Outrageously Yours (6 page)

“I understand that. Which is why we need to—”

His patience snapped, and he cut the other man off again. “Need to what? Work together? Share our results? What else would you have us share, Colin? What else of mine do you believe you have a right to claim?”

“Simon, please.” The whispered entreaty touched a cord inside Simon that hummed with an emotion he’d rather not feel—had not
allowed
himself to feel in many months.

They were once trusted colleagues, the best of friends.

He turned away, started walking.

Colin dogged him, close at his elbow. “You’ve been avoiding me for months now. Hasn’t enough time gone by?”

Simon stopped again, intending to issue a warning for Colin to back away immediately. But the regret in his erstwhile friend’s eyes stopped him cold and yanked his disdain right out from under him. Was he being too hard on Colin? Was it time to forgive?

The answer came in an onslaught of images from that despicable day last winter: a drab room in a roadside inn, a hastily packed valise, Gwendolyn’s tearstained face, and her steady progression from fear to fury—aimed at Simon. And Colin, leaning in a corner of that room, his arms folded, his head down, his face an unreadable mask.

No, not unreadable. One glance had told Simon all he’d needed to know, and Colin’s silence had only confirmed his conclusions. Even now, the pain of the betrayal pierced his gut with a force that threatened to double him over.

He resumed walking, fast, nearly breaking into a run. “You already helped yourself to my sister. I’ve nothing left of value for you.”

Colin’s footsteps echoed hard on his own. “There’s something I never explained to you about that day. I thought it best I keep silent, but now I’m not so certain. Simon . . . Wait.”

Simon’s blood scorched his veins. He had awakened that morning last winter expecting a day like any other, until his housekeeper discovered Gwendolyn missing, some of her clothes gone as well. Thank God she hadn’t been clever in covering her tracks, for it had taken only a few inquiries in town for Simon to learn in which direction she had gone.

He rounded on the other man, bearing down on him so forcefully that Colin retreated a step. “The only reason I tolerate your existence is because Errol and Ben value your association and because I arrived at that wretched inn before anything irreversible happened to Gwendolyn. If I were you, I would thank the Almighty for that each and every day. Now, good day.”

He continued at a brisk clip through the trees, taking a sharp left where the footpath merged onto Trinity Street. His temples throbbed; his clenched jaw ached. He needed that pub more than ever.

“Lord Harrow! My lord?”

“Galileo’s teeth. What now?” He stopped and reluctantly turned.

Colin stood where Simon had left him, his features iced over with wounded astonishment. Simon looked beyond him. Across the common, Bartram Hendslew’s running feet sent up a flurry of russet and gold leaves. His hair, usually lying flat in an arrangement that began at one ear and trailed across his balding pate to the other ear, flapped like loose vines in the breeze. In his raised hand he brandished a bundle of papers.

“Your dissertations, my lord.” Upon reaching him, Hendslew passed the bundle to Simon, then attempted to comb his hair into place with his fingers. “You said you wanted them the very moment the session ended.”

“Oh, yes, thank you. I’d nearly forgotten.” And almost no longer cared. Any enthusiasm or hope with which he’d awakened that morning had withered, in these past several moments, like the dead leaves rustling across the lawn.

Still, a kind of vague curiosity drew his glance to the top of the pile. Finding nothing extraordinary in the cramped handwriting or meticulously rendered diagrams, he shuffled and perused another, then another and another.

Then, at the very bottom of the stack, his eyes lit on something quite different . . . unusual . . . innovative. . . . He whipped his reading spectacles from his coat pocket.

“Could it be?” Separating the several pages of the essay from the others, Simon shoved the remaining papers back into Bartram Hendslew’s hands. He took a step, then several more, unaware of his direction as he first skimmed the drier details and then became absorbed in the first attempt he had yet seen to answer his question:
Why?

The words
poetry
,
symmetry
, and
balance
filled his vision and ran like music through his mind. He read on, captured by a passion scarcely contained within the neat lines. His hands began to tremble. No one had explained the spirit of investigation and experimentation in these terms before. The author had gotten the basic details of the procedure right enough, but then so had the majority of the others. Not one of them, however, had taken the risk of baring his soul when it came to answering that unassuming yet powerful question.

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.”