-17-

Eliza

Although she'd been reluctant to leave Jane unattended, Eliza realised it would be impossible for them to spend every moment together, and indeed, neither of them would want such an attachment. They were both independent women in their own ways, and so after they'd drained the teapot, Jane had taken the remainder of the cake through to the Lady's parlour where the light was better, and she had her lace-making things laid out on a cushion. Eliza had watched her manipulation of the bobbins for several minutes. It was a skill she'd never mastered herself and could find little patience to learn, but one she admired. The constant motion though was lulling and soon her eyelids began to sag. Startled to her feet by the act of dozing off, she declared the need for a walk and Jane waved her on her way.

As it remained decidedly inclement outdoors, Eliza proposed to take herself on a tramp about the castle's rambling architecture with the dual purpose of poking into its many corners and secrets while simultaneously tracking down Jem without being seen to be seeking him out. Alas, she did not find him on her walkabout in any of Cedarton's many reception rooms, which was how she eventually found herself outside of Bell's surgery in the basement.

"Miss Wakefield?" Bell opened the door to his lair, a book open in his hand, which he snapped shut on seeing her and peered at her down the length of his hooked nose. His wig was slightly askew, making her suspect it had been hastily plopped back on his head in response to her knock. "Is there something you require my assistance with? Having been regaled with your skills, I find that somewhat unlikely. Is this perhaps a courtesy call? Have you come to tell me you've cured all the local ails, and my services are no longer required by his lordship?"

He still sounded haughty, but somewhat less hostile than on their initial introduction. He was, she thought, poking fun at himself as much as her. Nevertheless, she could not entirely warm to him.

"I wondered if you knew where I could locate Mr Whistler?"

"Of course you did. He is a very sought-after fellow." He seemed about to send her on her way, when he instead took a step back and pushed the door open wide so that she was able to see inside the surgery. " Et voilà !"

The chaise had been displaced to beneath the high, narrow window which currently bled a meagre drizzle of light on Jem tinkering with a set of chemical apparatus. His outfit was of deep, dark, green, and he was without coat or neckcloth, stripped to his shirtsleeves, which in turn were rolled up to his elbows, revealing them to be covered in a fine dappling of golden-brown hairs.

There was something supremely enchanting about catching him so dishabille.

Too often, she'd despaired over those whose heads were turned so readily, but Jem… Jem seemed to generate his own gravitational field that drew her in, and as much as she wanted to declare that it was wholly his genius that generated that attraction, truthfully, simply gazing at him filled her with all manner of soft indefinable feelings, and a longing to brush up against him as a cat might do.

It was that desperate pull that also stalled her from striding straight past Bell. She could not let her attraction to Jem get in the way of her plans. They had agreed to mutual exploration, but she would have to keep a fast check on herself to avoid growing unhelpful emotions. Therefore, she forced herself to stall their meeting, and used that moment to study him at work instead.

"Maybe I shouldn't interrupt."

Bell coughed into his fist. "Chemistry is not his natural occupation. It's taken some considerable effort to get to this point. I daresay he might be pleased of someone to show it off to."

She was intrigued. "Is it something to do with his puffing devils?"

"Lord, if only," Bell gave a dry chuckle, and ushered her in so that he could finally close the door behind her.

Jem must have heard them, for he turned toward them, his eyes flashing green and gold. A grin then stretched across his face, broad and welcoming. "Eliza." He made come hither motions until she joined him by the table. "You'll excuse my state of dress, I trust. I thought you busy with Lady Linfield, or I'd have hunted you down to assist with all this. Brewing potions is more your field, I think, than mine. Really, I could use the expertise of my cousin Pip, but I think I have this all working nicely now. The heat source has been the worst of it."

Indeed, it was her forte, at least in terms of brewing herbal remedies. "Should I be donning an apron?" Doctor Bell passed her exactly such an item. It was of the sort more usually found on a butcher but served the desired purpose of keeping her clothing clean. "What is this? Not your usual sort of experiment." A flame sat heating a bubbling vessel, from which a glass pipe led to another larger vessel situated upside down in a vat of hot water. She had seen depictions of such arrangements attributed to Lavoisier for the collection of gases.

"No, the mysteries of steam and pressure have been sidelined in favour of chemistry today. I have one of Davy's pamphlets." Jem rustled through a sheaf of papers covered in scrawled calculations but didn't seem to find what he was looking for, until he looked up and spied Bell and the book. The doctor had reopened it and was studying its pages again.

"Ah, you have it. Do you know of him, Eliza? Not Bell, I mean, Davy. In his role as a superintendent of the medical pneumatic society he's been studying the effects of an array of newly separated gases. This is what I'm trying to replicate."

Of course, she had heard of Davy. He was busy shaking up many of the fundamentals of chemistry, and while she wasn't as well versed in the subject as she'd like to be, she did follow along as best she could.

"Will it help drive your engine?"

"Oh, heavens no. No, I don't think so. These are his instructions for the preparation of nitrous oxide. And the study of its effects on the body. The earlier preparations involved zinc, which would have been a problem as I don't have any, but the later ones involve bubbling nitrate of ammoniac though water and then collecting the gas." He pointed out the inverted jar.

"I see, but to what purpose?"

Jem frowned, but quickly shrugged off the question and gave her a smile. "Well, you may have heard tell of laughing gas. It's been quite the thing in certain circles of late."

She had. Her friend Bella Rushdale, now the Marchioness of Pennerley had written to them of an evening soiree she'd attended with Lord Pennerley and all manner of artists and bohemians, where silken balloons containing the substance were passed around, and had succeeded in making everyone quite giddy and dreadfully merry. "And this is that?"

He nodded with great enthusiasm. "So then, are you saying Lord Linfield demands you produce it to use as a form of entertainment?"

Doctor Bell gave a curious guffaw. Whereupon he and Jem exchanged equally curious glances that ended with Jem shaking his head, and Bell relinquishing the book into his hands. This Jem immediately passed to Eliza and turned out to be Davy's treatise on the subject, published only the year before.

"In a sense. However, you needn't worry. His intention isn't to pass it around his guests. It's purely for his personal consumption. And he didn't so much deliver me the task as I suggested the experiment."

"Because he cannot wait until he returns to town to sample its effects?"

Lips pursed and cheeks sucked in, Jem seemed to be determinedly fighting off a smirk. "I guess you might say that's about the gist of it. Linfield's not what you'd call a patient man. What he wants, he generally wants right now."

That was usually the case with the aristocracy; impatience was baked into their marrow. At least it was a relief to find Linfield wasn't intending to cajole his guests and his poor wife into partaking of this newly discovered laughing gas. Fortunately, but slightly bilking too, since it would mean she'd be deprived of the opportunity to experience the effects for herself, out of a purely academic interest, of course.

"Will you not sample it too?"

Jem nodded at once. "Oh, definitely. Any true scientist knows that you ought to verify outcomes and potencies for oneself." He tapped a finger against the pages of the open book in her hands. "There are a range of reported effects according to this study. The only way I can be certain I've collected the correct gas is to test it by inhaling and verifying the results."

How quick he was to smile. How full of vitality he seemed in that moment. The very air around him seemed to thrum with excitement. This was how she'd observed him in the engine sheds at Stags Fell as she showed off his workspace, his engines, and the rudimentary plans to create his own puffing devil locomotive.

"Options besides dosing yourself are available," Bell remarked. "It is not always necessary to experiment on oneself, or even advisable."

"In your line, perhaps," Jem replied.

"Practicalities abound."

"Yes, I don't suppose one can really extract one's own heart in order to poke about in the vessels to determine how it malfunctions." Eliza's remark succeeded in making both men gawp at her. Jem's surprised gurn cracked first. "Oh, I think she has the right of you there, Bell. You do like to poke around in viscera."

Bell rolled his eyes. The tilt of his head set his wig at an even more alarming angle. Irritably, he straightened it. "You might be more thankful for my studies. If it were not for myself and other anatomists, medicine would not be progressing, and the various quacks and charlatans would still hold reign with their archaic notions of humours and bloodletting."

"I'm delighted to find you don't hold to those practices," Eliza said. "For it is a novelty to be sure to find a physician who doesn't rely entirely upon cupping and drawing as if it were some magical panacea. I only pity the poor souls whose cadavers you torture to obtain such knowledge."

"I see you question my ethics, Miss Wakefield."

Indeed, she did. Ludlow Bell was precisely the sort of carrion crow that paid to have decent folks' endless peace disturbed by having them dug out of their graves and dissected on his table like giant joints of meat.

"A body is but worm food, Miss Wakefield. It is of no practical use to its previous owner, and I should think as a self-proclaimed scientist, you should appreciate that in order to mend a thing, one must first understand how it is that God intended it to function. Only then can one determine how disease, poverty, and malnutrition can alter that vessel."

She did understand that, but bodysnatching had become a worrisome hazard of death.

"I suppose you're a pickler, Doctor Bell. Are you a pickler?"

"Only if there's a purpose to the pickling. Preservation for the purposes of study, or comparison is wise, as is it beneficial to catalogue the mutations and deviations from the norm. Pickling things purely for non-scientific or monetary purposes, I cannot condone. But the trade of organs, teeth and the like is hardly a new fad. The church has always encouraged such things in the form of relics."

"That is hardly the same."

"It is exactly the same."

"My friends," Jem stepped between them. "Must we be so hostile to one another? Might we not put aside our differences of opinion and focus on the experiment happening before us? Eliza, perhaps you'd be so good as to take some notes for me? Bell—"

"It rather seems that my assistance is unnecessary. You have yourself a scribe, what more could you need? I have matters of my own I can attend to." He stalked off in a long-legged stride, a deep frown etching his face that made his skeletal slenderness all the more pronounced.

"He's awfully pompous," Eliza remarked of his disappearing silhouette.

Jem looked up from his task of adjusting various portions of his apparatus. "I think you scare him."

"What could he possibly find terrifying about me?"

"Fears for his livelihood, I should imagine. Eliza, one only has to know you for a short while to realise how terrifyingly bright and adept you are. If a marquis chose you over a physician, and Bell is by no means the only one trained in progressive methods, then surely that's a sign that their days as an exclusive club are numbered."

"Not while women remain barred from the universities and lecture halls."

He nodded. "I concede that is an issue, but it is not the case everywhere. They may be few in number, but there are women now with university degrees in both philosophy and medicine."

"Barely a handful compared to the many, many men, and none here in Britain, only in Sweden, and Bologna, and other such far places. They may as well be on the moon, for they are just as inaccessible to me as an orb in the sky."

"You could learn Italian," he said. She was tempted to kick him, but he was fiddling with the equipment, and she didn't wish to disrupt his experiment. The acquisition of another language would not swallow up the distance between a foreign university and her beloved Yorkshire.

"My French is barely passable. It would likely be a waste of my efforts to attempt another language as well. No, I shall keep up with my studies as I've always done and learn from books and the other resources around me."

He nodded. "I didn't mean to insinuate otherwise or tell you what to do. You may borrow that book, if you like, once I am done here. Though I warn you, you may be horrified by the number of lives sacrificed to the cause."

"Lives?"

"Small mammals, primarily. Though there are sections of study dedicated to the effects of various gases on fish and reptiles too."

"I see," she said. "Poor beasts. It's such a shame that progress must come at such a gristly cost." Normally she'd have her nose thrust inside such a tome immediately, but the live experiment being conducted before her currently held her attention. "Is your gas ready?"

He nodded. "I think it may be." From under a sheaf of papers, he produced a waxed silk bag. This he attached to the glass apparatus by means of a tube attached to a small tap in the vessel where the gas was collected. "Are you sure I can't tempt you to partake in this experiment along with me? One of Davy's observations is that it opens the mind to endless possibilities. He found his thoughts awash with unique ideas and all manner of possibilities."

She was tempted, for knowledge of all kinds was indispensable, but nervous too of filling her head with vapours and having her thoughts slide away from her. Cedarton was a dangerous place to not be in full possession of one's faculties. She'd taken tincture of poppies once, to ascertain its effectiveness in numbing pain, and experienced its benefits, but saw also how it melted the mind, as did so many other remedies recommended and described by both Culpepper and Elizabeth Blackwell.

"Don't feel I am pressuring you. You may make your decision after I've taken a good dose of it, and you've witnessed the effects."

He bled off some of the collected gas, until the small bag inflated. Then, once the tap was shut off, Jem nipped closed the neck of the sack. "If you could turn to a new page for me, then I'd appreciate you transcribing any observations and findings. Davy reports taking up to twenty quarts, and regularly imbibing six, but I think what we have here will be more than sufficient for this trial and to satisfy Linfield's requirements. At least, hopefully."

He brought the bag to his lips and covered both his mouth and nose. Eliza watched his cheeks grow flushed, and a smile crept over his face. His eyes shone bright making the hazel tones stand out against the deeper, forest green.

"How does it feel? Is it acting in the way you expected?"

Jem seemed to struggle with the formation of words for a moment. He moved his tongue around his mouth and over his teeth, before finally bringing his fingers to his lips. "Presently, it's all in my head, making it feel strangely thick. I would not describe it as a particularly pleasurable—Oh! Oh, wait. It's spreading." He stretched out his arms and proceeded to weave patterns in the air with his digits. "That is curious, and—" He brought the bag back to his mouth and took another few deep inhalations. "It is most curiously pleasant, especially in the extremities. I don't quite know how to best describe it."

"All of your extremities or just some of them?" Eliza enquired, while doing her best to both keep an eye on him and transcribe his thoughts precisely and concisely. The nib of his pencil was worn and made her writing smudgy, but there was no pen or ink to hand.

"Most all." Jem continued to weave his patterns for several moments. "It subsides disappointingly quickly. I suppose this is why Davy reports inhaling for up to twenty minutes. It is curiously freeing though." He seemed to be fighting to spit out his words now. "My mind is quite open. There are so many thoughts. Such clarity." He took yet another draft.

"But what is the purpose of it? What is its practical application? Please tell me this is not simply a study in depriving yourself of reasoned thought."

"My paymaster's purposes I'm not at liberty to depart."

"Is it for a medicinal purpose, or a recreational one? Tell me that at least."

Jem dragged a nearby stool to him and balanced on its surface. The dreamy expression on his face lingered, and as he raised the bag to his lips to inhale again, Eliza found herself reaching out and staying his hand.

"Is he ill? Is Linfield unwell? Is that why he's here at Cedarton?"

"Eliza cease. You're asking for knowledge that I'm truly not at liberty to reveal."

"So, he is sick?"

"No."

"Then tell me why he has not bedded Jane."

He coughed, and his cough turned into a laugh.

"Nothing, but nothing escapes you, does it? I suppose she has told you that. I told him that she wasn't so ill-informed as he liked to think. Even the most modest of maids have some notion of what occurs in the marriage bed, unless they are city bred and entirely without ears or eyes."

"Jem, she is my friend. I will not have you disparage her."

"Lord, no, I mean her no disrespect. A woman ought to know these things. I think it's scandalous that so many are so desperately uneducated. I only mean to say that Linfield imagines her so thoroughly green that she'll believe any old nonsense he feeds her. I think she is probably rather wiser than he."

"You are talking in riddles."

"That is probably for the best."

She observed him for some minutes more, jotting down her observations of his appearance. He took to waddling around the laboratory as if he couldn't quite decide where to put his feet but following a more or less clockwise direction around the worktable. Occasionally, he would mutter a few words, or release a chuckle. When he reattached the waxen sack to fill it a second time, Eliza slid her hand over his, which caused him to stare most intently at the point of contact.

"I think I might like to try it."

His head twitched to one side.

"Unless there is some inherent danger of which I'm unaware?"

He gave his head a miniscule shake, then swallowed so that she could see his Adam's apple bob. "Davy records the results of several women partaking, and none describe ill effects, only amplification of their general disposition. Those who are of a flighty and delicate nature, react as flighty, delicate creatures are wont to. But Eliza, you have never been those things."

"Indeed, I should think not. Shall it make me giddy?"

"It's heady," he replied. "But come rest against me as you breathe, in case you should feel the need to fall into repose." It seemed to her that of the two of them, he was more likely to fall into indolence. Jem moved them over to the chaise and sank against its backrest. Rather shockingly, he positioned her so that she rested her back to his body. "I'll cover both your mouth and nose. Deep even breaths," he murmured soft against her ear. "Get it right to the bottom of your lungs."

The effects stole through her body from her chest to her toes, creating a sense of muscular power. However, it was not a thrill in her extremities she experienced, but rather an abrupt and involuntary urge to laugh. This she did the moment the bag was removed from her lips, while the tip of her nose tingled, and her cheeks warmed as they might when coming into a warm kitchen after a walk on a frosty morn.

"What is so funny?"

Jem's words whispered against her ear made it tingle in turn, as if his breath were possessed of feathered fingers, and each was caressing the skin in a way that filled it with delight.

"You did say it was called laughing gas."

"I did."

"I can't stop myself," she giggled, and touched her lips with her fingertips, as if by doing so she might control herself.

It did not work.

"What do you feel, Eliza? I'm finding my thoughts are much diverted, and it's difficult to remain focused on what remains external, the internal calls so loudly. But then, you are here, and you are in here." He tapped his skull. "My thoughts are all of earlier. What we did. Eliza, there's so much more I want to do with you. So very much more." His lips grazed the back of her neck. "You don't regret it, do you?"

"Of course not. Why would you think—?"

"Only, that I feel such a cad. Eliza, you must know that I want you to be mine. I want to know you in all ways, and for us to be together. I can't stop thinking about you. My head is bursting with you, and every detail of earlier. How your mouth felt wrapped around my cock. The heat of it. The taste of myself on your tongue. Friggin' your pearl yestereve. I want to do it again. To lick you. Kiss you. Touch you. To bring you the same measure of pleasure. Nay, even more, for you deserve to be worshipped."

"Jem," she chuckled. "Perhaps you have imbibed a little too much."

"Not at all. The effects subside rather quickly. I'm speaking only the truth. I adore you. You're the most intoxicating of creatures that ever lived. There's never been a woman in my life to whom I've felt such a desperate affinity. I was so, so sure that Joshua would have won you. Christ, I wish that I could give you the life you wish. I would do so in a heartbeat. All the learning you might desire, and all the acknowledgement too."

What else could she possibly do but smile at such at notion? "You enthral me too, Jem. You are not like other men of my acquaintance, you are not pompous and over-inflated in your opinions, you delight in the workings of the world as I do, and you see me. You never belittle my accomplishments."

"Belittle them? I should like to sing them to the heavens."

"Yes, but don't," she said, turning and catching hold of his hand as he made to raise them and exalt her to the ceiling. In so doing, she knocked the bag from his hand, which escaped across the floor, emptying its contents into the air of the room. "Drat," he muttered.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"

Jem put his hands over hers. "It doesn't matter. There's more brewing, and I think I have the measure of its effects."

They both stared at their entwined digits. To Eliza it felt hopelessly right. "If you wish him mirth it will surely bring it, or do you mean to open his mind?"

"Ah." Jem's teeth rasped against his lower lip. "It's a rather delicate topic. Might we avoid it? I don't wish to think of Linfield when I am with you, anyway. I'd rather think of us, and all the things we might do together." His expression sobered a fraction. "But what of Joshua?"

"What of him, Jem? I have not heard a whisper from him since that day. It seems so long ago, and so impossible as to have been anything more than a daydream."

"It was not. I was there." His look said he could still feel the collision of their lips as vividly as she did. "Then, may I kiss you?"

"May you? Lud, I thought you'd never ask. I should like that very much. But wait." She stayed him with her hand against his chest. "What of Doctor Bell?"

"Bell? Ah, yes, Bell." Jem shot a glance over her shoulder, but he didn't turn his head. "He won't disturb us."

"Jem, he's right next door."

"You're right." He hollered. "Ludlow, don't you dare come in."

Eliza covered her mouth with her hands, then laughed, her incredulity infectious, so that they were both beset by giggles.

"I can't believe you did that? Whatever will he think?"

Jem caught her hand. Raised it and kissed her knuckles. "Do you know, I don't actually care. He may imagine whatever he wishes. We will know the truth, and that's all that really matters."

"And what is the truth?"

His arms slid around her. "That I want you all to myself for now and always."

"Is that so?" She challenged him with the arch of a brow.

"Aye, it is so. Will you come up here?" He patted his lap, only when she rose to oblige, he lifted his legs onto the chaise. "Straddle me, as a man would a horse."

"Next, you'll propose that I ride you like one. I thought you wished to kiss me."

A flush rose through his neck into his cheeks. "You see into my head. God, Eliza. I swear my prick's crying out for you. And yes to kissing. Don't you recognise a man when he's desperate?" He tugged her down on top of him and stole the air from her lungs as his kisses teased the seam of her lips, and his tongue led hers in a merry dance. They were both breathless and still lively as spring lambs when they pulled apart.

"Should I kiss you elsewhere too?" She reached for his falls, eager to reacquaint herself with that part of him too. Feeling the velvet heat of his prick before had only cemented her desire to further explore the relations that happened between a man and a woman, and how such connections came about in practice.

"What he'd most like is to slide deep into your cunny."

"How scandalously you speak." Their mouths were mere inches apart now, her straddled over him, his hands, one on her waist and one beneath her skirts, on the bare flesh of her thigh above her stocking top. He ticked a finger from side to side across her skin. "Are you in fact, a roué, sir? Set on deflowering me?"

"I confess, such a temptation has crossed my thoughts."

"But surely not, you being such an upstanding and studious gent."

"I fear I'm not the man you believe me to be, although I am both upstanding and studious."

"And what man is that, besides the one I want?"

"Eliza."

She pressed a finger to his lips. "Just kiss me again."

Her hands clamped around the back of his head, pulling him closer. For a second a fear stole through her of what he must think of her brazenness, but all that dissipated as she heard his groan, and his lips caressed hers.