Philomena didn’t even try. She remained beside him, smiling back at him stupidly in the mirror.
“I knew you had hidden depths,” Ramsdale said, the smile acquiring a tinge of puzzlement.
“Perhaps we all do. I’ll see myself out.” The sun would be up for some time, and Philomena was not Lady Melissa, to be escorted at all hours when setting foot outside her own doorstep.
There went the last of Ramsdale’s smile. “You will do no such thing.”
“You said we were through for the day, my lord.”
“So we are, but you will not travel the streets alone when I am available to remedy that sorry plan. Shall you take your rose with you?”
He plucked the pink blossom from the porcelain bud vase in which it had sat for the afternoon. The rose was only half-open, and the spicy fragrance had come to Philomena on every breeze teasing its way past the windows.
“The blossom is better off here,” Philomena said. “That rose belongs in a Sèvres vase, surrounded by learned treatises, velvet upholstery, and Mr. Gainsborough’s talent.”
Ramsdale sniffed the rose and took out a monogrammed handkerchief.
“Mr. Gainsborough was to my father’s taste more than mine, though I do like his equine portraits.” He took the vase over to the dust bin and dumped the water over his handkerchief, then wrapped the wet handkerchief around Philomena’s rose.
“The blossom should travel well enough if we don’t stand about here, arguing over a simple courtesy,” he said.
And thus Philomena walked home in the lovely summer sunset on the arm of an earl, who carried for her the single lovely rose.
She realized as her own garden gate came into view that Ramsdale was being gallant, as men of his ilk were supposed to be—when it suited them. Earl, by definition, did include a certain mannerliness toward the ladies, even a lady of humble station.
Which meant the definition that no longer functioned must be the definition of Philomena herself, for she was most assuredly not the sort of woman to stroll along on the arm of a titled lord, conversing easily about bequests, Latin abbreviations, and the joys of translating a language that had no definite articles.
*
Jack and Harry Eagan had learned the apothecary’s trade from their father, in whose memory they raised a glass of brandy every Saturday evening as they counted the week’s earnings.
Mama had been the family’s commercial genius, though, and they recalled her in their prayers each day at supper. She’d been the one to insist her grandson Jack Junior be sent off to Cambridge and her other grandson Harry Junior to Oxford. The expenses had nigh bankrupted their papas, but the lads had acquired polish, connections, and a smattering of natural science that gilded advertisements and product descriptions with credibility.
Mama had also pointed out that ladies preferred the counsel of other ladies when purchasing a tisane for Certain Ailments, and thus the Eagan wives were usually on hand to help customers of the female persuasion.
In her later years, Mama had noticed that each social Season resulted in a crop of young ladies eager to employ any means to secure a good match. She’d watched as those young ladies had become increasingly desperate with the passing weeks, until—by early summer—they would have burned their best bonnets and sworn allegiance to the Fiend’s housecat if the result was a titled husband.
The Eagans were all red-haired, slight, and energetic, which Mama attributed to having fiery humors, as evidenced by their coloring. Jack Eagan thought the red hair was indicative of quick wits, and Jack’s hair was the reddest of them all.
“Poor dears,” Harry said, closing the door after another lady’s maid had been sent on her way clutching a bag of fragrant dried weeds. “As badly as they want to speak their vows, you’d think the young men of England would oblige them.”
“Young men are fools,” Jack replied, for that was the expected response and what dear Mama would have called an eternal verity.
“You were a fool,” Harry said, twisting the lock on the shop door. “You should not have mentioned that King’s Encyclopedia business at dinner the other night.”
“Duke’s Book of Knowledge, and it were Hal Junior who suggested we find it.”
Hal Junior had gone to Oxford, which he tried without success to lord over his cousin. Jack Junior had grasped the potential to turn the language of science into coin, while Hal had learned to hold his drink.
“Nobody finds what’s been lost for two hundred years,” Harry said. “That’s not a believable tale. We’re more likely to find the king’s common sense hiding under a toadstool.”
“A good tale is only half believable,” Jack retorted, “like a rumor on ’Change.” He took a rag from beneath the counter and began polishing the shop’s wooden surfaces. Harry would do the glass jars and windows, and thus the shop would be neat and tidy for tomorrow’s customers.
“But you shouldn’t have told that tale to the other chemists and apothecaries,” Harry said, starting on the jars of teas and tisanes. The patent remedies were dusted once a week, on Mondays. Fewer people drank to excess on the Sabbath, hence demand for relief slackened early in the week.
“The other fellows will come up with their own schemes,” Jack said, “and old manuscripts will be all the rage before the king’s birthday. I do so love the smell of this shop, Brother.”
Harry paused in his polishing to survey shelves of jars and bottles, treatises, sachets, soaps, elixirs, teas, pomades, fragrances, and recipe collections. Every product was guaranteed to enhance health or well-being in some regard.
“The smell of a successful family enterprise,” Harry said, inhaling audibly. “But if all the other chemists have their old manuscripts, then ours won’t be special.”
Harry was a hard worker, and he took the welfare of the customers to heart. Jack was thus left to deal with more practical matters, such as parting those customers from as much of their coin as possible.
“You are worried about The Duke’s Book of Knowledge because of that rumpled old fellow who came in here earlier asking about it,” Jack said. “That fellow was none other than Professor Phineas Peebles himself.”
Harry used his elbow to shine up the glass lid of a large jar labeled Fine English Lavender, though a small quantity of grass clippings might have strayed among those contents.
“What’s a professor to me, Jack Eagan?”
“He’s our pot of gold. Your own son studied under Peebles at university, and it’s from Peebles that Hal Junior learned of The Duke’s Book of Knowledge. The manuscript is famous, among them as studies manuscripts. Peebles has got wind of our tale, and he’ll spread the word, and our shop will soon be the most popular apothecary in London.”
Popular being a genteel version of profitable.
Harry repositioned a series of jars sitting on a table in the center of the shop, so they were lined up in exact rows.
“How does one old gent make our shop popular? He didn’t buy anything, best as I recall, but took up a good twenty minutes poking about and asking questions.”
The next part of the discussion had to be handled delicately, for Harry had inherited Papa’s logical mind—logical, Mama had said, as if logic ever moved any faster than a funeral procession.
“Our Elixir of Aphrodite’s Joy will be the one everybody buys,” Jack said, “because it was discovered by a woman.”
“Have you been nipping from the Godfrey’s Cordial, Jackie, my lad?”
Lovely stuff, the cordial. It had doubtless soothed the nerves of many a frustrated wife.
“Peebles has a daughter—Hal Junior noticed her, said she’s her father’s right hand. She reads over everything the professor has published, lives for all that Greek-ish nonsense.”
“Galen was Greek. Don’t you be insulting our Galen.”
Galen’s Goodbody Elixir was a perennial favorite with the housemaids and stable boys.
“And the duke fellow,” Jack went on, “who had this manuscript writ dow
n was from Florence. The Florentines were powerful clever people, and the professor’s daughter is clever too, says Hal Junior.”
“He was probably sweet on her.”
Hal Junior was sweet on anything in skirts, bless the boy. “So we put it about that the professor’s own daughter dreamed that she’d find the recipe beneath the tallest tree on the Lover’s Walk at Vauxhall, put there for her by the goddess Aphrodite, to be shared with every unmarried woman of good name in the most important city in the civilized world.”
Harry started on the shop window, though most of the smudges and dirt would be on the outside. He cleaned the outside in the morning, the better to greet everybody who happened by and the better to show off the merchandise throughout the day.
In winter, a window cleaned at sunset would be dingy by dawn.
All of these small touches of genius Mama had devised, and Jack abruptly missed his dame. She would have seen the potential in The Duke’s Book of Knowledge, and she would have concocted a better story than some goddess cavorting among the soiled doves of a London night.
Harry spit on his rag and went after a long streak. “You say Hal Junior studied under this Peebles fellow?”
“Your own dear boy, and Peebles is obsessed with this manuscript. Nobody has seen so much as a page of it since Good King James took the throne long, long ago.”
Harry finished with the long streak, and the window sparkled in the evening sunshine.
“Seems to me that Cupid might have left something beneath that tree for the gents,” Harry said. “Nothing sorrier than a young man’s pangs of unrequited love.”
Never underestimate the power of a logical mind. Mama had been right about that too.
“Just so,” Jack said, fraternal affection warming his heart. “Gifts from the deities of old to the lovelorn of today, bequeathed to a scholar’s plain-faced spinster daughter.”
Harry tossed the rag in the air and caught it. “Is she plain-faced? Not like Hal Junior to pay a plain-faced girl much mind.”
“She’s a scholar’s daughter,” Jack said, taking a pencil and paper from beneath the counter. “They are always plain-faced. We need product descriptions, Brother. Even the gods benefit from effective advertising.”
Harry got out the brandy—stored in a bottle labeled Hungarian Nerve Tonic—and poured two full glasses. Advertising was thirsty work.
Which great wisdom had not come from Mama, but from Jack’s own modest perceptions.
Chapter Four
‡
“But we know that what we imbibe, what we eat, even what we touch and smell, has an effect on our mood,” Miss Peebles said. “Why is it outlandish to think that in former times, when folk were more attentive to their natural surroundings, some perspicacious monk noticed that a particular concoction resulted in a greater sense of affection for members of the opposite sex?”
Ramsdale and his translator strolled along in the lengthening shadows as clerks made their way home and shopkeepers closed up for the night. The earl was seldom abroad at this time of day, but he liked the sense of tasks completed, rest earned.
No chess for him tonight. He was too fatigued by his hours in the library with Miss Peebles and her relentless intellect. Then too, Lord Amesbury was a sharp fellow. Ramsdale would allow himself a nap before dressing to join the marquess for dinner.
“You know little of monks, Miss Peebles, if you think they needed a magic potion to increase their awareness of the ladies. The average monk wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the fairer sex, and thus he’d remark each woman he met with great… fondness.”
Especially if he was a young fellow and the lady was comely.
Miss Peebles’s brow knit, as if the habits of celibate males were one topic beyond the grasp of her brilliance.
“An apothecary, then,” she said. “A man happily married, children frolicking at his knee of an evening. He notices that the ginger tea with rose hips he’s made to combat sore joints or a bilious stomach also results in a mood that ladies find attractive.”
She was passionate about her science, passionate about her languages, passionate about finding the Duke, of whom they’d seen neither word nor phrase. Would she be passionate otherwise?
By virtue of their linked arms, Ramsdale prevented Miss Peebles from charging headlong into the street as a fishmonger’s empty wagon clattered by.
“I cannot imagine that ginger and rose hip tea would predispose me to anything other than profanity,” Ramsdale said.
“And yet that ungracious observation might be the effect of the rotten-fish stink that came to you as yonder wagon passed us. Admit that the theory of a love potion is sound.”
“The theory is not sound,” Ramsdale countered, flipping a coin to the crossing sweeper. “You leap, my dear, from a potion having an effect on the person who imbibes it, to that same potion having an effect on the persons in the vicinity of the imbiber. Where is your supporting evidence?”
He cared little for her supporting evidence. He simply enjoyed watching her mind work, watching her free hand gesture for histrionic emphasis, watching the looks of passersby who were amused by a young lady discoursing at volume about Florentine monks and alchemical theories.
“Consider,” she said as they turned down the side street that led to her back garden, “the intoxicating effects of spirits.”
“My very point,” Ramsdale replied. “One drinks to excess, one becomes intoxicated. One’s companions do not, unless they too are drinking.”
“Is this truly the case, my lord? Is it not more a matter of one man drinks, and his good spirits and bonhomie, his humor and garrulousness, inspire others around him to join him? He’s drinking, and soon they are too?”
How could she know—? But of course, she’d know how university boys gathered round a barrel of ale or hard cider.
“That proves nothing. One man’s sociability will result in others joining him. That doesn’t prove the sociability was the result of…”
“Yes?”
The happy drunk was a fixture in any pub or gentleman’s club, and few responded to him with anything other than good will, or at least, tolerance.
“You spout nonsense, Miss Peebles. The spirits work upon the one drinking them. Have you ever become inebriated by association with one consuming spirits?”
Her steps slowed. “No, but I am in company with only my father and Jane when spirits are on hand, and they never consume to excess. Papa would as soon drink ginger tea as wassail or sip flat ale as wine. You must, though, concede that when a lady wears perfume, that does have an effect on the gentlemen in her ambit.”
Damn, she was relentless. “You’re suggesting the Motibus Humanis is more about perfumery than intoxicants or tisanes?”
“You enjoy the scent of that rose, my lord. Most women and men of your strata would not dream of going out of an evening without first splashing on their fragrance of choice. They do so with the express intent of creating a more favorable impression. Who’s to say that the impression created isn’t…”
They’d reached the little alley running behind her father’s modest dwelling. Venerable oaks arched above, and the racket and clatter of the street faded.
“You were saying, Miss Peebles?”
She looked around as if surprised to find herself a half-dozen streets away from where the conversation had started.
“The Duke’s Book of Knowledge is of interest on a scientific basis, my lord. The ancients grasped the movement of the heavens more clearly than did our nearer ancestors. The same might well be true regarding scents and potions that stir the emotions or plants that aid the cause of medicine.”
In the quiet of the alley, Ramsdale realized that the damned manuscript had inspired foolish hopes in an otherwise sensible young woman. Miss Peebles expected wisdom to flow from The Duke’s Book of Knowledge, valuable insights, genuine science.
“You are daft,” he muttered, setting the rose on the nearest stone wall. “Men and women have no
need of magic elixirs or exotic scents when it comes to taking notice of each other.”
“Beautiful women,” she retorted. “Handsome, wealthy men, perhaps. What of the rest of us? What of the plain, the soft-spoken, the shy, the obscure? Do you begrudge them the benefit of science when their loneliness overwhelms them?”
Good God Almighty. She sought the Duke for herself.
“Madam, it is often the case that a woman attracts a man’s notice, and because that man is a decent fellow and would not press his attentions uninvited, she remains unaware of his interest. She doesn’t need the dratted, perishing Duke, she needs only a small demonstration of the fellow’s interest.”
Another demonstration. Miss Peebles regarded the rose resting on the stone wall a few feet away, the stem wrapped in Ramsdale’s damp white handkerchief. She seemed puzzled, as if she’d forgotten the flower, and possibly the man who’d carried it halfway across London for her.
“Miss Peebles—Philomena—you will attend me, please.”
Ramsdale took her by the shoulders. Her expression was wary and bewildered, and thus he schooled himself to subtlety. No one would see them in this quiet, shadowed alley, but by the throne of heaven and in the name of every imponderable, Miss Peebles would take notice of him.
He framed her face in his hands and kissed her.
*
Ramsdale’s palms and fingertips were callused, while his kiss was the essence of tenderness. Philomena was so stunned by the earl’s attentions, so utterly unprepared for such intimacy, that she wasted precious seconds searching for words to describe sensations.
Gentle, teasing, delicate, daring… oh, the adjectives flew past in a jumble as Ramsdale shifted, and a debate ensued between Philomena’s mind and her body. Her intellect sought desperately to catalog experiences—his thumb brushing over her cheek, his body so tall and solid next to hers, the imprint of his pocket watch against her ribs—while her body railed against words and labels.
And her body was right: This experience was beyond her ability to describe. Rejoicing sang in her blood, while a great emptiness welled too—the unfulfilled longings of a woman invisible for too long, invisible even to herself.
How to Find a Duke in Ten Days Page 5