Just as she retrieved the clothbound tome she’d taken from the library, the office door swung open.
“Who’s there?” a male voice demanded. A blinding burst of lantern light filled the room.
Ivy froze. Heart pounding in her throat, she blinked to make out the identity of the tall figure filling the doorway, though she knew from the owner’s light tenor that it could not be Lord Harrow. Her shaking fingers held the book up like a shield against her breast. In another defensive gesture, she folded her shoulders inward, for though she wore her gentlemen’s clothes and the bindings beneath, she had shed her coat to maneuver more freely during her search. The lack of that protective layer of wool left her feeling vulnerable.
The lantern picked out glints of gold on a tailored sleeve, and she recognized the footman who had carried her trunk into the house that morning.
“Oh, Daniel, it’s you,” she said on a sigh of relief.
“Mr. Ivers, is it?” When Ivy nodded, the servant stepped into the room and lowered the lantern. He eyed her up and down, not in the way she was used to, as male customers sometimes assessed her from over the counter at the Readers’ Emporium, but in that competitive, mildly hostile manner young men reserved for one another, and which she had encountered once or twice during her brief stay at the university. “What are you doing in his lordship’s office?” he accused more than asked.
Ivy raised her eyebrows. “Is this Lord Harrow’s office? I fear I’ll never learn the lay of the house.” She held out her book and silently thanked the foresight that had prompted her to bring it with her from the other room. “Couldn’t sleep. Thought a bit of reading might help. Would you be a good fellow and point me toward the stairs?”
The suspicion not quite leaving his smooth features, Daniel stepped aside and gestured with his free hand. “This way, sir.”
Ivy spent the next several days becoming familiar with Lord Harrow’s laboratory and learning to use the equipment. He taught her how to construct the voltaic cells, how to produce a continuous current, how to direct it, and how to strengthen or weaken its voltage. They experimented with chemical compounds, separating elements as he had done during his challenge, though to much less dramatic effect with fewer sparks and no shattering glass.
With each procedure, he allowed her greater independence until, after issuing a few basic instructions, he stepped back and merely observed. One afternoon he spread sheets of calculations across his worktable. Together they pored over the equations, double-checking his original work and making adjustments. The sums and quotients represented vast amounts of energy, leading Ivy to ponder whether she and Lord Harrow were dealing with theoretical possibilities, or if the figures pertained to his mysterious generator.
“Would not this amount of amperes exceed the resistance of a current and cause an overload, thus culminating in an explosion?” she asked of one equation in particular.
Lord Harrow had pushed his spectacles higher on his nose and peered over her shoulder, only to snatch the paper out from under her hand. “Great bloody heavens, Ned, you’re right. How could I have missed this?”
He had slapped the page back down, whipped off his spectacles, and seized her shoulders. His beaming face pulled close, so close Ivy braced for the press of his lips against hers. As on their first day together, his eyes widened and he stopped short, but his broad smile didn’t lessen. “You have more than earned your keep, dear boy.”
The praise had filled her with pride and a secret longing to cast off her gentlemen’s clothes, however briefly, and bring that almost kiss to fruition.
It might have been easy, during those wondrous days, to forget the mission that had brought her to Harrowood. Oh, but she hadn’t forgotten, and she continued her midnight forays through the house, once having to hide behind a potted palm for a quarter hour to avoid an apparently insomniac Mrs. Walsh. Ivy’s own dearth of sleep was beginning to show in the smudges beneath her eyes. But so far she had turned up no evidence of Lord Harrow’s sister having been to the estate, with or without the stone.
Once she ventured into a bedchamber that could only have been Lady Gwendolyn’s, judging by the initials on the bed pillows. A quick look around suggested that no one but the upstairs maid had entered the room in many months. Ivy stole toward the dressing room, but before she could so much as open a wardrobe door or peek inside a drawer, the housekeeper appeared in the doorway.
“Did Lord Harrow send you in here?” the woman demanded.
Was the woman trailing her, night and day? Ivy quickly arranged her startled features into a moue of innocence. “No, ma’am. I fear I am lost again. A confoundedly enormous house, this.”
“And apparently you’ve no sense of direction.” The housekeeper’s brow wrinkled with distrust. “Your chamber is in quite the opposite direction, young man. In the east wing. Now get along with you.”
Ivy decided it was time to try another tack. As casually as she could, she asked Lord Harrow about his family. He spoke of Lady Gwendolyn only briefly.
“I have a sister, presently in London in service to the queen,” he said, and to Ivy’s offhand query as to whether she would have the privilege of making the young lady’s acquaintance, he replied, “I don’t expect her home any time soon.”
The terse finality in his tone had ended the discussion, leaving Ivy to wonder. She believed him to be a man of honor who would never steal outright or be a willing party to theft. But was he protecting his sister until he discovered a discreet and tactful means of rectifying matters? Or . . . Ivy couldn’t discount the possibility that he might be stalling for time to conduct experiments on the stone before returning it to its rightful owner.
Could she blame him? If Victoria were not her friend, and if Ivy had not pledged her service to her queen, she might be tempted to do the same.
In the evenings, she and Lord Harrow walked in the garden and discussed what she had learned, or they climbed into their respective saddles and took off through the forest at a pace Ivy found manageable enough. She rode Lady Gwendolyn’s mare, an even-tempered, sure-footed mount that didn’t seem the least put off by Ivy’s awkward seat or inadvertent tugs on the reins.
Only once did Lord Harrow break into a gallop on a wide, flat expanse of trail, prompting the mare to sprint in pursuit. Nearly smothered by her own pounding heartbeat, Ivy leaned forward and hung on for dear life, but when it was over and she discovered that she had survived, she was exhilarated and proud and willing to do it again . . . well, sometime soon.
Especially bolstering to her courage was when Lord Harrow swept off his hat and laughingly exclaimed, “Take that, everyone who ever believed Ned Ivers too studious to be intrepid.”
Those were the glorious times, when her duty became almost a joy; when, for the first time in her life, someone saw through her exterior to the person inside, not the woman, but the scholar, an individual guided by the principles of science and discovery.
Those times made Ivy exultant . . . and wretched. Once she discovered the whereabouts of the stone, she would never—could never—see Lord Harrow again. For the person Lord Harrow saw each day, whom he had come to know as Ned Ivers, would cease to exist.
Her sister Laurel had faced a similar dilemma when she’d gone to Bath last spring disguised as a wealthy widow. Laurel made friends, fell in love . . . and feared she would never be forgiven for her masquerade. But this was a thousand times worse. Ivy would just as soon enter a brothel as ever admit to anyone that she had worn trousers and kept company with men. And while she refused to allow society’s opinions to rule her, Lord Harrow’s esteem was beginning to matter—more than she had ever imagined it could.
“You’re walking a bit stiffly today, Ned,” Lord Harrow commented as they entered his laboratory that Friday morning. “Has Butterfly not been providing a smooth enough ride?”
The teasing glint in his eye prompted Ivy to grin. “I’m afraid it’s not the mare that’s at fault, sir.”
“Never mind. Yo
u improve daily.”
As on the previous few mornings, Lord Harrow shed his coat and tossed it over the back of a chair. After an initial hesitation Ivy did the same, keenly aware of how she stretched propriety’s limits. Being in shirtsleeves freed their arms, which made working so much easier. She had grown more accustomed to wearing trousers as well and no longer tripped over her own feet. But the combination of trousers and no coat exposed her rear, her hips, and the shape of her thighs in alarming ways. She felt on display, almost naked.
This state of dishabille exposed astonishing aspects of Lord Harrow’s anatomy as well, and made Ivy’s task more difficult still. As her initial delight in the laboratory began to subside, more and more her attention was drawn to him: his sleek hips, his broad shoulders and chest, his tight abdomen and powerful thighs . . . and the part of him that formed such a mysterious, formidable bulge at the juncture of his breeches, unsettling her to a degree that worsened rather than eased with each passing day.
“I’ve a surprise for you today, Ned.”
She didn’t say that each day with him brought surprises, both joyful and disconcerting. Instead she watched him cross the room and shovel coal into a huge furnace, her ungovernable fascination drawn to the wide stance of his brawny legs, the knotting of the muscles in his forearms, the arc of a rear that made her wonder, scandalously, if it would be as hard to the touch as it appeared.
As she pondered this possibility, Lord Harrow abruptly turned and caught her staring. With a start she flicked her gaze upward to a more appropriate vicinity of his person, but too late. His pale eyes flashed with surprise and then darkened with acknowledgment, and all Ivy could do was look away while her cheeks burned and her vision swam in a haze of embarrassment.
Lord Harrow cleared his throat, and Ivy died a small death inside. Had she revealed the truth in that careless moment? Surely he would realize that only a woman, an inexperienced, spinsterish woman at that, would gaze upon him so brazenly and with such longing. Unless he thought her one of those odd young men with irregular predilections. Surely that would be worse. Surely Lord Harrow would never stand for such a thing.
After an interminable pause he said, “Well, Ned, aren’t you going to ask me?”
Ivy’s breath trembled. “Ask you what, sir?”
“About the surprise. Aren’t you burning to know?”
Oh, yes, burning . . . in his presence, she always felt flushed, inwardly ablaze. His smile grew when she didn’t answer. He raised the shovel, then half turned to bring the furnace behind him to her attention.
Her eyes gone wide, Ivy sprang forward. “The generator?”
“We’re going to turn it on. If you think you’re ready, that is.”
“I’m ready.” Her voice surged an octave. “I’m quite ready, sir.”
“Good. Bring me the lucifers from my desk. The long ones.”
Ivy brought the friction matches to him. Within a few minutes the coals glowed brightly inside the grate. “It’s going to take a little while for the water to heat. Damn, but I wish steam weren’t necessary. I’ve tried electromagnetic and electrochemical induction, but thus far they haven’t generated a strong enough charge to activate a motor of this scale. That is what I am hoping you and I together will devise.”
“You seem to have a classic paradox.” Ivy loved an intricate puzzle, and the challenge Lord Harrow described sent an electrical-like charge through her. “You’ve developed a device that can potentially replace nonelectrical sources of power, but which is nonetheless dependent on those sources. What you need is something entirely new, something as yet undiscovered.”
“Exactly, Ned.” His features took on an animation that matched her own excitement as he crossed the room to her. “That has been the focus of my experimentation.”
“It isn’t so much what you wish to power, as how.” Ivy’s pulse took off at a near canter. “That is why your challenge centered on the process of electrolysis. That’s the meaning of your question, the answer to your elusive why. You’ve been separating compounds in the hopes of discovering a powerful new element.”
Her gaze fused with his, and their combined zeal all but sent sparks shooting in the air between them. “You are hoping,” she whispered, “to recombine elements in a manner that improves upon nature. You are dabbling in a whole new kind of physics.”
“More than dabbling.” A slight tremor shook his voice. “And more often than not, practically blowing myself up in the process.”
Her hand flew to her lips, but she quickly dropped it upon remembering that men didn’t use such gestures. “Hence your caution in allowing me to operate the equipment.”
He drew closer, his next words a caress against her ear. “Can’t be blowing up my assistant along with me, now can I?”
He raised a hand, and for one exhilarating, startling moment, the warmth of his expression led her to believe he was going to reach for her, take her in his arms. How eagerly she would have gone, her passion for science and her growing passion for him impossibly entwined.
The moment throbbed with anticipation and uncertainty and nervous fear, and ended all too soon. Lord Harrow merely gripped her shoulder and gave her the shake that had become so familiar, so endearing, and so dreadfully insufficient. No man had ever tempted her like this before, because with every other man came the unhappy prospect of setting her interests and aspirations aside.
Ivy had never wished for a husband, but daily now she found herself wishing for Lord Harrow. Wishing for more than these affectionate gestures of his . . . wanting everything she could never have.
Across the room, the vat began to hiss. Lord Harrow grinned and his eyes lit up. “We’re ready to begin. Sir, let us start our engine.”
Chapter 7
A trill of elation banished Ivy’s regrets. “What do I do?” A release valve at the top of the vat whistled. Jets of steam shot out. From a cabinet against the wall Lord Harrow dug out two bulky pairs of woolen gloves. “Put these on. They’ll protect you from both steam burns and electrical shock.”
Ivy remembered the pair he had worn to protect his hands during his challenge. The ones she tugged on now reached to her elbows, while a stiff lining restricted the movement of her wrists and fingers. Lord Harrow brought her to where the ductwork met the generator’s four upright coils.
“Stand right here, Ned, and hold the lever. At my command, you’ll give a single, forceful flip, opening the valve and releasing the charge into the coils.”
“Am I responsible for ignition?”
“You are.” He couldn’t seem to stop grinning now. Moving to the room’s curving wall, he gripped a crank that operated a pulley and cables that stretched to the ceiling. Slowly the skylight opened wide to offer a gaping view of the bright morning sky.
“Allowing too great a buildup of energy in the room could possibly result in an explosion,” he explained with a wry pull to his lips that led Ivy to conclude he spoke from experience.
A twinge of apprehension tightened her belly. The Mad Marquess . . .
“Now, then.” He strode to the furnace and climbed onto a stepladder. At the top of the vat was a spoked wheel like that of a ship’s helm. As if navigating treacherous waters, he gripped the wheel in both hands. His shoulders bunched and the muscles of his back strained his linen shirt. He cast a glance at her from over his shoulder, his brow pulled in concentration. “In a moment I’ll open the preliminary valve and send the steam through. Be ready, Ned.”
She almost said, “Aye, aye, sir.” Instead she flexed her fingers inside the rigid glove and tightened her hold on the lever.
“Ned!”
His shout seized her attention. The vat emitted a piercing screech. Spurts of steam erupted into the high, domed ceiling and snaked out through the open skylight. Goose bumps rippled down Ivy’s back.
“I nearly forgot. Once you flip the lever, move back several paces. Since we are not powering a mechanical device, the current will not be directed into a controlled out
let. The result is that the charge will simply flow into the room, the excess wafting out through the skylight. You’ll feel a strange tingling, but don’t be alarmed. It’s quite safe.”
“Oh,” she said somewhat weakly as she briefly questioned the validity of his claim. Excitement won out and she said more firmly, “Yes, sir.”
“On my command, then.” His forearms thick and corded, his biceps bulging beneath his pushed-up sleeves, he heaved on the wheel, once, twice, again. It gave an inch or so. He tightened his grip, and another determined yank brought it half around. A gushing sound echoed inside the copper duct. A frenzied buzz raced closer and closer to Ivy. Beneath her hand, the lever vibrated furiously.
“Now, Ned!”
Her teeth clamped on her lower lip, she flipped the lever. The moment her hand came away, an invisible force propelled her backward. She stumbled, landed on her bottom, and slid several inches.
A column of steam burst from the duct and into the generator’s four coils, creating tiny bolts of lightning that crackled as they spiraled around each coil and zigzagged between them. The gears began to turn, the pistons to pump. The voltage ran along the center beam until it began a steady rocking motion that forced the wheel to turn and the bellows to expand and compress.
Pulsating energy fanned out in all directions. A few sparks flew, like shooting stars. Lord Harrow’s box of gadgets slid off the table and spilled its contents across the floor. The galvanometer needles spun. Cupboards rattled, and the doors of the locked wardrobe shuddered as if about to burst open.
Ivy’s skin became charged with sensation while the hair at her nape prickled and rose. At the furnace, Lord Harrow tugged again at the wheel. Ivy bit her tongue to keep from calling out to him in fear, to beg him to cut off the power.
Could he? He’d told her that once his generator started, it continued even without the steam-generated charge. The room began to spin in Ivy’s vision. A numbing tingle spread through her limbs. Overwhelming and frightening, the current now controlled the rhythm of her breathing and even the beat of her heart, speeding it to match the rocking of the beam and each whir of the wheel.
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