Outrageously Yours (4 page)

Their trepidation pleased him, even made him smile a little beneath his show of animosity. He fully intended to intimidate them all—or, more precisely, all but one. Perhaps today would be the day he discovered that singular student with the knowledge, ingenuity, and courage necessary to become his laboratory assistant.

An assortment of mostly first years filled the room, fledglings fresh out of schools like Eton, Merchant Taylors’, and Charterhouse. He might have found an assistant without resorting to such dramatic tactics had he looked to the more experienced ranks of the upperclassmen; certainly he would have found a qualified scholar among the university dons or fellows. But he wanted neither, for both tended to come burdened with too much ego and ambition, not to mention preconceived notions that could prove difficult to contend with.

What he wanted,
needed
, was someone learned enough to understand the latest in scientific theory and technique, but young enough to have retained his idealism. Too much to ask? Perhaps. He wouldn’t get his hopes up.

Upon reaching the laboratory table at the front of the hall, he pivoted, once more making theatrical use of the cloak that swirled around his booted ankles. He leveled his timorous audience with a glare, and for good reason.

There was no place at his side for the faint of heart. Discovery and innovation depended upon a sound theoretical process, sharp intuitiveness, and nerves of steel. In the field of electromagnetism, apprehension and indecisiveness led to experimental failure at best and dead scientists at worst. Not a risk he was willing to take for either himself or any of these wet-behind-the-ear hopefuls.

Shrugging the outer garment from his arms, he tossed it to an occupant of the first row. The surprised student nearly fell out of his seat in his effort to catch it before it hit the floor. Simon thanked him with a brusque nod and gestured to the apparatus arranged on the table before him.

He curled his lip in disdain. “I trust you have all had an opportunity to view the equipment.” After an instant’s hesitation, a head nodded, initiating a domino effect throughout the hall, though more than a few students remained frozen in their seats.

“Good.” As part of the challenge, he allowed them no questions and set them precious few guidelines. “Can you all see?”

Nods again rippled through the hall.

“Then let us begin.”

He raised the lid of the three-foot-long, coffinlike casing of a voltaic cell, exposing the internal spine of alternating copper and steel squares. Selecting a jug, he poured in the powerful acid solution he had mixed that morning. Pungent fingers of heat rose from the contraption, forcing Simon to avert his face from the chemical reaction of the liquid against the metals. Blinking and holding his breath against the fumes, he replaced the lid.

Taking up a glass cylinder about six inches long and three wide, he filled it with potash, a mixture of soaked wood and plant ash. After corking either end of the cylinder and setting it onto a pair of brackets, he threaded a length of copper wire into each end. One of these wires he wound around the brass contact terminal at the end of the battery that emitted a positive charge.

He pulled on a pair of leather gloves lined with a thin, flexible layer of cork. “Observe.”

With a pair of foot-long tongs insulated with a coating of India rubber, he plucked up the remaining wire attached to the cylinder and, holding it at arm’s length, touched it to the negative terminal of the battery.

A burst of light inside the cylinder set off several cries of alarm. Brighter and brighter the illumination grew, a small, enclosed nova of lustrous globules that erupted around the wire at the negative contact. From the positive end of the cylinder, wisps of gas spiraled into the air. As though he were part of the circuit, energy vibrated up Simon’s arm and spread through his chest. His heart raced, though mainly from excitement and not electrical shock. The combination of cork and rubber insulation protected him from the full, potentially dangerous effects of the charge.

Peering through half-closed eyelids, he kept the tiny conflagration in his sights until experience alerted him that the process had nearly reached completion. He released the tongs and stepped back. Immediately the glass shuddered, splintered, and exploded in a shower of flame and sparks.

As one, his audience pulled back in their seats. Some leaped to their feet, poised to run. Others turned away, shielding their eyes with their forearms.

Fools, they should be watching closely, not ducking for cover. Didn’t they understand the small miracle of science taking place before their very eyes?

Simon stepped back to the table’s edge. The copper wires now hung free. Glass shards and bits of incinerated potash littered the tabletop. Scattered among them, molten lumps of a silvery metal writhed and glowed, though they were fast cooling. He pointed at these lumps and raked a severe glance across the startled faces before him.

“Your task is this....” He paused as a sudden flurry produced writing tablets, quills, and pots of ink. “Tell me what this mercurial metal is, and no, it is not mercury. Tell me how I produced it: the exact process from start to finish. Most importantly, tell me
why
.”

The mosaic of blank stares almost made him laugh. That last bit of instruction he had added as another means to weed out the mediocre, to separate the wheat from the chaff. Instead of expressing his amusement at their reaction, he drew his brows in tighter. “Yes, gentlemen, you heard me correctly. It is not a mere list of instructions I am seeking, but a full and clear understanding of the properties demonstrated here today.

“There is to be no discussion,” he reminded them sternly, “not a word exchanged between you. The slightest sidelong glance toward your neighbor’s work is grounds for immediate disqualification from this challenge. You may leave at any time, but once you have done so, you may not reenter the hall. Upon taking your exit, you will submit your thesis to Mr. Hendslew.” He gestured to the middle-aged man just then entering through the arched door at the rear of the hall. “Good day and good luck.”

Retrieving his cloak from the student in the first row, he started down the aisle. He’d retreated about halfway when, from within the rows of seats to his right, a hand slid tentatively in the air. Simon ground to a halt, his glance landing on a wisp of a youth with a mop of dark, curly hair.

As a silence as thick as the bogs beyond the city settled over the hall, Simon’s gaze met a pair of dark eyes that glittered like onyx within pale, almost feminine features, so delicate that for an instant he was taken aback. He shifted his scrutiny lower, to a high starched collar held by a silk neckcloth tied with an uncommonly fussy knot, and then to slim shoulders encased in the artful cut of a frock coat the cost of which would have fed a working family for a month.

Too neat, too clean, too oblivious to what he was just told.
A dandy in the making, Simon concluded, one who exemplified all the spoiled arrogance one would expect from the scion of an upper-crust family. There were generally two types of students at Cambridge: those like this impertinent young bounder who hailed from pedigreed, landed wealth and who believed rules were not for him, and those whose families made great sacrifices to send their exceptional if penniless sons here in hopes of providing them with better futures.

Despite the fact that he himself hailed from the former category, or perhaps because of it, Simon’s annoyance at that hovering hand turned his mood as black as the scowls he had been feigning.

“Have you a problem with your ears, sir?” he growled. “No questions.”

The hand wilted out of sight, and Simon exited the hall with a bafflement he could not dismiss. The words he had intended to speak were far different from the ones his lips had formed. He had meant to summarily disqualify the youth and send him packing in disgrace as reward for his galling audacity. But in the instant before Simon had opened his mouth, he had seen some intriguing quality glimmering in those sharp, dark eyes, a quality that had momentarily made him regret his rule against questions.

What would this bold young man have asked?

 

Ivy’s quill hovered above the page in her tablet. Lifting her other arm, she dabbed with her coat sleeve at the moisture beading across her brow. The air trapped within the paneled walls of Burgh Hall, endowed to the university by the grandfather of the very man who had just stormed in, barked orders, and stormed out, smelled of concentration, desperation, and a smidgen of fear.

Touching the back of her hand to her chin, she looked to see if traces of her coal dust “beard” came away. Beneath the unfamiliar sensations of woolen coat, waistcoat, and linen shirt, her back itched and her sides trickled with perspiration. Ivy had always assumed men’s clothing would be liberating, but quite the contrary; what they lacked in corsetry and petticoats they more than made up for in tailoring that constricted and stifled. In her trousers and boots, her legs felt as hotly encased as sizzling sausages; her arms felt trapped by her cumbersome sleeves.

She tugged on her cravat to relieve the pressure against her neck, but she could do nothing to ease the strain of the silk strips binding her breasts beneath her shirt. Neither could she ease her mind of the discomfiting images of the Marquess of Harrow—an impression that left her flabbergasted and breathless, until she could barely concentrate on the formulas and equations scrawled across her pages.

He was not at
all
as she had imagined. Then again, Victoria hadn’t bothered to describe him, other than to allude to the startling contrast between his nearly black hair and his pale silvery blue eyes, remarkable eyes indeed, Ivy must admit. As for the rest of him . . . her insides fluttered.

In picturing the Marquess of Harrow, she had drawn upon the engraved prints of the famous scientists she had seen in books. They had been middle-aged or older, balding or grizzle haired, bespectacled, paunchy, and stoop shouldered—she supposed from constantly leaning over their laboratory tables. And judging by the mild expressions and intelligent eyes captured in the portraits, those men had possessed another trait Simon de Burgh apparently lacked: patience.

With all the ferocity of a winter squall, he had barreled through the hall, his ill humor evident in every echoing footfall, every terse motion. In his presence, a collective apprehension had descended over the students, but nowhere near as quelling as the apprehension that had swooped down upon Ivy when she had raised her hand.

How could she have been so reckless! Lord Harrow’s disdain had struck her like a physical blow, forceful enough to rattle her bones. Yet she had not been about to break one of his hard-and-fast rules. She had only wished to inquire whether he wanted them to footnote their references.

Blinking, she once again attempted to banish him from her thoughts and focus her attention on the sums, diagrams, and lines of neat script filling several pages of her tablet. She had drawn upon the work of men like Alessandro Volta, who had invented the electric pile similar to the one Lord Harrow used in his demonstration, and Humphry Davy, who had patented the process of separating compounds into their unique elements as Lord Harrow had done; and she mentioned André Ampère, who had developed the theory of electrodynamic molecules that explained how the separation occurred.

Glancing through her calculations, she double-checked her citing of Georg Ohm’s equation for measuring the voltage of a current. As a chorus of scratching quills continued to resonate through the hall, she sat back and wondered what she had missed. Surely there was something.

The challenge he had set them seemed too easy, ridiculously so. Lord Harrow had chosen a procedure that had revolutionized the electrochemical sciences some twenty years ago. With so much having been written on the subject, anyone with even a mild interest in the natural philosophies should have been sufficiently well-read to adequately explain the process they had seen here today.

Unlike the men around her, Ivy hadn’t enjoyed the privilege of a formal education. What she
had
benefited from was time—lots and lots of time during her childhood to explore Uncle Edward’s extensive library in his country estate of Thorn Grove. Since his death a year ago, she had commandeered every science and natural philosophy tome that had found its way into the Knightsbridge Readers’ Emporium.

If
she
found this challenge elementary, then surely Lord Harrow could have found an assistant several times over by now. That he had not done so gave her pause and made her reconsider the very last, and in his words most important, of his instructions.
Tell me why.

How cryptic of him. Why what? Why break down a compound to its elements? Why bother to generate electricity at all, and make it run along wires from one place to another? However fascinating Ivy found the phenomenon of electromagnetism, she had always wondered how such raw power might be harnessed in the context of everyday life.

Letting her quill come to rest against her tablet, she closed her eyes and, for the first time in her life, considered
why
she had always spent so much time exploring the laws of such sciences as gravity and magnetism, rather than perusing the latest fashion plates or losing herself in romantic novels.
Why
would she rather see her sisters off to the plays and concerts they enjoyed so much, and prefer to spend her time among her books instead?

Laurel, Willow, and Holly loved poetry, but to Ivy, science
was
poetry. They found beauty in the rhyme and meter that transformed words into music. For Ivy, beauty lay in the symmetrical relationships between numbers, in the balance of the equations, and in the magic of cause and effect.

Suddenly the answer seemed clear as glass—a substance formed from yet another scientific process, thermodynamics, where silica, soda, and lime were fused together at great temperatures. Glass, like the potassium formed from Lord Harrow’s demonstration, involved the interplay of molecules and the rearranging of matter . . . even as the cook, the baker, and the tailor manipulated their raw materials into wholly new shapes and forms. How much more extraordinary, then, were the machinations of the chemist and the physicist, who employed earth’s greatest complexities to make the impossible possible.