She stood up suddenly, hands on her hips, approaching, perhaps too near for comfort. “I am bored, sir, and have been imprisoned in your flat now for days.”
“Hardly that, my lady, and you are no prisoner! And if . . . I have kept you here only until such time as—” What on Earth has brought all this on? Ah, his earlier outburst.
She sat again, her eyes softened by gathering tears; they glittered, cut emeralds caught in a sunbeam. No, not anger. Fear. Fear he would send her on her way, return her home. He recognized this look well enough.
“Not that I am complaining, Mr. Erceldoune. Much to the contrary. You have been beyond kindly, sir. Beyond . . . Please forgive my—”
“Hush now. I’d have done the same for any—”
“The risk, sir . . . My father—”
“Knows not that you are resident here. And shall not, unless you tell him yourself. You are ready to return home in any event, should you desire it. In fact, I see no reason for you to stay, if that be what you wish. Or to find other accommodation. Simon Bell might perhaps—”
“No! I do not trust Simon. I have no one—”
“I cannot keep you here indefinitely, whatever you—”
Steadying herself against the laboratory bench, she took in the breadth of the laboratory. “This room is . . . it is glorious. As beautiful as my father’s solarium! What is this place?”
The change of subject was not unwelcome. For the moment. “It . . . it is where I work when not in the shop. Here I prepare the recipes: the elixirs and lotions, poultices, items I employ in my trade. I am new to this part of London, and I hope in a time not too distant, this will be a busy place, as I make myself better known to the physicians hereabouts. Although I daresay, in the brief time I have been here, I’ve seen nary a one—save Dr. Bell. I do not expect that many of them would attend the ill here, but—”
Cate laughed. “Did you think even one of those dandies might dirty their breeches or boots in Smithfield? I aver not, sir! Very few would come here amongst what is called by many the ‘vile zoology’ of the place. And they do not, I daresay, refer to the animals sold in the market. Do you think, no matter your reputation elsewhere, any would deign to visit you here? Indeed not!”
She was right, of course. He had said it himself many times over. “It grieves me, but I know it to be true. I’ve had my doubts about the medical care afforded the people here resident. It is poor, to be sure. But no physicians about at all? And with St. Bartholomew’s so nearby, I’d hoped I was mistaken, but feared it. Which is why, in part, I’ve chosen Smithfield. The folk here are in sore need and I’ve no lack of skill,” Gaelan said with more pride than he’d meant. “Yet it angers me that . . . You would think, if only out of a sense of duty to Hippocrates . . . The suffering alone would—”
“Would not signify amongst a single one of them, sir! At least not amongst the physicians with whom I am acquainted.”
Gaelan snatched a glass flask from the workbench, clutching its slender neck until he thought it might shatter in his hand, infuriated at the lot of them—Bell included. For where had he been, this descendent of the brilliant, compassionate Benjamin Bell? And yet, well-qualified apothecaries were scorned by medical society, when they should be welcomed as equals in practice.
Cate approached the workbench, cautious, yet her intention was clear, her gaze fixed on the flask still clenched in Gaelan’s fist, her hand held up to stay his. She was too near, yet he applauded her effort to settle his ire. The girl was quite something. Clever did not begin to describe her.
“Fear not, dear lady. I’ve not a mind to shatter the vessel. I’ve need of it in the hours to come. And many more yet to craft.”
“What an exquisite and unusual vessel it, Mr. Erceldoune. Its neck is delicate and . . . those arms, so magnificently curved. It resembles a bird to my mind—odd to be sure, but perhaps a shore bird. I fear your grip on it is so fierce . . .”
Gaelan glanced from the flask to his guest. Shrugging, he placed it gently on the countertop and wiped his hands on his waistcoat. “Aye, birdlike indeed. It is, in fact, called a pelican retort. Of quite an ancient design. Medieval . . . if I am not mistaken,” he added quickly.
He held it out to Cate, inviting her to examine it. “Some ascribe a spiritual purpose to an implement such as this, but I find it is quite effective in rendering my preparations the purest possible, which has very little to do with the soul, but much to do with healing the body.”
“Wherever did you find such a thing?”
“I fashion all my own glassware. Do you fancy glass, then? It is an odd occupation for a lady such as yourself—”
“Not so odd as you might think. When I was a girl, my father would delight me with baubles from his glassworks. He owns . . . I mean to say, up north . . .” She turned away briefly. Clearly, she had said more than intended. “Suffice to say,” she continued after a moment, “I’ve an eye for glass wares, and—”
Gaelan searched her countenance; her cheeks reddened under his scrutiny. “You are Lord Alfred Kinston’s daughter.” An accusation more than a statement. He regretted the tone of it immediately. He knew the man only incidentally, but his glassworks too well. Of all the people to venture past his threshold in seek of help, he’d not expected . . .
“I . . .” Cate’s eyes fluttered and Gaelan was beside her in two steps, catching her before she fell to the wood planks.
“You should not have come up here,” he said too sternly, setting her back into the chair. “The climb is too sharp and perhaps I was hasty in thinking your recovery—”
“No, that is not it. Not at all. It is that you . . . Why did you say that? That my father is Lord Kinston?”
Gaelan ignored the question. He poured a tumbler of water from a blue glass carafe. “Drink this—”
She waved him away. “I must know how you guessed it. Or have you known all along and have been planning my return, even today? What did he offer you? Or was it Simon Bell made the offer?”
“My lady, do not agitate yourself. You’ve nothing to fear from me. This is but cool water. It will freshen you in a trice. I promise.”
She nodded, sipping slowly before handing it back to him.
Gaelan sat on the floor beside the chair. He needed to calm her; it would not do in the midst of this crisis to have her relapse. “I swear it, until you made mention . . . I lived for a time in the north of England and knew of a glassworks there—between Liverpool and Sheffield. Kinston Glassworks, owned by Alfred Easton, Earl of Kinston. There are other glassworks in the north, of course, but . . .” He shook his head and shrugged. “It was but a guess.”
CHAPTER 24
Gaelan had known Lord Kinston when the earl was but five and twenty—and the most ruthless of masters. The burns, the overwork, the disease from too many hours and too much exposure to poison in the windowless purgatory of the Kinston Glassworks. So, the girl was yet another of Kinston’s victims. Gaelan peered at the floorboards, refusing to look up into Cate’s gaze.
Finally, she spoke. “I do not know what to say, sir. You now have the power to return me to the one place I cannot go, that I detest with all my heart. My father would indeed pay you well for that service. I ask but one thing. That you allow me but a day’s head start. I shall be out of your hair, whatever comes to pass.”
There was a steely boldness in the tenor of her voice. She was strong; that much was obvious. But force her to withstand her father’s certain cruel judgment? He could not do that to her. He could not deny her whatever small amount of protection was in his power to offer. “I would not betray this confidence, nor the trust you’ve placed in me by confessing it, my lady. Please do not trouble yourself ere you work yourself into an awful state. Be assured I’ve said nothing about you. Not to Bell. Not to anyone.”
Gaelan retrieved a small amber bottle from a shelf, placing three drops into her water glass. Again, she waved him away. “You ought drink this; it will hasten your recovery. For despite how we
ll you might be faring now, a turn for the worse is not out of the question. Not yet, especially as you seem quite insistent upon climbing stairs and moving about when you should be resting!” He could not suppress the small quirk of a smile.
She was beautiful, this young lass, and Gaelan imagined how a smile would brighten her countenance and lighten the heavy burden she wore in the grim line of her mouth and her luminous, sad eyes. He stood to go back to his work, needing desperately to break the sudden intimacy gathering between them. “Please allow me, my lady, to return to the task at hand. I’ve yet a few hours’ work ahead of me before—”
“When I was a child,” she began, ignoring him, taking a further step toward him, “my father would bring me trinkets from the glassworks; they were precious to me as the crown jewels.”
There it was—the beginnings of a true smile. He took several steps backwards, moving to the other side of a long workbench. “It is, indeed, a miraculous thing—a magical thing, glass is, but I must insist . . .”
He retreated to an area in the far corner, clear but for a large cauldron set atop several large, flat granite tiles. She followed. “Please, my lady, allow me to attend to my work. I must insist—”
“Caitrin. That is my name, and now you know who I am, there is little purpose concealing it from you.”
“Caitrin, then. Greek in origin: pure. Quite fitting you. And an improvement over ‘Cate.’” Tapping the edge of a tile, Gaelan ignited a blaze beneath the cauldron, drawing out his watch and noting the time.
She frowned, her lower lip trembling. “I am quite the opposite of pure, and that you know only too well, sir.”
He should not have made mention of so sensitive a point. “I cannot agree. Yet, perhaps a distraction might be in order to forestall an argument on the subject of purity. And I’ve just the thing, and it will not at all keep me from my work.”
Of all chemistry’s creations, none was so magical as glass: amorphous and liquid, jewel hard, yet not solid—no crystals to be seen in its composition. Yet. Sand and soda ash and lime. Iron and whatever else his heart desired, set afire and transformed into something so fragile, so beautiful, and yet so practical.
“You see, I have always fashioned my own glassware. No baubles, not often, only what is required in my trade: flasks, cylinders, tubes. I learned the craft as a boy, and it has stayed with me always. Quite an extraordinary thing to transform simple sand and metals into something durable and at the same time so very fragile. Alchemy at its most elemental—fire, earth, the air needed to fuel the fire. Water to harden it.”
“You insist on its practicality, yet you speak of it as a poet might.”
Ah, there it was—the full smile he’d hoped to elicit from her, softening every feature. The instant transformation left him breathless. His face grew hot, and not from the fire beneath the cauldron. He turned away from her, retrieving a few needed implements from a low shelf.
“I’ve a need just now to craft several vessels quite soon should I have need of a particular prescript. And if you promise to keep your distance . . . for your safety of course . . . I would not mind if you would stay and observe. That is, if it might amuse . . . distract you . . . from your troubles.”
“It would that, Mr. Erceldoune.”
Her eyes sparkled with a light he’d not seen in them. Anticipation. Curiosity. He could not hope to divert her from her thoughts with a simple beaker, nor even a swan flask. He knew exactly what would spark her imagination and demonstrate the true magic of glass.
Gaelan collected a few items from the workbench before returning to the cauldron. “I should like to fashion for you a Rupert’s drop. It will serve both to test the readiness of my cauldron . . . and as a bit of an apology for my earlier brusqueness.”
He would lose a moment or two, but to see her laugh, even that smile once again . . . Had he but the time, he would play the court magician, revealing the trick with an actor’s flair. But he’d too much to do; besides, he’d never been much the showman, unlike too many, less scrupulous, fellow apothecaries, who’d the canny instincts to gather about them all manner of passersby. Pied pipers with horse-piss tonics.
She shrugged, and her hair cascaded about her shoulders—a blaze of sunlight captured on a fine summer’s morning. “I do not understand. A Rupert’s . . . what?”
“A Rupert’s drop. Do you not know what that is? Did your father never let you witness the brilliance of it?”
His tutors at Dernwode House, who’d taught him the trick, would scold him when he’d dare call it magical: “This is not magic. Magic is for fools and heretics”—reminding him that his own father had been executed for wielding so-called magic. “This is science. Manipulation of God’s Nature, as we are intended to do, and nothing more.”
Indeed, they had been right, but as a lad . . . Magic. Science. The two were entwined and inseparable—a matter of perception. One era’s magic was another’s great scientific achievement. After more than two centuries, he’d seen it proven over and again.
Gaelan glanced at his watch again and returned to the cauldron, pouring the contents of several small jars into the pot. Caitrin followed to stand at his side.
“Not so close by.” He ushered her to a large crate—a safe distance. “Please, my lady, do remain seated whilst I work.”
“What are you doing, sir? What do you stir into that pot?”
“Potash and copper oxide, a small amount of a silver compound as well, together I blend them under the immense heat of—”
She began again to rise from her place, her countenance ablaze with curiosity. He held out a forestalling hand. “Please do keep your seat, and not draw too near. The heat will singe your hair.” Gaelan stirred the brass cauldron with a metal rod, tapping his foot to the stone tile a second time.
“Where is the furnace to heat your mixture?”
“It is hidden in the stones, where it might safely do its bidding without setting my shop and half the market afire! An invention of mine, and quite sufficient, I assure you, for my purposes.”
He withdrew the rod, and with it, a syrupy ball of molten glass, which resembled blue-green molasses. “Now watch, my lady, and you shall see!”
The small ball dangled from the tip of the rod, transforming into a large blue teardrop as Gaelan manipulated the metal implement over a second vessel filled with cold water. Lower and lower it dropped, thinning at the very top into a glistening thread no wider than a spider’s silk, before it snapped, sinking into the water.
“A moment.” Gaelan held up a hand, admonishing Caitrin not to rise from her place. Plunging his hand into the water, he withdrew the drop and knelt on the floor before her. “I am no magician, I fear; I’ve no flair for theatrics, yet there is little else as magical as this piece. From liquid to solid it has journeyed in the span of mere seconds. Yet that is not the best of it.”
He opened his hand, revealing the turquoise teardrop, iridescent and gleaming.
She gasped, her hand to her heart. “It is exquisite.”
“It is hard as diamond. I might take a mallet to it, and it would not break, yet—”
“Oh, do show me. Please!” she asked. Her eyes sparkled in delight and curiosity. She clapped her hands together in glee as a child might do.
“Very well.” He bid her to follow.
“Ah, so now I might rise from my place at last?”
“The danger is past. The cauldron will settle now, ready for use, but no danger to . . .” He gestured toward her hair, which hung wild about her face and down her back.
“Is the furnace fire yet ablaze? Have you not work—?” As she approached, Gaelan showed her a foot pedal at the base of the platform. “A small device to calm the blaze. Maintain the heat, but not douse it. But come. See.”
He led Caitrin to his workbench. “Observe! But do not close your eyes, not even a blink. No matter how you may wish to do so. You must witness every moment.”
Gaelan took up a sledgehammer from his desk, lifti
ng it above the glass drop.
Cate held up her hands. “No! Do not . . . You shall destroy . . . Please!”
“Do not trouble yourself! I only mean to demonstrate my point. That something so apparently fragile may not be quite as we perceive. Now observe. I promise,” he added with a smile, “if it breaks, I shall make for you ten more—in all the colors of the rainbow. Now step back and do not close your eyes. Shield them if you think I might blind you with the scattered shards, but . . . do watch!”
Caitrin inhaled a deep breath under Gaelan’s attentive gaze. He meant to dazzle her, uncertain why it had become so important—and so suddenly. He’d been immune to the charms of women far more beautiful than she—for decade upon decade, yet . . .
Gaelan hoisted the hammer high above his head and struck a blow, hitting the drop straight on, startling himself with the ferocity of the strike and its thunderous blow.
“You see, my lady? It did not break. It did quite dent my metal tray, but the glass drop is intact. Not even a chip!”
Gaelan handed it to her, removing a transparent glass beaker from a shelf. He held up a finger. “Now my lady, if you will clip the drop like so . . .” Gaelan slipped a small implement into her hand, holding the teardrop above the beaker.
“One, two, three, and . . . now,” he encouraged Caitrin. “Cut it . . . right . . . there.”
She snipped the fine thread of glass that extended from the glass bauble and it exploded into the beaker—a shower of color and fine sparkling powder like fine blue snow.
Her reaction was as he’d hoped. Delight as if she’d not a care in the world. It would do for now, until the reality of her situation renewed itself in her thoughts. “I’ve no time now, but perhaps later I might fashion for you a jar in which you might keep the tiny shards!”
“But how? How is it possible to work this sorcery?”
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