Page 3 of Ash and the Butterfly

Upon entering Bexley Hall, Grace and Aunt Amelia were greeted by Charlie’s brother John Calthorpe. The new earl was a neat, personable gentleman in his early forties, eyes pleasantly crinkled, only truly interested in animals that could be ridden, hunted, or fished, though he’d always admired his brother’s devotion to the study of the “boring tiny ones.” Though the man was understandably somber now, Grace recollected Calthorpe as warm, devoted to his wife and their three boisterous young sons. Lady Agnes and the children were away visiting her mother, to Calthorpe’s subdued relief. “It’s chaotic enough, here,” he’d muttered.

Grace was seen to a room decorated in hues of rose, with framed pressed flowers on the walls and a view of the garden that featured bright plants arranged to follow a spiraling design of small stones. Atop the room’s dresser perched a taxidermied ferret wearing an Elizabethan ruff and tiny crown, posed in an eternal chivalrous bow. Books lined the table by the bed. She peered at the spines and realized they were all authored by Charlie.

Suddenly, she was crying again, and hugging the books to her chest. A strange aspect of death—feeling the loss yet not being able to believe it. The truth that Charlie’s life had ended seemed impossible, antithetical to everything about the man’s vibrance.

Grace felt a shot of fear. What if she was never again treated the way Charlie treated her? Fundamentally, he saw her as someone smart and interesting, with an inner life worth investigating. So, so soon , Grace would become The Honorable Mrs. Randolph St. George. And she had little hope that her future husband would ever see her at all.

This short time in Charlie’s home was more than one goodbye. It was a farewell to he r friend ... and to a time in her life when anyone cared at all what lived between her ears.

Even with its charred, boarded-up corner, the Bexley Museum and Library was one of the most beautiful buildings Grace had ever seen. It stood alone in the landscape, surrounded by ancient groves and rolling hills, a brisk fifteen-minute walk from Bexley Hall. One moment, all Grace could see was trees. The next, around a bend in the path, the building came into view, massive and solid, its cream stone walls almost luminous. Charlie had commissioned it in a harmonious Classical Greek style, but incorporated nods to the architecture and materials of an Indian palace.

Upon stepping into the lofty entrance hall, Grace was greeted by a taxidermied tiger and a real orange tree growing out of the floor. She spun, staring at all the beauty.

Philip led her and Aunt Amelia to the library. The walls of the large, hexagonal room held floor-to -ceiling bookcases. There was a long wooden table, and two leather chairs before a cavernous fireplace. The ceiling was domed, painted with a gilded spiral containing scenes of gods bestowing wisdom upon mortal men. Through a door, Grace glimpsed a solarium with green plants.

Amelia settled by the fireplace with her book, while Philip led Grace to the table. It bore marginally organized piles of paper scrawled with sums and scratched-out keys—evidence of the scientists’ failures. In the center of the table were four large linen-bound notebooks, as well as a smaller one with a weathered leather cover.

Philip waved to the journals. “Here, Bexley’s entire vision lives and dies. Not to put too fine a point upon your task. We—you—have less than a week. Tea? Coffee? Strong spirits?”

“A bit of each, to start, followed by opium whenever you can manage it.”

Philip chuckled. “Deadening your brain aside, we are prepared to provide you with any assistance you need. We can rotate in a professor to help test keys, and we can bring someone in full-time ... ”

“Thank you. It doesn’t take long to know whether a key works. And I may find something important, auditioning solutions. For now, I’d prefer to work alone. I understand the urgency, I assure you.”

He nodded, grateful. “Sweet Grace. Thank the holy infant in his manger for your brilliance.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“Bexley was sure.” He rose. “Well. I shall be in the exhibition hall, attempting to bring order to chaos. Drop in if—”

A voice in the doorway interrupted him. “Denton, you’re needed in the—”

The voice stopped abruptly. When she looked up, she saw why.

Luke Ashburton stood in the doorway that led to the exhibition hall, arms full of empty shadowboxes. He was looking at her with an expression of disdain so potent it almost seemed to surprise him more than her.

Like Philip, Ashburton had changed since Grace last saw him. He seemed broader-shouldered , his cheeks a bit hollower, skin tanned from all the out-of -doors physical effort of his travels. His abundant head of unruly, curling brown hair, however, was unchanged. As was his slightly crooked nose, and the white scar that bisected his eyebrow, creating a small gap in its line. As well as his uncommon, lean height—the doorway seemed suddenly lower with him standing in it.

Also the same: his arrogant affect. Everything from the cant of his brow to the set of his mouth spoke of a man as convinced of his own brilliance as he was of the ordinariness of most everyone else, including Grace.

Grace, most of all.

Now, facing Luke Ashburton for the first time in two years, Grace’s right palm grew hot. The memory of contact with his cheek when she ended their final encounter by slapping him.

I would rather die than touch a man like you.

Pity, as it’s all you were born for.

“The cavalry has arrived,” Philip said, before relieving Ashburton of half his burden of frames. “Don’t be rude, Ash, thank the lady for saving every hide in this lofty establishment.”

“I haven’t saved anything yet,” Grace murmured.

And at that moment, the beast said exactly the same thing : “She hasn’t saved anything yet.”

She felt her face catch flame. She knew violent color must even now be spreading down her neck, across her décolletage, and she cursed her inability to hide her feelings.

Meanwhile, Ashburton at least had the manners to look embarrassed that he’d spoken the thought aloud. “We are most grateful for your help, Miss Chetwood,” he now amended, stiffly, and gave an abbreviated bow, awkwardly keeping his armload in place.

“It is my honor,” she said. “I wish nothing more than to see the earl’s museum open exactly as he’d dreamed it.”

“Well,” Ashburton said. She expected him to follow with some easy sentiment. Well, we have every faith in you. Well, all you can do is try your best. Well, let me know if I can be of assistance.

But he couldn’t seem to make the words come. So allergic was he to saying the slightest kind thing to her.

“Well,” she replied, allowing her voice to go a little sharp.

“Come along, Ash, let’s allow the lady to work in peace.”

Ashburton regarded her for a last moment. She felt rather like a flea under that gaze. Then, with an allegedly respectful tip of his head, he turned on his heel and exited. Philip followed.

Never mind the arrogant, curly-haired demon. Grace had work to do.

Though the fifth journal was smaller, it seemed to employ the same cipher as the larger ones. Grace carefully studied them, and began to make a mental list of approaches she would try.

Being but a room away from her least favorite person added strain to her concentration. She found she had to rise frequently to pace, shake out her limbs, regain her focus.

It was absolutely ridiculous. She’d spoken to Luke Ashburton twice in her blessed life before this day. Inexcusable to be distracted by a snide, superior man she’d spoken to twice. Especially when the first of those two encounters dramatically misrepresented his character.

Luke Ashburton had seemed kind , the first night they met.

That was the true jape of it, how wrong Grace had been.

In her defense, she had heard of him before she saw him, and everything she’d heard had flattered the man. Third son of a baron, devoted to a life of the mind. Ambitious explorer. Wrote a book about moths with such gripping prose that it became fashionable for members of the ton to be seen promenading with a copy tucked under an arm. Discovered a new species of snake right here in England. Despite having no title and no significant wealth—rumor held that he lived in a four-room townhome flat near but not in Mayfair—he was, owing to his growing notoriety in academic circles and the truism that brilliant gentlemen who travel the world tend to accumulate riches eventually, considered an intriguing and passably viable prospect.

It helped that Ashburton was attractive, in a bookish, aloof way. “Appealingly asymmetrical,” she’d heard a woman call him, referring to the crookedness of his aquiline nose, which brought a hint of the pugilist to his otherwise refined features. His angular height only added to the compelling effect. As did the unsmiling, thoughtful expression his face tended to fall into as he watched.

He always watched, Grace would come to understand.

They’d first met at the Marwells’ ball, early in the season. Grace and her friend Clara Abernathy had approached a circle of acquaintances at the periphery of the ballroom. Among them was a curly-haired man she’d never encountered, taller, slimmer, somehow more serious than the rest. Grace watched his gaze move over the crowd, thorough, inquisitive, and she was seized with the desire to be the focus of it.

It triggered butterflies in her stomach, which, as ever, made her giggle, and it was her giggle that made him look her way.

She could have sworn the sound of her laugh amused him—that is to say, that he liked it. Later he would call it out as one of her worst traits. But in that moment, he looked intrigued. And when he looked at her, something in the way his eyes traveled over her form and to her face stopped her in her tracks.

She was used to men’s gazes fixating on her hips, her breasts, her soft arms. The shape of her body seemed to negate curiosity beyond its particulars. If a man bothered to meet her eyes, there was something lascivious in his, as though the lushness of her form told him something wicked about her character.

Not so with Ashburton. He took in her form briefly, with a shimmer of frank appreciation, but when his gaze landed on her face, it held extraordinary self-awareness . As if to say that he knew . He knew what her appearance must make people—men—think of her. And he would not disappoint her by jumping to the same conclusions.

And then, he read what was in her eyes. A comprehension that there was something different about him. Curiosity.

Something was happening, in the blink of an eye. Two strangers, conversing without words, agreeing via twin slight smirks that they were meeting under ridiculous circumstances. But nevertheless, intrigued by one another.

Philip had been there with his wife Catherine, and introduced Ashburton as a colleague, with whom he and the Earl of Bexley had gone on a recent “scientific adventure.” Ashburton had teased Philip, pointing out that the man had never in his life read a scientific text. “I prefer to learn in the field,” Philip said, unruffled. “Reading sends me to sleep.” He winked at Grace and Clara. Grace, to her consternation, giggled again.

And then, a pause, one waiting for Grace to fill it. But in that moment, Ashburton’s presence tied her tongue. She was noticing that his eyes were more gray than blue and wondering if it plagued him that his curly hair refused to stay in place.

Then Clara said something charming that Grace did not mark at all. Ashburton turned his full attention to her.

Grace would later wonder if things might have ended less harshly had she declared herself when she could, when he was open to considering her a person with interests and depth, and not merely a vapid social climber. What if she had mentioned that she read voraciously, philosophy and scandal sheets alike, or that her particular passions included not only fashion but also the geometric interpretation of imaginary numbers?

But she’d gone mute, because she found the light in his eyes so sharp and unusual. She didn’t yet know that the light was merely extreme self-regard .

She did go soft in the head, so in a way, she deserved it. That he came to regard her as an idiot.

He’d filled the silence with a dry remark, and Clara had parried it with one of her own.

Grace had stood there and giggled.

Grace worked into the night, sometimes at the table, sometimes leaning against a bookcase, enjoying the soft support of leather spines, sometimes wandering, making her mental list.

The only positive aspect of her work was that eventually, it so consumed her thoughts that she was able to push away vitriolic musings about the arrogant varlet in the exhibition hall. By the time Aunt Amelia came to collect Grace for bed, Grace hadn’t thought of him once in at least five minutes.