Page 11 of The Lady Sparks a Flame (The Damsels of Discovery #2)

11

I…think I have got hold of a good thing, but can’t say; it may be a weed instead of a fish that, after all my labour, I may at last pull up.

—Michael Faraday

“This was a terrible decision,” Sam declared in the wake of an abominable luncheon of undercooked dumplings and overcooked carrots.

None of the women surrounding Sam had the grace to look the least bit ashamed. They’d lured him into their trap with the promise of post-luncheon tea and he’d fallen for it.

“There are some who look down upon slapkopf because it is a game the peasants play in Bavaria,” said the marchioness as she examined her cards. “I find it more pleasant than quadrille or skat, myself.”

“Yes, it is a good game, except—”

“ Slapkopf ,” Karolina cried. Startled, Sam jumped, then ducked too late to avoid her open-handed smack in the back of his head. “I win,” she crowed merrily, sweeping the cards toward her.

Rubbing the back of his head—Karolina was stronger than she appeared—Sam clenched his teeth and ignored Phoebe, who sat with her cards covering her mouth.

Laughing at him again, no doubt. He’d been slapped in the back of his head so often in the past hour, it was a wonder his eyes remained in his head.

“How…why did you get to call slapkopf ?” Sam asked. “I thought you had to have won at least three rounds.”

Karolina launched into a detailed explanation that made no sense about acorns and leaves and what have you, while the marchioness recounted the points and Phoebe interjected a caustic observation every two seconds.

Except.

They weren’t caustic anymore.

“Now, if Phoebe had won twice in a row, you could have called slapkopf .”

He scratched his head. “Are you certain the game is called slap kopf ? I can’t imagine the Bavarians smacking each other in the back of the head at the card table. Seems to me it would lead to more than a few duels.”

Karolina shook her head. “No, Mr. Fenley. This is how it is played; I am certain. My sisters and I have played it all our lives. Now, it is Moti’s turn to deal.”

The food had not gotten hotter or more appetizing, nor was the manor less cold and haunted, but things had changed since the afternoon Sam questioned the purpose of still life portraits and found himself in agreement with Jonas. He had been given tacit permission to leave off the honorifics when he spoke with Phoebe and Karolina, though he never took the liberty of using their pet names.

Add that to the many times since then he’d fallen over some stray piece of furniture and made them laugh. Plus, even Lady Fallowshall found the ridiculous compliments he came up with amusing.

By simply paying attention to their moods and being himself, Sam had been judged and found acceptable.

It should annoy him that these noblewomen , especially a villainess of majestic proportions, cared one way or another what he said or did.

Instead, it occupied far too much of his brain space.

Sam was under no delusions that he was as intelligent as his sister or the rest of her scientist friends. A good two-thirds of what they said went in one of his ears, buzzed around his skull like a dying wasp behind a curtain, then flew back out the other ear. Yesterday at breakfast (lukewarm gruel, lukewarm eggs, fried curd cakes with jam) he’d asked Phoebe whether she had continued her studies during her travels.

’Twas as if he’d found a key, unlocking a secret stash of charm and excitement that had been hidden for years. Phoebe went into excruciating detail about electrolysis, someone named Faraday, and a cascade of terms he assumed had to do with whatever branch of science it was that interested her. Might have been physics. Might have been chemistry. Might have been chemophysics.

Sam wasn’t certain that was a scientific discipline, but it should be.

More surprising was that Karolina had followed along with the explanation and then asked a question about volcanic piles or something. Phoebe’s face had lit like a candle as she answered.

If you asked him, volcanic piles sounded uncomfortable, but no one asked him. They did laugh at him, though, when he fell up a flight of stairs.

Twice.

He didn’t mind. Their laughter was clean and real, like a cup of fresh water after drinking brackish water.

That night after supper (cold potato soup, gristly beef roast, more boiled gnome eggs) Karolina and her mother invited him to play cards again, but Sam wasn’t falling for it.

“The back of my head will be flat if I play with you ladies,” he complained, only half joking. “I am a man of some stature, and if you keep slapping me in the head, it might diminish my masculine charms.”

When Sam waggled his eyebrows with the last remark, Karolina and her mother laughed delightedly, as they should.

Phoebe rolled her eyes.

Jonas, who had come in to feed the measly fire, snorted like a bull at Sam’s words. Or at least Sam assumed it was his words to which Jonas objected.

“You play cards because the English cannot play chess.”

All of them turned to stare at Jonas when he made the declaration.

Karolina peered over at Sam, who hovered at the doorway, thinking to escape back to his room. “Do you play chess, Mr. Fenley?”

Did he play chess?

Well, he had mastered the subtle art of manipulating the public at the early age of ten. He had convinced princes to buy baubles, earls to buy tin soldiers, and dukes to buy key rings. He had outmaneuvered his competitors when he figured out that those enormous mansions in London were too expensive for the coin-poor aristocrats, and quietly invested in buying them up and then breaking them down.

If that wasn’t chess, what was it?

“Of course,” Sam said. What he left unsaid was, I can also ice-skate and climb mountains. Theoretically.

“Oh, wonderful,” said Karolina. “I love chess.”

Feck.

“I will play you,” Jonas said.

Even Phoebe raised her brows at this.

A sly grin twisted the edges of Jonas’s lips. Revenge perhaps for Sam having seen him sprawled on the floor like a rag doll a few days earlier. If Sam said no, he would disappoint Karolina. If he said yes, he’d have to sit opposite Jonas for an extended period.

Lose-lose.

“What a splendid idea,” Sam declared.

From Phoebe’s expression, the smile Sam dredged up and pasted on his face was in no way convincing, but Karolina clapped her hands in approval. He tried not to drag his feet over to where Jonas pulled out a second table, then opened a small drawer to reveal a polished rosewood and ivory chess set.

Funny, now that Sam wasn’t playing cards, the ladies switched to a nonlethal game of skat while they watched the men. Their palms must be too sore from smacking him on the head all afternoon.

“We won’t bet money,” Jonas said. “ This time.” His fingers were thrice the size of the tiny pawns, but he set the board deftly, quietly humming a tune.

Then came the slaughter.

“Well,” said Karolina when it was done, her voice overly sweet as though she spoke to a dying man. “Well, that was an interesting strategy, Mr. Fenley. Was there a reason you chose the Spanish opening?”

Sam opened his mouth, trying desperately to conjure a brilliant lie, but gave up and shrugged instead.

Spanish opening. Was that a chess term for failing spectacularly ?

“Perhaps you played too many hands of slapkopf today?” the marchioness asked.

“Oh dear,” said Karolina sympathetically. “You fell over that bench this morning as well.”

Phoebe’s mouth twisted as a smile fought for dominance with her usual pout of superiority. “I suspect you may be fighting the effects of continuous brain injuries, Mr. Fenley,” she said.

“There is nothing wrong with my head,” Sam retorted.

“Then we should play again,” said Jonas.

“I don’t think…Oh, look you’ve set the board up again,” Sam said. “Lovely.”

Horrific, more like. The second game was even more embarrassing.

“Do you have many headaches?” Karolina asked Sam afterward.

Sam glared at Jonas. Wonderful. Now the Hunt women were wondering if he were damaged.

“You play too much,” said Jonas.

What was this supposed to mean?

“Playing is the point of the game, my dear sir,” Sam said.

Shadows gathered around the other man. He frowned as though Sam had insulted him.

“Not here,” Jonas chided him. “Here, the point of the game is to win.”

The words hung heavy in the cold of the room, and Sam knew Jonas was not speaking of chess.

For a man who hoarded his words like coins, Jonas was a skilled teacher. Without saying anything more about Sam’s abysmal performance, he set out each piece, then demonstrated its moves. Slowly, Jonas repeated their earlier game, moving the pieces on both sides of the board, humming the entire time, in such a way that Sam saw what he’d done wrong.

In the next game, Sam moved his pieces, and Jonas would move them back and show Sam alternate ways to move, never saying much other than “Back, over, try again.”

Every so often Sam would glance over to see Phoebe staring back at him and Jonas, a speculative expression on her face.

Speculative.

Not angry or dismissive, the two most familiar expressions Phoebe wore when she encountered the outside world.

But not with Sam. Not anymore.

They finished with an abrupt “Good enough” from Jonas. He stood up from the table and nodded at Sam. “Again, tomorrow night,” he said, then left the room without a backward glance.

Sam stared at the board, humming along to the same tune Jonas had favored, and replayed the last four moves. Easy to see how this game could become addictive.

“You are an admirer of Beethoven?”

When Phoebe sat opposite him, Sam started. The fire was mostly embers. Karolina and the marchioness had gone to bed without him noticing.

“Who is Beethoven?” he asked, flicking the pawns back into line.

“The piece you were humming,” she answered, moving her pawns so they were off-center.

How appropriate.

“Who is Jonas?”

There were still a few candles lit, but the curtains had been closed in the parlor to keep the worst of the draft away, and shadows lunged along the sideboards and turned in slow circles on the ceiling.

Phoebe lifted one brow and pursed her lips, but rather than a rebuff, she let out a thin sigh.

“He is a…relative, of sorts.”

In the dark, Phoebe’s eyes were the black of a night’s sky—a sky that would be purple in the light of a star, but no stars twinkled back at him. Her long fingers kept troubling the chess pieces, picking them up and moving them round, the only sign of her restless nature.

“Of the sort born on the other side of the blanket?” he asked, using polite society’s term for a bastard.

“You might say that, if you were rude enough,” she allowed.

“Not much of a talker,” Sam said.

“He had a stutter. My father used to mock him terribly for it.”

A draft had found its way past the thick brocaded curtains billowing against the wall.

“Will you tell me?” Sam asked. “Will you tell me why you are all horribly, horribly sad? Why your half brother serves us dinner, why your mother keeps opening windows, and you talk to empty picture hooks?”

Phoebe’s face closed and she sat still, staring at the queen held loosely in her palm. “What does it matter?” she asked finally. “We aristocrats with our eccentricities are the last of a dying way of life. Soon the world will belong to men like you, unburdened by history. There is no point to talking about what we cannot change.”

“Men like me?” he asked quietly. “What about women like you? Your mother might be muted by her upbringing, but you are from a new generation, too. You and those secret scientists will run the world someday.”

With a cynical laugh, she stood. “Women like me will never run the world. We are a man’s worst nightmare.”

Sam’s head jerked in response. “What nonsense is this? Beautiful. Brilliant. You are a man’s dream, Lady Hunt.”

Not his dream, though. The last thing Sam wanted to dream about was the fire and ice that made up Phoebe Hunt. He liked sweet dreams of cakes and pies. He wanted to dream of Karolina.

Or he would, if he could fall asleep in this damned mausoleum.

“I don’t care what men dream, Mr. Fenley,” Phoebe said. “That is my fatal flaw. I do not care. How I look, how I smell, whether supper is on the table, or how your day has been. I do not care.”

Liar.

Phoebe cared. She cared too much, and it hurt, so she numbed herself to everything, the bad and the good.

He didn’t say this, though. She would only deny it.

Besides, Sam wasn’t certain if she were armed.

Phoebe opened her hand and let the queen fall to the chessboard. “Good night, Mr. Fenley.”

“G’night, Phoebe,” Sam said, but she had already walked away.

···

“Moti?”

Phoebe stopped at the entrance to the nursery and had to hold on to the doorframe when the scent hit her.

The barren nursery still smelled like girl sweat and paper, fear and love, cold porridge and old biscuits hidden beneath pillows for midnight snacks.

The room had been cleared of the cribs that once stood side by side, covered with moth-eaten netting and home to a motley assortment of rag dolls and puppies. They’d a nurse, once upon a time. Phoebe remembered her whiskers, which tickled their eyelids when she kissed them good night, and the crooked fingers that sewed tiny versions of what she loved best. Babies and dogs.

Only a handful of books lay scattered on the bottom shelf of a dusty bookcase where once there had been piles of cloth-covered volumes, a precious few in Lithuanian. A clothes stand stood empty, and the golden curtains stained with whatever liquids one encounters in a nursery had been removed from the newly cleaned windows.

This room had been their refuge, the safest place in the manor, since the men never climbed past the first set of stairs. Terrible storms would roll across the countryside to smash up against the Pennines to the south, but the thunderous winds and lashing rain were a far-off countermeasure to the silly songs and haunting stories Phoebe and her sisters told one another in the flickering candlelight.

Phoebe rubbed her eyes as the past superimposed itself upon the present and the room was simultaneously full of color and bare of any sign of life.

“Moti?” she whispered.

“Here.”

The first step pained her, but Phoebe walked across the empty room to where her mother sat on the floor, back against the bare wall, heedless of the dust and grime. Without curtains, the windows let in the peculiar light of this part of the country, blue and gray with a hint of green, which, when it hit the yellowing walls, muted even the brightest hues.

Beneath one of the windows stood a wooden bucket. A small puddle of something brackish had spilled and smelled of vinegar.

Phoebe inhaled sharply and knelt at her mother’s side even though she would ruin her skirts.

“Moti, were you cleaning the windows yourself?” she asked.

Moti looked at her hands, red and wrinkled, and grimaced. “No one will come here to clean. Not even Jonas. They are too afraid.”

Phoebe did not reach out to touch her mother. When Moti considered wandering away from the world, she did not want to be touched.

“Leave it, then. Let the windows stay dirty,” Phoebe said.

A broom leaned against the wall inside a circle of clean floorboards.

“Are you tired?” Phoebe asked. “You go lie down and I will finish—”

“Look in the closet,” Moti interrupted.

Phoebe froze. Her mother’s beautiful eyes shone clear, and she spoke in English. This was a good sign. Still, there could be anything in that closet. Or nothing.

A consequence of living with a parent who crossed the boundaries of sanity was the temptation to follow them. To leave behind a world becoming more difficult to navigate with each passing year and spend your days with ghosts.

To give up.

To let go.

One of the reasons Phoebe used to cut herself was that the pain pinned her to the present. When she split her skin with the edge of her blade, thoughts of past or future were wiped away by the sight of her private abomination, the only way she knew how to stay in the present without resorting to madness.

For many years, Moti spent days and sometimes weeks in the company of the unseen and the dead. Precipitated by a visit from the marquess, her mother would pull into a tiny ball of a being, her retreat marked with sudden outbursts of creativity; painting murals on the walls or dyeing yards of muslin and draping a room with the cloth in a blinding maze of still-dripping material.

Phoebe’s oldest sister, Alice, showed signs of joining her mother in her journeys when she turned seventeen. A nervous girl, Alice developed a fear of sleeping during adolescence. At night Alice would walk the halls of the manor, tallow candle in hand, holding conversations with invisible beings, staving off the inevitable surrender to exhaustion.

Their father decided Alice suffered a condition of the womb.

The doctors of the day agreed, opening asylums for women who displayed symptoms of “female hysteria.” The patients were mostly wives sent by their husbands. Women who were prone to saying no or stop or disagreeing with the man of the house one too many times.

“What she needs is a babe or two,” the marquess once opined at the breakfast table while holding a broadsheet in front of his face. “Women who don’t breed go mad.”

Indeed, the common wisdom among the medical profession was hysteria might be a disease of the mind, but its effects had a direct impact on a woman’s reproductive system. In other words, women who said no to sex with their husbands were diseased. Conveniently the reverse was true as well. Women who wanted too much sex or enjoyed sex were also suffering female hysteria, and daughters or sisters who were guilty of intercourse outside of marriage with men or women were committed to these asylums until they were “cured” and vowed never to commit such an unnatural act again.

Though he never looked up over the paper that day, her father knew they hadn’t nodded in agreement. He’d lowered his arms slowly, eyes flicking across their faces like tiny slaps; the sight of so many daughters offending him, as though he’d forgotten they were there. Breathing in the tiniest hint of disagreement, his nostrils quivered.

“Isn’t that so, wife?” he asked. “That a woman’s behavior can make her barren. Or unable to produce a boy child.”

Caught in the currents of danger Phoebe stared at her father as one might a cobra rising from the basket. Her mother sat to his right, head bowed, silent, thankfully. Surrounded by the women of his family, her father might be eating alone for all he took notice of them until he settled on whom he would single out for condemnation. Mostly it was Moti. That day it was Alice, who’d come late to breakfast, then wandered off, crying silently.

Phoebe had loaded marmalade onto her toast, hoping it would help her swallow past the tension in her throat.

“My lord, I wish you would reconsider.” Her mother’s voice had rung out in the anxious silence. “Can we not give Alice a season first? She is from a distinguished family. To have a beautiful dress and dance at a ball, every girl should do such things.”

“Out of the question.” He hadn’t bothered to extrapolate, just buttered his toast.

Phoebe had known what would happen next. Still, she prayed silently, Don’t argue, Moti. Please .

“My lord, I do not understand.”

The smack of her father’s palm against the breakfast table had shocked a small gasp from them all. As his head swiveled and his glare fell upon her mother, Phoebe and her sisters began at once to fade, melting into the furniture, ghosting their way to the door. The odor reminiscent of burning refuse; the scent of fear and a harbinger of danger crawled down the back of Phoebe’s throat. Numb limbs carried her to safety, so she never saw what happened next. Imprinted on her brain was the jumble of pronouncements that still echoed through the years.

“Perhaps we harvest the funds for a season from the money tree out back?” His voice, so calm.

“There are many ways to economize, my lord…”

“…tried to bring you happiness and all I hear are complaints and demands…” Now he adopted a wounded air. It twisted Phoebe’s insides into a tight ball that took days to unravel again.

The more her mother’s voice rose, the quieter her father’s replies.

“You’ve no concept of the cost of a season, do you? Are you truly so selfish you would rob the bread from your children’s mouths to pay for whatever new gowns you will insist on for yourself and the girl?”

Crouched outside the dining room like a coward with the rest of her sisters, Phoebe listened to her father pull apart her mother’s arguments as a child might pull the wings off a fly. The truth was her father was ashamed of his wife with her heavy accent and odd ways. His trips to London were for his pleasure; this made obvious by the way he looked upon his return to Prentiss Manor. Well-fed, newly dressed, smelling of cigars and expensive cologne.

Daughters could be bargained away like cows or horses without having to pay for them to be displayed.

“How can you take pleasure in disagreeing with me when your defiance poisons your womb?” he’d asked, calmly.

Until the rage came.

Yet, women were the ones suffering hysteria?

“Do you not grieve for the children you have killed?” he demanded.

Phoebe shook with anger at each accusation. The worst of the fighting ended with this—what her father saw as her mother’s ultimate betrayal. Her inability to give him a living son.

The words were indistinct, but her mother’s pain came through clearly.

“…hope this time…everything the doctor told me…”

“I have told you repeatedly your disobedience is the cause. You are a most unnatural creature.”

Waving goodbye to their sister, bundled into a carriage on the first leg of a long journey to Lithuania two months later, they’d hoped marriage and motherhood would keep Alice in the present and out of the clutches of ghosts.

Phoebe and her sisters had shed a tear or two, but Moti had cried for days after Alice left. Phoebe reckoned they were selfish tears. She thought her mother cried because the rest of her children showed no signs of a similar madness and she felt somehow ill-done by them. She wanted company.

“There is nothing bad in there, Bee,” her mother said, startling Phoebe from the quagmire of memories lapping at her toes. Every time she entered this room, Phoebe catapulted somewhere back in time and lost herself in reminiscences.

Never were they happy times her mind chose to revisit.

Phoebe rose and crossed to the closet, one hand on the doorknob.

“Moti,” she said, not opening the door, “if you hadn’t come here and been married to Father, what would you have done?”

“What would I have done?” Moti echoed, one eyebrow rising in an expression of confusion. “I would have married someone else and had babies. It is what women must do.”

Phoebe pulled a breath in through her nose and held it, staring at the tarnished brass beneath her fingers.

“Yes, I know, but if you hadn’t come here, would you have had fewer children, or gotten a painting instructor, or learned to ride, or…”

Moti waved her delicate hand in the air, dismissing the questions.

“Why do you ask such questions? Ever since you were a child. Why? Why?” She’d been staring out the window, but Moti now turned her gaze toward Phoebe.

Expecting the question to have been rhetorical, Phoebe said nothing, but Moti wanted an answer.

“Tell me, Bee. You are a scientist. You ask questions to which none of us have answers. Why?” Moti asked.

“Because I have no faith,” Phoebe replied.

Moti moved her mouth as though she were tasting the truth of this admission.

Phoebe continued. “I have no trust in benevolent beings, no desire to leave anything to so ridiculous a concept as fate. Because the earth must be solid beneath my feet.”

Her mother tilted her head, the northern light intent on siphoning her outrageous beauty. Phoebe was struck not by how young her mother appeared but how little the terrible events of her life had left a mark on her skin or hair. Her scars were on the inside.

“What do you do when there is no answer?” her mother asked quietly. “You cannot expect to go through life always in control. The world will shake you up and down no matter what.”

Tightening her hand on the doorknob, Phoebe pretended to consider Moti’s words. What her mother didn’t know was that Phoebe had figured out long ago how to sidestep a shaking world; camouflage weakness with sarcasm and drown desire for affection in a healthy dose of rage and despair.

“Open the door, Bee.”

Inside the closet were narrow shelves that once held the nursery’s bed linens. Only three shelves were occupied now. Two books, Chemical Manipulation, Being Instructions to Students in Chemistry and Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics , squatted on the second-to-bottom shelf. Chemical Manipulation was partly singed, but Experimental Researches looked untouched.

“Those books, they were the books you loved, yes?” Moti asked.

Phoebe couldn’t answer, her throat had closed. On the shelf above the two textbooks stood a handful of blackened glass flasks, two wooden stands she had built herself to replicate Faraday’s experiments on electromagnetism, and a handful of warped Faraday discs she had spent two years’ worth of pin money to obtain.

“I thought he’d burned it all,” she whispered finally.

Moti shrugged in that way she had of distilling their father’s monstrous deeds into matters of small importance.

“What he burned can be replaced.”

Phoebe closed her eyes and pressed her lips tightly together. She would not gainsay her mother, not after a gesture such as this. They both knew it for a lie, but only Moti believed the lie could transform into the truth.

Before she discovered the existence of women scientists, before she even thought of herself as a scientist, Michael Faraday had been Phoebe’s idol.

Historically, scientists had believed there were different kinds of electricity. That stuffy old Italian, Luigi Galvini, posited the force moving within a living being was “animal” electricity, separate from “static” electricity.

Faraday knew only one electricity exists, and different phenomena were caused by increasing the intensity and quantity of the same electricity.

Only one power.

While Faraday might have believed wholeheartedly in his religion, his work proved to Phoebe that religions were a way to keep the populace complacent. The church’s answer to why offered no room for competing theories, no margin for error, and ensured women were forever yoked to a purposeless life.

There was no all-knowing Father, capricious and vengeful, who fueled the world. Nor myriad spirits of water and trees, no miracles, and no ghosts.

Only electricity.

A flow of power without a gender or race.

The same power charging the sun charged her body. Her mother’s body. The world’s bodies.

Once Phoebe understood this, she understood why women scientists threatened men. Why the world was ambivalent toward scientists in general.

Science proved men and women were made of the same stuff. That the same life force flowed through colonizers and the people they oppressed. That a king was a king because he said so, not because anything holy that ran in his veins set him apart from his subjects.

Science is a truth hard to swallow.