Talk Sweetly to Me (4 page)

Her finger did not stop tapping, but she smiled as shyly as if he’d offered her a compliment. “You misidentify the weapon. It’s not a knife.”

“No?”

Miss Sweetly shook her head. “It’s a double slide rule from Elliots, and I have found it extremely useful in dispatching all manner of men. Especially the ones given to excess histrionics. Now shall we continue the calculation?”

He sat back, smiling faintly. “By all means. I can see where this is heading. I have always wanted to be abused with numbers.”

She huffed. “The chance that my father would not discover the whole thing before it proved too late is one in ten, and the possibility that I should be hit on the head with an anvil, or a similarly heavy item, is perhaps one in a million. Tell me, Mr. Shaughnessy, what is the probability of all those things occurring in conjunction?”

“Ah…” He had to use paper to keep track. “That would be…a chance of one in…a hundred billion?”

“Ooh.” She winced. “That’s a very small number. I’m exceedingly sorry for you, Mr. Shaughnessy.”

“It is.” He looked at the figure. “What, precisely, was I calculating?”

She looked up at him. For one moment, he thought she was going to be shy again—that she would move away and shake her head rather than answer. But even though her voice was low, she still said the words.

“That,” she told him, “is the chance that you’ll be able to seduce me.”

His mouth went dry, and he coughed heavily. “A slide rule to the heart,” he heard himself say. “Ouch. Is that what you think of me? That I’m trying to get you alone so that I can seduce you?”

She met his eyes. “What else am I supposed to think when you show up at my place of work, pretend not to know me, and inveigle lessons with me from my employer? What else would you be trying to do, Mr. Shaughnessy?”

He blinked. He opened his mouth and then very slowly closed it again.

“I don’t know.”

She scoffed.

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “But coming here, lying to Dr. Barnstable, lying to you just to seduce you—that sounds like a sinister plot. I don’t have sinister plots, Miss Sweetly; they take too much work. I’m here because I would like to spend more time with you, and because I love listening to you talk about mathematics. Nothing more villainous than that.”

She clearly didn’t believe him. Her nostrils flared ever so slightly; she turned away, setting her hand between them.

“Speaking of mathematics,” he said, “why did an anvil appear in the midst of that calculation? I’ve done a great many things and even I have never had call to use an anvil.”

She looked up into his eyes. “How else was I to acquire amnesia?” she asked shyly.

He blinked in confusion, then burst into laughter as he realized what she meant.

She frowned. “I’m not attempting to amuse you. I would need to forget not only my own moral sense, but my work, my family, my future—everything I would give up if you succeeded in such an aim.”

“In that case,” he promised, “let me set your mind at ease. I hereby adopt a strict no-anvil policy. If I ever have you in my bed, I want you to remember yourself. I like you. There’s no point having your body if you’re not included.”

She should have smacked him for that, or at the very least, ordered him away. Instead, she touched her slide rule, moving the metal cursor back and forth.

“Then there’s no point at all,” she whispered.

Behind them, Mrs. Barnstable gave a snort. They both jumped, but the older woman only turned her head from side to side before subsiding once more.

“Haven’t you been listening?” he asked in a low voice. “This—talking to you, just like this—is already the point. I like you. I like talking to you. If you don’t like me, send me off.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. And then, without answering, she began to write another set of numbers on a sheet of paper.

“Let’s practice division,” she said.

Anyone who heard her patient explanation might have thought her cool and earnest. Stephen knew better. She
hadn’t
sent him off, and no matter what she was saying, the message was clear. She liked him—unwillingly, perhaps—but she still liked him.

He waited until he’d started on the problems she’d set for him, until she had picked up her pen and restarted her own calculations, before he spoke again.

“I have another question about that last probability.”

She set down her pen. “Go ahead.”

“You are always very exacting about the numbers you use. When you said I was forty percent likely to be charming…”

She blinked up at him. “I haven’t done an accurate calculation, but yes. About forty percent. If you wish, I could collate—”

He shook his head. “I don’t need a list. It’s just to satisfy my own curiosity. Why only forty percent?”

She looked down. “My personal tastes—nothing you should worry over, really—”

“If I have not made it clear, Miss Sweetly, I take an avid interest in your personal tastes.”

She let out a long breath. “I don’t trust you,” she said simply. “If you had half a chance, you’d take me to bed.”

He could have denied it. But truthfully? He wasn’t trying to shove her in that direction, but would he say no? Of course he wouldn’t.

“Ah.” He picked up the next sheet of problems she’d written out for him, found the next number on the slide. “Then you have nothing to worry about, not according to your calculations. You could find me charming all the time, and according to you, I’d still only have a chance of…of…” He fumbled.

She took pity on him. “One in forty billion.”

“There, you see? I don’t have half a chance. I’m not even within spitting range of a hundredth of a chance. So there can be no harm in your allowing yourself to be charmed by me all the time.” So saying, he gave her a brilliant smile.

It affected her. It obviously affected her. Her hands tangled in her lap; she glanced down, not in demure deflection, but as if to avert her eyes from the sun. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, as if her spectacles chafed.

“You’re trying to charm me with mathematics,” she said.

“Is it working?”

She looked up at him.
Yes,
said her dark eyes, shining at him.
Yes,
said the part of her lips, the fingers that drew up to brush her hair.
Yes,
said the tilt of her body in his direction.

“No,” she told him with a firm shake of her head. “It isn’t.”

Chapter Three

T
HAT NIGHT,
R
OSE DREAMED
that a column of numbers was chasing her through some odd, non-Cartesian landscape, a vista of lines and swirling colors. In the distance, someone was laughing—not a cruel laugh, or even a laugh at her expense. Just a friendly, welcoming laugh.

The numbers caught her, taking hold of her shoulder. She jerked away, but they held her fast.

How did numbers
grip?
She turned to them, fascinated…and very groggily came awake.

The room was dark; the only illumination was a pale stripe of moonlight, filtered through an inch-wide gap in her curtains. No sound rose from the street; it was the dead of night indeed.

But there was a hand, warm, on Rose’s shoulder. It gave her a little shake.

“Rose,” Patricia whispered, “are you awake?”

“Patricia?” Rose turned to find her sister sitting on the bed next to her, her form dim in the night.

“It’s started.” Her sister’s voice crackled with excitement, but the hand on Rose seemed tense, almost fearful.

Rose didn’t need to ask what
it
was. There was only one
it
in the household these days.

She sat bolt upright in her bed. “What? Already? It’s too soon.”

“Thirty-six weeks, by Doctor Chillingsworth’s count. It
is
too early—but I felt a most definite contraction. It’s starting.”

“It can’t start. Isaac is—”

She cut herself off. Her sister’s husband was not yet home. They’d been so sure he would have returned by the time the baby came. They’d charted the remaining weeks of Patricia’s pregnancy against the expected return of his ship with a sigh of relief.

When they’d found out that Patricia was with child—days before Dr. Wells was scheduled to leave—he’d been upset at missing the majority of her pregnancy. Rose had promised to write to him, to tell him the day-to-day occurrences.

“Take care of her for me,” Dr. Isaac Wells had told her in return. “If I can’t be there, you’ll have to stand in my stead.”

Rose was the younger sister; Patricia had always taken care of her. But somehow, that solemn request, made by a brother-in-law that she liked, had only firmed her resolve. If Patricia had always taken care of Rose, that only meant that Rose now had a chance to return the favor.

And so she wrote to Isaac regularly, telling him everything that transpired. She’d reported faithfully every morning when Patricia felt poorly. She’d described the baby’s first tentative flutters, barely detectable, up through the more recent kicks that had drummed against Rose’s hand. She’d told him all…but it didn’t change a thing. Patricia wished her husband would come back before the baby was born, and Isaac wanted the same thing. He was a little more than a week away now. To have the baby come so close to his arrival would be…

…A blessing, Rose told herself firmly. No matter when it came.

So she swallowed what she had been about to say.

“Have you sent for Chillingsworth?” she asked instead.

“Josephs left a few minutes past. He should be back soon.”

Mr. and Mrs. Josephs were the married couple that kept house for Patricia—Mrs. Josephs as the maid-of-all-work, and Mr. Josephs as an all-around handyman. In their neighborhood, having two servants was considered an enormous expense; she’d heard someone whisper that Patricia was putting on airs above her station. But then, Patricia’s husband was away, and she herself was pregnant.

“Are you scared?” Rose asked. “What does it feel like, a contraction? I did promise to tell Isaac everything when he returned. You have to tell me.”

“Oh, I’m not having the contraction any longer—now I just feel…I don’t know, a little odd.” Patricia gave a deprecating laugh. “Like a bloated duck on the verge of being popped. But that hasn’t changed since last night.”

“Can you walk?”

“Of course I can. How do you think I got to your room? Even bloated ducks can manage a good waddle.”

Rose smiled. “Well, labor hasn’t altered your sense of humor. It’s still dreadful.”

“Wait until I have another contraction,” Patricia said. “Then I’ll have no humor at all. Come and wait with me downstairs?”

Rose dressed swiftly and held her sister’s hand on the way down the stairs—even though Patricia tried to wave her off, saying she was perfectly able to walk on her own. Once she’d ensconced her sister in pride of place on the sofa, Rose ran around, lighting lamps, pushing away all the shadows of the night. It was lovely to have something to do. She bustled about, fetching and carrying for her sister—slippers, a warm blanket, chamomile tea, and a crumpet that she toasted over a fire and then piled high with butter and currant jelly.

“Mmm,” Patricia said, closing her eyes. “Won’t you have one, too?”

“I was already having the oddest dream when you woke me,” Rose said. “I don’t need to upset my digestion any further.”

“Dream, eh?” Patricia’s eyes narrowed. “You weren’t dreaming of—”

“I dreamed I was being chased by a heap of numbers,” Rose intervened.

Patricia choked, almost laughing. “You would.”

Yes, someone had been laughing in her dream. Almost like that. Friendly laughter, the mirthful burble of someone who knew all Rose’s faults and loved her anyway.

It had been too deep a laugh for Patricia, and not merry enough to sound like her mother. Her father’s laugh was more of a rumble. And yet it had seemed familiar.

The answer came to Rose as her sister took another bite of crumpet. Mr. Shaughnessy laughed like that.

She’d been avoiding thinking about him. Despite his protestations, she knew exactly what he was doing. This was how men like him seduced women like her: step by careful step, wearing away at her inhibitions one by one.

She had no illusions that her innocence would protect her; innocence was for a different class of women altogether. Rose was a shopkeeper’s daughter; she was a woman who worked for a living herself. The well-to-do men who could command society’s respect usually thought that women like her existed to serve in whatever capacity they were desired.

She didn’t know why she hadn’t sent Mr. Shaughnessy on his way. Stupidity, surely. Misplaced romanticism. But this wasn’t the time to berate herself.

As her sister took yet another bite of crumpet, the front door opened. Mr. Josephs entered.

Behind him came Doctor Chillingsworth. The physician’s coat was wet with glistening rain; he set an umbrella in the umbrella stand, frowning at it as if it had no business being wet. He took off his gloves and chafed his pale hands together for warmth. Then he looked over at Patricia—seated on the sofa, wrapped in wool blankets, trying not to drip red jelly down her chin—and his expression froze in something that looked alarmingly like a sneer.