Light of My Heart

by Elizabeth St. Michel

  The dressmaker slammed the door in his face. When Rachel’s lightheadedness diminished, she gave a small smile. Poor Anthony. She had baited and whetted his appetite with the hydraulic formula on incompressible flows. Of course, he’d be like a dog after a bone until he obtained more answers.

  Predictable.

  Chapter Three

  Anthony scowled. He knew exactly what Miss Thorne was doing, making him cool his heels through fittings, a nap, her toilette. He had received a note from her, informing him that Lord Humphrey, her cousin Jacob’s half-brother, had offered to be her escort this evening, relieving Anthony of his duty. Time had completely gotten away from Anthony and he was arriving at Chelmsford’s home at the eleventh hour. He scaled the steps, tossed his hat and coat to the awaiting footman.

  Already seated at the dinner table, pink-cheeked and smiling, was Miss Thorne, like a flower among weeds. The blue dress she wore, miraculously prepared by the seamstresses this afternoon, molded snugly to her narrow waist. Her breasts pushed high enough to spill impressively over the bodice. On any other woman the gown would be lackluster, but on Rachel, the gown evoked a timeless elegance, like a mathematical theorem exactly proportional to a number of independent ideas he could grasp in a theorem, and inversely proportional to the endeavor it took to envisage them. In spite of Anthony’s astonishment, it was difficult to believe she was the same outlandish woman who had invaded his laboratory, and then dared to keep him at bay all afternoon.

  Anthony nodded to Lord Humphrey and Lady March. The rest of the fifty inhabitants he could care less about. Rachel finished an anecdote and pure energy boomed around her, a tangible throb of laughter.

  He was seated in the only chair left across from her. “Miss Thorne, I’d like to continue our discussion.” His request came out as a command and she straightened.

  “Enjoy the party,” said his host, Lord Chelmsford. Chelmsford, his former roommate at Eton had a predilection for taverns, billiard rooms and other forbidden premises. Where Anthony excelled and prodigiously graduated in two years before attending Oxford, Chelmsford barely finished Eton at four years, no doubt earning his degree in buffoonery. Time had not altered him.

  “Shocked to see you. Thought you’d fallen off the edge of the world,” said Chelmsford.

  Anthony ignored him. “About the hydraulic—”

  Miss Thorne sighed, her eyes, though a gentle blue, seemed unusually penetrating, as if they had witnessed a profundity of experience seldom met by a person her age.

  “You should have learned patience, Lord Anthony. It’s a conquering virtue.”

  “There’s no time for it.” Right now, he was a highly combustible, biological and chemical compound ready to explode. “Unless you really don’t know.” Take that, Miss Thorne. With certainty, she’d submit to thumbscrews before she let him have the upper hand.

  She disentangled herself from her partner’s conversation and smiled at him impudently. Wisely, Anthony restrained himself from grinning outright. It wouldn’t do to send Miss Thorne into a temper. Beneath that angelic expression, her eyes glittered then darkened, and then with a momentary flash, bore through him for revealing her as a bluestocking.

  “Drawing upon Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and laws of viscosity” she said, “I implemented Bernoulli’s Calculus that affirms for an inviscid flow of a non-conducting fluid. An increase in the speed of the fluid occurs simultaneously with a decrease in pressure or a decrease in the fluid’s potential energy.”

  Everyone turned and stared. A woman having intellectual interests? Anthony did not care. It was in the interest of science. “I had rejected Bernoulli in my calculations.”

  “Your error, Lord Anthony. You need to move from Pascal.” She inclined her head, a candid censure, indicating he was using calculus from an earlier mathematician.

  “Amazing,” said Lord Robert Ward, his guttural voice grating, as if he worked in a coalmine and swallowed dust. “Didn’t know you made errors, Rutland.”

  A vein pulsed at the base of Anthony’s throat while Lord Ward did a double take, his gaze making a slow motion trail from Miss Thorne’s face down to her bodice. Hot blood shot through Anthony’s veins. How long would it take for a two hundred and thirty-five-pound man to dissolve in a vat of sulfuric acid? One day? Two days?

  Lord Ward had already gained entrance to the coveted Royal Society of Science. Of course, from the notes on electricity he had paid someone to steal from Anthony’s laboratory a year ago.

  His hands fisted. Oh, what he would like to do to…could do…

  At the age of nine, Anthony’s older brother, Nicolas had insisted on boxing lessons for the two of them. At first, Anthony had seen the sport as transitory but the exercise proved to give him satisfaction and kept him in shape. He sparred with the tenants on his father’s estate, massive farm boys built from hardened work, eager to take on the duke’s son with no regard for his position. The fighting was dirty, and he liked it that way.

  Anthony focused his gaze on his nemesis. “So nice to see you, Ward. Your presence, like an indefinite visit from an impossible senior relative, with all the dottiness, fragility of mind, and…terrible thievery. When you leave, no one will shed tears of sadness, on the contrary, tears of relief.”

  “Are you questioning my honor?”

  “I am not questioning your honor; I am denying its existence.”

  “I could call you out for that,” Ward snarled.

  “You wouldn’t. You’re a terrible shot, couldn’t hit the broadside of His Majesty’s ship.”

  “Lord Anthony, have you finished your electrical experiments? Of course, your paradigm is a little off, but I understand your lacking” smirked Ward as if he knew so much more.

  The more was what Lord Ward had stolen from him. In hindsight, Anthony now stored many of his notes in his head in case Lord Ward attempted to steal from him again.

  “Lord Rutland has astounding aptitude in his study of electricity,” said Miss Thorne.

  “Do tell, Miss Thorne,” lured Lord Ward.

  Anthony narrowed his eyes. How much had she read of his notes? She had no idea that Ward was trying to steal his work again.

  “Enough to say his genius is incomparable.”

  Anthony lifted a brow. Why had she championed him when he had tainted her with a wolfish intellectual passion so unlike her sex?

  Ward snorted. “And you can say this because—”

  “Because I have followed Dr. Benjamin Franklin’s discoveries and have had a look at Lord Anthony’s notes.”

  Ward leaned over the table to assign a confidential tone, yet spoke loud enough over the hushed whispers and watchful eyes for all to gather what he’d said. His hard blue eyes stared across the table to Lord Anthony. “You compare Lord Anthony to Dr. Franklin?”

  “I do. Dr. Franklin is mortal. Lord Anthony is supernatural.”

  “So much knowledge for a Colonial woman?” Lord Ward jeered, then looked down her bodice.

  Although giving a brilliant smile, Miss Thorne’s eyes narrowed as she locked gazes with Lord Ward. “With what part do you have the most difficulty? The fact I’m a Colonial…or that I’m a woman? Either of which I consider high praise. I dare say that you could not beat Lord Anthony in any one of the electrical discoveries that he is about to launch.”

  Anthony ground his teeth. She had thrown down the gauntlet. No way did he have even one of his experiments close to completion. To wring her neck.

  Lord Ward’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times before he sputtered, “You dare to make such a declaration?”

  “Afraid?” Anthony made a broad sweep of his arm. He had enough of Ward’s eyeing Miss Thorne’s charms. “Be aware, I ask politely only once, after that, I’ll not be called a fool. There are many invited guests to witness the challenge. So you see, prudence suggests that we make amends, steel our soft hearts to the inevitable, and invite you to be so accommodating to answer the contest.”

  “I see,” s
aid Ward with mock-urbanity and suave detachment, waving an effeminate hand while taking his measure of Lord Anthony. “I confess there is much force in what you say.”

  “It’s with good cheer that you lighten my sentiments,” said Anthony. “If I win, I will take your position at the Royal Society of Science, and if you win, Lord Ward, I will forfeit five thousand pounds.”

  Ward’s eyes played over Anthony like points of steel. “Never will I lose, so get used to being five thousand pounds lighter in the pocket.”

  He smiled at the pompous man. “Then allow me to put it another way—perhaps more indulgent. I will have what is mine by rights. This I do not doubt.”

  Murmurs of shock mounted around the table from the unorthodox gambit but Anthony had his eyes fixed on Lord Ward. If the fraud had a gun, Anthony would have a bullet in the head.

  Dinner ended, the men stood and before the ladies left for the drawing room, he felt her presence next to him. Her hand threaded through his arm, warm and delicious. He looked down on her and she smiled up to him.

  She drew her hand away as if she were too forward. He recaptured her hand and placed it on his arm, patted it, and held her beside him. Which of them trembled?

  “Lord Anthony, I am weary from my travels. Do you think you could escort me home?”

  His heart slammed against his chest. How could he resist? He told Lady March, Rachel’s chaperone to bid adieu to her friends and to meet them at the entrance. He said good night to Lord Chelmsford and felt no remorse, informing a disappointed Lord Humphrey that he was escorting Miss Thorne home. He collected their hats and cloaks and they waited on the outdoor steps of Chelmsford’s home for the Rutland coach to pull up from a collection of carriages.

  Her vexing wager rattled in his head. “Look at the fine conundrum you’ve got me into. I’m nowhere near your cock-and-bull story. I’ll be the laughing stock of England.”

  She withdrew her hand. He snatched it back and held it on his arm, unable to define the warmth radiating inside him, despite his consternation. Her hand felt at home there.

  Her lips parted, surprised by the gesture as much as he. “I should be the one angry with you for exposing my accomplishments, but Lord Ward needed a reprimand. He insulted you and I took exception. What else was I to do?”

  “You should have consulted me first.” A cold wind pushed against his jacket, the kind that numbed the lips and froze the face. She automatically leaned into him, poaching his warmth. “This morning” he said. “I paid a visit to my assistant’s brother to confirm he had never returned home. I don’t have a good feeling, and worry that something nefarious has happened to George. I need him. Without another pair of hands, my work will be as slow as a broken-winded, hobbled mare.”

  Drizzle fell sluggishly down, and the air felt cold and clammy. Rachel ducked further into her cape. “I’ll be your assistant.”

  “You?”

  Her breath came out in a puff of fog. “I’m more than qualified. I read at the age of three and have had a lifelong love of science.”

  He heard the jingle of reins and a coachman’s sharp whistle to halt the carriage horses. “I suppose you are going to tell me you sat on the same rock as Dr. Franklin.”

  She bobbed up on her toes, her eyes meeting his. “We are friends. When I was thirteen, I met him in Philadelphia. Ever since, I’ve been cursed with the love of electricity and its workings. We correspond regularly.”

  “Then I shall require your help in the laboratory” Anthony might have been enraptured with the soft dreaminess in her blue eyes except three things happened in neat deadly preordained rhythm, as slow as the tick of a Huygens clock. The pendulum shortened, the swing of the arc reduced, one, and two, and three. A flash of light from a balcony up above, a harsh laugh, and a scraping of something heavy being moved.

  Instinct or his systematic mind made him look up. Like a bullet, he grabbed Rachel and used his body to curl around her, pitching her over the steps and into the bushes. A concrete flower pot exploded on the top of the steps right where they had been standing. He had used his body to cushion the fall, Miss Thorne sprawled on top of him, her hat gone, her rich auburn hair unpinned and flowing over him. Besides the barberry thorns stuck into his back he warmed, very comfortable with her on top of him.

  She curved her hand on the side of his face. “You saved my life.”

  A whole world of complexities pulled his heart away from the gloom where he had not been able to save his wife’s life. You saved my life. Rachel’s words, thrown in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling him out of the quicksand, scooping him up from a place of drowning and into the wild richness of air. She was breathing hard. Anthony didn’t know whether to kiss her or expound on the gravitational pull and impact of a one hundred-pound mass on two biological bodies…and the likelihood of survival. The latter was safer.

  “My hat.”

  “We’ve averted near death and you are worried about your hat?”

  She scrambled off him, stood on shaky limbs, then plunged through the shrubs. “Lord Rutland, there is a man. I think he is dead.”

  Grooms quickly gathered from the carriages parked in the circular driveway. Anthony ordered the Rutland head coachman to hold up a lantern while he parted a bush. His breath hitched. George lay with a large bloody gash across his head and a pool of blood saturated the ground. A sudden coldness hit Anthony’s core. He reached to his assistant’s neck, felt for a pulse. Nothing. He was dead.

  Anthony took off his coat and covered his assistant. His voice broke with the horrific death George had faced. “Get the authorities,” he ordered one of the grooms. George died because he worked for Anthony.

  He turned to Miss Thorne, scrubbed a hand over his face. “My assistant, George. Whatever twisted mind did this, sent a message loud and clear. I will notify his family.”

  Chapter Four

  After spending half of the night at the Duke of Chelmsford’s with the authorities, Rachel now sat in the library of Anthony’s ancestral home for further examination of George’s terrible demise. Lady Ward had retired from all the excitement of the evening. Rachel had changed out of her silk gown and rested on a brocade chair opposite Anthony.

  A fire crackled in the fireplace, warding off the damp winter chill and illuminating a vast number of leather bound books that populated the shelves from the floor to the gallery above. How she itched to read every tome and how lucky Anthony was to live in a scholarly paradise.

  Anthony sans his frockcoat, leaned forward, rested his elbow on his knees, easy in his skin, yet attentive. His ebony hair, pulled back in a queue, fell over his snowy white shirt. Other than a tear in his stocking there was no evidence of their fall into the barberry bushes. Her face heated from the memory of that awkward position. She tilted her head to the ceiling of gilded stucco, that presented framed paintings of God, angels in war, and the seizure of earthly mortals from demons below.

  Anthony caught her staring at the motif, his deep baritone voice infused with shades of deeper meaning. “The artist demonstrated the deadly poison of the serpent destroyed by joy that filled the souls of the vanquished and served the power of redemption.”

  How wonderful he was to distract her for a moment from the night’s events. Not to be outdone, she said, “The artist has captured the iron hand of right and absolute, yielding a stronger force that defeats evil and allows us to move from darkness to light.” As she parlayed the response, a lightness tingled in her chest, enjoying the shared intellectual camaraderie. Touché, Lord Anthony.

  Anthony pressed his lips together. “Or has the artist divined the experiences of our past are the architects of our present?”

  She could not think of one thing to counter his debate, not when she swiped a tiny rapier and Lord Anthony served a blow with a battle-axe. I will win next time. Rachel smiled and for a moment, the embossed tomes, the beeswax candles sputtering in candelabras, and then the walls, melted away. The world, and all its inherent drama, vanished leavi
ng only the two of them, and an intangible profoundness that left them intimately connected.

  Catching her breath, Rachel ripped her stare from Anthony’s compelling regard, thankful for the interruption of Duke Richard Rutland’s entrance and trailed by a servant carrying tray of food. The servant poured tea and following the Duke’s nod, departed, closing the doors behind him with a light snap.

  Duke Richard Rutland stared out the heavily draped windows. His silence loomed. He was a tall, handsome, imposing man, regal with dark hair greying at his temples, and smartly dressed despite the lateness of the hour. He did not have the thickening middle that a man his age would present. No. He was rather robust and appeared as one who rode horses for hours, and…he was forbidding. His staunch demeanor gave the appearance of someone you’d dare not cross.

  The Duke sat behind his massive rosewood desk. “I wanted to talk to the two of you without the authorities. There is more to George’s death and the attempt on your lives this evening. We’ve been lax since Nicolas and Abby’s kidnapping a year ago. Again, we are being played upon by an unseen adversary.”

  Anthony rubbed his thumb across his chiseled jaw. “I remember the whole situation as if it happened yesterday. During Abby’s betrothal party, both father and I had received a life and death summons to my laboratory.”

  Duke Richard threaded his fingers through his hair. “Fortunately, my impatient nature saved us. For I believed a hoax had been played and we left, seconds before the lab exploded. During the chaos, Abby had been abducted by Percy Devol, a madman bent on revenge against the long deceased Duke of Rutland, Anthony’s grandfather, holding the insane and illogical belief that he was the rightful heir to the dukedom. His goal had been to eliminate all of the Rutlands.”

  Anthony stood, strode to a sideboard and poured himself a drink. “Imprisoned aboard the Civis, Abby would have perished under the thumb of the ship’s Captain, a former slaver, and his dreadful crew if not for your cousin, Jacob Thorne. Fortunately, his privateering activities included capturing the merchantman in which Abby was held prisoner.”