“I also have your pretty face and your vast fortune. So, yes, my happiness is complete.”
She kissed him, lips, teeth, and tongue. Climbing atop him, she opened his shirt to the waist, nibbling each inch of torso she uncovered. But her eyes were on him, watching.
Could she detect it on his face, his need to intermingle their molecules and meld their atoms? Could she see through to all the deep, secret, cobwebbed places in his heart?
She undid his trousers. Her lips followed her hands, her tongue swirling about him in scalding, indecent ways. His hips flexed involuntarily, even as despair swamped him. She took him deep into her mouth; his grunt of pleasure echoed against the walls.
“I love the size of you,” she declared, “the texture of you, the taste of you.”
And the rest of me?
He shut his eyes tight against the pleasure, against the pain, against the possibility of betraying all the yearning in his soul.
CHAPTER 15
Louisa did not gain access only to the Stargazer; her husband also issued her carte blanche to visit his study anytime she liked.
Huntington had a library worthy of its stature, but the true treasures of its collection were to be found in his study. There were scientific classics from the age of antiquity, first-edition copies of Newton’s great works, and every issue of the journal Nature from the past fifteen years. The study also boasted a wealth of astronomer’s aids, from Uranometria and Atlas Coelestis to the just-arrived New General Catalogue, an exhaustive survey of 7,840 star clusters and nebulae. And last, but certainly not least, copious volumes of his own notes, and cabinets upon cabinets of photographs he had taken of the Stargazer’s view of the sky.
Until now, they’d spent most of their waking hours apart, time in bed and before her telescope notwithstanding. But with the study at her disposal, that changed. When she had discharged her own duties, she took to reading in a corner of the study, a pile of books in her lap, another pile on the floor, writing down anything she didn’t understand in a notebook.
When the weather was fine and at times even when it rained, they went for walks in the afternoon. After dinner each night he apprenticed her in the operation of the Stargazer—the levers and pulleys used in changing the beast’s direction and angle required both muscle and delicacy. She learned how the prism attached to the Stargazer split the incoming light into its rainbow patterns, with bright lines corresponding to emission of light by atoms and dark lines corresponding to their absorption. And he taught her the steps involved in photographing the patterns onto silver-coated daguerreotype plates, to be developed for detailed analysis later.
Sometimes she found herself thinking that she was a happily married woman: both on the surface and quite some distance beneath the surface.
If she kept digging down, of course, at some point she came into contact with a barrier and signs that warned, This close but no closer.
And not just from her side of the barrier.
As kind and helpful as he had been of late, the way he sometimes looked at her, it was almost as if he didn’t trust her.
“Finding anything in my notes?”
She looked up to see the man too much on her mind closing the door of the study behind himself. He was still in his riding clothes, having gone out to inspect the new roofs on the tenant houses that had recently been completed.
“They are excellent notes,” she said. “Very detailed. Very legible.”
He had teased her about the near illegibility of her handwriting, warning her that when she solved mathematical problems under his tutelage, her penmanship had better not give him trouble, or he would mark everything as incorrect and then rap her on the hand with a ruler.
“What do you think of my prediction of the ninth planet’s position?”
She moved a finger down the smooth edge of the pages. Despite the clear readability of his letters and numbers, she didn’t know enough mathematics or physics to understand much. She just liked to huddle with his notes because he had set them down in his beautiful hand. Because if he loved nothing else, he loved his work. And if she could become part of his work . . .
“It’s absolutely wrong. Should be at least another half astronomical unit farther out.”
“Really, my young virtuoso of Newtonian mechanics?”
“Find the planet and prove me wrong.”
“I will, tonight itself.”
She smiled, closing the notebook, only to remember that she was practically covered in them. There were notebooks on her lap, next to her on the chair, on both armrests, behind her head, and at her feet—she’d wanted to feel as if she were in his embrace. “You won’t. It will rain tonight. You will better spend your time in my bed.”
He looked at her oddly, almost as if he were displeased by that invitation. “Still haven’t tired of me yet?”
His question unnerved her. “Any day now,” she said, deliberately flippant. “So you’d best take advantage of my lust while it lasts.”
He picked up a newspaper that had been set down on top of a low shelf and brought it to his desk. She gazed at him as he began to read while still standing—the beautiful profile, the strong shoulder, the long, sinewy arm—but only a moment; she didn’t want him to catch her staring.
So she stared at the cover of the notebook instead. Planet IX, volume 2. After a few minutes, he left the paper and returned a book to its place on the shelves just behind her chair.
Her heart began to pound as his hand cupped her face and turned her enough for him to kiss her. “Finally,” she murmured. “I was wondering whether I’d expressed my carnal needs forcefully enough.”
“Worry not. You always express your carnal needs loud and clear.”
It further unnerved her that she couldn’t tell whether he wanted to reward or punish her for being so forward.
He rounded to the front of her and shoved aside all the notebooks from her person with a carelessness that was completely at odds with the thousands of meticulous hours that must have gone into the work. Next thing she knew, her skirts were bunched at her waist. He sank to his knees, pushed her thighs apart, and pulled her to the edge of the seat.
She began to tremble almost from the moment his mouth descended on her. And she did not stop trembling until long after he was finished.
Only to tremble again when he rewarded—or was it punished?—her the exact same way that night.
• • •
She was recovering from a case of sniffles brought on by a sudden onslaught of autumnal weather. Her nose was red. The rest of her face, too, was somewhat ruddy. And the somber blue of her cloak did her complexion no favors, making her appear even more splotchy.
All this Felix perceived. But he could see only loveliness, endless, endless loveliness.
Love was not blind, but it might mimic a deteriorating case of cataracts.
“No luminiferous aether?” she asked, half frowning, smoothing the thick blanket on her knees with her gloved hand. Outside the carriage, the day was cold and drizzly, as it had been since the middle of October. “But that’s the medium in which light travels, isn’t it? What next, no gravity either?”
Sometimes he wondered what she’d made of him lately. He was afflicted with a deep possessiveness intermingled with an equally deep frustration that he could not move an inch closer to her heart, even with the help of his telescope. She might not be able to identify exactly what ailed him, but as much as he tried to keep it to himself, she had to have sensed, to some degree, his inner disequilibrium.
“You can verify gravity,” he answered, “even if you cannot see, hear, or touch it. Luminiferous aether, on the other hand, is entirely conjecture. Why can’t light simply travel through a vacuum?”
They were approaching the nearest town: The renovation of the schoolroom was almost finished and she wanted her own supply of notebooks before
her lessons began. He was beginning to wonder about the wisdom of those lessons: In his vanity, he had wanted to be the one to reveal to her the scope and majesty of his favorite disciplines, but now the lessons seemed simply the next thing that would not garner him her heart.
“So that’s what your correspondence with the American professors is about, disproving the existence of aether?”
He had familiarized her with his various scientific inquiries and correspondences in the hope that she might yet fall in love with what he did, if not who he was. When had he come to be made of foolish hopes? Or perhaps more accurately, when had he come to be once again made of foolish hopes?
“We discussed the specifics of their experiment. If aether exists, then one should be able to measure its relative motion to our planet as it moves through all the surrounding aether. If you are interested, there is a lecture coming up in London on refining the measurement of the speed of light, and that should address some of the issues surrounding whether aether plays a—”
The carriage had slowed to a crawl as it neared the high street. Her attention was squarely on him. Then it wasn’t.
She stared beyond his shoulder, her expression one of both confusion and consternation. He turned around to see what had caused such a reaction on her part.
His gut tightened. Miss Jane Edwards, Lord Firth’s sister, emerged from a milliner’s shop, arm in arm with a man. The man opened an umbrella, his face turned toward Miss Edwards and away from Felix. But Felix didn’t need to see the man’s face to know that he could not be Lord Firth, unless Lord Firth had added two stone in weight and four inches in height.
“That is Miss Edwards,” said Louisa, as their carriage began to pull away.
“So it is,” Felix replied, hoping he was as good an actor as he used to be. “I wonder who is the man—not Lord Firth, to be sure.”
Louisa, her lips curled in distaste, still stared after Miss Edwards and her companion, who climbed into a carriage of their own that drove off in the opposite direction.
“I suppose he could be a cousin or an uncle,” she answered. “Wait—Lord Firth once told me that neither of his parents had siblings who survived childhood.”
Felix could almost hear his heart plummet.
Her brow furrowed. “But then again, Miss Edwards had a different mother. And her mother could very well have living male relatives.”
He nodded, trying to look only marginally concerned.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry; what were you saying about London?”
“That there is a lecture that we can attend that might address the paucity of proof for the existence of aether.”
Could this really be the end of the matter?
“That does sound interesting,” she said, her tone making it plain that her thoughts were still largely preoccupied with something else.
He held his breath. Should he say something to distract her, or should he absolutely refrain from such a tactic, lest he appear to be deliberately changing the subject?
She stared out the window for a few seconds. They passed an ironmonger’s shop, a penny bazaar, and a bakery.
Abruptly, she looked back at him. “By the way, I never asked you, but how did you come to know that Miss Edwards and her brother are lovers? I would imagine it isn’t something they would let anyone, even the servants, witness.”
Now he prayed that he was as good a liar as he believed himself to be. “When I was still at university, years ago, I was invited to shoot grouse in Scotland one year. Lord Firth and Miss Edwards happened to be at the same shooting party.
“You know I keep a somewhat irregular schedule. So at half past three one morning, I opened my door, intending on an hour or so of observation outside, with a portable telescope I’d brought. And whom should I see stepping out of Miss Edwards’s room down the hall, still fastening his trousers, but her half brother.”
She grimaced. “Right, of course.”
Then, unexpectedly, she kissed him on his cheek. “Thank you,” she said, with a rather weak smile. “I would hate to have married him.”
• • •
Once upon a time, all he wanted was to reduce her to a state of unbearable sexual arousal.
Then, possible revelations on Miss Edwards’s part would have earned a shrug from him, plus a redoubled effort to cheat, lie, and steal his way to what he wanted. The Felix Wrenworth of that era would scarcely recognize himself today, a man in love, a man who blanched at the thought that his bride would think less of him.
Yet it was now that Miss Edwards cropped up, a reminder from the gods that acts of hubris never went unpunished.
By the next afternoon he had collected various intelligence concerning her reason for being in Derbyshire. He didn’t particularly like what he learned, but the silver lining was that Miss Edwards was expected to leave the country before the end of the year.
He didn’t anticipate that Miss Edwards would call on his wife, but he didn’t want to take that chance. Nor did he want to take the chance that Louisa might run into Miss Edwards again, this time without him. Thank goodness he had happened to mention the lecture in London. He would bring that up again. It should not be too difficult to persuade Louisa to attend an astronomical lecture. And once they were in London, he’d keep her there until they must return to host the Christmas house party.
By then Miss Edwards would be gone and he would be safe.
CHAPTER 16
The travel plans fell into place with surprising speed, once Lord Wrenworth recommended that they could first visit the Cantwells in their new house before heading off to London.
Louisa could not turn down such an opportunity. She missed dear Matilda. She missed everyone. She even missed Julia’s indignant yowl as Cecilia dragged her by the ear from one room to the next.
She anticipated a wonderful time with her family, and perhaps a wry amusement watching her husband resume the mantle of The Ideal Gentleman, a phenomenon she had not witnessed in weeks upon weeks.
She did have a wonderful time with her family at the bright, tastefully furnished new house. And she did derive a wry amusement watching The Ideal Gentleman take the Cantwell women by storm again, leading Cecilia to opine that while she believed women the far superior gender, her brother-in-law made an outstanding representative for his sex.
What Louisa had not expected was the butterflies in the stomach that she experienced watching him wield that glossy allure of his, with an occasional sidelong glance at her as if to say, Remember this?
She did remember this feeling of being a coconspirator, of being in on a delicious secret that she would always keep to herself.
But he didn’t stop there. Even when they were in the privacy of their own room, he remained utterly winsome—droll, naughty, and faultlessly considerate. It made her realize that she had never experienced a direct charge of his monumental charm. Gone was the undercurrent of tension that had made her just slightly nervous since the night of the telescope. This particular incarnation of her husband wanted only to show her a marvelous time.
Part of her realized that his charm was being deployed with military precision, and the rest of her didn’t care. He’d been so good for so long; why should she cling to those most awful of memories? Why shouldn’t she stop doubting and let herself enjoy her good fortune?
London made it even easier to have a marvelous time. The great metropolis provided endless diversions. Besides attending the Royal Astronomical Society lectures and purchasing Christmas presents for her family, they spent long, leisurely afternoons at book dealers’, explored a fascinating exhibition of adding machines, and frequented music halls, the newer venues where a man could take his wife without worrying about her respectability.
Apparently her husband had, in his younger days, been to music halls of the more risqué variety, too.
“There was this one particularly
memorable song. Do you know, according to its lyrics, what English gentlemen like to do?” he asked mischievously as they lay in bed together one night.
Louisa moved her head closer to his on the pillow. “What?”
“Play cricket, box, and torture cocks,” he said with a straight face.
“Oh, that is horrible!” she exclaimed. “Tell me another one.”
Which made him kiss her, chortling. And they stayed up deep into the night, laughing over all manner of naughty things.
When he got up to go to sleep in his own bed, she almost told him to stay. She didn’t, though she did take hold of his hand when he leaned down to kiss her good night—and only slowly let go.
At some point, she must think of the future. It was all very well and good to wall off her heart and plant signs that said, This close but no closer. But what if her husband had reformed? He had said nothing one way or the other, but his actions spoke loud and clear for themselves. In every sphere of their life together he had become an admirable partner; it seemed almost unfair to continue to withhold her greater affection from him for choices during one aberrant fortnight months ago.
It would be so much easier to thrive in this marriage without the constant weight of her cautions and suspicions.
Deep down, she wanted to trust him.
And always had.
• • •
Outside, wind howled and rain lashed at the window shutters. But inside, Felix and Louisa were warm and snug under the covers. The lamps and sconces of the room had been extinguished, but a fire still roared in the grate and its coppery light danced on the walls and glowed upon her smooth cheeks.
They lay on their sides, facing each other. He caressed the indentation of her waist. Her hand had been roving over his buttocks only a minute ago, quite freely and greedily, but now those same fingers played with her hair, making her look sweet and girlish.
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