He flipped back to the first page, and his breath caught in horror. “His name. Galileo’s teeth, sir, this student neglected to write his name on the paper!”
He practically pounced on Bartram Hendslew, who stood hugging the rejected dissertations to his chest. As Colin had done, he pulled back in self-defense. “Did he? Well, never fear, my lord. The student who wrote that essay was the last to leave the hall. A very green young lad, new to Cambridge. Has some roundabout connection to Buckingham Palace, I’m told. The son of a high-level secretary to one of Her Majesty’s ministers, though which one I do not recall—”
Simon resisted the urge to seize the man’s lapels. “Hendslew, his name, if you will.”
“Ah, that would be Ivers, my lord. Mr. Edwin Ivers. Odd little chap, I must say. In fact he—”
“Do you know where he’s gone?”
Hendslew’s eyebrows went up. “As a matter of fact, there was a small group waiting for Mr. Ivers when he exited the hall. I heard their intentions of gathering in the rooms of one Jasper Lowbry, at St. John’s College.”
At a trot, Simon doubled back across the common.
“Ol’ Ivers here drinks like my grandmamma. Down that claret, old boy, and then try a real man’s drink.”
A slap between her shoulder blades nearly sent the glass flying from Ivy’s hand and the wine she had just sipped spurting from her mouth. Somehow she managed to prevent both small disasters, but upon swallowing, she received another whack from her neighbor that threw her into a fit of coughing.
The backslapping continued in earnest, a joint effort now from the two young men sitting on either side of her at the small dining table. Their laughter filled her ears. Cheroot smoke curled before her face and made her eyes water until the grinning faces across the table blurred. Despite the cool autumn breeze flowing through the open windows, Ivy sweltered beneath her woolen coat. Her stomach began to roil.
“Ah, leave the poor bloke alone,” someone yelled, but to little effect, except to bring on louder peals of laughter.
Setting down her wine, Ivy thrust out her arms and shoved her well-meaning neighbors away. Still coughing, she pushed to her feet and stumbled to the nearest window. She found the frame and gripped it, and leaned out over the sill to suck in drafts of refreshing air. Dazzling sunlight lit the courtyard two stories below. A pedestrian turned his face up to hers, saluted, and kept walking.
With her throat already strained from her efforts to speak in a lower voice, the smoke and liquor only made matters much worse. Gradually, the coughing subsided. The laughter behind her did not. Turning, she perched on the wide stone sill, caught her breath, straightened her coat, and attempted to regain her dignity.
“Here, sip this.” The host of the party, Jasper Lowbry, a handsome young man with intelligent eyes and a ready smile, pressed a snifter into her hand.
Bitter fumes spiraled upward to burn her nose. She would have much preferred water, but something told her such an option would never have crossed the minds of these raucous students.
“Go on,” Jasper urged. “It’ll help. And don’t mind them. Making you the butt of their jokes merely means they like you.”
Ivy nodded her gratitude and took the tiniest sip. Jasper returned to his half dozen other guests, who continued to gulp down spirits and shovel an assortment of hors d’oeuvres into their mouths. Their boorish table manners made Ivy cringe. Their uproarious conversation increased in volume while steadily decreasing in coherence, but thank goodness for that. A good portion of their language tended to scorch her ears.
Just as with the Marquess of Harrow, these Cambridge men had met none of her expectations. She had supposed university students to be well mannered and scholarly, making use of every spare moment to study, contemplate, and debate. Ha! But for their costly attire, their apparent heedlessness when it came to their coin, and the opulence of Jasper Lowbry’s rooms—which put Ivy’s modest London town house to shame—they might have been brigands at any dockside tavern.
Still and all, these particular brigands, all fellow residents of St. John’s College, had eagerly opened their doors to young “Ned Ivers,” along with their liquor bottles, humidors, and snuffboxes. Ivy was finding that being a man taxed the body in ways she had never before considered. Blinking, she attempted to clear her throat but only ended up coughing again.
“I can tell you what’s wrong with him,” slurred Preston Ascot, the pock-faced son of a Foreign Office diplomat. Mr. Ascot had bulldog features and the heavyset bulk to match, offset by an affable sense of humor. With a slovenly grin he thrust an unsteady finger in Ivy’s direction. “Poor sot’s been poisoned. The Mad Marquess no doubt slipped him something lethal.”
A gangly, bespectacled chap named Spencer Yates drew on his cheroot until the burning end crackled softly. In a billow of smoke he called out, “Wouldn’t be the first time, from what I hear.”
Another among the group murmured, “You’re speaking of his wife, aren’t you?”
“No, no,” Jasper Lowbry interceded with a roll of his hazel eyes. “Pure rubbish, that. Harrow didn’t do her in. But ...” Still standing by the head of the table, he leaned in closer. The others went quiet and craned their necks to hear what he would say. Curious herself, Ivy hopped off the windowsill and rejoined the group.
“They say he’s keeping her body somewhere in that manor of his.”
The diplomat’s son frowned at Lowbry’s words. “What the devil do you mean, keeping her? Keeping her how?”
“Not sure, quite. Preserved somehow.”
Revulsion rippled across Ivy’s back and raised the shorn hairs on her nape. The others around her reacted with similar repugnance, swearing, quaffing mouthfuls of brandy or whiskey, and shaking their heads in disbelief.
“You needn’t take my word for it,” said Lowbry with a casual shrug. “It’s common knowledge among the upperclassmen.” Hunching, he propped his hands on the table and leaned low. “Generations of de Burghs are buried in Holy Trinity churchyard, but you won’t find her there.”
“Oh, but that’s ridiculous,” Ivy blurted. “She must have been buried with her own family, then.”
Lowbry shook his head. “The Quincys are all buried at Holy Trinity as well. Her father is a don of physics here.”
“What on earth would the marquess want with his wife’s remains?” Ivy shuddered.
Lowbry cast a grave, and in Ivy’s opinion dramatic, glance around the table. “They say he hopes one day to . . . resurrect her. Like in that book. You all know the one I mean.”
“You know, it’s not that far-fetched,” said Spencer Yates. He blew a smoke ring into the air. “Luigi Galvani’s experiments on the nervous systems of frogs proved that movement is achieved by the flow of electrical charges between the nerves and the muscles.”
“Meaning what?” Ivy demanded. “Surely you’re not suggesting that the stuff of fiction can be intertwined with legitimate scientific—”
“Meaning,” the youth interrupted with an exaggerated pull of his mouth, “the heart is a muscle, and the Mad Marquess could very well be pumping electricity into his wife’s heart in an attempt to make it beat again.”
A chill slithered up Ivy’s spine.
Mr. Ascot broke the heavy fall of silence. “Bloody hell.”
“This would explain the flames and sparks people have seen shooting out over the house at night,” another of them said.
Nods circulated around the table.
Ivy brought her glass to her lips and drank deeply, remembering too late that the vessel contained foul-tasting brandy instead of a more reviving brew. Another fit of coughing erupted, but this time with the odd result of clearing her head and restoring her to rational thought.
“What you’re suggesting is pure insanity,” she said. She snapped a hand to her hip. “Surely so many students wouldn’t be vying for the opportunity to work with the man if they truly believed him mad.”
“Mad does not necessarily a murderer make
,” Lowbry pointed out mildly. “As I said, he didn’t kill his wife. She died as a result of an accident, some sort of fall. Lord Harrow was away from home at the time.”
“How awful ...” A fist closed around Ivy’s heart.
She herself was no stranger to the sudden loss of loved ones. Her parents had died in the fire that claimed her childhood home many years ago. She had no precise memories of that day, only vague images of running, shouting, escaping the house with the flames at her heels. She and her sisters had been saved by the servants . . . but her parents . . . no one had ever been able to explain why only her parents had been trapped by the conflagration. . . .
“As to why so many are vying for the position,” Lowbry went on, “the man is a genius. His contributions to the field of electromagnetism are said to be inestimable. Besides, who wouldn’t seize the chance to work with a bona fide mad scientist?” Grinning broadly, he splashed more whiskey into his glass and raised it in a toast. “To the Mad Marquess of Harrow.”
“The Mad Marquess,” the others chimed in, all except Ivy. She felt ill again, and as though the walls were closing in on her.
University nonsense indeed. Had Victoria sent her to deal with a lunatic?
A pounding at the door made them all jump. With a quizzical look, Lowbry went to answer it.
“Lord Harrow!” he exclaimed, then quickly recovered his composure and stood aside. “Welcome, sir. To what do we owe the—”
“Sorry to barge in on you like this.” In a bound, the marquess crossed the threshold. Ivy’s pulse thudded at the sight of him, speeding to a frantic pace when he scanned their stunned faces and demanded, “Which one of you is Ivers?”
Chapter 4
For several resounding ticks of the mantel clock, no one moved, no one spoke, no one dared to breathe. Then, one by one, the gazes of the others settled on Ivy as though she had just been accused of some shocking crime.
She glared an appeal to each of them. Hadn’t they taken her under their wing, made her part of their tight little group? Hadn’t she accepted their ribald jesting and vile-tasting spirits with good grace? Yet with hardly a blink they abandoned her, or so it seemed to Ivy, who now felt as conspicuous as a peacock in a snowdrift.
Her mind raced with questions. Could she possibly have won the challenge? There had been that brief, glorious moment when she had believed she had answered Lord Harrow’s questions with singular brilliance. But no sooner had she handed her papers to Mr. Hendslew than she had realized how parochial and downright idiotic she must have sounded in comparing science to poetry.
She had approached this challenge not like a scholarly gentleman, nor even like a woman, but like a silly, sentimental girl. Her skin ran hot with shame at the memory of the drivel she had composed.
And yet . . . Lord Harrow was here, and he was staring at her.
“Are you Ivers?” His cape flaring out behind him, he bore down on her, prompting her to back away until her heels struck the wall beneath the window. She might have tumbled out had Lord Harrow’s hand not shot out and snared her wrist. “Careful, lad. Now that I’ve found you, I can’t have you plummeting to your death. You are Ivers, are you not?”
Her head trembled as she nodded.
“Good.” Lord Harrow released her, stepped back, and gave her a terse looking over. “You’re the hand-raiser,” he accused.
Ivy nodded again in short, jerky motions that made the Mad Marquess dance in her vision.
His lips drew tight, and Ivy felt sure he had come to disqualify her from the challenge. A frantic apology ran through her mind, but then he gave a nod of his own. “Come with me.”
With that, he turned and strode from the room, tossing out a brisk “Gentlemen” as he went. After an instant’s hesitation, Ivy took off after him.
Simon made his way out to St. John’s Second Court. The chapel bells rang out the noon hour, a familiar, comforting sound. He had been a St. John’s man himself, although his rooms had been in the residence halls of the First Court.
The boy’s rapid footfalls echoed from inside the stairwell. A moment later the lad stumbled outside—literally. As if his feet had tangled in an invisible web, young Ivers barreled through the doorway and sprawled headlong, breaking his fall with his hands and narrowly saving his chin from the ravages of the paving stones.
Then he simply lay there, stunned and out of breath. A torrent of laughter spilled from above. When Simon shot a glance upward, a circle of flushed faces in the window scattered out of sight.
He walked to the youth and leaned over him. “I say, Ivers, you seem remarkably intent on killing yourself today. Any particular reason why?”
“No, sir,” came a slightly muffled reply. Ivers sniffed and slowly levered himself off the ground. Once he had achieved a sitting position, Simon offered him a hand up. “Oh, er ... thank you, sir.”
The contact of the youth’s slender fingers against his own sent a peculiar sensation through Simon, not entirely unpleasant but nonetheless disconcerting. He pulled his hand away. “Are you injured?”
Ivers brushed dirt and small bits of leaves from his coat. The fine-boned face turned upward, and in the bright daylight Simon saw that his eyes were not as black as he’d previously thought, but the shape and color of almonds. That he should notice the boy’s eyes at all was disquieting, all the more so when he glimpsed the sheen of a tear.
The youth averted his face. “No, sir. I’m not injured.”
Some unnamed instinct sent Simon a foot or two away, a distance that strangely felt more comfortable. “Tell me, are you typically this clumsy?”
“Sir?” Flustered or perhaps insulted, the youth hitched his small nose defiantly into the air.
“It is a necessary question, Ivers. Surely you can grasp the dangers of having an accident-prone assistant in a laboratory filled with electromagnetic equipment.”
“Oh . . . quite right, sir. And no, sir . . . not typically. It’s ...” He glanced down his length, perplexity blossoming across his milky-smooth brow. “It’s the boots, sir. They’re new, not yet broken in.”
Simon’s gaze followed Ivers’s tapering trousers to where the stirrups circled the soles of a pair of black and tan half Wellingtons with squared-off toes—the very height of fashion. “Only the best, eh, Ned?”
“Sir?”
“Never mind. How soon can you have your things packed?”
“Sir?”
Simon studied those dark eyes and again saw, behind the lad’s confusion, the simmering energy that had caught his attention that morning. Puzzlement gripped him, a sense that the spirit embodied by that spark simply didn’t fit the outer image of the ungainly Mr. Ivers, as if he’d been encased in a foreign, utterly mismatched shell.
“You know, Ivers,” he said, “for someone who is able to pour his heart out through his pen, you have surprisingly scant verbal skills. This could prove problematic.”
Alarm filled the boy’s eyes. “I promise it won’t, sir. I can be as verbose as you please when the occasion warrants it. It’s merely that ...”
“The boots?” Simon joked. “Cutting off the oxygen to your brain?”
Ivers’s oddly elegant eyebrows knotted and white lines of tension formed on either side of his nose. Then . . . his generous lips twitched and broke into a grin. “Indeed, sir, that must be it, surely. I must find a way to loosen them posthaste.”
Simon joined in the youth’s chuckles, until something about their shared mirth felt too familiar, too . . . intimate. He stepped another stride backward. What was it about this fellow that left him so flustered, and would it be a hindrance to their working together?
The thought of screening more applicants overcame his doubts. The lad was awkward and shy, but that would change once they established a rapport. Simon would make this work; either that or he must reconcile himself to working alone.
Simon regarded the boy, waiting respectfully if nervously silent. “Mr. Ivers seems too formidable for such a wisp of a youth. What
do they call you at home?”
The lad considered a moment before he smiled and lifted his chin. “Actually, sir, my sisters call me Ivy.”
“Ivy?” The sound of it made Simon feel like smiling, too, but he didn’t. No, like the fellow’s laughter, the nickname produced a too cozy, too damnably intimate sensation inside him. “That won’t do, either. What did you say your Christian name was?”
“Edwin, sir.”
“A bit formal, that. I shall call you Ned. You may call me Lord Harrow.”
“Yes, sir. Then . . . I have won the . . . the challenge, sir?”
Simon blinked and dropped his gaze in concern. “Those boots really are too tight, aren’t they? What the blazes do you think we’re doing here? Of course you won the challenge.”
“Thank you, sir . . . Oh, thank you!”
“Mind you, we shall proceed on a strictly trial basis. Upon the first indication that you might prove unsuited to the position—”
“There shan’t be, Lord Harrow. I promise. I swear, oh—”
“That will be sufficient, Ned.” Simon scanned the rows of Gothic, stone-cased windows of the building before them. “Are you presently living here?”
“I am, sir.”
“How soon can you have your things packed and ready to be moved?”
Ned’s eyes narrowed within their uncommonly thick lashes. “Moved . . . to where, sir?”
“Harrowood, of course.”
“But . . .”
“You can’t very well assist me from here, can you?”
“But I thought ...” Ned’s hands snapped to his hips. “I assumed the laboratory in question would be located on the university grounds.”
Simon emitted a laugh. “My dear boy, I am not employed by the university. I have one laboratory, and it is located at Harrowood.”
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