There Will Be Phlogiston Read online

  Riptide Publishing

  PO Box 6652

  Hillsborough, NJ 08844

  www.riptidepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  There Will Be Phlogiston

  Copyright © 2014 by Alexis Hall

  Smashwords Edition

  Cover art: Simoné, www.dreamarian.com

  Editor: Sarah Frantz Lyons

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at [email protected].

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-256-1

  First edition

  December, 2014

  ABOUT THE EBOOK YOU HAVE PURCHASED:

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  An instructive story in which vice receives its just reward.

  Inspired by true and scandalous tales of the Gaslight aristocracy, we present the most moral and improving tale of Lady Rosamond Wolfram.

  Weep, reader, for the plight of our heroine as she descends into piteous ruin in the clutches of the notorious Phlogiston Baron, Anstruther Jones. Witness the horrors of feminine rebellion when this headstrong young lady defies her father, breaks an advantageous engagement, and slips into depravity with a social inferior. Before the last page is turned, you will have seen our heroine molested by carnival folk, snubbed at a dance, and drawn into a sinful ménage à trois by an unrepentant sodomite, the wicked and licentious Lord Mercury.

  Reader, take heed. No aspect of our unfortunate heroine’s life, adventures, or conduct is at all admirable, desirable, exciting, thrilling, glamorous, or filled with heady passion and gay romance.

  “A lady is reputed so much the better dancer or waltzer as she obeys with confidence and freedom the evolutions directed by the gentleman who conducts her.”

  —Hillgrove’s Ball Room Guide: A complete practical guide to the art of dancing

  Thomas Hillgrove (1864)

  About There Will Be Phlogiston

  Chapter the First

  Chapter the Second

  Chapter the Third

  Chapter the Fourth

  Chapter the Fifth

  Chapter the Sixth

  Chapter the Seventh

  Chapter the Eighth

  Chapter the Ninth

  Sneak Peeks

  Prosperity

  Shackles

  Squamous with a Chance of Rain

  Cloudy Climes and Starless Skies

  Liberty

  Dear Reader

  Also by Alexis Hall

  About the Author

  Enjoy this Book?

  “That one,” said the Phlogiston Baron. “I want her.”

  Lord Mercury gently lowered the man’s arm. “It’s rude to point.”

  “In your neck of the woods, it’s rude to breathe.”

  “Well, yes, if you do it loudly and offensively, and in a way that could be considered frightening to ladies.”

  “And I suppose I do?” Anstruther Jones stuffed his hands in his pockets, ruining the line of his otherwise exquisitely tailored evening wear.

  Lord Mercury compressed his lips on a smile. “On occasions, but perhaps I find such occasions rather invigorating.”

  “You mean—” Jones leaned in “—when I’m fucking you.”

  The blunt words travelled all the way along Lord Mercury’s spine like the caress of a rough hand. Heat swept upwards and, more worryingly, downwards. He did not dare turn his head. The man’s eyes would be too full of knowledge, too full of purpose, and Lord Mercury would be able to think of nothing but how it felt to be the object of such a gaze. “Please don’t. Not—”

  He didn’t know how to finish, or if he even meant what he was saying, but it didn’t matter because Jones pulled back immediately, his attention returning to the woman who had initially caught it. “Tell me about her.”

  There was absolutely no reason for Lord Mercury to feel . . . what? Disappointed? Was that what it was? These thorns in his heart? He had been the one to curtail whatever it was Jones had been trying to do. Taunt him. Flirt with him. Unravel him in the middle of a ball, a notion at once terrifying and strangely enticing, all his filthy secrets spattering to the pristine floor. The last scion of Gaslight’s oldest family: nothing but a catamite and a whore. And even his ruin was incidental, for Anstruther Jones needed only one thing from him. Anything else was mere diversion.

  Lord Mercury swallowed his pride—what little he had left of it—and gave the Phlogiston Baron what he wanted. As he had from the beginning, little knowing where his compromises and his capitulations would lead. “That’s Lady Rosamond, Lord Wolfram’s daughter.” His voice echoed in his ears as though it belonged to a stranger’s. “She’s insipid. A china doll. I don’t know what you can possibly see in her.”

  “Something I like,” was the Phlogiston Baron’s only answer.

  “Acquaintance will likely cure you of that.”

  Jones laughed—an ungentlemanly burst of mirth that made people stare at them. It should have made Lord Mercury uncomfortable. It did make him uncomfortable. Immoderate laughter was uncouth, as he had explained on several occasions, but Anstruther Jones would not be curbed. On any matter.

  He laughed when he felt like laughing.

  And there was something frighteningly pleasing in that.

  He set off towards Lady Rosamond, trusting Jones would follow. She was standing demurely at her mother’s side—a diminutive creature, golden haired, rose-cheeked, decked out in a three-flounced, pink silk ball gown with skirts so wide it seemed a light breeze might sweep her into the sky as if she were made of nothing but light and air.

  She had only recently made her debut, so Lord Mercury knew little about her. Like all young ladies, she was said to be charming, amiable, and lovely to behold. Her family was good, her portion was good. She was greatly admired by gentlemen, but not—he thought—by the other debutantes.

  He knew well enough that there had only been pique in his dismissal. Her beauty was striking. It would have been, even if delicacy had not been the current mode. Picture-perfect womanhood: soft, yielding, fragile, rosebud pink lips formed in the shape of a kiss to be taken.

  He bowed to her. “Lady Wolfram, Lady Rosamond, will you allow me to introduce to you my—” the word caught a little in this throat, a lie in so many ways “—friend, Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones, Lady Wolfram, Lady Rosamond.”
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br />   “Of course you may.” Lady Rosamond’s voice was a sweet, ladylike trill. “Introduce him, that is.”

  Jones performed something that was probably a bow (if you happened to have your eyes closed while he did it) and then recited, “It gives me great pleasure to form your acquaintance, Lady Rosamond.”

  Her eyes, which were blue—not like Jones’s eyes were blue, but bright and hard-glazed like the willow pattern on porcelain—slid past them. “I’m sure.”

  Her tone had not wavered, but it was not the response Lord Mercury had told Jones to expect Nevertheless the Phlogiston Baron only shrugged.

  Shrugged. In a ballroom. In front of a lady.

  “Do you want to dance?”

  “No,” returned Lady Rosamond.

  It was all Lord Mercury could do not to put his head in his hands.

  Jones glanced his way. “Is she allowed to say that?”

  This was rapidly becoming unsalvageable. He appealed in silent desperation to Lady Wolfram, but the woman only laughed the strangest laugh, and murmured, “Charming, how very charming.”

  “Perhaps,” he tried, “perhaps Lady Rosamond does not feel like dancing tonight?”

  Lady Rosamond tossed her head like a wilful horse. “I do not feel like dancing with Mr. Jones.”

  “Then—” he sketched another bow “—we should take our—”

  “Why not?” asked Anstruther Jones.

  “Because I am too good for you. Good night, Mr. Jones.”

  And, for the second time that evening, the Phlogiston Baron laughed.

  Lord Mercury had not initially been receptive when Anstruther Jones turned up on his doorstep, sans invitation, introduction, or even calling card, wanting to “cut a deal.” But he had a way of getting what he wanted, and Lord Mercury was, frankly, running out of things to lose. For all he could trace his line back at least a century—high royalty for Gaslight nobility—the only thing it meant in real terms was a hundred years of gambling, drinking, and ill-advised investments. Jones’s offer had been simple, if galling: he would repair Lord Mercury’s fortunes in return for his assistance in entering society.

  “I want a house,” Jones explained, “like this house. For my children to call theirs and give to their children. And family. I want to have a family.”

  Lord Mercury could still remember the arrogant way the man had sprawled across his Chippendale sofa. The tatty brown duster that reeked of tar and phlogiston. His weathered face, his harsh mouth, and his eyes, grey-blue, restless and protean like the sky.

  “You don’t need social acceptance for that.”

  “No, but I’ll damn well have it.” Of course what he said was ’ave it—those broad Gaslight As. “If not for me, for them as follow.”

  “You can’t buy Gaslight.” Lord Mercury mustered all the hauteur of his name. “And you certainly cannot buy me.”

  Anstruther Jones said nothing, his silence somehow no less forceful than his words, and reached deep into the pockets of that dreadful coat. He began to pull out paper after paper after paper. Debts, all of them: vowels, bills, promissory notes.

  Mortified, Lord Mercury turned his head away. It was one thing for a matter to be generally understood but never admitted to or spoken of. Quite another for an ill-mannered commoner with ideas above his station to scatter the undeniable truth all over Lord Mercury’s last Axminster.

  “What do you want?” he asked, hating how weak he sounded.

  “I told you.” Jones ticked his ambitions off on his fingers. “Home, position, family. Your help.”

  “You can’t afford me.”

  The man’s mouth curled into an unexpected smile—a little bit wicked, a little bit sweet. “Try me.”

  Lord Mercury named a sum so outrageous it embarrassed him to utter it aloud.

  “Done.”

  “I . . . I beg your pardon?”

  “Done.” Jones spat into his palm, and held it out.

  Lord Mercury stared at the other man’s hand blankly and bleated, “Oh, what are you doing?”

  “Sealing the deal.”

  “Well, consider this a . . . a . . . preliminary lesson, but in polite society we do not spit on ourselves, or each other. Or at all, as it happens.”

  “So what do you do with cherry stones?”

  “We transfer them politely from our mouths to the spoon and then—” It belatedly occurred to Lord Mercury that he was being laughed at.

  Jones’s eyes were full of light as he wiped his hand on his trousers and extended it again.

  It was surely a devil’s bargain.

  But Lord Mercury had a household to manage, factories to run, appearances to maintain, and debts to pay, so many debts. He had been intending to marry money—a devil’s bargain of a different kind.

  He stared at the hand, then at Jones.

  The man’s gaze did not waver.

  The truth was, Lord Mercury could no longer afford the luxury of pride.

  They shook. The rub of the calluses on Jones’s palm sent sparks all through Lord Mercury’s skin. Made him feel tender in comparison.

  It was faintly humiliating, but also . . . not.

  The next few months were difficult. It was not that Jones was stupid, or that he did not take well to instruction, but he questioned everything. It was not enough for him to simply know a thing was, he had to know why it was. And Lord Mercury was increasingly conscious that his answers amounted to little more than “Because that is the way of it.”

  Nevertheless he tried.

  He instructed Jones on etiquette, taught him how to bow, how to choose wine (though not to enjoy it), traced for him the lineage of all the major families, talked him through their fortunes, their histories, their scandals. He did his best to smooth the Gaslight from his voice, but the raihn in Spaihn stubbornly rehned on the plehn, and attempts to educate the man’s taste were similarly unsuccessful.

  It was not, Lord Mercury had to admit, that Jones had bad taste. Merely that he made no distinction between, say, the music hall and the opera, and formed his opinions without giving consideration to what others might think of them. Opinions, as far as Lord Mercury was concerned, were derived from social context. They were like a well-chosen hat: framing one’s elegance of taste, and proving that one both knew, and could afford, the right sort of hatter. But, for Jones, they were a round of drinks at a common tavern: selected purely for personal gratification and shared liberally with all and sundry.

  Effort to convince Jones to engage a valet also failed. He said he had no interest in hiring a grown man to ponce round him with a clothes brush. Lord Mercury would have tried to explain the vital importance of proper attire but, as it happened, Jones dressed well. Or rather, he dressed badly, in clothes more suited to an airship than a drawing room, but he wore them with ease and conviction. And, once Lord Mercury had introduced him to a proper tailor, he looked . . . oh, he looked . . .

  A well-cut frock coat and some made-to-measure trousers didn’t precisely transform him miraculously into a gentleman. If anything, they just framed more completely who he was. No rough diamond, Anstruther Jones. He was coal, through and through, coarse and strong, possessed of private lustre.

  But everything had only truly started unravelling when he tried to teach Jones to dance. He had feared the potential for gossip if he hired a master, so instead he had purchased a copy of Strauss’s Liebesständchen on wax cylinder and set up his mother’s phonograph in the ballroom. As he pulled the curtains back from the windows, grey light sloshed over the unpolished floors and the tarnished mirrors, making the dust motes gleam like broken stars.

  It had been a long time.

  His mother had glittered here, more brightly than the gilt, more brightly than the jewels she wore. He remembered the scent of her perfume, the sound of her laughing. He saw her every time he looked in the mirror: he had her eyes, her hair, her skin. He had learned later that she was profligate, degenerate, a reckless gambler, a shameless sybarite, but she had been his w
orld. She had taken him to Paris at the age of six, to Vienna at eight. He had tasted his first champagne at nine and developed a taste for it by eleven. He had shared her box at the opera, dined with poets and revolutionaries, waited for her in artists’ studios while she reclined upon tiger skins and was painted.

  Everyone said it was no way to raise a child, but he had never been a child. He’d been her acolyte, her companion, her confidant. And, a little after his fourteenth birthday, she had fled to Italy with one of her lovers, leaving him with a broken heart, a crumbling house, a name he could not afford, and a note that said, Sorry darling.

  “Are you all right?” asked Jones.

  He flinched. How had he not heard the man approaching? Jones was hardly the quiet sort. “Yes. Of course.”

  To his horror, Jones reached out and swept something from his eyelashes. It glinted on the tip of his finger, a tear, already disappearing into Jones’s skin, becoming nothing. “What were you thinking about?”

  “The past, I suppose. It’s not important.”

  Jones shoved his hands into his pockets, and Lord Mercury bit back an urge to tell him not to. It would be futile, anyway—it was almost as though he had magnets in them. “This place could do with a bit of work.” He nodded towards the green stains marbling the plasterwork. “I think you’ve got some rising damp.”

  “I will have it seen to.” Even though he now had the resources, Lord Mercury found himself oddly reluctant to plan the work the townhouse required. Perhaps he had grown too accustomed to living this way. Or perhaps he had simply grown tired of laying increasingly elaborate façades over broken things.

  Jones turned, too bold, too vivid, for that time-washed place. Smiled his crooked smile. “I feel like I’m in a fairy tale. You just need some briars growing round your cursed castle.”

  “Well,” returned Lord Mercury sharply, “I am in no need of a handsome prince. I am waiting to teach you the waltz.”

  “All right.” Jones shrugged. “What do I do?”

  Lord Mercury set the needle against the wax cylinder he had already placed in the phonograph. There was a crackle, and the opening notes of Strauss’s waltz slipped quietly into the ballroom. The delicate pizzicato seemed to echo the anxious quivering of his nerves. Old grief, he thought, and irritation at Jones. Who was still standing with his—