He gazed at her, but his expression was preoccupied, as though he didn’t actually see her. “How far did your father get on the machine before his death?”
“He was able to disintegrate complex animals, such as cats, and cause them to reappear. But only within the machine. He wasn’t able to project them elsewhere.”
“I see.”
He crossed the space between the table on which she had spread her father’s blueprints, and the beginnings of the new teleportation device. He studied her progress, and he made a sound of approval.
“I see,” he said again. “Very clever.”
She was about to link the cap and the chair when a thought occurred to her. She glanced over her shoulder. Sebastian watched her intently, comparing what she was doing with the blueprints.
She deliberately crossed the wires.
“That’s wrong,” Sebastian said, pointing as he approached. He pushed her hands aside so that he could pick up the wires. “It doesn’t make sense for you to connect those two wires like that. You’ll confuse the signals. Here. Let me do it.”
She held her breath. Had she succeeded in intriguing him? Now that he had seen her father’s design, would he want to continue her father’s work?
Then his hands dropped heavily to his side. He seemed to realize what he had done, and his dark brows drew together into a single line. He raised his head and glared at her.
She met his gaze levelly. “I need your help. I cannot do this alone.”
He made no answer. Instead, he turned and limped out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
…
Rose didn’t permit the incident to depress her spirits. True, Sebastian’s reaction hadn’t exactly been encouraging, but she supposed that it would take time to wear away his resistance. Meanwhile, she was willing to be patient, and she had plenty of work to keep her occupied. By nine, worn and exhausted, she had crawled into bed, but she woke suddenly in the middle of the night.
This time, she knew exactly what had disturbed her sleep.
Sebastian was dreaming again.
She lit a lamp, pulled her coat over her nightdress, and hurried barefoot to his room. She had expected to find Sebastian lying half-naked in bed. Though she had seen him in similar states of dishabille twice already, the sight unsettled her as much as it had the first night.
Annoyed at her own missishness, she said, “Mr. Cavendish.”
This time, he woke immediately, rolling onto his back and sitting up in a single smooth motion. The sheets bunched at his waist. He raised a hand to cover his eyes against the flare of the lamp she carried.
“Get out,” he growled.
She hesitated, then said, “I think you should tell me about your dream.”
“No.”
She stood near the door, waiting.
“You have already invaded my house and utterly disrupted my existence,” he said wearily, pressing his fingers into his eyes. “Is that not enough? Must you torment me further?”
“It isn’t my intention to torment you. But it helps, sometimes, to talk about it. In the men’s wards at the hospitals, they always told us their dreams. They slept better afterward.”
“I don’t suppose it can get any worse,” he said, and laughed.
It wasn’t a pleasant sound.
Rose stepped closer, and when he made no objection, she set the lamp on a small side table and sat on the chair Sebastian had occupied the night she had arrived. The leather was worn and comforting, and settled around her like an embrace.
With the warm glow of the lantern illuminating the room, she could now see the scar tissue running down his chest. His leg-and-leather leg brace, covered in a thin patina, leaned against the arm chair. He took no better care of it than he had his house or his machines.
“What do you dream about?” Rose asked again.
He was silent for so long, she didn’t think he would answer. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and rough. “It’s always the same. The day I was captured, in the summer of ‘63.”
When he didn’t continue, she said, “The bursar at the university said you were an Iron Ranger.”
He nodded.
Evidently, it wouldn’t be easy to get the story out of him. She wasn’t surprised. She had met few men who willingly spoke of the war and had learned how to ask the right questions and say the right things. “Our papers called the Rangers daring and brave,” she said.
He made an abrupt, jerky motion with his shoulder, as though shaking off a touch. “We were largely scouts.”
“Scouts? You crossed enemy lines to ascertain their position?”
“Sometimes.” The hard muscles in his shoulders shifted. “Sometimes we engaged in guerrilla fighting or espionage missions.”
She crossed her arms to ward off a chill. “It sounds dangerous.”
“I suppose it was.”
“How were you captured? While scouting?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t look at her, keeping his gaze fixed on the window and the snowy park beyond. She noticed the roses she had placed in a bowl on the ledge earlier that day were still there.
She had half-expected him to throw them out. “Were you alone?” she asked.
“I had ten men with me.”
“What happened?”
“We walked into an ambush.” He turned his head to look at her at last, but she knew that he wasn’t really seeing her. “I was shot in the face. I was lucky.” He laughed, low and bitter.
“Lucky?” she repeated, incredulous.
“Five of my men were killed instantly. They’re the ones—”
He hesitated. She did not attempt to break the silence. “I hear them.” His voice was rougher than usual, as though he had to force the words. “My men. I hear them shouting, only I can’t see them—it’s so dark, and there’s blood in my eyes.”
Her breath caught. “I’m sorry,” she said helplessly.
He leaned back into the pillows, but his body remained tense. “It was a long time ago.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t make it easier to bear.”
He raised his head and looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time that night. “No. I suppose it doesn’t.”
She shifted in the chair, discomfited beneath that dark, intense gaze. “What happened next? To you and the rest of your men?”
He did not look away.
“We were taken to a Confederate prison camp.”
She shivered, remembering the stories she had heard of the brutality and inhumane conditions of such camps. “And then?”
“Two of my men starved to death,” he said, his voice flat.
“What about you?”
“I was able to escape with two others one night. One was shot while we tried to get away. We had to amputate his arm with a kitchen knife.” He hesitated. “Sometimes I hear him, too. In my dream. He didn’t scream, not really. But he cried, and—well. It wasn’t pleasant.”
“Sebastian,” she said. It was the first time she had used his Christian name, but he didn’t seem to notice, lost again in his own private, hellish reverie of the past. He gazed at his hands and absently flexed his fingers.
“We were in the middle of enemy territory, with no food, no medicine, nothing. We lived off the land for weeks before we made contact with Union headquarters again. I was back with the Rangers within the week. Grant was conducting his Virginia Overland Campaign. My iron horse was shot out from under me during a skirmish, and it crushed my leg. While I was trying to free myself, a piece of shrapnel buried itself in my heart. They had to give me a new one.”
Rose’s own heart constricted as her gaze dropped to the scar on his chest.
“Why did you become a Ranger at all?” she asked, after a moment. “I know when you graduated, Professor Smith invited you to Oxford to conduct work on a machine that could read minds. You need not have fought.”
He shrugged. “In the summer of ‘61, they tracked me and a doz
en other scientists down and recruited us to work on fighting machines and airships for the Union cause.”
“You could have remained at the laboratories in Pennsylvania,” Rose said. “You would have been safe.”
He gave her a look of disbelief. “Men were dying daily. Many of my classmates had gone. It would have been cowardly to remain behind. And besides, they needed men who knew how the machines worked. They wanted me to serve on an airship, but I elected to accept a captaincy with the Iron Rangers.”
“But did you continue to build new machines during your time with the Rangers?”
“Yes.” His jaw tightened.
“What sort of machines? The newspapers wouldn’t say.”
For a moment his lips parted as though he intended to tell her, but then he flattened his mouth into a thin line. “Our technology was classified to keep the enemy from learning what we were doing.”
His resurgent reticence deflated her. She shouldn’t have mentioned the machines when he had so little desire to speak of them. “You must have helped save many lives,” she said, trying to recover.
He looked startled. “Saved lives?”
“Yes, of course. The war would have lasted much longer if we didn’t have obvious technological superiority.”
For a moment he said nothing, and when he finally spoke, his eyes were cold and dark as deep water. “They were machines of war, Miss Verney, and people died.” His voice was thick with contempt. For her? Or for himself? “You want to know what I created? I made blasters that could disintegrate a man between one heartbeat and the next. I designed explosives that could take out an entire brigade. I built bombs that could decimate whole city blocks. If I’m crippled and scarred now, it’s only a rough sort of justice.”
She studied him closely, turning over in her mind what he had just told her.
And that was when she finally understood.
“This is your penance,” she said.
His brows lifted. “I beg your pardon?”
“All this self-flagellation. The way you live. Your refusal to build machines anymore. You believe you are responsible for the deaths of the men who were killed by your inventions during this war, and this is your way of paying your debt to them.”
“Make no mistake, Miss Verney, I am responsible.”
She shifted in the chair, leaning toward him. “Men have always found ways to kill each other in times of war. Even without you, they would have managed.”
He leaned his head back against his pillows with unutterable weariness.
“Everything I built made it easier to kill more men with less effort,” he said.
Rose drew a breath. So this was it, then; the terrible burden of guilt and self-loathing he bore, the soul-scar far more crippling than the loss of his beauty or his leg or his heart. Tears prickled in her eyes, but she didn’t permit them to fall. He wouldn’t welcome her pity.
In that same moment, she also acknowledged what she hadn’t allowed herself to consider the night she decided to remain here at Cavendish House, in defiance of Sebastian’s wishes. She was not here merely to see the completion of the teleportation device. She was here because she could not give up on the pupil so beloved by her father, the scientist she had admired so ardently in her girlhood. She was here because she could not leave him alone with his demons in the wreck he had made of his home and his life. She was here because she could not bear to watch him destroy himself like this.
He was bitter and angry. He was broken and damaged. But he was still Sebastian Cavendish; a principled man of powerful convictions, brilliant beyond belief, and far, far stronger than he knew.
He was worth saving.
She searched for the right words to say to him, sifted through the poets and philosophers she had read and loved for something that might comfort him and perhaps allow him to forgive himself. In the end, however, she discarded them all.
“I do not deny that terrible things have been done with what you created,” she said. “But there is nothing inherently good or evil about machines, Sebastian. It’s what men choose to do with them. And there have always been and always will be evil men, just as there have always been and always will be good men.”
He said nothing, merely watched her out of those pale, haunted eyes. Around them the room was empty and silent, filled with the scent of roses.
She did not allow herself to falter. “You are a good man, and good men must suffer because of war. It’s always like that. You carry much guilt, and I suspect that nothing I say can ever persuade you that your guilt is misplaced. But there are better ways of atoning.”
His head moved, his eyes flickering. Still he didn’t speak.
“You were given a great gift,” she said, “and in your self-pity you have squandered it. I’m disappointed in you, Sebastian. I expected more of you.”
For a brief second, a spark seemed to light his dark eyes. Then it died. “You have no right to expect anything of me,” he said.
She met his dark gaze and clasped her trembling hands to still them. “Did you know why a teleportation device was so important to my father?”
When he didn’t answer, she said, “It was because of my mother. Father was in Washington when she fell ill with pneumonia. We sent him a telegram, but he couldn’t make it home soon enough. My mother died an hour before he finally arrived. He never really recovered from the shock, and he devoted the rest of his life to pursue a means of instant travel.”
She rose to her feet, and picking up the lamp, met his gaze without flinching. “You survived the war. You seem to believe that this was a mistake that must be rectified with self-neglect and liquor and sheer pigheadedness. But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if there was more in this world you were meant to do?”
She crossed the room to the door, then turned to him one last time. The room was once again cast in strange shadows, and she could no longer see him lying in bed.
She was glad.
“Goodnight, Mr. Cavendish,” she said. “I hope to see you upstairs on the fifth floor tomorrow.”
She shut the door very gently behind her.
…
When Rose climbed the stairs to the fifth floor the next morning and pushed open the laboratory door, she came to a dead halt just inside the room.
Sebastian was stringing copper wires in festoons across the top of the teleportation device.
For a moment she stood very still and simply watched him work. This was where he belonged, she thought, watching the deft movement of his fingers, an expression of complete absorption on his face. He was completely at home, completely alive, here in the laboratory. How could he have stayed away for so many years? How could he have denied himself what gave him so much happiness?
He looked entirely different from the unkempt, ill-tempered man who had kissed her a little more than a week ago, or even the one who had gazed at her from across his bedchamber last night. Though his scar stood out livid in the morning light and his hair sprang up wildly from where he had run his fingers through it, it hardly mattered. He looked as though he had somehow been lit from within, as though a lamp had been brought into a dark and musty room.
This was the Sebastian Cavendish she remembered from her girlhood: passionate, intense, utterly absorbed in the work that he loved.
This was the way he should be.
She had to clear her throat before she could manage to speak. “Good morning, Mr. Cavendish.”
He turned his head, taking in the sight of her standing in the doorway with one dismissive glance before turning back to the device. She raised her eyebrows and waited for him to say something surly.
She wasn’t disappointed.
“What the hell took you so damned long to get up here?” he demanded. “I need you to hold the wires while I attach them. And find me the damned pliers. Can’t find anything in this mess.”
She hid a smile at the impatient tone of his voice. Then she swiftly crossed the length of the room, picked up the p
liers from one of the work benches, and handed it to him.
Chapter Three
The weeks passed.
Rose couldn’t remember the last time she had been so happy, so absorbed in her work. She hadn’t truly realized how stifled her existence at Louisa’s had been, how difficult her father’s final years, and how much the sadness and pain of the war had weighed on her.
For the first time in years, she could do as she wished. Freed from the sick rooms, the stream of sick and wounded, the endless lists of Louisa’s demands, she could concentrate fully on her father’s final invention.
Time fell into a pattern. Each day, they spent hours ensconced in the laboratory, working on the teleportation machine. Each night, they sat down to well-cooked meals prepared by clockwork cooks and elegantly served by clockwork footmen.
Rose programmed the automatons to bring Sebastian his breakfast and dinner in the laboratory, but she insisted, as she had insisted to her father, that they eat their suppers together. She had a dining table set up in the heart of the rose garden, and every night at sunset they met there to eat. Afterward, in the purple twilight, they walked amongst the roses, Ashputtel stalking their heels. Sometimes they talked; sometimes they were silent. Then, when the last light had faded, they returned to the laboratory, turned on the electric lights, and went back to work.
They took two weeks to recreate the machine up to the point her father had. It took up the center of the laboratory; a gigantic box hung with innumerable copper wires enclosing a chair upon a platform of zinc, a tall prism of glass, and a massive magnet balanced upon a pedestal. On the box’s side was a ratchet with a handle covered in rubber, which could move up and down along numbered slots.
“It’s not beautiful,” Sebastian said, studying it with satisfaction, “but it works.”
They celebrated with a bottle of sweet, rich wine that night, and Rose, gazing across the table at Sebastian’s scarred face as he spoke of their progress, felt her heart contract on an emotion she didn’t care to examine too closely.
A Riveting Affair (Entangled Ever After) Page 5