4. In Which Luke Ashburton Is Distracted

May 11, 1822

6 days to the opening

Had the late earl been alive to oversee the inaugural exhibition, Luke would have functioned as his assistant. He’d have spent this time working at a far more leisurely pace, preparing specimens—his specialty, owing to his patience and the precision of his hands.

Now, everyone looked to Luke with questions, and expected him to make final decisions. No one had precisely decided that the exhibition was now his to oversee. But logic dictated that the task move into his hands. Bexley had discussed every detail of his vision with Luke. Luke was his right hand. Of course it all must fall to Luke.

It felt like trying to assemble a puzzle missing half its pieces, in the dark, at a funeral.

Luke set up stations around the grand, echoing exhibition hall, away from the wall being reconstructed by a noisy team of builders. He assigned tasks to the professors: assessing and sorting, cleaning and restoration, preparing for presentation, and drafting the detailed display cards that would accompany each specimen. Capturing Bexley’s particular interaction with the insect on the pin felt central to the endeavor.

Unfortunately, the information Luke supplied from memory did not adequately convey the earl’s spirit. They needed those journals.

Meanwhile, all worked somberly, against the cacophonous backdrop of structural repair.

There was one reliable source of brief delight: pulling a jar, intact, out of packing material, and beholding some outrageously gorgeous creature. Beetles of such intense iridesce nce, they seemed more jewel than animal. Spiders with comically fearsome mandibles. Gray moths with wings so thin th ey looked like they’d evaporate under a strong gaze.

And then it was back to work.

All his life, Luke had lost track of time when he worked. He’d only realize he’d been bent over his task for hours because a muscle would cramp or his bladder would report an urgent need to pass water. During the final stretch of writing his first book, he’d learned to rise slowly from his chair after several instances of nearly fainting from ignored hunger.

But because he was in charge, and thus would slow down the work if he collapsed, Luke resolved to rise and stretch every hour or so, and to stuff something down whenever his stomach groaned. If he found himself staring into space, he’d take that as an indication he needed to shake feeling back into his limbs, go gather a lungful of fresh air.

His legs were stiff as he walked through the echoing library. The last several times he’d passed, Miss Chetwood had not been seated at her table. This did not surprise him. She did not seem capable of sitting still, on account of her high susceptibility to being dazzled by whatever shiny object intruded upon the periphery of her vision. Luke was puzzled as to why Denton and the others didn’t seem more concerned that she simply was not up to the task before her.

He’d spy her at a bookcase, upper body angled sideways as she read titles on a low shelf. Or drifting about, munching an apple, neck craning as she looked at the painted scenes on the ceiling. Or l eaning against a wall of books, eyes closed, antsy finger s tapping the spines to either side of her hips.

Of course, the Oxford men seized any excuse to talk to her. They were polite, but their eyes were sharp and interested, and, when she wasn’t looking, rather hungry. Lord Spencer-Beckett was too miserable from last night’s drink to expend energy on anything but his job, but the rest all made so many excuses to visit the library that Denton caught on and pulled each to the side to scold them for the transparency of their fascination.

Even so, Miss Chetwood never lacked hot tea, a biscuit, or fresh fruit—whenever one ducked out, they returned with some little golden fleece. She accepted it all with a benign smile.

Of course she did. Men tripped over their tongues wherever she went. The scientists’ attentions must have struck her as mild, even sweet in comparison to the maneuvers of the ton’s rakes and sophisticates.

Still, it all put Luke into rather a dark mood.

This time, as he passed through the library, Miss Chetwood was, for a change, sitting at the table. Her chin rested on an ungloved hand; the other, he saw, was lightly spattered with ink. Her casual posture belied the action of her quill— flying across the page, her writing light and shockingly neat, considering the velocity of her nib. Pausing to dip her quill seemed, each time, annoying to her, and that explained the spatters—she plinked the tip into the inkwell without looking, impatient to get back to writing.

Her focus, he had to admit, reminded him of his colleagues. And of himself.

What was singular, though, was her speed. He and the others had labored at the bloody cipher for days. Their work had been halting, painfully slow, replete with frustrated sighs—at one point, the famously mild Professor Fitz had hurled his pencil across the room—and long pauses to do arithmetic on scratch paper.

She was doing all of it in her head.

Her expression was pure focus. She was sucking her bottom lip in concentration, her eyes so lit with enthusiasm that they reminded him of fireflies.

He did n’t know how long he stood there, watching. A strange unease rising in him. A mix of annoyance and fascination that would not harmonize, but clashed, oil and water.

Her aunt was reading by the fire, and now coughed and stretched. The sound caused Grace to look up, blinking, with an expression deeply familiar to Luke—she’d lost all track of time.

Immediately, her eyes went to the man standing there.

Her eyebrows flew up. She blushed, straightening.

“Do you require something, Mr. Ashburton?” Her voice had a guarded quality. She spotted the ink on her hand. Embarrassed, she worked to rub it out with her thumb.

What he wanted was to step closer. He felt it like a rope tied to his ribs, pulling him forward. A speck of ink had managed to land on her clavicle. He wanted to look at it more closely. He wanted to lick his thumb and wipe it from her skin.

No, he wanted to punch himself in the face. Weak. You’re weak. Don’t act as though you’ve never seen an alluring woman. You have work to do.

“No,” he said, and he was relieved that the word sounded cold.

Her eyes narrowed. “Gladdens me to hear it,” she said tartly, and returned to work.

Unaccountably embarrassed, Luke resumed walking through the space. His footsteps echoing. The sound of her nib, scratching fast across the page, taunting him.

Observation was a power Luke had cultivated all his life. He could determine if a beehive’s queen was unwell based on the behavior of her workers. He could identify beasts in the forest by tracks or by scat. He was rather famous in his social circle for his ability to discern, with one deep glance, whether a horse was inclined to kick or a dog to bite.

This, in the end, was what bothered him most about Grace Chetwood. She made him doubt his own power of observation.

Standing over an emerald Heterorhina elegans in the exhibit hall, Luke was doing his best to concentrate. But his mind kept returning to the woman in the next room.

Judging by the pace of her work, he might have been slightly extreme in his assumption that she was too unserious for her task. But something tight and righteous inside him resisted adjusting his opinion of the woman.

One thing Luke knew for certain was that no instinct was to be trusted, because he was a member of a pathetically weak species: the human male. Their flaw being, of course, that the brute demands of their bodies tended to override the wisdom of their brains. Luke did his best to organize his life in a manner that tended responsibly to physical needs: exercise, light meals, long walks, visits to the whorehouse when handling himself did not adequately dispatch carnal urges. And yet . . . his body liked to intrude upon his peace anyway.

That’s what this was. Grace Chetwood, intruding. His doltish body responded to her in the way it always had. No information about the woman’s mind or character made a whit of difference to Luke’s anatomy.

Wasn’t that all it had ever been? From the first moment he saw her? His flailing mind, attempting to ascribe some noble facet to lust?

Wasn’t that why after their brief encounter at the Marwells’ ball, Luke had found himself, only three days later, excited to be attending another? Luke had never cared for balls. Stuffy seas of preening idiots. But he had a mission: approach Grace Chetwood. Have a conversation. Discover who she was.

So he made the error of visiting the next ball she’d be likely to attend.

By the time he had spotted her, in a sparkling gown the color of a Madagascar citrine, her dance card was full. So, he danced with other women. Still, she was the one he watched.

On paper, Miss Chetwood should not have been so compelling. That high, crystalline giggle could well become irritating. The red hair caused her to clash with many environments simply by existing in them. Her body was insistently voluptuous, and she gleefully opted for the latest style, uncaring of whether it framed her figure outrageously. The woman was bracingly unapologetic, if not constitutionally defiant.

Luke had, up to that point, largely been compelled by women who were quiet, introspective, unmoved by gossip, immune to silly fads. Ethereal, dark-haired ladies with dreamy, distant eyes.

And yet, when he saw Miss Chetwood, dancing or laughing or merely standing, taking in the whirl around her, enjoying, no, delighting in the chaos ... Luke could not take his bloody eyes off her.

She was lovely. But ... Luke had a strange, almost painful instinct that there was more to this woman than he could hope to discern simply by watching in a ballroom. That in some way, the lushness of her form was engineered to mislead the easily distracted from the truth of her. And that as a result, very few people—if any— did know who she was. What she was.

That was the spark that lit in his gut. Not so different from the one that drove him to the library or into the forest or onto a ship to the Americas. A spark that was a whisper: there is so much more here for you to discover. Things you do not even have a name for yet. Look deeper, and you will be rewarded.

By late that evening, it had become clear that Miss Chetwood was particularly charmed by a black-haired lord of perhaps five and twenty. Elegant, handsome, the future marquess of something or other.

Miss Chetwood and the gentleman danced two dances, and by the second, Luke’s curiosity had abruptly given way to a sharp, unpleasant desire to distract himself by any means necessary.

So he’d left the room. To the garden—too cold—then back inside. When, walking down a hall, he heard that familiar little bell, her laugh, coming from an alcove.

Luke had stepped into an unoccupied parlor. Through the crack in the door—was he honestly spying through a crack in the bloody door?—he could see into the alcove.

Where Miss Chetwood was allowing the black-haired gentleman to lean very close indeed.

The intimacy of it was apparent, and Luke knew he should look away. His next, indignant thought was that this was what he did : observe creatures in their natural habitats.

He could not hear what the man was saying, but Miss Chetwood listened w ith sparking eyes. He felt a pang of longing.

The man had leaned in to place a kiss upon her mouth. A long kiss. Long enough for her to laugh, and stop laughing, and for him to drag her closer.

She broke their contact. And giggled—nervously, it seemed to Luke—with a gloved hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide.

The man stepped to her again, taking her off guard with his second kiss—aggressive, now, and Luke knew an urge to race over and pull the brute off her.

But then, Luke saw her melt into it. She made a small, breathy noise that, to his mortification, shot straight to his loins.

And then a trio of ladies had swept down the hall, and Miss Chetwood ducked back to hide.

“We should return,” she told the gentleman once the others were gone.

“Not yet,” he said, and reached for her waist.

She swatted his hand with a smile, then pulled him with her toward the dance floor.

Luke had lingered, contemplating his certainty that the lord was an inadequate suitor for Miss Chetwood. Any man was, whose wooing technique included pushing past a lady’s resistance. Such behavior betrayed a belief that the carnal was a treasure to seize, rather than a voyage to take. Miss Chetwood, Luke had observed, moved through the world at a high, energetic velocity. She needed a man who would take his time. Ride out her initial burst of excitement, pull her into something deeper.

If I kissed her, I would move to her slowly. I would take my time with those lips. Until she grabbed my hair and demanded more.

But quickly, Luke had shaken that notion off. What a useless train of thought . He was no handsome future marquess, after all. He was a soft-spoken , odd-looking , unnecessarily tall third son who spent his days staring at insects and his nights writing about them.

Silly of him to come here tonight imagining that a conversation with her could ever have amounted to anything. In a certain way, the clarity of it was soothing.

Perhaps, he thought then, we are meant to have a friendship instead.

Recalling it now, Luke was stunned by his own inanity. A friendship.

Torture, to be in close quarters with the woman now. Every time he looked at her, he was reminded of his worst moments.

Luke realized that his hand, holding a fragile moth, was trembling.

He stepped back and blew out an exhale. Christ. This was unacceptable.

He knew a real moment of hate for Grace Chetwood then. For turning him into this.

You did this to yourself, you imbecile.

Somehow, that did not lessen his agitation. But he had work to do. And he needed steady hands for it.

He closed his eyes, imagined taking all the unwelcome chaos and stuffing it into a small iron box in his chest. Slamming the box closed. Locking it. And throwing the key into a volcano.

Luke got back to work.