Page 25 of The Lady Sparks a Flame (The Damsels of Discovery #2)

25

One has more happiness in oneself, in endeavoring to follow the things that make for peace.

—Michael Faraday

Some people thought Sam had an enormous ego. As though that were a bad thing. He supposed if he’d used his massive self-confidence for evil, or let it make him blind to the suffering of others, it would be a detriment.

The way he saw it, his ego kept him afloat when other men might be drowning.

When he woke, the day had passed and it was dark. He knew Phoebe had been gone for a while, because the other side of the bed was cold.

She’d left without waking him.

Without even a letter.

He’d been so tired from spending nights in gin halls and days rousting Welshmen, a few bouts of lusty lovemaking were all it took to send him into a sleep so deep, Phoebe could slip away.

Another man might have taken this as a sign Sam should do as Phoebe had told him. Let her go. Live a good life. Find a safe love.

His ego, however, had piped up loud and clear.

Sam Fenley was going to make Phoebe Hunt admit she loved him.

Because she did.

Phoebe had seen to the heart of him, seen the man behind the jokes and smiles. Every time she’d examined him, she’d come away with indisputable findings; he did deflect with humor, he did need to step back and appreciate his successes. She couldn’t have come up with these theories if she didn’t care for him, worry about him…love him.

And Sam loved Phoebe in return. Loved her in a way that had permeated his bones. This was a love he’d never wanted to find. He’d been permanently altered; loving this woman ran through his veins, his fingers, his mouth, his words, and his dreams from now until the day he died.

He hadn’t set out to look for this love; this love had found him. Sam and Phoebe were two lodestones and an invisible force guaranteed they would come together.

Always.

Sam set out for Hunt House readying his reasons for Phoebe to marry him. While their obvious compatibility in bed and similar taste for cheese-and-pickle sandwiches topped the list, he prepared plenty more arguments.

He could make her laugh.

She could make him be serious.

He was young and energetic.

She was older and wiser.

He would be honest with her.

She would return the favor.

Most important, they would champion each other. Sam knew Phoebe would approve of his breaking down social barriers erected by the titled class. Why, she’d pick up a club and help him demolish them. In return, Sam would use his broadsheets to protect and even advance her reputation until Phoebe could be free from the cloud of suspicion and return to the ladies at Athena’s Retreat.

He hailed a hack and made the short trip to Hunt House, where he encountered two of the three Hunt women. After only fifteen minutes, Sam added patience of a saint to the list of his desirable traits.

“What if she is face-to-face with lions?” The marchioness paced the length of the parlor in Hunt House where Sam had first met her. Color had returned to her skin and despite the brown tint to the light from outside, the lady looked more alive than he’d ever seen her.

Would she grow in substance the farther away she moved from Prentiss Manor?

“What of those bison she showed us in the folio of animal prints? They are too large to be tamed. They will eat her, I’m certain of it.”

“Lions are not found in the American west, my lady,” Sam assured her. He sat on one of the needleworked chairs and watched the marchioness march past Karolina, who scurried about with more tea and handed her mother a newly ironed handkerchief.

“Nor do highwaymen outnumber citizens, and Americans do, indeed, use napkins at table.” About that last part Sam wasn’t sure, but he needed the marchioness to leave off her crying and tell him where her daughter had gone.

“I told you, Moti,” Karolina said. She sat, finally, having refreshed the tea. In a day dress of lilac, she resembled a flower, her long neck a stamen and the ribbons of her cap fluttering like butterflies in the breeze left by her mother’s pacing. “Also, bison do not have teeth.”

Sam opened his mouth to refute this assertion, but shut it again when Karolina glared at him. Gads, but she had a way of looking at a man that was nearly as frightening as her sister’s.

The marchioness stopped abruptly and pointed at Sam. “You have come to propose to Karolina?”

Oh dear.

“He has come because he is madly in love with Phoebe,” Karolina announced before Sam said a word.

Well. That was…straight to the point.

“No, Karolina,” the marchioness remonstrated gently. “Mr. Fenley is to save you from that horrible Mr. Armitage.”

Karolina cocked her head and examined Sam as though he were a specimen. It would unnerve him if he weren’t used to women scientists doing the same.

“ Did you truly wish to marry me, Mr. Fenley?” Karolina asked. “You didn’t do a good job of attracting my interest.”

Again, Sam blessed his ego. It protected him from the offense another man might take at such an uncomplimentary statement.

“I thought we agreed, my interest lay with Lady Phoebe,” he said through gritted teeth, still smiling, however. “If my interest lay with you, I can assure you I would have swept you off your feet—”

“By falling into me and knocking me over?” Karolina asked sweetly.

“You cannot marry her, Mr. Fenley,” said the marchioness sharply, her thin fingers pulling at the lace of her handkerchief. She’d gone to the windows and twitched the floor-length curtains, peering down at the street below.

Now, this was getting confusing.

“I cannot marry…?”

“Phoebe,” the marchioness clarified, letting the curtains drop and coming to sit next to Karolina on the settee. “You cannot marry her. She is leaving England for a new life. A better life. This island is not large enough to hold her. She said…” Lady Fallowshall smiled and a knot formed in Sam’s chest. What this woman had endured, what she had lived through, and still she was capable of love. Amazing.

“…Bee said she wished to live beneath a sky so big, she remembers why she is on this earth. I think this means she wants to be louder than she ever could be in London. Loud enough to reach the sky.”

The marchioness wasn’t sad about Phoebe’s departure. She was proud.

Sam understood.

This had kept him from contemplating a future with Phoebe, even when he recognized that she’d gone and stolen his heart. Even when Sam had seen in Phoebe’s eyes that she’d gone and given him her heart in return.

Here was another hurdle he’d have to scale, but Sam had spent his life convincing women to take a chance on whatever he was offering. He’d enough money to buy whatever Phoebe needed to be happy. Another Athena’s Retreat, if that was what she wished. He’d raze Prentiss Manor to the ground and start over again with her.

“I can make sure she is happy here, my lady. I will make it my life’s mission,” he promised.

The marchioness did not look convinced.

Karolina, still gazing at him with sympathy, set down her teacup in its saucer and shook her head sadly.

“Best of luck, Mr. Fenley. I have relished this time coming to know my sister better. From what I have learned, though, I doubt you will dissuade her.”

Some of the hope bled out of him.

“Whatever Phoebe’s answer,” she continued, “I hope you know you are one of the few people who have ever made her laugh.”

“The lady laughs because he falls all the time.”

Delightful.

Jonas was here as well. Everyone was here except the one person Sam wished to see.

Dressed in fashionable trousers and a cutaway coat, Jonas wore a funereal black waistcoat and a cravat tied in a simple knot. He’d obviously not lost his custom of lurking, for he’d come into the room silently. Hopefully, the man would unlearn the ways of Prentiss Manor after a while spent in London and tromp around like an elephant—the way everyone else did.

Jonas went and stood behind the marchioness, setting his hands on the back of the settee and smiling down at her when she looked at him.

“You think to convince her without injury?” Jonas asked, breaking his gaze with the marchioness and fixing Sam with a glower. “Without injury to Phoebe,” he clarified. “You will definitely be injured.”

“Yes,” Sam declared. “No injuries. No worries. Please, just tell me where I can find her.”

···

An hour later, Sam stood on a rickety dock and stared at The Queen of the Seas . An impressive ship. If one enjoyed a protruding front.

Which Sam usually did.

“I said, Lady Phoebe Hunt!” he shouted to an agitated little porter hanging over the ship’s rail ten feet above him.

“You’re feeling a what now?” the porter called back.

For feck’s sake.

Holding a leather wallet, Sam carefully extracted a few paper notes and held them out toward the ship.

“I will give you two pounds if you find…Oh, well, that worked, didn’t it?”

Sure enough, as soon as the notes were flashed, the porter had scurried off out of sight. Now Sam had to find the words to woo the most recalcitrant woman he’d ever met. After his sisters, that is.

“Sam Fenley. What are you doing down there?”

Ah. Even at a distance, annoyance carved lines on her face. Beautiful woman.

His woman.

“My darling!”

That was sure to get a rise from her. Nothing he loved more than seeing this woman turn to fire rather than ice.

“I am telling you, Sam Fenley,” Phoebe shouted, “if you don’t stop calling me that, I will shoot you. I will.”

He didn’t doubt it. Rather than deterring him, it urged him on.

“You are my darling, Phoebe Hunt,” he called back.

Sam had racked his brains searching for the perfect words to convince Phoebe to stay in London. Luckily, he was a devoted reader of Mrs. Foster’s novels. Why, she was the inventor of the grand gesture. Every man he knew who’d wooed and won a scientist from Athena’s Retreat had done something out of a Foster novel.

Sam had never dreamed he’d be in such straits. He’d assumed he would knock the woman of his dreams off her feet (not literally…well, perhaps literally) and his obscenely good looks and piles of money would do the rest.

Whatever happened next, he was not going to jump into the Thames.

Grantham had already done that as a grand gesture to Margaret and besides, Sam had worn his new coat, and the river water was filthy. No, for Phoebe Hunt only an argument that satisfied her brain would do. Flailing about in the river would simply earn him pity.

Perhaps even mockery.

Gulping in the fetid Thames-scented air, Sam sent a quick prayer heavenward that his voice would hold out. That Phoebe would not only hear but listen to what he had to say to her.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “You’ve spent so many years without a man saying these words—these important, essential words any young girl needs to hear; you are my darling. Not only that, but you are also brilliant .”

Phoebe rocked back on her heels, one hand going to her chest. A fierce wave of joy rushed through Sam’s veins. This would work. She would believe him.

He continued. “You are funny, you are captivating, you have incredible powers of observation and so many talents.”

“I don’t believe you. I don’t,” she insisted.

“You already know you are beautiful,” Sam called, walking ever closer to the edge of the dock.

“What you don’t know is how incredibly kind you are to your mother and sister. How your face lights up when you talk about volcanic piles…”

“Voltaic piles,” she called down to him.

“…and how I explode with joy when you come apart beneath me.”

By now nearly every stevedore and sailor had stopped what they were doing to listen. Sam did not care. This was his one chance. He wasn’t going to let it go.

“I love you, Phoebe Hunt!”

“Don’t say that!” she shouted into the wind.

“Don’t say it unless I mean it?” he called.

On the deck above him, Phoebe said nothing, but she pulled a handkerchief from her reticule and frowned at it, seemingly furious.

“I don’t know whether you could love me, love any man after what happened to you. If you could see your way to return my affection…”

Oh, dear God, she was lifting the handkerchief to her face. He’d made her cry. She would kill him for that. Gulls overhead screeched encouragements, or were they warnings? The sounds of the crew making ready to cast off buzzed around him and the earth shook beneath his feet.

Sam flung one last plea into the air between them.

“If you have the courage to love me, Phoebe, I will spend the rest of my life making certain you never regret it.”

These, then, were his parting words to her.

A challenge.

Phoebe shook her head and said nothing. The horn blew from the captain’s perch, and the anchors rose on either side of the ship.

Sam didn’t move, not even to blink.

Please.

Please.

With excruciating languidness, Phoebe raised her hand, palm outward, and held it in the air for a long moment until Sam raised his hand as well.

Then, without batting an eye, Phoebe jumped off the side of the ship.