Outrageously Yours (14 page)

“Or inadvertently zapped the lad with electricity and doesn’t wish anyone to know!” Ben finished for him.

Simon nearly upset his tea. Earlier, he had feared precisely what Ben described. Realizing his beguiling assistant had been stunned but not injured by the energy flow had rendered Simon nearly giddy with relief.

He regarded the others through narrowed eyes. “Very funny, my friends, but you’ll meet Mr. Ivers soon enough, and you shall find him in the best of health. I merely left him above to tidy up after our morning’s work.”

He aimed a glance skyward, to where his laboratory windows peered out over the rooftops of the main portion of the house. She was taking an inordinate amount of time with her task, and he felt a twinge of unease. Perhaps she
had
suffered ill effects from the current. Perhaps he should race back up and check. . . .

With a tug on his fob he pulled his watch from his waistcoat pocket, consulted the time, and frowned. “Didn’t think our power surge caused that much chaos. What
could
be keeping him?”

 

The key turned. The lock clicked. Her hand wrapped tight around the latch, Ivy froze.

Behind her, the laboratory had been set to rights, and all the equipment tidied and covered. She had fulfilled her duties to Lord Harrow; now it was time to perform her duty to Victoria. She supposed she should have reversed the order of her priorities, for surely the queen’s orders superseded Simon de Burgh’s.

But even now, with no excuses left to detain her, she hesitated, wishing to prolong the moment of discovery as long as possible, hoping with all her heart that she found no incriminating evidence against Lord Harrow. What if she did? It was her inability to answer that simple question that prevented her from pressing the latch and opening the door. And yet ...

Victoria’s own words set Ivy’s hand in motion. These past days had taught her many hard lessons about what it was to be a woman in a man’s world, with the barriers and sacrifices, and the constant battles that must be fought simply to maintain one’s rightful place. For her young friend who needed her, then, as much as for queen and country, Ivy opened the armoire’s doors.

As with her first view of Lord Harrow’s laboratory, the contents did not at first register coherently in her mind. A stack of black shapes filled the back wall of the cupboard, metallic octagons that stood nearly as tall and wide as Ivy herself. Reaching in, she traced the ridges that traveled rather like the lines of a maze from the outer rim to a bowl-like center lined in tin.

Baffled, she counted the octagons—six in all. A gleam in the corner of the armoire caught her attention, and she discovered a tied bundle of poles and brackets, perhaps, she deduced, for fashioning some kind of stand.

A scraping sound behind her sent her whirling. Her breath lodging in her throat, she viewed the room through saucer-wide eyes. The door had not opened and nothing seemed to have moved. The scraping came again, making her jump and drawing her gaze to the floor.

A few feet away, an iron rod, which she must have missed when cleaning up, rolled toward her with a jerky motion as if pushed by an invisible finger. It moved twice more as she watched.

Stooping, she picked it up, only to have it fly from her palm into the armoire to adhere with a loud clatter to the first of the disks. She had to use all the strength in her fingers to dislodge it, and even then the attraction between the contents of the armoire and the rod fought against her efforts.

“Magnets,” she murmured aloud. But these were no ordinary magnets, neither in size nor strength. Still, she could not see a need to lock them away, as if there could be some danger if anyone found them. What danger could there be in a magnet?

Gazing over her shoulder at the sheet-shrouded generator, she remembered what Lord Harrow had told her about his quest to find, through electromagnetism, a power source that would replace steam and the chemically charged voltaic cells. According to Michael Faraday’s dynamo theory, a magnet set into motion produced an electrical field that, when made to interact with conductive coils, produced a continuous current.

But such large magnets . . . What could Lord Harrow be planning to power with his generator? And if, as he had indicated to her, he had not yet met with the success he craved, could he be seeking a more powerful source of magnetism, perhaps . . . from a hunk of meteorite stolen from the queen?

A knot formed in her stomach. Had she missed any potential hiding places? But Lord Harrow hadn’t denied her access to any of the cupboards or cabinets, and she had seen inside them all. Only this armoire had been locked. She looked back inside, and suddenly saw the one thing that, in her amazement over the huge magnets, she had missed.

A pine box only slightly larger than a workman’s tool chest lay in the back corner, half hidden behind the bundle of poles. Crouching, Ivy first moved the poles out of the way. Then she clamped a hand on either side of the cask and dragged it closer. When the hinged lid refused to open, she tried Lord Harrow’s keys again. On the fourth try, the lock gave. She raised the lid and peered inside.

Like a slingshot, her heart slammed against her ribs, then catapulted into her throat. The lid slipped through her fingers and banged shut. A yelp escaped her, but as a true scream pushed against her lips, she forcefully swallowed it back.

Her hands, she discovered, lay balled in trembling fists against her thighs. She forced them to uncurl, to reach again for the box. As her fingertips made contact with the dull, yellowed wood, she clamped her teeth over her bottom lip.

She had not glimpsed a body inside that box, but . . . she glared down at the closed lid as if her gaze could penetrate solid matter. Had she seen correctly, or had her imagination played a beastly trick on her?

There was only one way to find out. Her shaking fingers once more raised the lid.

“A
h, I believe that’s Mr. Ivers coming to join us.”Using a hand to shade his eyes from the sun, Simon made out Ned’s slim figure moving through the shadows in the library. “Gentlemen, you may judge for yourselves that no harm has befallen the lad at my hands.”

But as his fellow scientists turned to peer through the doorway, Ned’s feet tangled in an invisible web. She stumbled, caught herself, hovered on a precarious brink, and toppled like a felled tree to land with a thump on the Persian rug.

In an instant Simon was on his feet. When he reached her, Ned was already sitting up, blinking and looking dazedly about. She had fallen in an open area, thankfully missing the edge of the desk and the marble sofa table. Simon sank to one knee beside her, resisting the urge to wrap her in his arms.

“Are you quite all right?” For the sake of their audience, he smoothed away an anxious frown and produced a carefree grin. “Must be those dastardly boots again, eh?”

As she blinked him into focus, a look of shock pried her eyes wide. She dug her heels into the woven pile of the carpet and shimmied a good foot or two backward. Then she froze, staring back at him as if he pointed a gun to her heart.

“What on earth is the matter? Did you hit your head?”

Her breath came in gasps. Compressing her lips, she visibly fought for control. “M-Mrs. Walsh insisted you wished to see me.”

“Insisted . . . ?” Simon stood and reached down to help her up. “I’d merely like you to meet two of my colleagues. They’ve been entertaining rather harebrained doubts about your chances of surviving your apprenticeship here.”

Ned made no move to push to her feet, with or without his help.

Simon leaned over her. Dispensing with caution, he caught her chin in his palm and held it, even when her nervous flinch communicated her distress at his touch. The reaction yanked at his heartstrings more than he liked to acknowledge, but he filed his dismay and the reasons for it away for later. Turning her face from side to side, he examined the pallor of her skin. He noted that her pupils eclipsed the slightly lighter irises around them.

“I’m summoning a doctor from town,” he said in a tone intended to brook no debate. “Obviously the electrical current has had an adverse effect on you.”

“That isn’t necessary.” She had forgotten to use her false tenor, and her true tone rang out, light and musical, like the higher notes of a clarinet. Her eyebrows knit, and when she spoke again, her voice plunged an octave. “As you said, it’s the boots. The fall left me bemused, but I am all right now.”

As if to prove her claim, she pulled her chin from his grasp but at the same time gripped his wrist and maneuvered her feet beneath her. Once on her feet, she released him and tugged her coat into place.

Simon assessed her appearance. Clothing could be righted, but would Ben and Errol see past the superficial male trappings to Ned’s adorable features and sweet mouth, and in a burst of understanding realize the truth?

She flinched again as Simon reached to straighten the knot of her neckcloth and flatten her lapels. Her short curls stood a bit on end. He smoothed them with his palm, an act that produced a stab of affection that quickly burgeoned into much, much more. He couldn’t stop from wondering if her lips would taste as rich as honey, as satisfying as fine red wine. His eyes assured him they would; his mouth hungered to sample them.

His hands closed over her shoulders, the desire to kiss her raging through him like the charged winds of an electrical storm. He bestowed a manly shake instead and let her go. “Are you ready to meet two of my fellow Galileans?”

“Galileans, sir?” A spark of genuine interest ignited beneath her guardedness.

“Come, and we’ll explain.”

She relaxed considerably as she took a seat outside on the terrace, even smiling at an anecdote from Errol, an observation from Ben. They in turn seemed to accept her as young Mr. Ivers in the same easy manner as had her dons and fellow students at Cambridge. They saw her as their expectations dictated, and if they found the “lad” a touch too skinny or a bit on the effeminate side, this was by no means unusual enough to raise the suspicions of either man.

As soon as they left, Ned became as skittish as a baby rabbit. She retired to her bedchamber on the pretext of catching up on her studies. Simon waited for her in the garden before supper, but she failed to join him for their evening stroll.

“A headache, sir,” was her clipped explanation when she entered the dining room an hour later. “I trust you understand.”

“You must have hit your head when you fell. Let me know if the pain becomes worse.”

“Yes, sir.”

Silence.

What little she ate, she ate quickly, their conversation reduced to his intermittent comments and her terse replies. At an utter loss to explain this abrupt change in her behavior, Simon fell to reviewing his every action and word spoken in his beguiling assistant’s presence.

Had he insulted her, offended her in any way? To be sure, there had been numerous occasions when he’d have liked nothing more than to have his way with her, affront her maidenly honor in the most shameless terms imaginable. But no . . . there had been nothing, no lapse on his part.

Yet.

 

The clock in the gallery stuck midnight, the chimes echoing in the corridor outside Ivy’s room. Her bed untouched, she sat fully awake in an upholstered chair set beneath her window, the only light that of the single candle on the side table. Ragged clouds tore across the sky, obliterating the stars and shredding the moon. Her arms cradled the one item she had risked taking from home, secreted inside the padded lining of one of her trunks.

Years ago, Laurel had made the little doll out of old stockings, stuffing the body and limbs with cotton, sewing on buttons for eyes and yarn for hair, and fashioning a dress from a patchwork of fabric scraps. Miss Matilda had grown shabby with time, and stained from countless kisses and tears. But Ivy loved her.

She hugged her now tight to her breast and thought of home, picturing each of her sisters, and even dearest, departed Uncle Edward and the vague, faceless memories of her parents, because that was what she did when she was frightened.

The clock’s last notes dissipated. The house fell silent, as hushed as a thief moving through the shadows, or a contagion lurking in a mudflat. It was a silence that made Ivy afraid to move or even breathe, or consider what she had seen in Lord Harrow’s laboratory. Even Miss Matilda could not banish those images.

Propping the doll carefully against the arm of the chair, Ivy fled the room for the airy relief of the balcony. A cold wind, laden with the scents of September leaves, whipped her short curls into tangles. Its bracing slap tingled against her cheeks and tugged the edges of her dressing gown. Her
man’s
dressing gown, with her equally masculine nightshirt beneath.

She had thought coming here in disguise would both free her and shield her from all risk to her person, but she discovered that her masquerade only stripped her of her most powerful defense: herself.

The Ivy who had survived a fire, overcome her parents’ deaths, and, more recently, established a degree of independence in her own home and with her own London business simply didn’t exist in Cambridge. Ned Ivers could not seek help from Ivy Sutherland or draw upon any of her life’s experiences. Ned, the student and apprentice, was alone, and he had not the slightest inkling of how to proceed.

She wished to be Ivy again, to feel Ivy’s strength moving through her, bolstering her. She wished to regain her feminine power, her confidence of knowing who she was and all she was capable of achieving.

She wished to be a woman again.