Montgomery should have no place in those thoughts. He had not shown her any interest, and she knew enough of her own romantic imaginings to understand that a sober doctor was not the sort of man that she ever intended to fall in love with.
"Can we stop this line of questioning?" Brody said after waiting a moment to hear her response. "I don't mean to criticise you, but it seems that you know even less about what you want than I do." He gave a light laugh. "Let's get back to a plan for getting Montgomery and Hannah together."
That's when it hit Emelia. The way to fight Brody's ridiculous schemes was to match his far-fetched ideas with a far-fetched idea of her own. Brody was bending over backwards to manipulate his brother into a relationship with her sister, and he would be completely consumed with that thought.
She knew enough of his persistence to know it would take something very strong to break off his plan once it had begun—something like love, perhaps? That was the answer: Emelia decided to stop fighting Brody's machinations and to instead put into play a machination of her own.
"Alright," she said, pretending to relent. Best not to seem to eager, lest he should suspect something was underfoot due to her almost immediate change of heart. "Perhaps we can work something out. I am still unconvinced they are right together—Brody, I'll say again that my sister has never said anything romantic at all about Montgomery—but since you insist, I will give you one more opportunity to get them together."
"Really?" Brody was off today, certainly, because he seemed to accept this without question. The look of confusion on his face wasn't directed at her at all, but seemed turned inwards at his own thoughts. "You think it might work after all?"
"I think that you won't give up until we've thrust them irrevocably into each other's arms. Maybe then you'll see that there is nothing but your imagination there. Either way, I'm willing to try."
Emelia hid a smile. She'd been so heartbroken watching Hannah bear her soul the night before, realising that Brody had never shared a similar affection for Hannah, but perhaps the solution to that problem was the same as Brody's solution to his brother's sadness—a set-up without Hannah or Brody's knowledge. Emelia could arrange opportunities for them to spend time together; for Hannah to finally speak her true heart, all under the guise of arranging an engagement for Montgomery.
It was convoluted, surely, but what other choice did she have?
"I'm glad to hear it," Brody was saying, reaching up a hand to stroke his chin as he had when he was a little boy. It had always been one of his more endearing movements, Emelia had thought, and after the revelations of the last few minutes she found herself able to enjoy it without the slightest confusion about her own heart. She loved this young man as a brother; nothing more.
"You know what I'm going to say," she said. "The surest way to make sure they're in each other's spheres again." The best way to get Brody and Hannah together, she thought to herself, was to arrange something where they were thrown together as they'd been the night of the ball; a chance for Hannah to recreate the magic she'd felt last night. Emelia was ready. She would think of a way to bring these two together without revealing her sister's secret.
Brody gave an indulgent smile. "Are you going to ask me to host another ball? Because, although I would be happy to comply, I don't think my mother or the household staff could stand it quite so soon after the last one."
"Of course not," Emelia said with a smile. "No, I will be hosting the party, and I'll hear no complaint from you, dear sir."
Brody didn't complain, exactly, but Emelia didn't miss the grimace of concern on his face.
Chapter 18
When Emelia walked away from the Shaws home that day her mind was still caught up in her plans. She didn't know precisely what the future held, but she knew that her sister's happiness was paramount.
It was in this state of confusion that she stumbled upon Montgomery at the creek between their two estates. She didn't recognise him at first, thinking that he was the groundskeeper from the subdued tone of his clothes and the long brown oilskin he wore beneath a wide-brimmed hat.
She had opened her mouth, in fact, to call out a greeting when he heard her step and turned around. She saw that it was Montgomery at once and faltered for a moment, unsure although she didn't know why exactly. He had a jar in his hand and a net in the other, but when he saw her he set both aside and stood to his feet with a wide smile on his face.
"Miss Emelia. A pleasure, I'm sure." He looked behind her towards the house and something unreadable crossed his face. "Were you visiting my brother?"
"Yes," she said simply, not wanting or needing to explain further. She took a step forward and looked at the scientific paraphernalia he had spread out on the ground with unconcealed interest. "I'm surprised to find you here after the late night we shared." She paused, stumbling over how intimate the words sounded. "I mean, that we all shared. Everyone in the county."
He didn't appear to have noticed the slip up, already turning to examine his tools. "I was awake with the dawn," he said. "I think it's a symptom of studying long hours and working nights. Even when your body has the leeway to rest it chooses still to function on as though it was a prisoner to a schedule."
He ran a hair through his loose, wild hair, and shrugged like a boy. "But I'm glad of the morning. I've been trying to take some samples from the area, insects and moss and the like, to do studies on while I'm here. I grow weary of fireside conversations and social engagements, I fear, and the flora and fauna offers much more diverting occasion for learning."
Emelia felt that the proper thing to do now would be to curtsy gracefully and bow out of the entire conversation, turning towards home and leaving the gentleman with his odd pastime, but she couldn't quite bring herself to do it. There was something about the way Montgomery was standing there, ruffled and eager, that made her eager to learn as well.
She took another step forward and fell to her knees on the blanket he'd spread out in the soft, dew-covered grass. In a few moments she felt the damp seeping through her skirts, but she didn't mind. She picked up the net and turned it twice over in her hand. "Will you show me what you're doing?" she asked at length, looking up at him.
Montgomery was looking at her with a look of undisguised surprise and what seemed to be almost a sort of respect. He knelt down beside her, staying back on his haunches as trousers permitted and a dress did not, and picked out of the lineup a thin jar with a lid screwed down atop it. Inside the jar there was a bit of muddy liquid and something small, miniscule almost, struggling around in it.
"This was from the pond," he said. "I don't think you'd find a creature like this in running water like a stream, but it's worth examining, isn't it? I also took some cultures from our pond earlier that I intend to set out in a variety of temperatures and light exposure to see what cultures I can bring about. It's an experiment, like with yeast."
"Yeast?" Emelia looked up in surprise, pushing a strand of hair back out of her face.
"Yes, do you know how yeast works?"
"Intellectually, yes, but we've had a cook ever since I was a child and I wasn't exactly throwing the dough around myself."
Montgomery laughed. "I wasn’t a baker either, but father took me down once and showed me an experiment with the starter and a variety of temperatures and climes. It's interesting. Set out a few dishes and watch how the yeast behaves. You can kill it if your mixture is too hot or too cold, and you can ruin the bread if you let it rise too long or cut it off and put it into the heat before it's finished. Ask your cook to show you sometime."
Emelia could just imagine the shocked look on her cook's face if she put the question to her asking for education in the basics of bread-making, but it made her smile nonetheless. "I like that approach to things," she said musingly, looking back at the small jar of pond liquid in her hand. "I like that you are willing to let things live and fail and grow to learn more about them."
"Of course you like that," Montgomery said matter-of-fac
tly, not making eye contact. "You're a bright young woman."
Emelia looked up in surprise, but Montgomery wasn't meeting her eyes. He busied himself with the net, pushing and pulling it into place and then twirling it with a practiced wrist.
"Did you come down here today to gather water from the fresh stream?" Emelia asked.
"No, I actually came to seek out a dragonfly." He reached over and pushed a small wooden box towards Emelia. She opened the lid carefully, shocked to find herself looking at an assortment of preserved insects, some in varying levels of stone, one that was in an amber rock, and a few that seemed to have been captured within the last year. These were pinned neatly onto felt with their wings spread for examination. After a moment's examination, she looked up to find Montgomery's eyes were finally fixed on hers. He was watching her; testing her somehow.
"What?" she asked without her usual preamble. There was something about Montgomery that made one want to be blunt.
"I thought you might cry out," he said honestly. "I've shown that box to three other women, and one of them shrieked."
"The other two?" Emelia asked, thinking better of her sex than to assume that three such women would have been astonished.
"My mother, and a fellow colleague. They were both happy enough with the contents, although mother said she thought it ill done to take living things and kill them, even insects, just for the sake of learning more about them."
Emelia wasn't sure how she thought about that, but she felt there was perhaps a difference between the examination of insects and larger animals. Either way, the contents of the box were fascinating to her. She found herself looking at the long, narrow bodies and large eyes with a flurry of questions spinning in her mind. At last, she could keep them in no longer.
She reached into the box and pulled out the amber stone first. "How did the insect come to be trapped in here?" she asked. "And why is the butterfly still so colorful even after death? Did you get all these insects in a European climate? If so, why have I never seen a dragonfly of this teal hue before? I watch for them, I feel I would have seen such a thing if it existed in this county. Do you do any examination before pinning the creatures up? What have you learned? What is inside them—"
"Heavens," Montgomery said, laughing and holding up his hands in surrender. "That was hardly the response I was expecting, and you have to give a fellow time to prepare a response when faced with a barrage such as you just bestowed on me. I can answer all your questions, but perhaps not all today. I will say that very few of these insects were gathered by me. I found them in various collections of travelers over the years, and so most of them are from places outside England. The amber creature is from Africa, and the dragonfly of which you speak was found in the Americas." He put a finger into the box, hovering it lovingly over the wings of the butterfly but not quite touching them. "This girl was from England, however. Northern England, almost into Scotland. She's a beauty, isn't she?"
Emelia nodded in silence. Then, quite suddenly, Montgomery spotted something behind her and froze.
"Look," he breathed, pointing behind her. She turned slowly, half expecting a frightening spider or some other such thing one wanted to stay very still in the presence of, but she was wrong. There was a magnificent dragonfly, still small and delicate, with a long blue-black body and pale, lacy, opalescent wings.
The creature was dancing along atop the skin of the water and from blades of grass with the lightness of the breeze. Emelia watched, entranced. She turned and looked at the net in Montgomery's hand. It hung slack and loose by his side.
"Are you going to try to catch it?" she asked.
"Hush, and watch," was his initial answer. Then, after a moment, he added in a soft voice, "I've never been much good at snatching things out of their homes, to be honest. I always bring the net just in case, but I'm more likely to reap from other's hunting grounds than my own. Besides, this moment is more precious than another prize pinned in my box. Look at it—walking around like the water is its ballroom and the reeds its servants. Majestic."
Emelia turned at looked at Montgomery. He didn't feel her gaze, or, if he did, he didn't turn to meet it. She was delighted by this new side of him; not just the scientist, but the hidden romantic as well. He was very different from the cold person he so often showed to people, and she wondered yet again why he chose to hide between that behavior instead of showing people this side of himself.
She felt a sense of unusual, never before experienced, comfort, as though she could have sat on that one damp blanket in the company of this strange man with the intense eyes and distracted hands until the day had folded in on itself and gone back to bed.
"So you're not a scientist after all," she teased. "You're a guest at a theater."
He laughed at that, and she was struck by the way his jocularity lit something special and full in her own heart. "I am not," he protested with mock annoyance. "I am a man of science."
"I think," she said with a raised eyebrow, "that it is nearly impossible to be a man of science without indulging in a bit of wonder every now and again. The world is a remarkable place, is it not?"
"Miss Emelia, I do believe we have found something upon which we can agree," he answered lightly.
Emelia felt that there was much they agreed upon, and frowned a little at the implication otherwise, reminded again that there was much she didn't know about Montgomery. She reached over to a particularly wide reed and plucked it, twisting it between her fingers.
"No, not that one," Montgomery said. He reached past her, brushing her shoulder as he did so, and pulled a flat blade of grass out of the verdure. He handed it to her.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" Emelia asked.
"Young people," Montgomery said with a wry smile. "Always thinking you ought to do something instead of experiencing."
"Actually," Emelia retorted. "Romance and experience are rather trademarks of our generation. Besides, I can tell despite your high horse that you intended to teach me some skill or other with this little bit of grass, and you shan't make me feel bad about guessing as much."
Montgomery kept his face sober for a moment, and then let a smile creep from his sparkling eyes onto his lips. "I surrender, lass. You've a wit about you, that's for certain. Well, then, let's make music. Lay the grass against your thumb and then press your other thumb against it. Fold your hands around back like this—" he mimed the correct motion, "—and then blow. It will make a definable whistle if you can get the airflow right."
Emelia struggled with the grass, and when it was tightly between her thumbs and her hands were wrapped just right, she let loose a loud flow of air into her hands. The result was not anything even closely resembling a whistle.
Instead, it was something between a howl and a honk, and when the sound came rushing out Montgomery nearly fell over laughing. The sound was deep and safe. Emelia smacked him hard across the arm.
"Montgomery!" she cried, momentarily forgetting to call him "Dr. Shaw" as his rank demanded, "You tricked me."
"I didn't trick you," he said, recovering himself. "No, you just didn't blow on it correctly. Try blowing a little more gently, and pursing your lips."
She tried again, but this time the result was a bit of faint air and no whistle whatsoever.
"No," Montgomery said, suddenly seizing Emelia's already positioned hands and blowing gently but firmly against the grass pinioned there. "Like this."
The sound was a firm, sweet whistle that echoed into the little cove of the creek they were sitting like the music to the dragonfly's dance. Emelia was vaguely aware of the impropriety of the motion, but at first it seemed only as it was—innocent, childish almost, a little game to sing along with nature as it spun an entrancing melody. Then all the training she'd been taught since she was a girl sank in and she stood suddenly, pulling her hands back to herself and letting the blade of grass float unhindered to the ground.
"Yes," she mumbled, brushing the grass from her skirts and noting
the bright spots of dew left there where her knees had knelt. "Yes, I can see how you're supposed to do it. Practice, I suppose, makes perfect." She couldn't bring herself to look at Montgomery's face, and he said nothing. "Well, I must be off then," she said, stepping away. Her voice sounded loud and garish in the little hollow, like she'd broken the spell he and the dragonfly had so carefully woven. "I have much to do today, a party to plan, my sister to see to…" she stumbled into a curtsy. "It was good seeing you."
A Lady's Perfect Match: A Historical Regency Romance Book Page 13