Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Would you believe me, Alice, if I told you that London’s streets are about to be lit by a fire no hand ever need touch?”
Alice did not answer, but the small doll in her lap slipped lower against her knees as her head tilted slightly to the left. She remained motionless on the window seat, her large eyes fixed on Seraphina’s face, focused.
For five consecutive mornings, this had become their unwritten ritual.
Somewhere around ten of the clock, the brass latch of the library door would click softly, and Alice would drift into the room like a draft of cool air.
She never asked permission, nor did she offer a greeting.
She simply crossed the room, settled herself into the alcove overlooking the south gardens, and sat with Seraphina.
Seraphina adjusted her quill, dipping it lightly into the inkwell without breaking her gaze from the girl.
Even before the wedding, back when she had first arrived at the estate, Seraphina had spoken to Alice about science. She hadn’t known any other way to be. Luckily, it had drawn a spark of curiosity into Alice’s eyes from the very start.
The night of her arrival was the only night Seraphina had actually slept in her own bedchamber.
She remembered the morning after, when Alice had failed to appear for breakfast. After speaking to the housekeeper, she found out that it was because she was still exhausted and asleep, worn out after fighting a night terror in the hours before dawn.
Every night since, Seraphina had abandoned her own room to sleep in Alice’s.
She slept by her side, listening for the shallow gasps or frantic shifts in the bedsheets that signaled a nightmare, stepping in before the panic could fully take hold.
The night terrors were far less frequent now, and when one did strike, Seraphina found that no soft soothing or motherly cooing could reach the child.
Instead, all she had to do was begin reciting facts, stories of mechanics, bizarre phenomena of nature, or the ways of how the physical world worked.
Seraphina was entirely unsure whether she was fascinating the girl or merely boring her to sleep with lectures on atmospheric pressure and planetary orbits, but the strategy worked, and in science, a proven result could not be disputed; if a hypothesis yielded consistent data, one did not alter the experiment.
She would keep at it.
She could admit that she was tired, but watching Alice sit so serenely in the morning light made the exhaustion feel inconsequential.
Alice didn’t throw tantrums. She didn’t scream or demand things. In Seraphina’s presence, she was remarkably calm.
Seraphina believed this meant she was handling the girl well.
That despite her total lack of traditional maternal instinct, her practical, unfiltered approach was working.
Talking to Alice, even without receiving a word in return, functioned like thinking aloud to herself.
It allowed Seraphina to organize complex political arguments in the air before committing them to paper, even while holding the sincere belief that the intellectual company was benefiting the girl.
Seraphina leaned forward, resting her forearms on the blotter and gesturing with her quill toward a series of detailed technical diagrams spread across her desk.
“It isn’t magic, mind you,” Seraphina continued.
“Though I am certain the speculators in Mayfair will attempt to sell it as such to the credulous. It is pure, ruthless chemistry. They take common bituminous coal, lock it tightly into a cast-iron furnace where no air can enter, and bake it under intense heat.”
Alice shifted on the window seat. She didn’t speak, but her back straightened, her chin lifting as her gaze tracked the movement of Seraphina’s hand.
“Instead of burning to ash immediately, as it would in an open grate...” Seraphina explained.
“...the coal breaks apart and releases a thick vapor. A hidden gas. They capture that gas, run it through lime-water to strip away the foulest of the sulfurous stink, and force it through narrow iron pipes laid deep beneath the flagstones of the city.”
She picked up a draft page, turning it toward the light.
“Frederick Winsor demonstrated the scheme along Pall Mall not long ago. A single central furnace, sending invisible fire through fitted iron tubes to illuminate an entire street of glass lanterns at the turn of a brass cock. No tallow, no lamp-wick, no boy running with a torch from post to post.”
Alice slowly slid off the cushion. Her small footfalls made no sound as she crossed the rug, coming to stand right at the edge of the desk. She placed two small hands flat on the wood, leaning her upper body forward to peer at the ink-drawn schematics of the gas retorts.
“It is a brilliant feat of engineering, certainly,” Seraphina mused, her tone sharpening as her mind pivoted to her actual column.
She was writing under her usual pseudonym, preparing a scathing piece for the morning papers.
“The gentlemen in Parliament are falling over themselves with awe, declaring that we are burning the air itself to banish the night. But they are missing the entire point, as gentlemen so frequently do.”
Alice’s eyes lifted from the paper to Seraphina’s face, motionless, her chest rising and falling in slow, rhythmic breaths.
“They wish to talk about the wonder of the light,” Seraphina said softly, her quill hovering over a fresh sheet of parchment.
“I intend to write about who pays for the pipes. It is a question of public infrastructure and basic equity, Alice. The gas companies are rushing to lay these conduits beneath the wealthy thoroughfares. Pall Mall, Piccadilly, the private squares of the nobility, because that is where the immediate profit lies. The vestries will use public tax money, drawn from the pockets of every chimney sweep and market woman in London, to fund the paving and maintenance.”
She paused, tapping the feather against her chin, her eyes narrowing.
“Why should a seamstress in the East End, who works by the flicker of a single, rancid tallow dip she purchased with her last penny, subsidize the bright, clear light outside a Duke’s town home?
If a city chooses to illuminate its darkness, the light must belong to the public square first. It ought to secure the dark alleys where the poor are robbed, not merely decorate the promenades of the rich. ”
Alice nodded then, and Seraphina let out a giggle. “It seems as though you understand these problems, Alice,” she noted. “If you do, then you are far smarter than I give you credit for.”
Alice leaned closer still. Her small fingers trailed across the edge of the desk, coming to rest mere inches from the technical diagram of the iron pipe network.
Her rapt, undivided attention was anchored entirely to the intricate lines of ink as if she were absorbing not just the words, but the hidden, invisible current of thought running beneath them.
“Anyway, I can already tell that this will be an excellent piece. Everyone will be talking about it, so it excites me to write it.”
“Don’t you think that if you force the gas companies to lay three miles of iron pipe through the East End before they have made a single shilling of return in Piccadilly, they will go bankrupt before the first lamp is ever struck?”
Seraphina’s hand went still in mid-air as a gasp slipped from her.
William was leaning against the bookshelf at the far end, his coat unbuttoned, and his arms crossed.
“How long have you been standing there?” she asked.
“Long enough,” he answered. “Why choose such a small corner of the library to write? There’s a much bigger desk right in front.”
“I like it here. It’s close enough to the window so Alice and I can see the garden.”
He straightened, taking a step towards them.
“I like your new piece,” he said, stopping on the other side of the table, his body facing Alice, but his head turned to Seraphina where she sat.
” But you are assuming the order of execution is a matter of moral apathy, Seraphina,” William said.
“It isn’t. It is a matter of capital risk.
A coal gas work requires immense upfront investment: the iron retorts, the lime-water purifiers, the miles of subterranean piping.
It is expensive, it is loud, and half the city is convinced it will blow up in their faces.
The wealthy pay for the risk first because they are the only ones who can afford the experiment. ”
Seraphina set her quill down. “So the poor wait in the dark until the wealthy have decided the danger has passed?”
“They wait until the technology becomes cheap enough to scale,” William corrected smoothly.
“If Parliament passes a law tomorrow demanding equal distribution of lines from day one, no private investor will put up the capital. The entire enterprise collapses under its own weight, and then no one gets light. Neither the Duke in his square nor the seamstress in her alley. Patience is what eventually delivers the pipe to the East End, Seraphina, not outrage.”
“‘Eventually,’” Seraphina repeated, her eyes narrowing as she met his gaze head-on.
“A convenient word. Men of property are remarkably fond of eventually. It sounds like a promise, but it functions entirely as an indefinite delay. In my experience, when the upper classes tell the poor to be patient, it is simply a more polite way of telling them to accept never.”
William’s mouth twitched, the ghost of a wry smile brushing his lips. “A cynical interpretation, though not entirely unearned by our peers. I concede.”
He looked down at the technical schematics laid out between them, nudging the paper slightly with the tip of one long finger.
“Though I must add... only because I want to spite you. If your reform bill passes,” William added.
“I trust you have made provisions in your column for the union of lamplighters. They shall be quite out of work once we stop paying men to run about with long poles all evening. Unless, of course, we retrain the lot of them to swat moths. I imagine Mayfair will be positively swarming with the creatures, the moment we’ve turned half of London into a very large, very expensive bonfire. ”
The silence that followed lasted only a moment.
Then came a sound none of them had heard before. A laugh, bright and unmistakable, breaking loose from Alice all at once. Her small shoulders shook with it, and her hand came up to cover her mouth for half a second before falling away again.
Seraphina’s head turned toward her at once.
Alice was looking straight at William, her whole face open in a way Seraphina had never once seen since she’d arrived at Norwyn.
Her eyes were bright, her cheeks lifted, a full smile spreading across her face, the kind that belonged entirely to a seven-year-old who had simply found something funny and let herself laugh at it.
Seraphina held very still, willing herself not to draw any attention toward the moment, not wanting to be the thing that made Alice remember herself and go quiet again.
Then she lifted her eyes toward William, to see whether he’d seen it too.
William was standing completely still, his hand resting near the edge of the desk as though he’d forgotten it was there at all.
The impenetrable composure he wore like armor, the unreadable mask of the Duke of Norwyn, had simply fallen away.
His eyes were wide, fixed on Alice’s face with something close to disbelief.
There was no performance left in him, no restraint holding his expression in place.
For a moment, he looked almost like a child too, who was just given a favorite toy, undone entirely by the sound of a child laughing.
A thrum echoed in Seraphina’s chest.
Looking at him then, seeing something so natural sitting just beneath all his practical arguments and logic, something pulled tight in Seraphina’s chest. It was an instinct that wasn’t sure where it came from, like a pull toward him, an urge to close the small distance between them and acknowledge whatever had just cracked open in his composure.
This man, who spoke so dispassionately, looked so vulnerable in that moment.
Seraphina caught the thought instantly.
She slammed the mental door shut, pulling her gaze back down to the ink-stained paper before the feeling could take shape, before it could demand a name. She cleared her throat softly, her fingers tightening around the barrel of her quill.
“Moths,” Seraphina said. “Perhaps you’re right. I shall figure out something.”