Magnificent Devices 01 - Lady of Devices by Shelley Adina

Author:Shelley Adina [Adina, Shelley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Andrew Malvern had not known that James, always so hearty and hail-fellow-well-met, was a proud man. But it was quite plain that he possessed that vice, and that Lady Claire Trevelyan had injured it, whether she’d meant to or not. The fact that his partner struggled with a vice he did not didn’t bother him. After all, Andrew himself struggled with his temper and a tendency to fall into a glass of whiskey when he was tired and frustrated.

No, what bothered him was that because James considered himself snubbed by the young lady, he, Andrew, had lost the possibility of a fine assistant. How many gently bred young ladies, after all, were not only possessed of a landau and the skill to pilot it, but read scientific journals to boot? It galled him, frankly, and he was quite put out with his friend even now.

In fact, he was so put out that he couldn’t stay in his own laboratory, for fear that James would return and he would say more things he couldn’t take back. Instead of sending a tube to place another order of coal and chemicals, he had gone to the coal-yard himself, and then to the manufactory. He’d taken his evening meal with a glass of foamy beer at his mother’s cottage in Stratford, and watched the sun set over the smoke of London feeling full but not content.

He heard the whisper of her skirts upon the terrace a moment before she joined him. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you and young Lord James on the outs, Andrew. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“There is nothing you can do, Mother.”

“I can listen. It’s clear you need to get it off your chest, and you know it’ll go no further.”

That was true. A former lady’s maid, his mother had married a policeman who had advanced through the ranks to captain of his own detachment before he’d passed on. As confidante to both, she was the repository of secrets that even he was not permitted to know—such as what really caused the Duchess of Tavistock to divorce her husband, or what might have happened to the infant Lord Wilberforce Dunsmuir, who had disappeared two years ago from his bed under the very nose of his nurse. His mother had been employed in both households in her youth and in the latter case, still kept in contact with the nurse, sending the poor woman a basket of food every now and then to keep her from starvation.

“Very well.” He told her the whole story and ended with, “So there you have it. A woman’s come between us at last—but not in the way I might have expected.”

“The poor child,” his mother murmured. “Viscount St. Ives’s daughter, you say?”

“The very same. Now reduced to earning her bread like the rest of us—though I must say she doesn’t behave like your average Blood. She plans to put herself through university.”

“It will take more than the wages you can give her to do that.

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