Page 9 of The Lady Sparks a Flame (The Damsels of Discovery #2)

9

Do not refer to your toy-books, and say you have seen that before. Answer me rather, if I ask you, have you understood it before?

—Michael Faraday

“The first Hunt was a sorcerer, or so they say.”

Phoebe led Sam from the dining room to the great hall. Although she’d never bothered to confirm, family lore said the flagstones in here were part of the fort the Hunts had built upon when the Romans left.

Sam nodded briefly in appreciation of the fact and humored her by tapping his toe against the floor.

“In the thirteenth century, the family added a chapel, in the fourteenth century, they added a peel tower to the hall, and every other generation since then has built onto the manor until they balked at window taxes and left well enough alone,” Phoebe explained.

Whitewash flaked off the plaster walls, and thick age-blackened beams poked through from the sagging ceiling. At the far end of the room, the stone was unevenly set, and scorch marks peeked out at the top molding.

“There would have been a hearth here?” Sam asked.

Phoebe nodded. “This was the center of manor life for hundreds of years, this hall. I don’t know when they covered over the hearth or why. They tore down the chimney as well.”

“Come,” she said, and let him out the side door into a long gallery. Pieces of the floor were rotting beneath the handful of windows, cracks in the plaster around the windowsills giving evidence as to how the water damage occurred. It smelled like mold and oil.

Phoebe’s lamp was the only light source, the moon having risen on the other side of the manor, and the end of the gallery could not be distinguished in the gloom.

“Oho.” Sam’s voice was round and golden, reaching both sides of the hall. “I knew there’d be a bunch of ancestral portraits. Look at this fellow here. Who is he?”

“Sam. That’s a picture of Archangel Gabriel.”

Squinting, Sam nodded slowly. “?’Course. I see it now.”

“He has a golden halo round his head,” she said patiently. “None of my ancestors would ever have been painted as such.”

“Villains, were they?” he asked with relish.

“Indeed.”

When they were younger, her sisters and she had made up stories about the portraits, most of whose names were lost to history.

One great-relative they named Lord Ian the Evergassed. His diet consisted of only eggs and beans, which accounted for why there were gaps between his portrait and those of his fellows. Another portrayed the Duchess of Doom. Phoebe’s older sister, Alice, had named her. The duchess lost a hair from her forehead whenever she prophesied something miserable happening to a Hunt family member.

The copper taste of betrayal kept her from sharing those secrets with Sam; a wish to preserve the handful of good memories of her childhood from the light of contemplation. What if the stories they’d made up were horrifying to outsiders? What if the little jokes and mischief she and her sisters created turned out to be morbid or damaged?

The rest of the manor squatted behind Sam and Phoebe, blanketing all sound but the shuffle of their shoes on the rotting wood and Phoebe’s occasional mention of this painter or that. Men lined the hallway—from the first Baron Hunt to the fifth Earl of Brampton, to the first Marquess of Fallowshall, the Hunt men grew in peerage and power. The Hunt women, however, were mostly absent.

At the end of the gallery, the hairs on the back of Phoebe’s neck rose. Here one heard nothing from the main house. This wing had been her father’s domain.

He was dead, however, and Phoebe remained.

She ushered Sam into the room she and her sisters had once thought of as Father’s cave. A paneled room, with high ceilings and a wall of glass doors opening to a stone terrace, here sat her father’s prized possessions. Swords hung on the wall and a suit of armor leaned precariously to the left, over by the billiards table. Above the fireplace sat a hunting scene, a layer of dust obscuring the corners and dulling the gilded frame.

Best was the drinks table.

Moti and Karolina had no palate for wine and were happy to sip at the vinegar Jonas had served them tonight. In the cave, however, sat myriad bottles waiting to be emptied. If she drank enough, the ghosts would stay away.

Phoebe blew the dust from two glasses.

“Brandy?” she asked as she poured, not listening to his reply.

The aroma of dead fruit and old spices scented the air. Her father’s rooms had been cold, but he’d never lifted a finger to make them more comfortable. He’d sat like a mustachioed vulture in his high-backed chair and complained of the drafts over and over. Simply the memory of his voice caused Phoebe to shudder.

Sam, having left off playing with the suit of armor once the visor slammed shut on his fingers, offered her his dinner jacket.

Manners dictated she refuse him. There was a perfectly good lap shawl hanging over the back of the settee, but Phoebe would not put anything in here against her bare skin, so she accepted.

“Come, play billiards with me,” Sam said.

She swallowed the remainder of the drink and poured herself another.

“I’m afraid you’ll hit me with your cue stick,” she countered, walking over to the table and grimacing at his terrible aim.

“I won’t hit you,” he said. “I might drop the ball on your foot, though. Happens to me all the time.”

She played a desultory round, but it didn’t take long for Phoebe to tire of the game. She wanted to sit and drink, unbothered, until the sun rose and she could bear this place again. The floor swayed beneath her feet as she returned to the dusty bottles and poured herself yet another glass of brandy. A delightful numbness settled through her and she leaned one hip on the side of the table.

“Is every picture in this house that isn’t an ancestor a portrait of your father?” Sam stared at the hunting scene hanging above her father’s desk.

In it, the marquess rode astride a magnificent horse—a magnificent imaginary horse, for they’d never owned any animal that beautiful—with a pack of dogs running around by the horse’s forelegs.

“There is an etching in our nursery of frogs dressed like little girls in the last century. Is that more to your taste?” Phoebe asked. She’d a headache from the brandy, and she reexamined the bottles, hoping to find some viryta .

Sam’s thumbs hooked into the top of his trousers, tie askew, the brocaded black satin waistcoat shining dully in the low light. The ever-present darkness coddled his cheeks and the divot at the center of his chin, trailing down the hollow at the side of his neck and disappearing into his collar.

Phoebe made her unsteady way to stand next to him, leaning on her billiards cue for support.

“Other than those frogs, yes. Every portrait in this manor is of my father or one of his ancestors.” A short puff of air, almost a chuckle, escaped her and she lost her balance.

“Why is the portrait in the dining room missing?” Sam asked.

Phoebe ignored him and gestured to the painting in front of them. “This is one of Papa’s favorite themes. Himself, high above the rest of the world, surrounded by bitches set to do his bidding.”

The cue slipped on a bare patch in the rug, and Phoebe grabbed for Sam’s shoulder.

“You’re drunk,” he accused her.

“Do you blame me?”

Sam looked around him, no doubt seeing the gold leaf on the picture frames, the thick leather bindings of the folios stacked on the shelf, the ivory inlay on the doors of an ebony cabinet.

He couldn’t see the stain in the carpet where a drink had been thrown, nor the imprint of a shuddering body in the corner. Certainly, he’d never notice the two ghostly girls peering through the windows, shaking their heads in displeasure. Stupid man, blind to anything that mattered.

Sam caught her at her waist, but when Phoebe opened her mouth to scold him using some adjective like commoner or grubby , the floor tipped beneath her.

He was simply holding her up.

“Let me go,” she said, pushing against his hard stomach.

“I will if you would head toward a chair or a bench or something other than the side of the table.”

How dare Sam worry a fall could hurt her.

For the sake of hospitality, Phoebe allowed him to lead her toward a chair but stopped at the sight of an abandoned pipe on the table next to it.

“Get me out of here,” she said. “Take me out of here, please.”

···

He’d managed to force open the door at the far end of the billiard room and hustled the two of them out into the faint moonlight. Now the warmth of doing a good deed had faded and he was cold. Sam stared at his jacket and contemplated chivalry and whether he—being of the merchant class—was obliged to indulge in it.

Phoebe, having emptied half a bottle of brandy, did not appear cold at all, which meant Sam might be fine if he asked for his jacket back. Or she might slit his throat. Or both.

Phoebe wasn’t looking at him, she was staring out at the icehouse in the barren fields. Lord knew what they grew here in Cumbria.

Cabbages, probably.

Cold and green and bland.

Because Sam was stewing over how cold he was—and how supper had been abruptly finished and he was hungry—because of that, it took him a second when Phoebe turned to him and laid her head on his chest to remember he should under no circumstances do anything as intimate or maudlin as hold her close and rest his chin on her head.

“Would you take me to bed if I asked?” Phoebe’s question took him aback. She’d asked in the same tone with which she might venture a hypothesis. Detached. Slightly curious.

Sam would’ve been insulted if he didn’t have the same urge; simply to touch another warm person, laugh, find release, and fall into a deep, untroubled slumber.

“I suppose you think I’m that sort,” he said, trying to place her scent in the panoply of perfumes he’d sampled for Fenley’s Fripperies over the years.

Not tuberose. Cowcumber? Sage?

Phoebe pulled her head back and her eyes slowly focused on his face.

“Do you prefer men?” she asked without rancor.

“I like women just fine,” he answered. “No, I mean you think I’m the sort who’d tup a woman at the snap of her fingers.”

Now Phoebe’s head tilted as though he’d spoken another language.

“ All men are that sort, Sam Fenley.” She sounded put out, as though he’d disappointed her. “Pretend I’m a barmaid at whatever pub it is you frequent in Clerkenwell,” she said, her words sticky with drink. “If I were some Masie or Rosie, you’d take me up against the wall without a second thought.”

Sam sighed.

From the moment he stepped foot in the manor, it was obvious Phoebe’s father still ruled here. Sam had seen his fair share of bully boys and sadists while growing up in London, and while he empathized with the Hunt women, he struggled with this dichotomy of privation amid privilege.

Rather than contemplate the misery clinging to the surfaces here like dust, Sam decided to put Phoebe in her place.

“If you were a barmaid at my pub,” he said, tipping Phoebe’s face up, thumb beneath her chin, “I would tell you how pretty you looked tonight. How I’ve never felt anything as soft as your skin.”

He stroked her cheek as he spoke, thinking to call her bluff.

By God, but her skin was soft—glowing in the silver cast of a crescent moon, begging to be warmed.

The sensation of skin against skin had the same effect tonight as it had earlier in the day. Tiny trails of sparks went off down his spine.

Leaning over, Sam whispered in her ear. “Well before I’d even considered where or when I’d take you to bed—and it would be a bed—before I’d made you come, not once but twice, before I’d spread you out like a feast and set to pleasing every sweet pink part of you…”

Phoebe swayed and Sam tightened his grip on her, cursing himself. He wasn’t telling her a story now, he was describing a dream they’d both had as her hand came up and curled round the back of his neck, and he nudged his hips closer to her, letting his cock rest against her stomach.

“Before that, I would know your name. Your whole name. How many uncles you have and what ale you like to drink and your favorite color.”

Sam stepped away then, still holding her in case she fell over, but enough that she could read his expression as he continued.

“Because I’d want you to have time for a second thought, and a third, and however many it took. Because I’m that sort.”

“I’ve offended you,” she said.

“You have,” he agreed cheerfully.

A lock of hair had come loose from her chignon, thicker than it appeared when done up. She pushed it impatiently out of her face and pouted.

“Does that mean you won’t be pleasing my sweet pink parts?”

He pulled his jacket tighter around Phoebe’s shoulders, then turned her around and pushed her gently back toward the manor.

“Not tonight.”

He must have sounded convincing enough, for she walked away without argument—and without bidding him good night.