Tall, Dark and December
The elegance of engineering is matched only by the elegance of a heart devoted to another.
~ James Watt, On Steam Engine Innovations
He didn’t like London.
Weston Whitaker tightened the bolt on the engine’s flywheel with more force than necessary, his decision as chilling as the draft racing through a split in the warehouse doors. The whirl of the gears vibrated through his fingertips and down his arms, calming him when the city couldn’t.
The weather was horrendous, the general public entitled, the food marginal at best. He’d been forced at dinner last night—with a smile because he was pursuing funds for his project and no little amount of it—to eat pudding made of suet and dried fruit.
Which sounded passable until he’d come to find suet was a fancy term for the hard fat surrounding a kidney.
The seasonal twig of holly atop his generous portion hadn’t improved the taste once this dubious fact was revealed to him.
West drummed the wrench on the flywheel’s metal rim and questioned who in the hell mixed meat and fruit, then called it pudding.
Brits, that’s who.
Still, there were benefits. Rocking back on his heels, he wiped his hands on an oilcloth while giving England its fair due.
Crumpets smeared with apricot jam had become a breakfast favorite.
Too, his rented curricle—what he’d call a shay in Philadelphia—was the speediest rig on this side of the pond.
And the women…
A grin ripped across his face as the image of Lady Pilson popping her head from beneath his counterpane three nights ago frolicked through his mind.
Her hair a magnificent color caught somewhere between coal and onyx, the vision begging him to gently twist the tangled strands about his fist and draw her to him.
If not for the horribly proper, on the edge of grating pronouncements tripping from her lush lips, he could almost imagine she was an American girl happy enough to be entertained by a self-made man of means.
At home, with the empire he’d built enhanced by the face he’d been born with, he was more than popular.
As it was, every time an English chit, as they called them here, thought to look down on his lack of pedigree, he knew only to kiss them silly.
Thus unlocking the equation, a secure spot as mathematics was a piece of life he was fucking brilliant at.
Women, whether they be duchesses or milkmaids, weren’t so different.
They liked a man to focus on them and nothing but for a time, the kind of patience West owned in spades.
Truthfully, they seemed as curious about him as he was about them—once they overcame the sad fact there wasn’t a title hanging about.
At least he wasn’t lonely. Or not often. No lonelier than a man could take, in any case. His childhood had prepared him for solitude.
West jammed the rag into his waistband, reminding himself there was no reason to feel an ounce of guilt over his romantic activities.
He and Emelia had decided to wait until his return to America to determine where their brief affair was headed.
Maybe it was already over. She didn’t love him, and he was reasonably certain he didn’t love her, but they made sense.
Practical, common sense. Her father was an early investor in his design enterprise, and Emelia was embedded so deeply in Philadelphia’s high society she could do nothing but pull him in alongside her. And drown them both.
Although essential elements of the relationship were missing.
West paused as his chest spasmed, the wrench hanging heavy in his hand. When had love been a thing he could count on, anyway? Never in his life. Not once.
He was measuring the flywheel’s alignment when the staid footfalls echoing through the warehouse’s goods bay told him his handler had come to call.
“Sir, if I may be so bold but to intrude?”
The austere tone struck him with the same force as the pop of a ruler across his knuckles.
Better that than the leather strap, a practice the orphanage headmaster employed until West grew too tall to be threatened.
He held up his hand—one moment—closed his eyes and committed the altered design to memory, where it would remain until he pledged it to paper.
Unlike life, numbers were always reliable.
Bracing his fists on his thighs, he wiped the sweat from his cheek and stood with a pleasurable, groaning stretch.
Stepping back to observe the prototype he’d built by hand, he struggled to conceal the joy he received in toying with his manservant.
Everything about West—manner of dress, manner of speaking—were signs of the most dreaded of English difficulties.
Trade. Labor. Employment.
West turned to Brixworth to find a gaze as gray and penetrating as a bullet casting judgment. “Call me Weston, I beg of you,” he asked for the hundredth time.
Brixworth dipped his chin in polite refusal. “Sir, I’ve brought your correspondence.”
Holding out his hand, West blew a breath through his teeth and perched his bum on a crate. “What could possibly be important enough to travel to the wilds of the East End, dirtying your boots tromping through sleet and muck?”
Brixworth rolled his top lip between his teeth in the first show of unease West had ever seen of him. “Well, sir, unfortunately, you’ve been reviewed.”
Taking the small stack of letters, one emitting a sugary aroma that meant Emelia had finally decided to write, West tore into the envelope bearing Cambridge University’s shield.
He rather liked the elegant design, three open books on a breastplate of some sort.
They’d sent him enough requests for him to commit this emblem to memory right alongside his new calculations.
Brixworth smoothed his palm down his lapel, striving for crispness when he was as hard-pressed as a slab of steel.
“Another appeal to give a lecture to engineering students, I gather? An impressive feat for a man not of their legacy, if I may say so, sir. Cambridge doesn’t generally welcome foreigners into their brethren. ”
West grunted and let the note flutter to the floor, barely able to contain his amusement when Brixworth recorded its demise with a sorrowful sigh.
“Everyone wants to jump into steam and ride to glory. And make fifty thousand pounds the first year while doing it. I’ve had the young pups ask me how, bold as brass.
Versus, and I use your country’s term, the answer being bloody hard work. ”
Although West wasn’t much older than the pups, three or four years, at most.
The difference was, brutal circumstances forced a man to grow up quickly.
The next letter was from the Royal Society.
West had been invited to a roundtable with other industrialists involved in the steam trade.
This event he wanted to attend, unlike most else dumped upon him.
Giving the card a crooked fold and tucking it in his trouser pocket, he ignored Brixworth’s punitive tongue click.
“I know valets have rules and regulations for every little thing, attire, appropriate behavior and such. We’ve gone over it to hell and back, Brix, but I’m not made of the same cloth as the gents you’re used to serving.
We do it differently across the ocean, thank God. ”
Brixworth took a step back and came close to tapping his heels together. “I’m not a valet, sir. I’m the Duke of Mercer’s majordomo, and assisting you in an official capacity is outside my typical responsibilities, but I’ve been with the Tierney family for—”
“I don’t care,” West murmured, governing the faint rush of anger. “A fact you can convey to His Grace when you scurry back to Mayfair.”
Brixworth frowned and fiddled with his cuffs, apparently uncomfortable having to settle strife, even if he had been with the Tierney family for eons.
“I hesitate to discuss private matters, but in this case, I will go against code. His Grace didn’t know about you, as I’ve repeatedly stated.
Indeed, I was there the day we went through the deceased duke’s papers.
If you’d only meet with him, you would understand.
He is a family man to his bones. And you, whether you value this or not, are family. ”
West shrugged and ripped into the next envelope, though he wasn’t quite as indifferent as he’d like to be, which was his problem and his alone. “I’m not interested in family, not anymore.”
Except, he’d conceivably accepted the invitation to consult with a London engineering firm after he found out about his lineage whilst reading his mother’s diary—not long after a duke discovered the secret buried in his father’s papers.
Maybe West had known the close resemblance to his half-brother his investigator had mentioned would cause a stir.
Maybe he’d even been surprised by Tristan Tierney’s response to finding out his father had sired a bastard with an American heiress who fled the country upon learning she was pregnant.
The Duke of Mercer wanted them to be brothers—when a hidden kernel of fear wouldn’t let West grab that familial rope and hang on.
His past simply wouldn’t let him.
Turning back to his mail because West wasn’t going down a gaping chasm in front of a man sent to snoop on him, he breath caught upon reading the next missive. “The Earl of Sutherland has dropped out. He’s pulling his funding.”
West’s valet-cum-spy did another nervous press of his coat. “Your misdeeds have caught up with you. I tried to educate you about the proper standards of society, even for visitors to our fine city. Yet, you failed to listen.”