There Will Be Phlogiston Read online

  Or perhaps it was simply he was finally capable of seeing things clearly. Of seeing himself as he was, not merely as he wished to be, or as he feared the world saw him. It would take him a while to learn how to be proud and how to be free. But, for now, he could be proud of Jones, and of Jones’s love, and the fact Jones would have chosen a future with him over anything the world could offer.

  Perhaps, it was not too late. And, even if it was, perhaps he could still show Anstruther Jones that he would never make him ashamed again. He could, at least, give him that. He could find the courage to trust in love, in Jones, and in himself.

  It was the Copper Ball tonight. Anybody who was anybody or aspired to be somebody in Gaslight would be there. Lord Mercury had received his invitation long before his preferences for sucking off strangers in back alleys had become public knowledge.

  He pulled in a breath so deep his ribs ached. Ran his hands between his injuries, feeling the skin prickle in response, fine hairs standing up to brush the pads of his fingers.

  There. He lived. Breathed. Felt. Was.

  Arcadius, Lord Mercury, the last of his line, the oldest and proudest of the Gaslight nobility. He had lain with other men as men lay with women. He had put his mouth upon the cocks of soldiers and sailors, dockworkers and tavern boys. He had stood in dark corners, in the drizzling rain, hot with lust, hands upon him, in him, working him to fumbling completion. He had given himself to Anstruther Jones, let him into his body and into his heart, committed with him acts of gross indecency. And he had relished them all, these sins, these perversions, these rough ecstasies, their tenderness and joy.

  The last Lord Mercury met his own bruise-shadowed eyes in the mirror, and did not flinch or turn away. If he was to be damned, then he was done with shame.

  Needless to say, Rosamond was not enjoying the Copper Ball.

  As she had not yet crossed the border into matrimony, which permitted the alleviation of certain ignorances, she was not supposed to know about the fall of Lord Mercury. It was deemed too shocking, too depraved for debutantes. But she knew because everyone knew. It was all that was spoken of. An excitable stampede to outrage. Amazing, how many people had long suspected. The same girls who had swooned over him, the same gentlemen who had respected him, the same mamas who had coveted his name and his fortune. And now they scorned him, laughed at him, murmured that he got what he deserved, recoiled from his temerity in having dared to lurk amongst decent people.

  It would have been her they whispered about, had they only known about Ashworth Valley and Anstruther Jones. Selfish, she knew, to think about herself in the midst of someone else’s misfortune. But every day that passed left her a little more uncertain, a little more alone. She wondered what people did after they were ruined. How badly had Lord Mercury been hurt? How much did he care about his disgrace? Would she ever see him again?

  If one stopped and thought about it for a moment, there was no reason she could not have visited him at home. Or entertained him at Wolfram Hall. He was, after all, demonstrably no threat to her virtue. But there was no reason in any of this. Just fear and hate and cruelty.

  And, of course, Lady Mildred and her friends were talking about him too. Exchanging pathetic little anecdotes about how he had handed one her stole or helped another into her carriage. As if such encounters represented some brush with mortal danger. It made her hot and fizzy-angry inside just to hear them.

  “I stood on his toe once,” offered Lady Mildred. “It was my first waltz and he was so . . . so terribly dashing, you know, that I was deathly afraid of him.”

  “Rightly so.” Rosamond was glad she could not identify the interlocutor because she surely would have punched her.

  But, to her surprise, Lady Mildred hesitated before answering. “I . . . I am not sure. He was very kind. And he need not have been, for everyone admired him, and any woman in the room would have been delighted to stand up with him.”

  “One kindness hardly means anything, Milly. He is still a . . . a . . . well. As they say.”

  “It means something to me. And so I will not speak badly of him for a preference I believe to be none of my business.” Rosamond had always thought Lady Mildred a usefully plain opponent, but she looked . . . in all honesty . . . rather adequate when her colour was up, and her eyes were flashing. “And,” she went on, “I would advise anyone wishing to call herself a friend of mine to do like—excuse me, do you need something?”

  This last was addressed to Rosamond who had edged a little too close to the group. She wanted desperately to say something cutting, toss her hair, and glide away. But she couldn’t think of anything, and she was too fragile to muster much bravado. “Oh, um, no, I was just . . . I . . . I’m sorry.”

  She turned and hurried away, feeling graceless and ill composed, as if everything she tried so hard to be was flaking away like ash. Her skin prickled with sudden awareness and she almost stumbled straight into Jones. He put out a hand to steady her, his palm curving under her elbow. An innocent touch that nevertheless ignited her.

  Made her remember his mouth, his body . . . his fingers. Her own had played her false ever since, proving little more than adequate for the purpose to which she nightly put them.

  But now he was looking down at her with obvious concern.

  She hated concern. It was too close to pity. And she would not be pitied by the likes of Anstruther Jones.

  No matter how wretched she felt, or how much she desired him.

  Choice had been made. And that was the end of it.

  Now, if only she could stop seeing him everywhere. Like the most delicious cake she couldn’t eat.

  She pulled free from his gentle grasp, and pressed into the crowd, scandalously unattended, in search of her mother.

  Oh, she didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be quiet and alone, which necessarily meant her father’s house.

  Could she claim yet another headache? People would think she shared her mother’s habits, and honestly, she was starting to see the appeal. She had been prescribed laudanum for a while, when she had rushed a jump she shouldn’t have rushed and been flung from the saddle, breaking her arm. The tincture had tasted bitter enough that she had protested, but it had made the world so soft that all her thoughts had just slipped away, and even pain couldn’t stick anymore.

  She remembered, suddenly, her father at her bedside, his stiff-backed silhouette, and his fingers curled next to hers upon the coverlet. He had sat there all night long. And the next day he had sold her hunter, breaking her thirteen-year-old heart. It wasn’t Thunder’s fault, it was mine, she had screamed at him. Young ladies do not raise their voices, had been his only answer. The old helpless fury welled up inside her, but tonight it felt different, flimsy somehow, unimportant compared to that sombre, silent vigil, and the hand that did not know how to comfort her.

  She wondered what would happen if she went to him now. Father, she would say, I am very unhappy, and I do not know what to do. But all she could imagine him saying was, Young ladies are not unhappy, and they do as they are told.

  At that moment, a clock chimed the hour, and an announcement rang across the ballroom: “Lord Mercury.”

  And the whole world—from the guests to the musicians to the dancers to the servants—fell silent.

  Rosamond had no idea the mere absence of noise could be such a palpable thing. But there it was, a wave of nothing, sweeping across the marble floor, as heavy and stifling as heat. And, everywhere, a terrible stillness. A room of painted statues, their gazes turned towards the door.

  Where Lord Mercury stood.

  As elegant as ever in his evening dress, and a waistcoat of lilac silk that turned his eyes to jewels and his hair to flame. The shining auburn locks that had stirred several less well-appointed ladies to envy were gone, trimmed almost to nothing and smoothed back from his face. Such a loss should surely have diminished his beauty, but she found she liked him like this: revealed in some way he hadn’t been before. He walked slowly int
o the room, head held high, smiling faintly. There was a cut on his lip, bruises on his jaw, another beneath his eye.

  Nobody moved. Or said a word. Until all at once conversation resumed, and the orchestra jerked into a waltz.

  Lord Mercury was left an island at the heart of a spreading sea of emptiness. He even stood a little taller as everyone and everything he knew abandoned him. Rosamond took an impulsive step forward, hardly knowing what she intended, only that she did not wish to turn away from such dignity and courage, but a hand closed around her elbow. The marquess, his fingers digging into a remarkably tender spot at the crook of her arm.

  The parting of the crowds had made a human corridor, bodies and crinolines and closed faces, and the marquess pulled her roughly aside as Lord Mercury walked past them, his gaze intent on something beyond her field of vision. She strained to see, and there, waiting and smiling the biggest smile, was Anstruther Jones.

  Lord Mercury stopped before him, and bowed low. “Anstruther Jones, may I have this dance?”

  And Jones threw back his head and laughed his fearless laugh, the sound breaking beneath the domed ceiling of the ballroom like fireworks. “Yes,” he said, “yes. You can, and you may.”

  His hadn’t raised his voice, but it carried anyway. Most of the Gaslight nobility aspired to a London accent, but Jones didn’t even try, and the truth was, though she could barely admit it to herself, Rosamond adored him for it. There was harsh music in the way he spoke. It showed both the absurdity and the truth of things, and it made her long for a home she had never known.

  Lord Mercury was pale and still, an odd shimmer in his eyes. Untouched by scorn, but fragile in the face of kindness. “Thank you.”

  It was noisy and crowded in the ballroom, full of turned backs and cold, inquisitive eyes, but at that moment, they might have been the only two people in the world. Rosamond recognised the way they looked at each other—all that longing and hope—because she’d felt it too. It was strange, and yet not strange at all, to finally understand it in the reflection of someone else’s love.

  Lord Mercury reached out slowly and took the hand Jones held out to him. Came into his embrace. Together they stepped onto the dance floor.

  And they waltzed. A pair of entwined shadows gliding effortlessly through a cumbersome flower garden.

  They were beautiful together.

  It took a moment for society to realise exactly what it saw. And then there was carnage: muffled shrieks and shattering glass, gasps and exclamations, a babble of intemperately raised voices. Several women swooned, and only some of them were caught. More than one gentleman surged forward, reaching for a sword he was not carrying. And among the other dancers, the panic was mounting, some stumbling frantically away, despite the impropriety of doing so, some blundering into each other as they tried to see what was happening, and the rest grimly pressing on, stiff-backed and stony-faced.

  And through it all, Lord Mercury and Anstruther Jones were turning gently in each other’s arms. If this was ruin, Rosamond envied them.

  Lady Copper pushed her way to the orchestra, and stopped the music with a savage gesture. As the waltz died a drawn-out, discordant death, the remaining dancers fled. In the freshly falling silence, Lord Mercury bowed to his partner again, and Jones just grinned. Recaptured his hand and brought it to his lips.

  Two gentlemen. Being perfect gentlemen.

  To each other.

  It made Rosamond want to smile at their wickedness, their joy. But as she scanned the faces of the other guests, she saw only anger, revulsion, and incomprehension. And, where there was not, embarrassment. Gazes trained upon the floor.

  Someone knocked into her, tearing her skirt, almost pushing her off-balance. It was Lord Copper, whose fatherly geniality she had always rather coveted, although there was nothing even a little bit genial about him now. He was red-faced and muttering, his words catching at her like briars as he shoved past. “—bloody outrage. And in my house. They should be horsewhipped, filthy buggers.”

  Oh God, there was going to be a terrible scene, and Rosamond could not bear the thought of it. She did not want courage to bring ignominy, and kindness cruelty. She remembered Lord Mercury pleading with her to keep his secret. She remembered how it felt to kiss Anstruther Jones. To ride too fast through Ashworth Valley on a horse of flesh and steel.

  And then she realised. She, too, was tired of being frightened.

  Tired of trying to be good. Tired of trying to be perfect. Tired to waiting for someone to notice. Tired of waiting for someone to care.

  She might as well have joined the damn circus. They could have called her the Clockwork Girl. See how she smiles and curtseys, how lifelike she is. A miracle of modern mechanical engineering.

  Oh, to hell with it. To hell with everything.

  For the first time in her life, she was going to making a fucking choice. And maybe it was the wrong choice. Maybe it was a stupid choice.

  But it was hers.

  She yanked herself free of the marquess.

  His mouth twisted, as though he sensed her recklessness and her purpose. “If you associate yourself with reprobates, neither I nor my name will protect you.”

  “I do not want your protection.” She glared up at him, hating his handsome face and his dull eyes, and yanked the ring from her finger. It was rather a pleasure to cast that banal little solitaire at his feet. “I do not want anything from you.”

  Then she swept away from him, past Lord Copper and across the ballroom to where Anstruther Jones was standing with Lord Mercury—still hand in hand, their fingers tightly intertwined—at the centre of an unyielding crowd. Jones seemed as dauntless as ever—perhaps he was preparing to fight his way to freedom, or swing from a chandelier—but Lord Mercury was as pale as ice, trembling very faintly.

  She could hardly blame him. She felt caught somewhere between exhilaration and terror herself. “Mr. Jones, do you want to dance?”

  Rosamond actually thought she heard the flump as a nearby lady hit the floor in a dead faint. Whispers rushed away from her: what did she say, what did she say, whatshesay whatshesay.

  He smiled. “Always.”

  She glanced between the two men, suddenly uncertain. She had meant to come to their aid, but perhaps she had only made the situation worse. What would happen to Lord Mercury if Jones came with her? “If . . . if you are not otherwise engaged.”

  Lord Mercury pressed a hand extravagantly to his heart. “I would not dance twice in a row with the same gentleman. What do you take me for?”

  Rosamond laughed. She couldn’t help herself.

  It all seemed so simple suddenly, and everything else so silly. It was fun when you didn’t have to care about anything but the things—no, the people who really mattered.

  Footsteps sounded behind them, and she spun round, expecting the worst. Lord Copper, perhaps, with a riding crop. The marquess come to publicly humiliate her. Her father, his expression dark with disappointment.

  But it was Lady Mildred, ill attired as ever in tan and lavender taffeta. She gave a high-pitched giggle that, as little as Rosamond thought of her, was not the sort of sound she would have expected her to make. Lady Mildred was many things that were annoying, but stupid was not one of them. “Well,” she tittered, “aren’t we having a topsy-turvy evening. How droll.” She drew in a shaky breath. “Lord Mercury, will you do me the honour of dancing with me?”

  He offered his hand at once, his eyes full of gratitude. “It would be my pleasure.”

  Lady Mildred turned, her expression so marvellously vacuous that Rosamond had to repress a flare of admiration. “Why, Mama, whatever has happened to the music? Was there not to be a mazurka after the waltz?”

  It was a bold gamble. And it was met by the briefest of hesitations. Rosamond could not help but wonder what her own parents would have done. Her mother would have probably been too laudanum-soaked to notice. And her father . . . She did not dare to finish the thought, too afraid she knew the answer.<
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  But Lady Copper gave a sickly smile and clapped her hands, the sound cracking through the ballroom like a gunshot. “Play.”

  The orchestra lurched into action. Lady Copper seized her husband by the elbow and practically dragged him onto the dance floor. Other couples began to join them, slowly at first, but then with increasing urgency. A slightly desperate air of normalcy settled over the ball. A hastily transacted social covenant, allowing everyone to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened tonight. Certainly not that two sodomites and two seventeen-year-old girls had stood in flagrant defiance of everything society held to be right and proper and natural, and that they had done so without causing the sky to fall or the earth to crack.

  Even so, Rosamond knew that while they might be willing to ignore what had just happened, they would not forget it. And nor would they forgive. She was dancing on the tatters of her reputation. But she was dancing with Anstruther Jones, and it was the closest thing to magic she had ever known. Even if the mazurka could not have suited him less. His waltzing made up what it lacked in elegance with a certain . . . masculine vigour. But, unlike Lord Mercury who was lithe and as light on his feet as a cat in the moonlight, Jones was simply not built for . . . well . . . for hopping.

  Rosamond could barely contain her giggles. She was sure it should have felt wrong to be laughing. She had, after all, abandoned every precept she had ever been taught. Thrown away every hope of a respectable future. She didn’t even know what was going to happen to her when the dance was done. It would have been more sensible to weep.

  But she didn’t. She laughed, and Jones smiled down at her, and nothing about anything felt wrong.

  As it turned out, what she did next required no thought at all. It was simply the action of tucking her hand into the crook of Jones’s elbow, and waiting for Lord Mercury to take his other arm. Which he did, a few moments later, having bid a soft farewell to his dancing partner. Despite her resolution to think better of Lady Mildred, Rosamond permitted herself the slightly spiteful reflection that the other girl would likely keep the glove Lord Mercury had kissed, pressed as a cherished memento between the pages of a romantic novel.