Miss Benwick Reforms a Rogue

by Maggie Fenton

  She collapsed into an armchair beside the bed, pulled Leon’s sleeping cap back over her head, and wrapped herself in Leon’s bottle green jacket. She doubted she’d get much rest, but if this was the worst her sleeping arrangements got, she’d take it. Better an armchair than the duchess, though it looked as if she’d not have to prove that theory wrong any time soon.

  The deal she’d made with Hirst may have born a tiny resemblance to extortion, but she felt no remorse for it. There was a very good chance Hirst was going to pretend like it never happened when he woke up tomorrow, but she’d not let him get away with that. He’d given his word that she could stay. He said she could have whatever she wanted—not that she was going to take him up on that. She wasn’t stupid: she’d be lucky if she lasted a week here.

  She’d just have to convince Hirst of her usefulness. Which meant she’d have to truly be Mr. Hirst’s secretary—yet another part of her masquerade she’d not clearly thought through. But at least this didn’t fill her with the same dread nearly everything else about her current circumstances did.

  Before she’d grown too old to escape her mother’s matchmaking ambitions, she’d spent every day she could in her brother’s workshop, helping him in his various pursuits. She was well acquainted with eccentric men of science.

  Before she snuffed out the candle, she took one last look at Mr. Hirst, and all of her fragile optimism faded a bit at the sight of that hair, and that beard. Did the man even own shoes? Or a shirt without a hole in it? She’d yet to see any evidence to prove otherwise.

  But there were other, more troubling things for her to worry about than the pathetic state of his wardrobe or his sanity. Things like the sense of anticipation she felt at the prospect of crossing verbal swords with Hirst once more. Or the way she couldn’t seem to peel her eyes from him now, his full lips now slack with sleep, the candlelight flickering lovingly over the strong slope of his shoulders and back.

  Coarse and uncivilized he might be, but what had Lady Highbottom said?

  That’s why I want him.

  Well. Davina couldn’t blame her. Not one bit.

  Chapter Seven

  The Rogue in His Natural Habitat

  Julian staggered back as the combustion chamber finally ignited. It sent the piston pumping and the crankshaft and flywheel whirling into motion, the engine a huffing, clanking assemblage of moving ironwork, copper and illuminating gas. The sound was deafening, and the bottom of the metal frame began to thud worryingly against the worktop, carving a slow, inexorable path toward the edge.

  He probably should have bolted it down. Or tried starting it on the floor. But it was too late now. The beast was alive…though he doubted it would be for long. He could already hear the piston start to misfire. He still had not quite perfected it, though he was getting very close. He’d have to add to his instructions to the blacksmith when he ordered his next round of custom parts.

  Julian was close to completing the first workable internal combustion engine. He’d finally managed to get his hands on Carnot’s elusive work on thermodynamics while he’d been in France with Sir Wesley on their Continental tour, and he’d immediately started to incorporate the physicist’s theorems into his own work. But as was always the case with the realm of pure numbers, the practical application of it was proving to be nearly impossible to sort out. But he would get there eventually. He always did.

  He could almost smell the new patent in the air.

  Though that was probably just the exhaust. It was a good thing he’d opened the windows in his workshop before he’d tried igniting the engine…well, the ones with panes he hadn’t already blown out before today.

  At least he wasn’t bored. His brain had always needed the extra stimulation, even when he was a boy. It had been his insatiable appetite for number games and equations that had led to his early, unlikely education. Even the St. Giles stews had not been enough to disguise the uniqueness of his mind from well-meaning charity workers.

  They’d convinced his mother, who’d never known what to do with him, to give him over to their tender mercies. And rather than selling him to the highest bidder (which was, alas, all too common where he came from), they’d actually kept their promises, found him a sponsor, and sent him off to a proper school.

  For all the social agonies he’d suffered during those years as a charity student—one of even humbler origins than any of the other charity students there (none of their mothers were Gin Lane prostitutes, as far as he knew)—he was grateful for the nourishment of his intellect. His brain was an unwieldy and insatiable animal, always in need of feeding, and at that school, for the first time in his life, he’d finally been able to sate its hunger.

  Of course, his mind had only alienated him further from his peers. He’d eventually discovered that it had made him an outsider wherever he went, even back in St. Giles. When he’d returned there as an adolescent, he’d found himself surrounded by strangers there too.

  And after losing his mother and brother, he’d quickly found that he belonged nowhere, except for perhaps his workshop. As a young man, he’d used his ingenuity to crawl his way out of the gutter during the war with Napoleon.

  The crown had used him well during those years, though he’d more than returned the favor. They’d initially wanted his expertise in code breaking, but there were plenty of mathematicians better suited to that sort of brainwork than he. His area had always been applied physics, one where the end results were not merely theoretical. The war office had wanted better, more accurate weapons, and he’d given them just that—for a price.

  The war had made him a rich man, and his patents on machines like his steam-powered hammer, in use in nearly every factory in the North, had made him richer since. And his wealth mattered—not for the material things it could give him, but rather for the satisfaction of seeing his oldest enemy brought low at last after all these years.

  But his work wasn’t only a means to an end. It filled his days and occupied his mind, and sometimes it even exhausted him enough so that he actually slept without wandering off to random ditches about the estate. Or waking up in a fribble’s bed.

  God, he hoped he’d not have to face Mr. Fawkes again. Last night was still a bit of a fog in his brainbox, but he remembered enough to know he’d made a spectacle of himself. It seemed to be all he was capable of doing around the fribble.

  A change in the air, not unlike that static moment prefacing a lightning strike, alerted him to the presence of another beyond the clattering of his engine. He swung his head around and scanned the cluttered workshop. He found what he was looking for over the top of a bookshelf, and his heart gave a strange little stutter at the sight that met his eyes.

  Well, speak of the devil and he doth appear. It was Mr. Fawkes, with his tousled golden curls and too-angelic face poking out of a perfectly starched and folded cravat. Intense blue eyes peered over the top of gold-rimmed spectacles, one of them swollen and black, making it completely impossible to get a read on the thinking organ occupying that pretty head.

  He rarely trusted bespectacled persons. He most certainly didn’t trust this one. The fribble had secrets; that much was clear to him from the black eye alone. From his looks and coloring, it was obvious that he was indeed a close relation of Sir Wesley, but Julian was certain there was more to his tale of woe than a mere disagreement with an earl over science.

  “You’re still here, then,” he shouted over the whir—well, more of a stutter—of the engine. A very troubling stutter.

  Mr. Fawkes cocked an eyebrow at him in response to his question. The cheeky bugger. He seemed to take Julian’s present position over a thrumming piece of satanic machinery as calmly as he had taken to poking him with a stick in the ditch. Nothing seemed to faze the lad. It was impressive.

  “I’m still here. If you’ll recall last night, we struck a deal.”

  “Damn. I was hoping it had all been a dream,” he muttered.

  “Unfortunately, Lady Highbottom is all
too real.”

  He shuddered at the memory of those nails on his back. He’d been very lucky to survive.

  The engine made an alarming screech behind him. But Julian was not quite sure how to fix it. He was very sure he didn’t want to fix it at the moment, or go anywhere near the engine when it was sounding like that. He should probably think about taking cover, for a sound like that was usually followed by some sort of explosion.

  He opened his mouth to warn the fribble of their impending doom, but of course that was when the engine chose to combust.

  The force of the explosion shook the room to the rafters and knocked him off his feet. Several pieces of delicate equipment fell off various tables and shattered, while bookshelves tumbled to the floor and loose papers flew into the air like startled birds.

  He ducked as the crankshaft went flying overhead and through the only paned window left in the whole workshop in a hail of broken glass. Some stray scrap of metal then had the effrontery to bang against his skull and send his head whacking into the flagstones. For a moment, the whole room spun around him like some demented ride at a country fair, before settling back into place.

  As the acrid smell of smoke got worse, and not better, he dared to lift his head to locate the source of the problem. The workbench was on fire. Of course it was. Perhaps it had not been the best idea to test the engine out on oak. Or inside the workshop at all.

  “Hell and damnation!” he roared, leaping to his feet and fetching a canvas sack to smother the flames, ignoring how his brainbox pitched about his skull like a ship in a storm. When that was done, he stomped over the broken glass and glared out the window. Engine parts were strewn all across the back orchard. A stray sheep, munching on its lunch, eyed a scrap of metal nearby, as if considering it for dessert.

  “Where the hell did that sheep come from?” he roared.

  “It seems Yorkshire is overrun with them, sir,” Fawkes provided gravely, having somehow snuck up beside him. He nearly jumped out of his skin. The lad was like a bloody ghost.

  “He is in my orchard. He shall eat my engine.”

  “If he were a goat, I should be worried. However, I believe sheep have more discerning palates,” Fawkes continued, deadpan.

  He glared at the peacock, but he didn’t get the reaction he expected. His glares were legendary at fending off humanity, and yet Fawkes simply regarded him with mild curiosity. What was wrong with the lad?

  That was a question he had no time to answer at the moment, as half of his prototype was still unaccounted for. He rifled through the detritus of the explosion for the flywheel, hoping it too hadn’t gone the way of the sheep.

  “Are you looking for something in particular?” Fawkes asked, watching him much too closely and being absolutely no help.

  “I’ve lost the flywheel,” he said, “though I don’t suppose you would have any idea what that is.”

  Fawkes crossed the room and picked up said part from its resting place among a pile of half-read books he’d never bothered to put away. “I know what a flywheel is,” he said as he passed it off to Julian. “It went quite an impressive distance.”

  “Newton’s second law of motion, Fawkes,” he said absently, inspecting the part for damage. “‘Mutationem motus…’”

  “‘Mutationem motus proportionalem esse vi motrici impressae, et fieri secundum lineam rectam qua vis illa imprimitur.’”

  Julian gawped at the lad. He couldn’t help it.

  Fawkes shrugged nonchalantly. “What? I grew up helping Sir Wesley with his mad experiments. I couldn’t help but learn a few things along the way.” He quirked an eyebrow. “Would you like to hear Newton’s first and third?”

  Well, it seemed Fawkes had more in common with his cousin than his golden hair and puny build. Perhaps he’d prove helpful after all, though he seemed worryingly unafraid to quarrel with Julian at every turn. It was a trait Julian found both admirable and irritating as hell.

  The challenge in the fribble’s expression suddenly grew concerned. “You’re bleeding, Mr. Hirst,” he said, gesturing toward his forehead.

  Julian wiped at his brow and was surprised to find blood covering his fingertips. He untucked his shirt and dabbed his head with the hem. “Better?”

  Fawkes’ disapproving frown spoke volumes. “Here,” he said, stepping toward him and reaching into his pocket.

  There was no telling what Fawkes intended to do to him, so he took a wary step backward. He’d grown up in the stews—and the dormitories of a British boarding school (in more ways an even more harrowing experience than St. Giles)—and had learned never to underestimate his enemies. His retreat was stopped up short by a bench colliding with the back of his knees.

  He sat down with a thud and watched Fawkes extract a ridiculous piece of lace from his pocket.

  He snorted. Hardly the weapon he was expecting. And hardly the sort of thing to have any useful purpose. The fribble seemed determined to prove him wrong, however, pressing the article firmly against Julian’s brow to staunch the flow of blood.

  It was done perhaps a little more firmly than was necessary. Julian tried to contain his wince.

  Fawkes gazed down at him with a hint of disapproval and something else that made Julian wish he were wearing more clothes. He felt the same, slightly alarming sensation that he had when the fribble’s eyes had settled upon his naked chest in the ditch yesterday. Julian could have sworn there had been…appreciation. The kind usually bestowed upon him by females. Or by men with a certain predilection.

  He wouldn’t be surprised if the fribble was one of that sort, but it was impossible to know such a thing merely by appearances. His brother Freddie, who’d confided in him about his own inclinations shortly before he died, and who’d been nearly as strapping a lad as Bones, had taught him that lesson.

  Never judge a book by its cover: trite but true.

  But in the fribble’s case, it was hard not to. Julian was suddenly very aware of how close Mr. Fawkes stood to him, the slight whiff of expensive gentleman’s cologne and something else fresh and crisp as Yorkshire dew flooding his senses, making his head spin.

  He reached up and pried Fawkes’ hand from his temple. A mistake. The fribble’s skin was as warm and smooth as a woman’s, and its contact with his own sent a shaft of inexplicable heat skittering down his spine.

  He’d never been so confused in his life. Though it might have been the head injury. He hoped it was the head injury.

  The fribble froze for a moment, as if he had felt a similar jolt, unguarded surprise passing over his clear blue eyes. He stepped away, dropped his hand to his side, and gestured toward Julian’s temple. “If you would continue to apply pressure, sir.”

  Julian glanced at the scrap of lace in his hand. It was drenched in blood and beyond salvaging. He did as the fribble ordered but made sure to glower at him to convey his displeasure at being ordered about.

  “Argumentative and bossy, Fawkes. Not a good way to start off one’s employment,” he said.

  The fribble merely cocked that damned eyebrow again. “I’ve heard people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

  Yet another adage that was trite but true…and very irksome. Julian was hardly a paragon when it came to interacting with other people. That didn’t mean he liked to hear it pointed out.

  He strode forward until he was looming over Fawkes. If looks could kill, the fribble would have been reduced to a heap of charred bones.

  “I’ve half a mind to tie you up and ship you back where you came from,” he growled.

  Fawkes huffed, inexplicably unintimidated. “You mean to send me on my way without even seeing if I can do the job?”

  “One look at you, and I’m fairly certain you cannot.”

  Fawkes looked insulted. “One look at you, sir, and this room, and it is obvious someone needs to take you in hand.”

  Was the lad even aware of the innuendo in his words?

  “You’re making my head throb.”

  Fawkes
actually rolled his eyes at that. “I doubt that. Most likely it is the giant cut to your temple.”

  He snorted, reluctantly amused. Fawkes had pluck, he’d give him that. Even after their encounter in the ditch, Lady Highbottom’s siege, and an actual explosion, Fawkes still seemed oddly intent on remaining at Arncliffe Castle—which was suspicious in and of itself.

  But Julian would see just how much the fribble’s resolve remained after he saw what Julian expected him to do. Bones’ suggestion was not half bad, for if Julian himself couldn’t scare Fawkes back to Rylestone Green, then The Desk surely would.

  He gestured across the room. Fawkes glanced in the direction he’d indicated, and his expression wavered between awed and deeply disturbed. “See those papers, Fawkes?”

  “I see several forests’ worth of papers,” Fawkes said dryly.

  “That is my magnum opus on thermodynamics.”

  Fawkes gifted him with the eyebrow.

  “I’ve had a dozen secretaries before you try and fail at putting my notes in order.”

  “A dozen…”

  “Those were only the ones that lasted more than a few days. But since you seem to think you’re so clever, why don’t you have a go?”

  “Good God, Leon wouldn’t have lasted an hour,” Fawkes muttered under his breath. Or at least that was what Julian thought the lad said. Which made absolutely no sense at all. But he’d just had the stuffing knocked out of his brainbox, and he’d frankly not understood much of anything Fawkes had done since his arrival.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Fawkes said unhappily, his shoulders stiffening.

  “Think you can handle it, then?” Julian challenged.

  Composing himself with a deep breath, the fribble turned his scrutiny away from The Desk and back onto Julian. He pushed his spectacles down his nose and sized him up as if he were a piece of horseflesh on the block.

  Julian gazed back as sullenly as he could, crossing his arms over his chest. It was a pose that had once intimidated a Norwegian boxing champion with shoulders the width of a frigate into forfeiting a match before it had even begun.