Chapter 3

3

The door swung open and crashed against the wall, sending splinters of plaster off it.

Chastity and Patience, each sitting on a sofa at her tea table, started in surprise. A few papers fell from Chastity’s hands as she whirled around in her seat and stared at the intruder. She removed her spectacles to better see who it was.

Lucien glanced around in a drunken haze, fumbling to tuck his shirt into his breeches. His lips were swollen and glistening, his golden locks in disarray, making him look even more debonair and rakish. His tailored coat hung askew, draped over one shoulder, while his waistcoat dangled open. How he could still look like the living embodiment of Apollo in such a state, she didn’t know.

“Ah.” He grinned, his eyes hooded. “Good afternoon, ladies.”

In the corridor behind him, someone hurried past—a scullery maid who cleaned fireplaces and tidied Chastity’s laboratory. Maisie! She was flushed, her lips swollen and red, but a satisfied smile lingered on them. She threw a guilty look at Chastity as she passed the door.

Merciful heavens, did he just?—

“What do you think you’re doing?” demanded Chastity as she jumped to her feet, throwing the remaining pages of Patience’s new paper on the sofa.

“Ah, pardon me.” Looking around, he placed his hands on his hips, the material of his shirt gathering in wrinkles around his muscles. “I thought this was supposed to be my chamber.”

“Your chamber is in the west tower,” said Chastity through gritted teeth. “You’re in east tower, where I sleep and where my laboratory is located.”

Patience stood up as well, putting the pages she held neatly on the sofa. “Duke, you’re clearly not feeling well. Why don’t you go and lie down?”

“I’m capital!” he exclaimed with an even broader grin. He entered and paced the room.

The laboratory was situated in the east tower for its abundant light. Nearly half the tower’s wall consisted of diamond-pane windows, held in place by lead cames. Light was a luxury, so she arranged her work surfaces—several large tables—right by the windows. They held her instruments: thermometers, hydrometers, journals, beakers, flasks, and measuring cylinders. In the corner, carefully covered, stood her most prized possession: a compound microscope acquired through her brother’s connections with the Royal Society.

He walked by the tables, looking at everything, but he was swaying slightly, and he made sweeping gestures around himself, picking up this flask, then the other.

“Lucien, please be careful!” said Chastity.

Lord help her, she was furious with him! Was there any limit to his appetite? He’d just had a night of debauchery, and the minute he arrived at Rath Hall, he’d already found a scullery maid to seduce. And now he dared to barge into her laboratory, her sanctuary where she felt safe and confident, as though to rub her nose in it.

“Duke,” said Patience. “You’re a trusted family friend, but I know exactly what you just did with Maisie. You must stop seducing this house’s servants, or I will tell Dorian. He will kill you.”

Lucien chuckled and glanced at Chastity as he picked up a flask filled with vinegar, one of the liquids Chastity had been testing to decrease the rate of wound infections.

“Marie…er…Mona…”

“Maisie!” exclaimed Chastity.

“Maisie was quite sad.” He made a sweeping gesture with the beaker. “And there was no one to comfort her.”

The beaker flew out of his hand and crashed on the floor, breaking into hundreds of pieces. The sound was loud in Chastity’s ears, and the sharp scent of pure vinegar filled the air.

“Oh, no!” cried Patience, who shoved her hand against her mouth. “Oh, I’m going to be sick…”Clutching one hand to her stomach and the other to her mouth, she ran out of the room.

“Damnation…” Lucien stared blankly at the shards of glass and the puddle of vinegar pooling at his boots. “I’m sorry, Chastity!”

He dropped to his knees and began picking up pieces of glass. A jolt of anxiety shot through Chastity. No cuts, please … The image of her brother as a boy, covered with horrible cuts as he emerged from the glasshouse, was etched in her mind.

“Leave it, Lucien,” she said sternly as she opened a small cupboard under one of the desks and picked up several linen rags she had stored for cleaning. “Please, leave it be.”

But he didn’t. As she wiped up the liquid and the glass, he kept gathering the shards, and sure enough, blood mixed with vinegar on the floor.

Panic froze her limbs. She remembered the gashes to Dorian’s wrists and hands, blood streaming freely from his body… Then after a doctor stitched his wounds, the infection… the days of waiting for the fever to kill her brother, who’d only tried to protect her…

Praying for him to live.

“Lucien, you’re bleeding!” she cried as shethrew the rags into the waste pail. With wooden hands, she brought it towards him, and he threw the glass in there, as well.“Let me see,” she said as she pulled him to stand.

She grasped his left hand. His palm was large, his fingers long. Touching his skin felt like she was touching fire—exhilarating. Dangerous.

And it could burn her.

He inhaled sharply and yanked his hand away from her touch. “I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

“Blood is never nothing,” she growled, not recognizing the anger in her voice. The situation felt all too familiar. And she wouldn’t be the reason for another human being fighting a deadly infection when she could prevent it. Especially not Lucien. “Let me see.”

She grasped his hand once more and studied his palm. He had a small cut on the thenar eminence that was bleeding slightly. She exhaled with relief. “It’s just a shallow cut,” she said. “It should heal quickly if there’s no putrefaction… I’ll make sure you don’t get an infection like Dorian had.”

He frowned. “How can you do that?”

Heavens, she was still holding his hand. She looked up into his eyes, momentarily lost in the bottomless play of intense blue and violet tones under long blond eyelashes.

Stop melting! she commanded herself.

She scoffed. “Did you not listen to a word I said in the carriage?”

“I’m sorry, darling. I’m sure it was fascinating, but I’m not very perceptive when receiving scientific lectures after a night at Elysium.”

She sighed, let go of his hand, and went to her desk to search for the flask of spirits. “Of course you’re not,” she said, her eyes skimming the bottles and flasks. “I’ve been studying Dr. Edward Jenner’s work on vaccination. His ideas about preventing smallpox by introducing certain substances into the body made me wonder if we could prevent other ailments, like infections in wounds, by applying the right substances.”

“Go on, darling, it’s just a theory, right?”

“It is,” Chastity admitted as she picked up the flask and turned to him. “But so far I’m finding that cleanliness seems to reduce fever in patients. That’s why I’m researching different methods to keep wounds clean.”

“Right…” he said as he looked at the flask in her hand with a curiosity she hadn’t seen in his eyes for years. “Dr. Jenner’s smallpox research was fascinating. I’d like to see your research succeed like his did.”

She drew closer to him, her breath catching. “Long ago, your mind was scientifically inclined. I’d like to see you apply yourself better, Lucien. Debauchery is destroying you.”

“Ah. We’ll all have to die one day.”

She picked up a fresh clean linen cloth. “Your day will not come soon if I can help it. Do you remember what happened after Dorian broke out of the glasshouse?”

The smirk evaporated from his face, and he was utterly serious. “It’s hard to forget your best friend almost dying of fever.”

She uncorked her flask, and the sharp scent of alcohol entered her nostrils. “Precisely. The physician who treated Dorian… If he had cleaned his tools—as my research suggests—and Dorian’s wounds, he’d have dramatically reduced the chances of Dorian developing an infection.”

Lucien frowned, his violet eyes intense on her. “Is that why you’re doing your research?”

If Chastity didn’t know better, she’d interpret the astonished, warm look on his face as adoration.

But Lucien, the Duke of Luhst, could never possibly adore someone like her. A bluestocking spinster. He must simply appreciate that she wouldn’t let him get an infection.

She turned the flask over to wet the linen, then put the cork back. “Yes.” She took his hand again. Heavens, it was twice as large as hers.“This might sting,” she said. “Sorry.”

Carefully and gently, she ran the cloth over his cut. She heard him hitch a breath.

“Sorry,” she repeated.

Good Lord, his skin emanated something where she touched him, waves of warmth and tingles spreading through her. It was intoxicating. She felt his gaze on her like another touch, and it made her feel warm and light. When she looked up at him, his eyes were glistening with something she couldn’t discern.

“It’s my own fault,” he said. “Don’t apologize, darling.”

Darling… He addressed her so tenderly, as he no doubt did with all women. Surely he had whispered such endearments to Maisie.

But she wasn’t his darling and would never be.

She had hoped she would be once, when she was a silly adolescent girl and he was a charming boy four years older than her. When she’d thought his attentions towards her could be more than friendship, when she’d hoped…only to feel cruelly rejected when she saw him kissing another girl around a corner.

She forgot her foolish infatuation with Lucien then.

She quickly wiped up the rest of the blood with the cloth soaked in spirits, then picked up fresh rags and bandaged his hand as quickly as she could. She needed to stop touching him, even though it felt so good. Touching him reminded her of the girl she’d never be again.

When she finished, he muttered a thanks and wiped his hand.

She went toopen one of the windows to let the acrid smell of vinegar out. She breathed in the fresh, cool air to clear her head of him.Then, she dropped to the floor with another linen rag to wipe up the rest of the vinegar and glass. “Lucien, you could have avoided all this if you hadn’t overindulged in spirits and slept around.”

“I can stop doing that at any moment,” he said with a chuckle as he dropped to his knees to help her.“And if youspent as much time and effort being sociable as you do on your research, you wouldn’t be alone at night, at the age of twenty-eight, surrounded by nothing but your medical instruments.”

She suppressed a gasp at the hurt his words brought her. Feeling tears burn her eyes, Chastity met his gaze. “Perhaps you’re right, Lucien. But at least I have a purpose. What do you have, besides drink and debauchery?”