Page 7 of The Rumpled Gentleman

Chapter

Seven

T hree days passed with Orion arriving every morning to help Elara to clean the dusty workroom. He spent much of his time trying to coax a smile or two from her. She had so much pressing on her heart, and it was difficult to leave her looking hopeless. He left each day shortly after noon, returning to his home to work on his own experiment. Callon met him there, dressed like a High Fey lord rather than the half-elf he was. He spent mornings writing letters, afternoons with Orion, and evenings meeting with “people of note.”

All Orion had to do was prove his claim to said people, that the plentiful firestones found in every corner of the kingdom could produce light, heat, and the energy necessary to power something as complex as a steam engine. With simple alchemical conditioning and clever engineering.

And he was nearly there. He’d put the stones to work in his house. Beneath his mother’s tea kettle, in his hearth hidden by coal, beneath the burners in his laboratory.

He didn’t have to change the stones at all. He only coaxed them into doing something incredible. The potential had been there the whole time, for all the centuries that the stones had made up the walls and ruins of England.

It only took the right key, the right word, to access it.

“Heating a tea kettle won’t be enough,” Callon told him that afternoon. “I have a dozen interested parties. They need to see something bigger.”

“A steam engine.” They’d discussed that possibility before. “The current design of every steam engine in England utilizes coal power. It doesn’t matter how I run the formulas—that design won’t work for the firestones.” He looked up at a sketch hung on his wall of an engine as currently designed. “And I’m not an engineer.”

“I know someone willing to work with us. My engineer needs your permission to enter your sanctuary.” Callon gestured with both hands to the workroom. A workroom Orion had warded against everyone but himself and his most trusted friend.

“You trust him?”

Callon gave a sharp nod. “I trust her with my life.”

The sex of the individual didn’t matter a whit. The ability did. “Then bring her with you next time you come.” He looked up at the clock near the stairwell. “It’s nearly time for dinner.”

“I know. Your mother invited me to join you both. I said yes, of course. Your cook has an incredible talent with vegetables.” Callon, like full-blooded elves, didn’t have much liking for meat. “Before we go up, though, I thought I would ask about your florist friend. How is she holding up?”

“She doesn’t look as though she’s slept much.” Orion had noted purple half-circles beneath her eyes that morning. They’d finished tidying the room, and she had given him a list of supplies to procure. He had to go looking for everything on her list, as the duke wouldn’t hear of her leaving the house. “But there’s hope in her eyes.”

Callon tapped his fingers on the surface of a table. “If I were her, I wouldn’t be sleeping. But she’ll make herself sick that way, and if she does, it will draw the duke’s attention more than either of you would like. At this point, he’s a contented cat, watching the birds through the window. Push him too far, and he’ll slink out into the garden for a closer look at his prey.”

“How did you manage to make cats sound sinister?”

“Cats aren’t sinister. Merely Fey creatures.”

They left the cellar, and Orion tried to put everything from his mind while he enjoyed the evening meal with his mother and closest friend. Yet Callon’s prediction remained with him. Twitching at his mind and thoughts.

What if Elara wasn’t sleeping at all? Making herself ill would bring down the duke’s notice in the worst possible way.

He needed to check on her. Reassure himself that she wasn’t staying awake all night, working at the impossible. He’d been unable to tell her of his plan. If she let any of it slip to the duke, if she even spoke aloud in her sleep where a servant might hear, everything he worked for could be undone. If that happened, they would both face their doom.

Orion couldn’t let his father know of his concern, either. Which meant utilizing one of the few secrets he had learned from his grandfather and his own boyish explanations.

The secret of the druid-room. The very reason he’d put Elara there to begin with.

He dressed in black from head to toe and put on his cloak, spelled to make him blend with shadows. Then he took himself out into the night, to the travel stone hidden among the beauties of Hyde Park. The druid stone which his great-grandfather had paid a small fortune to connect to the same stones in his London residence.

France had been leading their nobility to Madame Guillotine at the time, so Orion’s ancestor hadn’t been acting out of baseless fear when he’d made a way for his family to escape their London home in the dead of night. One stone, removed from the floor of a hidden room, placed in the park, had become a pathway for the family.

Anyone of the first duke’s bloodline could access it. Including an illegitimate child, like Orion.

Elara sat hunched over the table, her eyes heavy with exhaustion. Around her, the room was a chaos of activity frozen in time: notes scattered across surfaces, their edges curling slightly, and several bouquets of drying herbs and flowers hanging from the shelves, their fragrances mingling in the stale air.

A single lamp flickered on the table, casting long shadows that danced across the walls. Elara’s hand rested on a note, the duke’s handwriting unmistakable, demanding an update on her progress by morning. She stared at it, a growing sense of dread knotting in her stomach. All she had accomplished was cleaning the room and ordering supplies. How could she explain that to the His Grace without invoking his wrath?

Her eyelids drooped, the words on the pages before her blurring into an indecipherable mess. She shook her head, trying to ward off the tendrils of sleep, but it was a losing battle.

She closed her eyes and briefly rested her cheek against the table’s surface. A few moments of rest wouldn’t hurt.

As she was about to surrender to the beckoning sleep, a soft sound snapped her back to alertness. The tapestry on the far wall, of the stag and the unicorn, fluttered slightly, as if caught in a breeze.

Elara’s eyes widened as the fabric moved again, more deliberately this time, and a figure stepped out from behind it. A man in a cloak emerged from the stone itself. He moved with grace, his presence almost ghostly in the dim light of the room.

For a moment, Elara’s heart raced with fear. But as the figure stepped into the light, the hood of the cloak shadowing everything but a mouth and strong chin, Elara recognized him.

It was the man from the masquerade, his lips pressed into a somber line. Relief washed over her in a wave, followed quickly by a surge of questions.

“It’s you,” she breathed, her voice barely above a whisper. “What are you doing here? How did you…?”

He raised a hand, a gesture for silence, as he glanced around the room, taking in the disarray of her work. “I came to see how you are faring,” he said softly. “And to fulfill our bargain.”

Elara slumped back in her chair, the tension of the night inexplicably easing in his presence.

The cloaked and masked man stepped closer, his gaze flicking to the note on the table. “I bring with me a way to appease the duke, for at least a short time,” he said, his voice firm with resolve.

From his cloak, the masked man withdrew a spool of thread. The flickering light danced across the filament, and it reflected the light back in a gleam of?—

“Is that gold?” she asked, stepping forward. “Gold thread?”

The stern lips briefly kicked upward but didn’t quite make it to a smile. “On loan, for now. But yes. It’s gold thread.”

She shook her head slightly. “I don’t understand.”

He gestured with his other gloved hand to her table. “May I?”

Elara stepped out of his way. “Please.”

The masked man swept across the room to the table, where he gathered one of her drying bundles of flowers to lay across its surface. “Flora to metallicum is unlikely to ever occur, through magical means or otherwise . To turn it to aurum is impossible.” His voice, low and grim, made her want to shudder.

“Latin doesn’t impress me, sir,” she said, gripping the edge of the table with one hand as he unwound the spool. “I know all the Latin names for my flowers, and most other things my father thought I ought to be trained to know. Metal and gold. Say the words you mean.”

“Habit,” he answered without sounding the least bit contrite.

“I know it’s impossible,” she added. “But we made a deal.”

“Even after you were advised against such a thing.” He sounded oddly disapproving considering he was the one who’d agreed to it. “I will uphold my end of the bargain.” He picked up a pair of thick, sharp shears from the worktable and cut the thread. “Start shredding the stalks of your flowers, Miss Millstone. The fibers as thin as you can make them.”

She stared at him for a moment in surprise, but then did as she was bid. She took a barely dried flower and tore the stem along its length. Piece after piece. While he cut the thread. The gold thread. She realized the lengths of his pieces of thread were comparable to the foot or so of each thin piece of green stalk.

“This will never fool anyone,” she whispered as the green juice from the plant stained her fingernails.

“This is only the first part of the plan.” He finished with his gold thread and tucked it inside his cloak, withdrawing a small snuff box instead. He opened it and held it out to her, and the inside glittered with gold powder.

“Gold mixed with mica,” he told her. “Dip your fingers in, please. Make sure you get some of the dust beneath your nails.”

She darted a glance up at him, finding his eyes watching her intently through the holes in his mask.

She obeyed, coating her fingertips in the tiny metal flakes.

“Sprinkle a bit across the table. Then wind some of the gold threads through with the stalks. Mix it all as much as you can. And get those plant fibers thinner.”

“It isn’t Linum usitatissimum, sir.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “What?”

Elara released a puff of a laugh, shocking herself that she even could laugh under the circumstances. “Flax. Linum usitatissimum is flax, which is where linen comes from. Or didn’t you know that?”

“Ah. Using Latin against me now, are you?” This time, he certainly smiled. “And that’s precisely what you will tell the duke. Flax begats linen, but only after a lengthy process. Your gold quality is poor, and tiny, because you haven’t the right items to work with.”

She sucked in a sharp breath. “I need larger quantities of the right kind of plant, and they must go through the same process as flax to become linen.”

This time, the smile was more of a grin. “Precisely. This process, from flax to linen, is a beautiful alchemy. It turns a simple plant into a fabric that has graced kings and commoners alike. Magic through ingenuity.”

“What do I ask for?” She picked up one of the plant fibers and split it down the middle again. “Something difficult to get, but not so difficult that His Grace knows we’re stalling for time. I assume that’s what we’re doing, since you say the actual feat I’m meant to perform is impossible?”

He gave a solemn nod. “Yes. We’re stalling.”

Elara’s hands worked diligently, separating the plant fibers, her mind racing with the implications of their plan. “We need something that would believably challenge the process,” she said, her voice steady despite the whirling of her thoughts. “Perhaps a rare variant of flax, one that’s rumored to have golden properties. Something only found in distant lands.”

He picked up the note, but she barely noticed. Her thoughts were on far-away fields of crops, her fingers busy picking apart the flowers.

“Suggest that only a specific type of flax, say, from the hills of Tuscany, known for its unique golden hue, can yield the results the duke desires. It’s specific enough to be plausible, but not entirely unobtainable.”

Elara felt a surge of admiration for his quick thinking. “And in the meantime, I continue with these experiments, giving the appearance of progress.”

He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “Exactly. Every bit of effort you show adds to the credibility of your work. The duke needs to believe you are on the cusp of a breakthrough.” He put the note back on the table.

She glanced up at him, her eyes reflecting a mix of gratitude and newfound determination. “You’re risking a great deal by helping me. Why?”

For a moment, there was silence as he seemed to ponder her question. “I have my reasons. Some battles are worth fighting, even against formidable foes like the Duke of Sutton.”

Elara returned her focus to the task at hand, her fingers lightly dusted with the golden mica. The room was quiet again, save for the soft sounds of their work. The mixture of gold thread and damp plant fibers shone under the lamp light.

“As for the duke’s note,” he continued, “tell him you’ve made a promising start. Mention the need for the special flax. It will buy time.”

Elara nodded, feeling a flicker of hope. “And then?”

“Then,” he said, straightening up and preparing to leave, “we plan our next move. Remember, Miss Millstone, you’re not alone in this. Farewell for now.”

“Good evening,” she answered, looking over her shoulder in time to see him slip behind the tapestry. Vanishing.

She stared at the spot where he had disappeared, then she walked to the wall and lifted the thick cloth, finding solid stone behind it.

The man had to be magic to come and go through stone. Elf, man, magician. It hardly mattered. So long as he kept his promise.