Chapter 8 #2
“There is an abundance of Miss Smiths. My favorite was Miss Petunia Smith. She was very tall. Almost as tall you, and she is the least likely to be married.”
“Why is that?” he asked.
“Most men did not like how tall she was. But she was lovely.”
“I did not meet a tall Miss Smith.”
“Perhaps that means she found happiness, then. I do hope so.” She tugged her bottom lip between her teeth. “Most of the women of my acquaintance were likely all married before this year. I am quite old, as you know.”
She was quite the perfect age. “Most of the women I was introduced to were young. I suppose that is one of the reasons none of them took.”
“You didn’t offer for any of them?”
“No.”
“Did you almost offer for any of them?”
“No.”
“That is odd. Especially since you needed the money and alchemists’ pockets are quite full. Overflowing you might say.”
“Mine will be, too, once I find a damned invention.”
“Grave work.”
“Grave. Exactly. The fellows are dead. What do they need work for? They’re supposed to be resting. And their widows or their children might benefit more from their prototypes.”
She was quiet and untangled her body from his side.
“Did your husband take any work to the grave with him?” he asked.
She shook her head. “He was a wonderfully imaginative man. He could dream up such… beautiful things. Impossible things. His skill did not meet his creativity, nor his ambition. He turned to various potions to increase his skill, brewed in back alleys. And it helped a little, but not enough. So he kept taking more and more until he couldn’t seem to do anything without it.
The Alchemist Guild did not help matters.
They rejected every one of his inventions, so they were never made known to the broader public. ”
“That’s unfortunate. Perhaps if they’d given his inventions a chance, you would not now be so destitute.” But nor would she be in his bed, so perhaps he owed the Guild a basket of flowers in thanks. A glamoured one, of course. Couldn’t afford the real thing.
“Unfortunate, but not unlike your own society. Do you share your transcendent talents with anyone?”
“You’ve seen me share them with an entire room.” Where was this going?
“But you cannot teach them. You cannot give them to anyone else to use.”
“Of course not. The talent only flows through the veins of particular men. And that’s why alchemy is not a true magic.
It’s a skill acquired through labor, practice.
While transcendent talent is divinely bestowed.
” Did he sound like a prat just then? He’d learned the fact about his future talent, his divine right to it, with his letters, and it had always sounded like any other fact—the sky is blue, transcendents were chosen.
But just then… he’d sounded like a prat.
She’d heard it and snorted. “Alchemy looks like magic to me. And it’s stronger than your talent, as even you have noted plenty of times.”
Uncomfortable not to be able to argue an inconveniently valid point.
“Your beliefs contradict themselves.”
Where was his quick wit? His razor-sharp tongue? His mind felt dull as bread beneath her analysis.
“Oh,” she chuckled, “Do not worry overly much about it. It is only that… perhaps we should investigate contradictions in our beliefs. Find out why they exist and what we should do about them. If anything.”
“You’re philosophical for a grave digger.” The bench he sat on was inexplicably hard.
“There’s nothing much else to do when digging a grave.
With your mind at least. The body is busy with a repetitive task it knows well, so the mind wanders.
You will have thoughts. And I suppose the nature of the location being a graveyard and all, it does make me a bit philosophical.
Please do not tell the other men. They will refuse to let women dig graves if they know it leads to a philosophical mind. ”
None of the women he’d courted in the last year had talked with him the way she did.
None of them had put him in his place. None of them had shown their minds, the depth and breadth of them.
But speaking with Persephone was like approaching an ocean.
You couldn’t see the end of it in any direction, and it would lap up at you, tickle your feet in surprising ways.
He wanted to walk right into it, submerse himself so far under that the sounds of the world faded away.
He wanted to rock in the waves of her mind.
Oh God, now he was getting philosophical, and perhaps maudlin, and something else he didn’t want to even name.
Was that why he’d not married any of the alchemists’ daughters?
Because even if they did have keen minds, they had probably been told that a transcendent like him didn’t want to see it, so they’d kept it to themselves.
But that still did not make sense. Better to marry a rich girl with few brains than no one at all.
He needed the damn money. That he’d not married the first girl served up by her rich father on a platter meant that…
something else… mattered to him… more? Than money?
No. Impossible.
But what other explanation was there? That he had standards beyond his coffers was utterly ridiculous, yet his coffers were still empty despite the train of willing heiresses he’d waltzed across ballrooms all season. Nothing explained it.
Oh, some might say his parents’ relationship had shaped him in foundational ways, had built in him emotional expectations for marriage.
But hell, his parents hadn’t even married for love.
His mother had expected her husband to lay in other women’s beds.
When Victor and Jane had been old enough, they’d been told the story of their father’s marriage, Jane’s birth, and the subsequent birth of—Victor tried not to gag, then and now—their own marital love affair.
Victor’s mother and father had married because they’d been forced to by their parents, and it wasn’t until Jane showed up on their doorstep, proof of his father’s wandering cock, that they’d begun to fall in love.
Classic love story really. Boy forced to marry girl.
Boy betrays vows to girl. Girl doesn’t care.
Girl acquires bastard daughter to raise.
Boy feels shitty in his soul about it. Boy grovels.
Girl refuses his apologies. Boy grovels for years, living like a celibate monk until girl realizes she loves his foolish arse and takes pity on him.
They live happily and loyally together the rest of their lives.
Victor did not feel, because of any of that, any sort of deep, abiding expectations of marriage, or of the heart for that matter.
None at all.
But if he was going to grovel for years and become a damned monk, Persephone Graves was just the woman to inspire—
No!
She was a grave digger. Had not a penny to her name. She wasn’t for him, no matter how her tides seemed to be dragging him happily out to sea.
“Is something troubling you, your grace?” Persephone asked. “You look stricken.”
“I’m having a very unwanted revelation about myself right now.”
“Would you like to talk about it?”
He looked at her, with her ocean mind and her spring-green eyes and her blue-black ember hair. “No. Not at all. Not with you. Not ever.”
“Well”—she wiggled—“I’ll try not to be offended. Look!” Excitement elevated her voice and bounced her off the bench. “There it is—the very tip of it.”
There at the end of the road where she pointed—
“Manchester,” she breathed. “Heavens, it’s been years since I’ve been here.” A sort of excitement electrified her every movement, her every word.
Damnit to hell. Now she was an ocean, spring, embers, and lightning? He was going mad. Being around her was rotting his brain.
He urged the horse faster. “Let’s get there and find the cemetery and leave.”
“There’s still too much daylight left. We’ll have to find an inn first and wait till dark.”
“You sound almost excited. Changed your mind, have you? Ready and willing to help me rob graves now, are you?”
“Not at all. I’m hoping I can show you around Manchester. And convince you to find a trade other than thievery.”
“I suppose you can try, but I hate to see you break under the burden of failure.”
“I do love a good challenge.” She was wiggling again, and he… hell, he was amused to see it.