There Will Be Phlogiston (2 page)

Shrugged
. In a ballroom. In front of a
lady.

“Do you want to dance?”

“No,” returned Lady Rosamond.

It was all Lord Mercury could do not to put his head
in his hands.

Jones glanced his way. “Is she allowed to say
that?”

This was rapidly becoming unsalvageable. He appealed
in silent desperation to Lady Wolfram, but the woman only laughed
the strangest laugh, and murmured, “Charming, how very
charming.”

“Perhaps,” he tried, “perhaps Lady Rosamond does not
feel like dancing tonight?”

Lady Rosamond tossed her head like a wilful horse.
“I do not feel like dancing with Mr. Jones.”

“Then—” he sketched another bow “—we should take
our—”

“Why not?” asked Anstruther Jones.

“Because I am too good for you. Good night, Mr.
Jones.”

And, for the second time that evening, the
Phlogiston Baron laughed.

Lord Mercury had not initially been receptive when
Anstruther Jones turned up on his doorstep,
sans
invitation,
introduction, or even calling card, wanting to “cut a deal.” But he
had a way of getting what he wanted, and Lord Mercury was, frankly,
running out of things to lose. For all he could trace his line back
at least a century—high royalty for Gaslight nobility—the only
thing it meant in real terms was a hundred years of gambling,
drinking, and ill-advised investments. Jones’s offer had been
simple, if galling: he would repair Lord Mercury’s fortunes in
return for his assistance in entering society.

“I want a house,” Jones explained, “like this house.
For my children to call theirs and give to their children. And
family. I want to have a family.”

Lord Mercury could still remember the arrogant way
the man had sprawled across his Chippendale sofa. The tatty brown
duster that reeked of tar and phlogiston. His weathered face, his
harsh mouth, and his eyes, grey-blue, restless and protean like the
sky.

“You don’t need social acceptance for that.”

“No, but I’ll damn well have it.” Of course what he
said was
’ave
it
—those broad Gaslight As. “If not for
me, for them as follow.”

“You can’t buy Gaslight.” Lord Mercury mustered all
the hauteur of his name. “And you certainly cannot buy me.”

Anstruther Jones said nothing, his silence somehow
no less forceful than his words, and reached deep into the pockets
of that dreadful coat. He began to pull out paper after paper after
paper. Debts, all of them: vowels, bills, promissory notes.

Mortified, Lord Mercury turned his head away. It was
one thing for a matter to be generally understood but never
admitted to or spoken of. Quite another for an ill-mannered
commoner with ideas above his station to scatter the undeniable
truth all over Lord Mercury’s last Axminster.

“What do you want?” he asked, hating how weak he
sounded.

“I told you.” Jones ticked his ambitions off on his
fingers. “Home, position, family. Your help.”

“You can’t afford me.”

The man’s mouth curled into an unexpected smile—a
little bit wicked, a little bit sweet. “Try me.”

Lord Mercury named a sum so outrageous it
embarrassed him to utter it aloud.

“Done.”

“I . . . I beg your pardon?”

“Done.” Jones spat into his palm, and held it
out.

Lord Mercury stared at the other man’s hand blankly
and bleated, “Oh, what are you doing?”

“Sealing the deal.”

“Well, consider this a . . . a . . . preliminary
lesson, but in polite society we do not spit on ourselves, or each
other. Or at all, as it happens.”

“So what do you do with cherry stones?”

“We transfer them politely from our mouths to the
spoon and then—” It belatedly occurred to Lord Mercury that he was
being laughed at.

Jones’s eyes were full of light as he wiped his hand
on his trousers and extended it again.

It was surely a devil’s bargain.

But Lord Mercury had a household to manage,
factories to run, appearances to maintain, and debts to pay, so
many debts. He had been intending to marry money—a devil’s bargain
of a different kind.

He stared at the hand, then at Jones.

The man’s gaze did not waver.

The truth was, Lord Mercury could no longer afford
the luxury of pride.

They shook. The rub of the calluses on Jones’s palm
sent sparks all through Lord Mercury’s skin. Made him feel tender
in comparison.

It was faintly humiliating, but also . . . not.

The next few months were difficult. It was not that
Jones was stupid, or that he did not take well to instruction, but
he questioned everything. It was not enough for him to simply know
a thing was, he had to know
why
it was. And Lord Mercury was
increasingly conscious that his answers amounted to little more
than “Because that is the way of it.”

Nevertheless he tried.

He instructed Jones on etiquette, taught him how to
bow, how to choose wine (though not to enjoy it), traced for him
the lineage of all the major families, talked him through their
fortunes, their histories, their scandals. He did his best to
smooth the Gaslight from his voice, but the
raihn
in
Spaihn
stubbornly
rehned
on the
plehn
, and
attempts to educate the man’s taste were similarly
unsuccessful.

It was not, Lord Mercury had to admit, that Jones
had bad taste. Merely that he made no distinction between, say, the
music hall and the opera, and formed his opinions without giving
consideration to what others might think of them. Opinions, as far
as Lord Mercury was concerned, were derived from social context.
They were like a well-chosen hat: framing one’s elegance of taste,
and proving that one both knew, and could afford, the right sort of
hatter. But, for Jones, they were a round of drinks at a common
tavern: selected purely for personal gratification and shared
liberally with all and sundry.

Effort to convince Jones to engage a valet also
failed. He said he had no interest in hiring a grown man to ponce
round him with a clothes brush. Lord Mercury would have tried to
explain the vital importance of proper attire but, as it happened,
Jones dressed well. Or rather, he dressed badly, in clothes more
suited to an airship than a drawing room, but he wore them with
ease and conviction. And, once Lord Mercury had introduced him to a
proper tailor, he looked . . . oh, he looked . . .

A well-cut frock coat and some made-to-measure
trousers didn’t precisely transform him miraculously into a
gentleman. If anything, they just framed more completely who he
was. No rough diamond, Anstruther Jones. He was coal, through and
through, coarse and strong, possessed of private lustre.

But everything had only truly started unravelling
when he tried to teach Jones to dance. He had feared the potential
for gossip if he hired a master, so instead he had purchased a copy
of Strauss’s
Liebesständchen
on wax cylinder and set up his
mother’s phonograph in the ballroom. As he pulled the curtains back
from the windows, grey light sloshed over the unpolished floors and
the tarnished mirrors, making the dust motes gleam like broken
stars.

It had been a long time.

His mother had glittered here, more brightly than
the gilt, more brightly than the jewels she wore. He remembered the
scent of her perfume, the sound of her laughing. He saw her every
time he looked in the mirror: he had her eyes, her hair, her skin.
He had learned later that she was profligate, degenerate, a
reckless gambler, a shameless sybarite, but she had been his world.
She had taken him to Paris at the age of six, to Vienna at eight.
He had tasted his first champagne at nine and developed a taste for
it by eleven. He had shared her box at the opera, dined with poets
and revolutionaries, waited for her in artists’ studios while she
reclined upon tiger skins and was painted.

Everyone said it was no way to raise a child, but he
had never been a child. He’d been her acolyte, her companion, her
confidant. And, a little after his fourteenth birthday, she had
fled to Italy with one of her lovers, leaving him with a broken
heart, a crumbling house, a name he could not afford, and a note
that said,
Sorry darling
.

“Are you all right?” asked Jones.

He flinched. How had he not heard the man
approaching? Jones was hardly the quiet sort. “Yes. Of course.”

To his horror, Jones reached out and swept something
from his eyelashes. It glinted on the tip of his finger, a tear,
already disappearing into Jones’s skin, becoming nothing. “What
were you thinking about?”

“The past, I suppose. It’s not important.”

Jones shoved his hands into his pockets, and Lord
Mercury bit back an urge to tell him not to. It would be futile,
anyway—it was almost as though he had magnets in them. “This place
could do with a bit of work.” He nodded towards the green stains
marbling the plasterwork. “I think you’ve got some rising
damp.”

“I will have it seen to.” Even though he now had the
resources, Lord Mercury found himself oddly reluctant to plan the
work the townhouse required. Perhaps he had grown too accustomed to
living this way. Or perhaps he had simply grown tired of laying
increasingly elaborate façades over broken things.

Jones turned, too bold, too vivid, for that
time-washed place. Smiled his crooked smile. “I feel like I’m in a
fairy tale. You just need some briars growing round your cursed
castle.”

“Well,” returned Lord Mercury sharply, “I am in no
need of a handsome prince. I am waiting to teach you the
waltz.”

“All right.” Jones shrugged. “What do I do?”

Lord Mercury set the needle against the wax cylinder
he had already placed in the phonograph. There was a crackle, and
the opening notes of Strauss’s waltz slipped quietly into the
ballroom. The delicate pizzicato seemed to echo the anxious
quivering of his nerves. Old grief, he thought, and irritation at
Jones. Who was still standing with his—

“One does not waltz with one’s hands in one’s
damn
pockets.”

“One offers one’s most sincere apologies.”

There was a comedically well-timed orchestral boom
from the phonograph, as if Strauss had deliberately written the
piece to make Lord Mercury look silly in front of Anstruther Jones.
“Position,” he said, “is very important. Under no circumstances
should the dancing couple stand vulgarly close. That is for
Europeans. You should clasp the lady’s hand, and place your own
hand at her waist thus.” He demonstrated on himself. “Neither any
higher nor any lower, certainly not
embracing
her, and you
must only touch her lightly. You are not, under any circumstances,
to press your hand upon her.”

“Why?” asked Jones. “Will she break?”

“No, but she would probably find you pawing at her
with barbaric enthusiasm deeply unpleasant.”

Jones tilted his head, the mischief still in his
eyes. “Are you friends with many women?”

“I have many female acquaintances. Now, please
attend me as I demonstrate the basic steps.” Lord Mercury’s heels
clicked far too loudly as he made his way to the centre of the
dance floor. Knowing Jones was watching him made him aware of
himself in peculiar ways: the flow of his coat over his hips, the
cling of his trousers to his thighs. “The gentleman begins like
this: on the beat, left foot, as so, then the right, and another
step with the left, like this. And no galloping, Jones. Remember
you are dancing with a lady, not a racehorse. And, after that, you
simply continue, left-right-left—are you attending?—for the next
six beats.”

“I’m attending.”

It was . . . It was . . . beyond strange, dancing
with an imaginary partner in an empty ballroom for Anstruther
Jones. Lord Mercury knew he was a good dancer—he was renowned for
it, in fact—and, as a general rule, he enjoyed it. But now he
wasn’t sure what was wrong with him. Light-headed and hot and
absurdly exposed.

“And then the . . . then the . . .” He had no reason
to be out of breath, but nevertheless he was. His heart was beating
hard enough to choke him. “Then the gentleman reverses his steps,
like this, in order that the couple may continue about the
room.”

“I think I can manage that.”

“Good.” Relief rolled through him. It was only
dancing. It shouldn’t have felt as though he knelt naked at the
man’s feet. “Now to put it into practice. Take your posi—” And that
was when Lord Mercury realised precisely what this lesson entailed.
For some reason—perhaps self-protection—his mind had slid away from
the reality of it. Or perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps the part of him
that was weak and fleshly and traitorous had wanted this all
along.

“Do you want to lead?” The gentleness in Jones’s
voice was mortifying. Magnified, somehow, too, by the silence as
the cylinder reached its end.