Chapter 14 #2
It was two nights later, as her husband tried to elucidate the Newtonian mechanics behind Urbain Le Verrier’s prediction of the position of Neptune, then still undiscovered, that Louisa’s ignorance revealed itself to be as high and thick as the Wall of Jericho.
“I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I didn’t understand a thing you just said.”
He threw up his hands in mock exasperation. “That was probably the best explanation anyone has given on the subject in the past forty years. Do you mean to tell me that you failed to appreciate my brilliance?”
“Utterly.”
“Well, that will not do, will it?”
“You could teach me Newtonian mechanics,” she said tentatively, not at all certain how he would react to such a request.
He shook his head. “That would be like teaching you to do a handstand on a galloping horse, when you don’t even know how to ride.”
Her hopes shriveled.
But before she could say anything to shield herself from embarrassment, he went on. “I would have to start you with the fundamentals and assume that you know nothing beyond elementary arithmetic.”
“But I can solve—” She stopped, self-conscious. “Saying I can solve paired equations now would be like telling a safari hunter that I once stepped on an ant, wouldn’t it? Or that I once caught a mouse in a trap?”
“You once caught a mouse? I run from those satanic creatures.”
She had the urge to giggle at the image he brought to mind, but suppressed her mirth. She did not want to be disarmed by his humor—it would be even more difficult to be wary when she was dissolving in laughter.
Instead, she cleared her throat. “Will you actually teach me?”
For a moment he seemed disappointed that his joke wasn’t better received. She felt a strange pang in her chest. She had to remind herself that with him, there was no such thing as simply wishing to please her. Always he aimed to exert more control, to reap more power.
He tapped a pencil against the barrel of her telescope.
“See, this is why so many gentlemen never marry. You get yourself a pretty wife, you spend half of your waking hours pleasuring her; then you spend the other half eradicating her ignorance. Soon your estate smolders in neglect and your personal hygiene suffers. Your tenants complain, your staff depart, and your wife won’t let you near her anymore because you are poor and malodorous. ”
Something about his tone—a barely perceptible melancholy—made her want to reach out for his hand. But it was probably her mind playing tricks on her. She needed to defend against him, not comfort him.
“I had eleven pounds and eight shillings of emergency money set aside,” she said briskly. “I will earmark it for soap, so you never need to reek, no matter how poor you become.”
He looked at her a moment, his expression inscrutable. “Well, in that case, I must test you to see exactly how undereducated you are. Then we will need to spruce up the schoolroom—a dismal place. After that, I will try to teach you, provided you can refrain from seducing the professor.”
A tactical retreat, she thought. She’d done the same herself, steering a conversation into the somewhat less complicated realm of the bedchamber. She fluttered her eyelashes. “Will you rap me on the hand with a yardstick if I do try to seduce the professor?”
“Of course,” he said. “I might even have to bend you over the table and spank you.”
“Oh, my.” She touched her throat. “I suppose I had better let you know that I’ve never been in the presence of a learned professor without somehow becoming naked in the process.”
That had led to a very good time in bed, including a few playful thwacks on her bottom. But now it was the middle of the next afternoon, his lordship was sequestered with his secretary, and she was alone in the schoolroom, looking about.
She wouldn’t go so far as to call it dismal, but compared to the rococo airiness of his apartment, it was undoubtedly dull and uninspiring, all dark panels and somber drapes.
Much of one wall was taken up with a big blackboard.
Near the windows stood a lectern; in the middle of the room, a desk and a chair.
Inside one glass-fronted cabinet was a rock collection, with each mineral’s name, provenance, and date of sampling recorded in a meticulous hand.
Her attention snagged by the sparkling interior of a geode, she didn’t realize for some time that all of the rocks came from locations on the estate, in the neighboring countryside, or from parks in London during the Season.
She had assumed that since he’d never had to submit to the fixed schedule of a school, he might have visited interesting, glamorous places when other boys were stuck in drafty classrooms. But if anything, his childhood had been almost as geographically circumscribed as her own.
It was disconcerting to think of him not as a man who marshaled wealth, beauty, and cleverness to obtain everything his heart desired, but as a possibly lonely little boy who could no more control the events of his own life than he could change the tilt of the Earth’s axis.
She shook her head: She was reading too much into a room that he hadn’t visited in a decade.
If anyone was born able to manipulate, it would be him.
His nannies probably ran themselves to the ground to please him.
His parents would have lavished him with presents.
And what father wouldn’t be thrilled to have sired such a son?
All the same, she left in a pensive and perhaps mildly forlorn mood.
* * *
Felix felt as if he were in the middle of a long stretch of a high wire, unable to go back to where he’d started, nor reach the relief of the far end—if there was such a thing as the relief of the far end.
He needed a safety net: If she were already in love with him, then perhaps it wouldn’t be so terrible if he were to fall off his shaky perch.
Looking back, it was shocking that he hadn’t been particularly concerned about the state of her heart. Whether she loved him had been immaterial; it had been enough for him to hold her mesmerized and unable to escape.
Now he was the one mesmerized and unable to escape.
As much as he pleased her in bed and as much as she couldn’t seem to get enough of him, like a racetrack, the bed was a closed venue. All the distances covered, all the thunderous finishes, and still they were in the exact same place as before.
He needed to do something that would open the terrain, that would in fact break through the confines.
The decision to invite her to his observatory was not made lightly.
It was a door that, once opened, could not be so easily closed again, the door to almost the entirety of his private life, something he shared with no one else in Society.
Even after the decision had been made, he still hesitated: It would be no different from the gifts he’d presented to his parents, in the hope of pleasing them and pleading his case.
The weather, overcast when it wasn’t actively raining, gave him a valid enough excuse to postpone the visit night after night.
But eventually the sky cleared.
He walked into the drawing room ten minutes after she withdrew from the dinner table.
She was at the rosewood secretary, writing a letter.
A day rarely went by without a letter from her to her family.
In the predawn hours, sometimes he would check the salver that held all the correspondence that was to go out on the early post, weigh her letters in his hand, and wonder what lies and omissions undergirded the narratives within.
She looked over her shoulder. “Finished with your cognac so soon?”
“I have something I’d like to show you, if you are not busy.”
“What is it?”
“The best private telescope in England—we’ve talked about it before.”
She blinked, and turned around more fully. “You want me to see it now?”
Belatedly he remembered that she had asked about his telescope once and only once. What if she was no longer interested? “If you’d like.”
“Would I have to travel for it?”
“A short way.”
She turned the fountain pen in her fingers. It felt as if it were his heart that she held, tilted one way, then the other.
It occurred to him that she was stalling, as if she, too, were hesitant. He couldn’t see why: It was not her intentions and her offerings out in the open, with rejection a very real possibility.
After an eternity, she blotted her letter and capped her pen. “Yes, I would like that,” she said. “Lead the way.”
* * *
He led her by the hand.
Though they made love night and day, they rarely held hands.
The warmth of their interlaced fingers made it difficult for Louisa to remain wary.
The entirety of his demeanor, since the end of the house party, made it difficult to remain wary. He was a solicitous husband, an attentive and insatiable lover, not to mention the perfect mentor, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the night sky paved the path for her growth as an amateur astronomer.
Sometimes the terrible days at the beginning of their marriage seemed to have taken place aeons ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. It was only the depth and bleakness of her erstwhile misery, the memory of which still made her cringe, that still fed her caution.
A diet that was apparently less than plentiful, for as she glanced at him, walking beside her, she did not want to doubt his motive, but to kiss him on his cheek—or some other such silly, girlish gesture.
“Why now?” she made herself ask, as they climbed yet another set of stairs. “Why do you want me to see your telescope tonight, out of the blue?”
If she did not protect her heart, who would?
“I was waiting for a clear night.”
“I mean, why do you want me to see your telescope at all?”
He looked at her askance. “Because I have ulterior motives?”
She felt a little sheepish at her suspicions being so plainly identified. “Don’t you?”
“Of course,” he said, his tone glib.
This time he gazed straight ahead and she could not quite judge what he meant.