“This is intolerable,” Ashmont said. “You can’t expect me to stay here, doing nothing.”
“Learn to tolerate,” Uncle Fred said. “I expect you to remain in London until you’re more presentable in body and mind. I shall go and talk to her.”
Ashmont unclenched his hands and stalked to the window and looked out. “While I remain, so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry who fancies himself a humorist can twit me, asking where my bride’s got to. And while the satirists draw my image with cuckold horns.”
“You seem not to realize that you’ve been a joke for some time now.”
Ashmont’s face darkened, and he turned sharply away from the window.
“You can fight everybody who finds your antics amusing,” his uncle said, “or you can show a little dignity and maturity for once, and laugh. If you can’t devise an amusing retort to the mockers, ask Blackwood to compose one for you. But if you want to do something useful, write a letter to Lady Olympia, declining her offer to release you. Make it a good letter. On second thought, I had better dictate it.”
Friday 14 June
The long-absent sun had finally deigned to send its beams through the windows of Camberley Place’s east wing when the Duke of Ripley, swearing, maneuvered a mechanical chair out of the study and into the library.
Lord Charles had built the study along an outward-facing wall within the library, close to its southern end. Next to it, a narrow passage led to the staircase to the Long Gallery, directly above. Even with a part given over to the study, there remained a library extending some one hundred feet, nearly the full length of this wing of the house. It held a great many more obstacles, though, in the way of tables, chairs, footstools, and sets of steps than did the gallery above. Being above, however, the Long Gallery was barred to Ripley.
His feet rested on the raised footboard and his hands clutched the handles that extended from the chair’s arms. Turning the handles—alone or together—moved the chair in various directions. The trick was remembering which combination of turns in which direction moved the chair which way.
After jerking himself about, right, left, and in a circle, he grasped both handles and turned both toward himself.
The chair shot backward, and he heard a little shriek behind him. Yanking the handles the other way, he darted forward. With a growl of frustration, he turned both handles right, and the chair turned right, and right again.
He heard footsteps approach.
“Perhaps, duke, you might wish to read the instructions,” said Lady Olympia.
He was aware of the hairs at the back of his neck rising at the sound of her voice. “No,” he said. “If my grandmother could steer this thing, I certainly can.”
She came closer and walked around him. “This doesn’t look like any invalid chair I’ve ever seen.”
“They were all the rage at one time,” he said. “Don’t know how many were made. Merlin’s Mechanical Chair.” He patted the worn handle. “Uncle Charles often talked about visiting Merlin’s Mechanical Museum in Princes Street. He bought this for my grandmother.”
She crouched to study the arrangement of metal rods connected to the wheels. “This is rather more intricate than what one usually sees.”
She wore another of his aunt’s dresses, plain and grey, except for the white neckerchief tied about her throat. The sleeves were narrow, boasting only a small pouf at the top of the arm. The bodice was equally severe. Like a coat, the thing buttoned from neck to hem. Though this one fit better than the one she’d worn yesterday, it didn’t fit as it ought.
Her thick brown hair was better. It had been put up simply, with a few coils at the back of her head, and some curls framing her face.
He wanted to lean over to inhale the scent of her hair, the fresh scent he remembered too well. He sat straight and gazed straight ahead over the tops of his shoes.
“It’s meant to allow the invalid more independence of movement,” he said. “My grandmother took herself over lawn and gravel and every sort of surface. I believe there was some sort of joking theory about attaching a steam engine to it, to move individuals hither and yon without manual or animal labor. She’d still be racketing about in it, I daresay, if she hadn’t succumbed to a vicious fever.”
The same fever had, he’d been told, left his father a shockingly changed man. Though Ripley had been ten years old at the time, he barely remembered the person his father had been before, the witty, charming fellow his mother spoke of sometimes, the gentleman who’d won her heart. The miserable miser had crushed all happier memories.
“Uncle Charles must have been chagrined to have to use it himself,” he said. “As I am chagrined. But there’s no help for it. The ladies of this house scold me deaf and witless if I try to walk. And with my bad foot, I’m not fast enough to outrun them.”
She stood up and smoothed her skirts. “Such a tragic, tortured life you live.”
“I never thought I’d see the day I’d be henpecked and rolling about in an invalid chair. But my time has come, it seems. I feel a touch of gout coming on. Maybe I’ll wear a wig and false teeth.”
She straightened her spectacles, though they were perfectly straight. “And so many have believed you’d never live long enough to suffer from gout or need a wig and false teeth.”
“Did your ladyship only come here to mock my infirmity or had you another ulterior motive?”
She set her hands on her hips and surveyed the library. “Your aunt happened to mention that Lord Charles’s more recent acquisitions were never entered in the library records. They’re in a heap somewhere in this room. I offered to make myself useful.”
Ripley turned the handles of the chair and it began to roll backward. “Down here.”
“Do you have to do it the hard way?” she said.
“It’s boring the other way.”
“Or maybe you don’t know how to make that thing go forward.”
“Of course I do. Nothing to it.” He turned the winches and the chair began to go in circles. He heard something thump onto the rug.
“For heavens’ sake, Ripley, you’re knocking books off—look out for the footstool!”
He dodged the footstool, but turned the handles too quickly, because the chair started to spin, and she cried, “Not the vase!” and jumped to catch it at the same time he spun the opposite way. She stumbled and fell across the chair . . . over his lap . . . vase in her hands and arse upward.
For one endless moment, neither of them moved. He was acutely aware of her body’s warmth and the pomatum’s scent rising from her hair. His head dipped downward and he inhaled, closing his eyes.
“It’s heavy,” came her muffled voice.
He lifted his head, cursing himself.
“If you can keep this thing perfectly still,” she said, “I can set the vase down on the floor.”
“I’m not sure about ‘perfectly still,’” he said. His nether regions were alert to the female body in close proximity. He could feel her breast against his arm.
“Can you take it?” she said.
“What?”