And him, caught in the middle of his mother’s rage and his father’s misery.

  As she turned around to face him, someone rapped at the door, startling them both.

  “My lord!” came Mr. Sturgess’s urgent voice. “Mr. Harris’s horse has returned to the stables without him, sir.”

  • • •

  Harris was stuck in a ditch, with a broken rib and a fractured elbow. Weston wasn’t so lucky: He and his horse were both found at the bottom of a ravine.

  And Felix, after shooting one of his favorite horses, descended into the ravine with a rope tied around his waist. When he reached the stoutly built Weston, he had to secure the latter—about two stone heavier than himself—on his back and climb up.

  It was pitch dark when the rescue party finally arrived back at the house. Louisa came running out of the front door, and it was worth the entire day of blistering cold to see the anxiety in her eyes.

  She went right past him. And then, almost comically, she stopped and pivoted on her heels. “There is a bath waiting for you. Go. The surgeon and I will see to Weston.”

  He saw his reflection as he crossed the entry hall mirror. No wonder she hadn’t recognized him immediately: He’d lost his hat, his hair was plastered to his head, and his face was dirty, his riding coat and trousers torn, drenched, and coated with mud.

  The bath had been drawn in her tub—the best one in the house. He sat down, wincing at the pins-and-needles sensation in his lower extremities, still numb from the cold.

  His valet left with his ruined clothes. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. The water was heavenly, though it did sting the myriad scratches on his person, and the steam called notice to minor lacerations on his face, nicks that he had barely felt earlier, because he’d been so cold.

  The door opened.

  “I won’t need anything for at least another quarter hour,” he said. “You may see to your other duties.”

  “I have already seen to my other duties.”

  Louisa.

  He opened his eyes. She carried a pot of tea and a plate of fresh buttered buns.

  “Would you like anything?” she asked.

  Yes, you.

  And not even for lovemaking, but just to hold, for safety and comfort.

  “Or should I ring the kitchen for something else?”

  “No, thank you. I ate plenty on the way back.”

  When he’d arrived at the waiting wagonette with Weston, who had turned unconscious from the pain of being maneuvered down a bumpy slope to the designated meeting place, there had been food and drink waiting: mulled ale, whiskey-spiked coffee, and curried pastries, all carefully packed to preserve their heat in the weather.

  “The pair of grooms who were with you told me all about your heroics. I hope you didn’t do it just to polish The Ideal Gentleman’s halo. You could’ve killed yourself,” she said, her tone unusually harsh, as she set down the tray on a footstool within his reach.

  “I was quite ready to let someone else undertake the heroics, but the two grooms with me were both afraid of heights.”

  Ten grooms and stable hands had fanned out in five teams in the search for Weston’s whereabouts. It was sheer chance that the team Felix had joined had stumbled across him.

  She lowered herself to one knee and examined his badly scratched right hand. “Why didn’t you have anyone see to it?”

  “You said there was a bath, so I came.”

  If she’d said he had to go back out and dig a ditch, he would have, too.

  “What happened?”

  “I had to remove my gloves to climb up. Then the rope slackened and I lost my foothold. So I grabbed the nearest thing, which turned out to be a rather thorny bush.”

  Her expression was pinched. He could not tell whether she was actually concerned for him or merely going through the motions.

  She tilted his still-cold hand toward the light, looking for any splinters that might be stuck under the skin.

  “I removed them all. They put me on the wagonette for the return trip—with a hot-water bottle in my lap, no less. There was a lantern nearby and I had plenty of time to pluck out the thorns.”

  She straightened. “Wait.”

  It was a request that required no response from him, but he answered all the same. “I will,” he told her. “I will keep waiting.”

  • • •

  Outside the bath, Louisa leaned against the wall for a moment.

  Ever since he left the house, her stomach had churned with anxiety. Hour after hour passed. Even after a messenger came and relayed the news that Mr. Weston had been found and everyone was headed back, she remained on tenterhooks, pacing in the entry hall, rushing outside at the slightest noise.

  Only to miss him completely when he actually did come back, looking like a chimney sweep who had been caught in the rain.

  As soon as she’d seen Mr. Weston settled, surrounded by the surgeon, the physician, two nurses, and Mrs. Pratt, the housekeeper, she’d left to see to her husband. She’d expected to encounter the chimney sweep again, but the man in her bathtub was as beautiful as ever, if somewhat bruised and battered.

  I will keep waiting.

  She made herself push away from the wall and retrieve the items she needed. On the way she encountered a gaggle of ladies, all anxious to learn of their host’s condition. News of his intrepid rescue of Mr. Weston had spread throughout the house—tomorrow it would be carried in dozens of letters to all corners of the empire.


  Steam rushed out when she opened the door of the bath. It was only as she approached the tub that she could see him clearly: the breadth of his shoulder, the column of his neck, the muscularity of his arms, stretched out along the rims of the tub.

  His eyes were closed, his eyelashes spiked with moisture. But as she neared, he opened his eyes and regarded her with so much gladness that she could not hold his gaze. Nor did she know where else to look—glistening skin and strapping build seemed to be everywhere in her vision.

  She sat down on a footstool, lifted his hand, and dabbed it with an alcohol-soaked handkerchief. He gritted his teeth but made no complaints.

  “You will be given a hero’s welcome tomorrow,” she said as she unrolled a length of white gauze. “That is, unless you decide to go down to dinner tonight, ravishingly bandaged.”

  “And that does not sit well with you?” he asked, ever perceptive. “An unscrupulous man like me becoming ever more celebrated?”

  “You did save Mr. Weston today.”

  She was more proud than she wanted to let on. But it was not an unalloyed pride. Mixed into it was a queer envy: an envy of those who knew him only as The Ideal Gentleman and did not ever question his glittering perfection.

  She would have been happy to feel nothing but pure admiration. To not be constantly torn between the gravitational pull of his person and the restraint of her well-justified caution.

  As she finished bandaging his hand, he rubbed his thumb along the edge of her palm, sending a shock of sensation up her entire arm. She pulled her hand away and busied herself dousing a fresh handkerchief in alcohol.

  But now she had to clean the cuts on his face. She patted around one scratch on his cheek, taking care not to look into his eyes.

  “When I slipped and it seemed Weston’s weight might plunge both of us back down the ravine, my mind went blank,” he said. “The moment it became clear that we would be all right, I thought of you.”

  She cleaned another scratch and remained silent.

  “If nothing else, I’ve almost half a term’s worth of lecture notes ready to go,” he went on. “It would be a shame to waste all that preparation.”

  She turned his face, looking for untended cuts. “The Ideal Gentleman always gets what he wants, doesn’t he? And now he wants my heart.”

  He waited until she’d finished disinfecting a welt at his temple to take her chin in his hand, to make sure she was looking into his eyes. “The Ideal Gentleman might have always had what he wanted, but I have not. I know perfectly well what it is like to wish for affection and receive none in return.”

  His gaze was sincere, transparent almost. She remembered what he’d told her earlier, the poisonous estrangement among all members of his family.

  “I won’t deny that if I were to have your heart, it would make me the happiest man in the world,” he continued. “But in the meanwhile, what I really want is for you to profit from our association.”

  “By any definition, I have already profited handsomely from our association.”

  “That’s for your family. I want you to have everything you have always wanted in life, everything you have ever dreamed about.”

  “And you will be content to just give and take nothing in return?”

  He raised himself and kissed her at the corner of her mouth. “I won’t be just content. I will consider it a privilege.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Louisa’s lessons began on the second day of the New Year, after their guests had departed.

  Since she’d last visited the schoolroom, a bronze model of the solar system had been placed on top of one of the shelves. The easel-like blackboard next to her husband’s desk had been painted with a grid of lines. And though the golden tulips were gone, there was now a large mixed bouquet on the deep windowsill, a splash of color against the greyness of yet another winter day.

  In a fawn tweed coat with leather patches on the elbows, the professor arrived exactly on time. He opened his lecture notes, checked his supply of chalk, and tapped one piece of chalk against the painted lines on the easel blackboard. “We’ll start with the Cartesian grid.”

  • • •

  When Louisa was called to the small blackboard and asked to find various coordinates on the grid, she’d been all too conscious of the shape of his hand at the top of the easel, the way his hair curled at his nape as he reached in to take another piece of chalk, and the scent of the fancy soap they’d been given at Christmas, which made him smell as if he had just taken a stroll, in the snow, across an entire slope of pine and spruce.

  But this physical proximity, as dangerous as it was, was not the reason she had resisted and then postponed the lessons for as long as she had. She’d been afraid he might prove to be a good teacher; as it turned out, he was an exceptional one.

  A love for his subject, a deep understanding of its intricacies, a logical, orderly progression of topics, and a delivery as charismatic and mesmerizing as any rallying speech from Henry V.

  She sat spellbound by this other side of him, the antithesis of the largely smoke-and-mirrors Ideal Gentleman. This was a man who had arrived at his knowledge and competence the honest way—no tricks, no shortcuts, no manipulation of the perception of others.

  A man of substance.

  An hour flew by.

  She left the schoolroom with four pages of sprawling notes and returned to her rooms to see her obviously flushed face in the mirror. It was another hour before she was sufficiently recovered to tackle her homework.

  And when she had done so, for reasons that did not exactly make sense, she walked out to her balcony, removed the cover from her telescope, pushed it out to the balustrade, and pointed its nine-and-a-half-inch aperture toward the Roman folly in the distance.

  There were once again dress dummies on the belvedere. No, not dress dummies: a single dress dummy, clad in a tweed coat much like those her husband wore around the estate, with a boutonniere pinned to the lapel.

  And the boutonniere was none other than a sprig of golden tulip.

  I am hopelessly in love with you.

  • • •

  She was the perfect student.

  She was always on time, always ready to learn, and always willing to ask questions. Her notes looked like those of a monkey attempting cuneiform, but her homework was always impeccably neat and almost always completely correct. In fact, she missed only one problem, on the third day of their lessons, and it had vexed her so much that it hadn’t happened again.

  However, Felix, by the end of their second lesson, already regretted that he hadn’t hired a tutor for her instead.

  She had the most potent gaze in the world.

  He could not fault her for looking at him as he described how to graph an equation or calculate the slope of a line—after all, she was supposed to pay attention. And it wasn’t as if she licked her lips, played with her hair, or toyed with the buttons on her blouse. To the contrary, she was indisputably prim and proper, her pen flying across her notebook, her expression serious, sometimes frowning slightly, as she took in his explanations.

  And yet, ten minutes into a lecture he would be tumescent. And at the end of a lesson he would be ragingly erect.

  It was in the slight part of her lips as she stared at him, the heightening of the color in her cheeks as the minutes passed, the way her left hand gripped onto the edge of her small desk during the latter part of a lesson, as if she were trying to physically restrain herself.

  He had to relieve himself with his hand after every lesson. And sometimes another time after she came to show him her homework. During their lessons, he would write problems on the big blackboard for her to solve, and he would find himself standing far too close to her, watching her, and barely holding himself back from pushing her against the blackboard and having his way with her.

  All the same, when she asked, a
fter the lessons had gone on for a fortnight, whether she could have two lessons a day, he said yes.

  And then immediately locked himself in his bedroom, desperate for relief.

  • • •

  If he were actually someone hired to tutor her, Louisa would have been doomed.

  The purposeful, fluid movements of his wrist as his chalk dashed across the blackboard held her rapt. His perfect freehand circles and parabolas sent frissons of pleasure through her. The talk of quadratic equations, matrices, and inverse functions were so much erotic poetry that set her belly aflutter. And if he even so much as hinted at trigonometry, well, she burned.

  If he ever noticed her lust simmering underneath her scholarly attention, he did not remark upon it. And did not let it impair his effectiveness as an instructor.

  “As you can see, the relative thinness or fatness of an ellipse is determined by the ratio of distance from focus to distance from directrix, or eccentricity, represented by the Greek letter epsilon.”

  She held her breath as a remarkably symmetrical oval appeared on the blackboard, complete with two foci and two directrixes.

  “The very nature of the ellipse, the fact that it closes on itself, sets the value of its eccentricity between zero and one, for the foci are never points on the ellipse, and the distance from focus can never be greater than the distance from directrix. But watch what happens when e is equal to one.”

  A parabola rose above the x-axis, its two arms perfect mirror images of each other. An unwanted heat began to pool inside her belly.

  “Every point on the parabola is equidistant from the focus and the directrix. Now, when e exceeds one, however, a hyperbola results.”

  An elegant x materialized, centered on the origin, its four arms extending into infinity. Despite her better intentions, she found herself breathing more rapidly.

  “All three of these forms, along with the circle, can be formed by intersecting a plane through a solid cone, as Apollonius of Perga discovered centuries before Christ.”

  A fire roared in the room. Afternoon sunlight streamed in from the windows. It was warm. Prodigiously warm. He unbuttoned his morning coat and proceeded to peel it off. Louisa stared.