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

2

I…express a wish that you may, in your generation, be fit to compare to a candle; that you may, like it, shine as lights to those about you.

—Michael Faraday

“I do not understand, Bee, how we can show our faces when strangers have walked through our home and touched our belongings. What would your father say?”

The delicate acidity of brandy fumes tickled inside Phoebe’s nose, and she savored the liquid in her mouth before swallowing. Her porcelain teacup held Calvados rather than Darjeeling, for she’d known this conversation would require a cartload of patience.

Since patience was one of Phoebe’s missing qualities, she substituted drinking for forbearance.

“Father is dead,” Phoebe said.

A quick uptake of breath followed this statement as her sister Karolina turned to stare up at the enormous portrait of the marquess that hung over the pink marble mantlepiece in the center of Hunt House’s formal parlor.

“Yes, he is dead,” the marchioness repeated, “but we still live, the three of us. What happens to our consequence now? You will return to the colonies, but your sister and I must remain to…continue. Somehow.”

Phoebe, Karolina, and their mother sat upon exquisitely embroidered seat cushions, cream silk with blue hyacinths. Their tea tray rested on a low, polished teakwood table. Behind her mother’s shoulder, however, the rest of the furniture lay shrouded in dustcloths. There were faint squares of darker color on the walls where paintings had been removed and a lone set of footsteps echoed on the floor tiles outside in the hallway where once dozens of servants had scurried.

It had been years since Phoebe encountered this very British setting of faded luxury, and the contrast with the sensible furniture and hand-braided rugs in her home in America was jarring.

“America is no longer a colony,” Phoebe reminded her mother, “but I will not leave until you’ve enough money to be secure, Moti.” Phoebe used the childish form of mother as her mother had used Phoebe’s childhood pet name.

“If you and Karolina wish to stay in London—” Phoebe began.

Moti set her teacup and saucer down with a discordant clank and rose from the silken settee, wandering to one of the windows that looked out over the square.

“I do not wish for this,” she said to the thick blue curtains that blocked most of the wan October sunlight.

Phoebe glanced at Karolina, but her younger sister kept her own counsel, appearing as composed as ever.

Quite a painting they would make.

Still Life with Women on the Edge of Destitution.

Missing from this portrait of the Hunt women were Phoebe’s four other sisters. Two of them were dead and two might as well have been once they married. Death was the last resort; marriage allowed her older sisters to escape, to live, and to never look back. Alice, their oldest sister, had married a Lithuanian count while Mari, the next in age, had married a neighbor’s son and moved to France with him. They hadn’t even come for their father’s funeral. An occasional package and a handful of letters were all Phoebe heard from them after they left England.

She didn’t begrudge them.

“Will you return home?” Phoebe asked her mother.

Moti said nothing as she pulled the curtains wide, pressing her forehead against the grimy windowpane. The first six months of mourning were over, thank God, and they all had changed from black dresses to half-mourning colors of purple and gray. Moti looked ethereal in a dove gray day dress with ivory lace at the high neck and bell-shaped cuffs.

“Home to Lithuania?” Karolina cradled a teacup in her slender hand, so pale a white, her skin matched the alabaster sheen of the fine porcelain. She, too, had switched over from her black dresses, for which Phoebe was grateful.

The Hunt women resembled corpses when dressed in black.

“We could stay with Alice and her count,” Karolina said.

“I don’t want to go home,” Moti whispered.

An invisible noose tightened about Phoebe’s neck; the sensation of suffocating beneath her mother’s misery. Her sight clouded except for tiny sparks of light outlining the furniture and her sister’s coiffure while a pinging like the tap of crystal against crystal rang in her ears.

In the past when such a sensation came over her, Phoebe retreated into herself to think about her latest scientific paper. She took refuge visualizing the various experiments in the induction of electric currents.

As a young woman, she’d been obsessed with the work of Michael Faraday. More specifically, the study of electrical currents; those invisible rivers of charges surging through space. The idea of it made her dizzy and happy at the same time. Energy flowed around her, even though she could not see it. If she could, Phoebe would reach out a hand and dip it into the river of electricity, let it seep into her veins and overwhelm the constant buzzing in her brain.

When the worst times were upon her, she would hide in her dressing room and clutch the velvet box that held her razor.

“My lady, you’ve a caller.”

The words broke her spell, and Phoebe fell back into her body, hard. Her mother dropped the curtain as though it were on fire and Karolina clenched the teacup to her chest.

“This is not a time for callers,” her mother said, looking at Phoebe for help. “We are not at home on Wednesdays.”

Phoebe knew her mother meant not available for social visits, but the phrase We are not at home gave her chills.

“Who is it, Jerome?” Phoebe asked.

The dour butler approached her and held out a silver tray. Upon it rested a rectangle of thick cardstock, gold-embossed printing covering the center of it.

How gauche.

Phoebe took the card and flipped it over in her hands while her mother and Karolina remained frozen.

If she got up and ran away right now, would they stay that way forever?

“Please, have Harriet send up another pot of tea and invite Mr. Fenley in,” Phoebe said to the butler.

As if she’d uttered a command to them, her mother and Karolina both began to move.

“Who is this Mr. Fenley thinking he might call at this time of day?” her mother asked, walking away from the windows to collect her gloves.

“Is he a friend of yours, Phoebe?” Karolina asked.

Phoebe ran a thumb over the embossing one more time, then threw the card on the table and put on her own gloves.

“I have no friends anymore, Karolina,” Phoebe said. “Only cherished enemies.”

···

Sam knew he had more pride than the average fellow. His early success gave him confidence lacking in most men his age. Occasionally, he’d meet someone like the Earl Grantham or Lord Greycliff, who’d seen organized violence, such as war, rather than the spontaneous violence occurring in the narrow streets where Sam had grown up. Those men’s brand of confidence was more polished, closer to the surface.

Sam’s certainty was belly deep. The result of pulling himself up from the bottom alongside his father, then reaching heights his father had no interest in attaining. Now, at twenty-five, Sam had made a fortune through his own resolve. That same resolve kept his spine straight and shoulders down as he entered the parlor of Hunt House and met the fierce gaze of Lady Phoebe Hunt.

Whenever Sam had visited Athena’s Retreat, he’d watched the lady from the corner of his eye.

Gads, but the woman was stunning.

The first time he’d tried his most persuasive smile on her, she’d frozen him with her icy purple stare, and he’d tripped over an end table. That would have been the end of it if she hadn’t attended one of Letty’s mathematical lectures wearing a rich, emerald-colored gown. Green gown, amethyst eyes, and a snow-white expanse of neck and shoulder. Like setting ladybugs out for a hedgehog, that combination had a heady impact on him.

That time Sam had barely said two words to the lady before Grantham knocked into him and Sam tumbled backward over a chair. Grantham had apologized, but by the time Sam righted himself, Lady Phoebe had disappeared. He never saw her again after that. She’d gone and blown things up on purpose and Grantham had her sent away.

Now Lady Phoebe examined him like a specimen as he walked in the room, and Sam stumbled when he saw all three women had the same purple-colored eyes.

They posed with the same grace and dignity; long necks, heart-shaped faces, the astringent smell of nobility, possessed of a beauty only the wealthy attained. Skin unblemished by sun or wind, white teeth from eating healthy food every day, and the absence of worry wrinkles around their eyes. Something else as well, some secret symmetry that made a man’s heart beat a little faster.

Who knows?

They might have purchased that secret as well.

“To what do we owe the pleasure of your company, Mr. Fenley?”

Sam bowed to the woman who came toward him. He assumed she was Lady Fallowshall, Phoebe’s mother, even though she looked only a few years older than her daughters.

Twin crevices bracketed her mouth and deep horizontal lines bisected her brows.

The marchioness must be a worrier.

“I recently had the pleasure of meeting your daughter Lady Phoebe again after a number of years,” Sam explained.

Years in which she’d been hiding out in America.

He flashed to the marchioness and then to Lady Phoebe a smile made brighter by years of Tomas’s Tin of Terrific Toothpowder. The other woman, Lady Phoebe’s sister, he assumed, flicked her gaze away from Sam to the enormous portrait above the unlit fireplace.

Sam followed her glance.

“What an…impressive portrait,” he said.

In fact, the painting was hideous. The Marquess of Fallowshall had been a handsome enough man. For some reason, however, he had requested to be painted in profile, accentuating an imposing nose—which he thankfully had failed to pass on to his daughters—his foot atop a dead stag, a hunting rifle raised in his right hand.

The man’s thin lips were pursed and his eyes narrow. He looked disappointed, as though there wasn’t enough blood or gore, as if the animal hadn’t experienced enough pain or terror for his taste.

Sam was not a hunter.

“Have you come to admire our artwork?” Lady Phoebe asked, her smile sharp as a knife. “You could have made an appointment.”

The sister mouthed something at Lady Phoebe, then blushed when she saw Sam watching her and dipped her head.

This must be the unmarried youngest sister. Sam had read the society gossip sheets before he came to visit. One sister lived in France, another lived in Lithuania, two were dead, one unmarried, and then there was Lady Phoebe, recently returned from America.

Lady Phoebe stared at Sam with the intensity of her fellow scientists yet managed to appear ambivalent over his existence, like her fellow aristocrats. She was taller than her mother and sister, her heart-shaped face thinner, and her shoulders stood out beneath the fine lawn of her dress. Whatever she’d been doing in America had given her muscles.

“I have come in answer to the advert you placed in my newspaper yesterday,” Sam said. Another few steps and he stood at the head of the low table in the middle of a lovely parlor set, two cushioned chairs and a settee. Having traded in such materials for years, Sam cataloged its worth and judged he could fetch a nice price for it.

“An advert?” The marchioness put a hand to her chest as though he’d committed some outrage.

“For the auction, Moti,” Lady Phoebe said. No one spoke while an exhausted-looking maid brought in another pot of tea and one more tea setting.

Once the maid left, the sister sitting in the far chair cleared her throat. Blushing, Lady Phoebe performed the introductions. Her blush intrigued him, hinting at a living being behind the mask of perfection she wore.

Sam took a seat. Lady Karolina offered him a biscuit on a delicate plate, then poured him tea. Announcing himself pleased to meet them, he set the plate on the table, biscuit untouched.

“It will be a spectacle, this auction,” he said affably.

Lady Fallowshall waved a hand before her face as tears appeared in the corners of her pansy-colored eyes.

“To think strangers here, touching our belongings, looking into our private spaces,” she lamented. Her accent pulled at the tops of her consonants; they sounded like raindrops on tin.

Lady Karolina pursed her lips and examined her gloved hands while Lady Phoebe made a pfft sound and sat straighter.

“If Father wished us to be spared such humiliation, he should have invested wisely,” she said.

To most folks, her words might sound hard, clacking against each other like drumsticks in a march. Sam knew better. He’d heard the same fear in women’s voices many times before when bills came due and IOUs were called in.

“Out of respect for you and your family, I have a suggestion,” Sam said.

The women stared at him as though he were a ghost.

Had he said something crude?

“Suggest away, Mr. Fenley,” said Lady Phoebe with a smile that conveyed only derision. “You must have heard along with everyone in London we have no coin and are forced to sell everything. Our circumstances are such we are willing to entertain even the most outrageous of suggestions.”

Ah, but the lady had a way with insinuation; a talent for making it sound as though she were doing Sam the favor.

Lady Karolina peered at him, and for the first time he saw the shadows beneath her eyes were nearly as purple as her irises.

All of London spoke of how Fallowshall had been living off his name for nigh on twenty years. When he died without an heir, these women had lost their protection.

Sam had no title and never would have one. He wanted the grease that came with a title. The way it opened doors otherwise locked to men of common birth. The one thing he could not buy.

Well, not yet .

“I don’t believe you’ll find my suggestion outrageous at all,” Sam said, smiling directly at Lady Karolina. Her creamy skin flushed beneath his stare. She wasn’t as regal as Lady Phoebe, but she didn’t scare the bejaysus out of him, either.

She would work.

This would all work.

Sam was convinced of it.

“What if someone took this off your hands?” he asked. “The house, the furnishings—all without having to see a pack of strangers wander through your home?”

Lady Karolina and her mother both looked to Lady Phoebe. Sam did as well in acknowledgment of where the power lay in the room.

Elegant to the point of iciness, she tilted her head a fraction of an inch in a way that conveyed many things without her having to say a word.

Things like, Continue to speak, for now, peasant.

Or, It would amuse me to see your head on a spike.

Also, My, what a broad set of shoulders on you. I command you to ravish me here and now.

Probably not that last bit.

“Mr. Fenley, are you telling us you are the answer to our problems?” Lady Phoebe asked, disbelief dripping from every crisp consonant.

Nothing cheered Sam more than a challenge.

“My lady, I’m not telling you, I’m promising you. Trust me and I’ll take care of your worries.”