Light of My Heart

by Elizabeth St. Michel

  “Lost his eye in a sword fight.”

  She breathed in Anthony’s scent, chemicals and sandalwood. He wrinkled his forehead, engrossed with his task and did not notice how close they were working together. She rather liked his warmth and nearness. But they were friends, working toward a goal. No need to muck it up with romantic inclinations.

  “He was in a swordfight with my father, a fight over my mother.”

  Rachel’s head snapped up, her pen creating a loud scratch against the table. “That is an interesting anecdote.”

  “My mother married my father and all was forgiven years later.’’

  Rachel did not possess the same feeling of the tall, dark-featured, Duke Cornelius. He may have made amends, been a close family friend, but he reminded her of a giant shark her brother had caught…the same cold black unblinking eye and, for a moment, she imagined gill slits on the side of his head.

  “We are ready for the test.”

  Rachel held her breath and prayed it would work.

  He stuck a wire to the ends of the discs. A small charge flared and faded away, vanishing into nothingness. “Damn.” He raked his fingers through his hair and turned away. “I will never succeed.”

  Rachel sagged, watching him pace back and forth. “Don’t give up.”

  “The charge is not enough.”

  “Allow the million little defeats to be the rungs on a ladder, each one that you climb to success. Persistence and patience will stand the hallmark of your triumph.”

  The door shoved open. Rachel swung around to see a visitor.

  Anthony’s voice came low, as if he were growling. “Aunt Margaret.”

  A servant escorted a petite, plump, grey-haired woman to a chair while another deposited a tray on a side table. An animal horn lay drooped on the older woman’s chest.

  “Time for tea, Anthony. Come here, dear boy and introduce me to the lovely Miss Thorne who I have heard so much about from Abby’s letters.”

  Anthony gave his matronly aunt a kiss on the cheek, made introductions, and then pulled up two stools, one for Rachel and one for himself. A crude seating arrangement, but charming none the same while a servant poured tea, and then departed. It was afternoon and the culinary delights made Rachel’s stomach rumble. Creampuffs. She tonged two of the flaky pastries onto her plate and a small flan. Her mouth puckered with the sweet-sour of a gooseberry tart. She let out a moan.

  “It is so nice to meet you,” Rachel said.

  Aunt Margaret reared back horrified. “I would never beat you.”

  Anthony looked to Rachel. “Let me try. My hair is on fire.”

  Aunt Margaret smiled and nodded. “Okay, in a while.”

  Rachel dabbed a napkin over her mouth to hide her lips. “Shame on you, Anthony. I like your Aunt Margaret. She is sweetness.”

  “I am so glad you came and agreed to be my chaperone,” Rachel offered.

  Aunt Margaret tsked and shook her head. “The King should never be overthrown. Such talk is treasonous.”

  “Oh, dear,” Rachel said. “I’ve created a muddle.

  Anthony gestured to the horn. Rachel had seen silver ear horns in the Colonies used for those who were hard of hearing. The funnel shaped device collected sound waves, amplified them and brought the communication to the ear.

  Aunt Margaret held it to her ear, appearing like a half-Viking. “This is my new ear horn,” she said proudly.

  “What kind is it?” Rachel asked.

  Aunt Margaret looked at the clock hanging on the wall. “A quarter after two.”

  Anthony slapped his hands on his knees. “Back to work.” He escorted Rachel to their experiment in progress.

  Rachel giggled. “Poor Aunt Margaret.”

  “Don’t let her deafness fool you, and above all, do not fall prey to her innocent confusion that masks the nature of her genius. Except for frequent attacks of narcolepsy where the rest of the world ceases for her, she has a practiced eye for concealed disasters.”

  To prove his point, snoring and very loud snoring burst from behind. Aunt Margaret slumped in her chair, asleep. On impulse, Rachel went into the back room, tore a blanket off the cot and covered Aunt Margaret, careful to tuck in the covers around her.

  “She is exhausted from her journey.”

  *

  “They are preparing to leave, Your Grace, for an extended carriage ride,” said Sebastian, the butler, closing the library doors behind him.

  The duke strode to the window, the butler behind him watching the young couple. “The Colonial induced Anthony out of his lab. Can you imagine? Let’s have a toast. An incredible accomplishment.” The Duke of Rutland poured a glass of sherry for them both.

  “Aren’t you going to offer a drink to me?” A voice demanded behind a large wingbacked chair. “And shame on you for assuming the plot to keep them together is between the two of you.”

  The duke arrested his drink halfwayAunt Margaret in the library?

  Sebastian straightened, put his drink down and resumed his position. “If that is all you require, Your Grace, then I shall be on my way.”

  “Nonsense. Stay, Sebastian.” Aunt Margaret waved a hand. “You two think you are the only ones privy to secrets. I wouldn’t be left out of this for a million pounds. Abby wrote to me” Their gazes locked as they assessed one another, confirming an unsaid secret, the duke taken aback by his wife’s diminutive sister.

  He threw back the entire contents of his glass, and then confirmed her accurate conclusion with a slight, mocking inclination of his head. “Well since we are all in the know, what do you suggest?”

  Aunt Margaret blinked owl eyes, her superiority conveyed. “We must be clever for they are both very intelligent. I come from the days where a little distance makes the heart grow fonder. Let us think of something to separate them for a while.”

  The butler cleared his throat. “If I may speak, Your Grace, Lady Margaret’s strategy has a purpose.”

  The duke nodded his head. “How do you propose that scenario when we can’t tear them apart from that absurd electrical fire they swoon about?”

  “Abby disclosed Miss Thorne was an inventor of sorts, had invented an indoor bathing tub, including a pump to move water upstairs. You could employ her to build one.”

  “And how would I do that? To retain her is the epitome of rudeness.”

  “Guilt and pride are powerful tools. Guilt is the bread and butter of many family communications.”

  “And pride?” the Duke prompted.

  Aunt Margaret pursed her lips dubiously. “You’re the expert.”

  She let that comment sit for a while. His lifelong assumptions on his wife’s guileless sister vanished, and his opinion of Aunt Margaret climbed another notch.

  “The girl takes great importance in her work. You need a bathtub and would appreciate her talents. Simple as that.”

  “I see,” he said, but that infuriating quirk of her lips told him he’d just amused her.

  “You better take charge and communicate your need as soon as possible.” She looked like a goose ready to snap, rose, and the butler rushed to open the door, nodding his approval.

  The duke raised a supercilious brow. “I see where all the cunning comes from in the family. You could box the ears of the best of the King’s courtiers.”

  Aunt Margaret snorted. “It’s taken you years to understand that? I congratulate you on your accomplishment and accept your acknowledgement as a compliment.”

  “It wasn’t meant as a compliment. I despair and remain thankful you are on our side. If King George put you up against King Louis IVI, all of France would flee to Germany.”

  *

  Anthony took Rachel’s hand and helped her into the open carriage. They had worked for several hours while Aunt Margaret slumbered, and then escorted his aunt back to the house. If only to work in his lab longer to recover from another failed experiment. But he’d promised Rachel a tour of the estate and was unable to refuse her.

  How
pretty she looked, wrapped in a black velvet cape bordered with ermine. “Lord Ward entertains all kinds of morbid amusements. His kind have no respect for science.”

  Anthony frowned at the guard following them, hating the idea that he was a prisoner in his home, but Rachel’s blue eyes glowed like winter turning to a warm summer lit sea and her excitement was infectious, making him forget his jailer.

  “We are not going to think about Lord Ward and let him spoil our outing,” she commanded.

  Anthony raised an eyebrow at her bold decree, climbed in beside her and laid thick furs across their laps. Harnessed in front, two matching black bays shook their manes and pawed the ground eager to be off. Anthony snapped his wrists and rippled the lines. The huge horses in perfect unison sprinted down the road and into the vast forests surrounding his ancestral home.

  “Isn’t it delightful to get out and get some fresh air? Enlivens the brain.”

  He couldn’t have agreed more. Nothing like glacial cold to tamp down the mounting fire in his body. Hours of trying to concentrate on his work left him wanting, her intellect sweeping over him like a carnal caress. It was not logical. How could he control his body? There must be some sense made to this madness. He exhaled, the air forming a perfect cloud.

  “I have accomplished the impossible and have pulled you from your laboratory.”

  Was there enchantment in her smile?

  “If you like frostbite and the bitter cold, cutting you with a hundred knives.”

  Rachel giggled. “Acknowledge all the beauty before us. How the afternoon sun glitters off the snow-burdened branches and hills, and the slight wind that tosses the tops of the towering oaks and whistles softly through their lower limbs, its power diminished by the thickness of the forest. So silent and peaceful as if the forest is holding its breath.”

  “All I hear is the ringing in my ears where sound is frozen and the cracking of my iced-up face when I speak.”

  “That sound from your face cracking is a smile born. Admit it, you are enjoying yourself.”

  “I think you are eccentric,” he huffed.

  She leaned into him to speak conspiratorially, and he savored her warmth. “My eccentricity has taken years of dedicated effort to acquire.”

  “No doubt. What next, Miss Thorne, chattering with cold until my teeth break? Or something industrious that a Colonial privateer would do, hanging my frozen body from the yardarm until the crows have picked their fill?”

  “You are hopeless.”

  He chose a less traveled road, and yielded to a cloying compulsion to detour toward what made Miss Thorne tick. Why had she said she would never marry? “This visit is about obtaining a husband?”

  She stiffened beside him.

  “You’re the same age as Abby, two and twenty,” he argued with his own smile of bemusement. “That’s hardly in your dotage.”

  Because I’m not that desirable. His heart gave a kick. Couldn’t get out of his head what she had muttered at the ball when she thought he hadn’t heard. She then piqued his curiosity in the science of what people were thinking, needing to understand why someone of Rachel’s loveliness would think she was not attractive?

  “So why are you disinclined to the institution of marriage?”

  She gave a snort of dismissive laughter. “Silly me. That was nothing.”

  She had passed the matter off too quickly. He was sensitive to her. Denial was an ordinary response to an atrocity, banishing the ability to feel. He should know, he repressed the feeling every day of his life. He’d not push her to tell him, but her voice reached out to him like the unexpected tendrils of a swirling galaxy, where she was involved and impacted by some dust and stars, but a lot of it was exogenous to her. He shrugged, perhaps a childhood trauma or something that happened to her during the war with the Colonies.

  “I’d never dream of perpetuating such a tragedy. I have no wish to be any man’s trouble, or wife.”

  So, she was disillusioned toward the idea of a husband. The road narrowed for a mile, and far below a raging river churned and eddied over sharp rocks.

  “So dangerous. I’d hate to think of anyone falling off the road.” She shuddered.

  Clever how she changed the subject. He was sure there was more to her story. He had seen a glimpse of fear in her eyes when Bonneville had cornered her. How her manner contrasted to the natural way she took his hand and pulled him on the dance floor. The painting in the Rutland library came to mind. The experiences of our past are the architects of our present. What haunted Miss Thorne? What had happened in her past?

  “What are you thinking of at the moment?” she asked.

  He looked down at her rosy cheeks and full lips. “I’m thinking geometry.” He didn’t dare tell her the fundamental diagram of her face was the same as the one of the whole body; the link between the two, the height of the face is equal to the vertical distance between the middle of the body and intersection of the legs and the navel is equal to the distance between the tip of the middle finger. If he drew a line upward from the navel, he could measure two impressive spheres then estimate the height, weight and distance. And if he leaned in just a bit, his lips would meet hers…

  Mesmerized by her rapt attention, he forced his gaze away. But, to be honest, the hell with all that geometry. He’d rather sample the spheres.

  “It would give me insight if you told me what you were thinking.”

  To tell her what he was thinking, would show his depravity. Definitely show his depravity. Concentrate. Think. “What did you ask?”

  Rachel sighed. It was an exasperated sigh but on her, it was how he imagined a sigh would sound after a long, lovely night of lovemaking. Except Rachel was an innocent. And he was inexperienced. Nonetheless his body reacted. Rock hard reacted.

  “My father is pushing me into the role of duke which means my brother… He sighed. It means he is beginning to give up hope of finding Nicholas. I refuse to yield to that notion. Nicholas is out there. I feel it in my bones.”

  “The world is full of peril and there are many dark places, but we must always have hope.”

  Her wisdom although inspiring, gave way to an unfortunate reality. “I have no inclination to be the duke. To idle over tenant disputes, bookkeeping and accounting. Pure hell. Already my father has forced me into some of the duties. I was never made for that role. Detest it. Nicholas was made for the task. Science is my first and last mistress.”

  Her hood fell back and she tossed her chestnut curls. “I can understand your difficulty. After seeing a fraction of the estate, the duty is onerous. A mind like yours belongs in discovery.”

  Silence reigned. The soft, muted thud of the horse’s hooves, the whisper of the carriage wheels over the snow and a woodpecker emerging from a hollow of a tree, a soft churr-churr invitation to its mate.

  “I want to thank you for saving me from Sir Bonneville. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t arrived in time.” She shivered from the memory.

  “I should have torn his right arm off and beat him with it.”

  Rachel pealed out her laughter and the sound rippled over the cedars and firs. He frowned. As a scientist, he was compelled to follow what was most probable, but in speculative thought, he was compelled to follow the fact that he liked to see her laugh.

  “You discuss brawling like the price of potatoes,” she said unable to control her mirth. “Oh, my, what is that?”

  Anthony stopped the carriage, looking at the line of dormers set like a row of teeth in the third floor attic, visible now due to winter and the trees bare of their leaves. “That’s Elijah Johnson’s home, and old sea captain friend of my father’s.”

  “Has he been at sea overlong? The disrepair”

  Anthony regarded the swayback sheds, and tumbled down and forsaken mansion. Surrounded by high oaks, branches extending horizontally, harshly angled, twisted, interlocked, grasping downward and upward, casting shadows of gloom and threatening anyone to enter.

  “
He died. His brother, a retired sea captain who lives in the town has not had the heart to tear the house down and this grand old dame has decayed into ruin.”

  “Sends chills up my spine…” she swayed into him. “…like someone is watching us.”

  He could not have agreed to a more hostile environment that left him uncharacteristically on edge.

  He snapped the reins as they moved along the undulating road, to the town declining sharply southward in the valley, close-girdling the crescent mountain to the west. “He was an odd recluse, a hoarder, making up for the loneliness and guilt of losing his wife at sea. She had insisted on accompanying him on a voyage despite his rabid denial of the dangers. A terrible storm swept her overboard.”

  “What a sad tale.”

  “According to his brother, some rooms you could only sidestep through. He was numb with grief and sorrow, and wasted away.”

  Anthony knew that agony of living. He awoke each morning with the need to accomplish, to exist, as effortless as it appeared and as unmanageable as it truly was, contented. In the course of each day, his heart would drop from his chest into his belly. Before the sun left the day, he was overcome with nothingness, nothing but the desire to be alone, to be contented with the magnitude of his pointless guilt. To be alone in his loneliness? I am not miserable. To convince himself of this had become an art. To convince others had become a masterpiece.

  Rachel’s lavender and lemon balm scent trailed over him, snaring him in its tentacles. He didn’t believe the ray of sunshine that sat beside him was fooled for one second.

  *

  From the shadows of a cracked window, Cuthbert Noot clenched his fists watching a carriage withdraw from the sea captain’s home he had commandeered since his escape.

  “To the last, I will destroy Lord Anthony. From Hell’s bowels, I will make him pay until I spit my last breath. Meant to kill him in his lab. Surprised his assistant. Couldn’t keep a witness around,” Cuthbert cackled.

  Playing cards behind him, his brutal companions grunted.

  Cuthbert had chosen well. The worst inhabitants of St. Giles, criminals from the Rookery underworld of London who found pleasure in slitting a man’s throat for a farthing. The man named Scar the foulest among them.