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  “What’s so extraordinary about him?” Edward sat back and crossed his arms. “He’s not a real scientist.”

  “Regardless, he has been able to illuminate the mysteries behind many ancient artifacts. They say his intuition is uncanny. Of course he uses his extensive knowledge to piece objects and facts together, but somehow he knows better where to start than anyone else.”

  “But how, Papa?” Mary asked.

  “Others have been trying to determine his secret methods for years, but none have had success. Rumor has it that he’s not ill at all but is recovering from a poisoning attempt from a jealous colleague.”

  “Christopher!” The duchess inclined her head toward their daughter, but it was too late.

  “Is someone going to poison Uncle Edward?” Mary asked, her voice rising to an ear-splitting pitch.

  “Of course not.” The duchess stood and held out her hand. “Now I believe it is time for you to have your tea with your siblings. Cook has made your favorite cream puffs. Say goodbye to your uncle.”

  “Goodbye, Uncle Edward. Will you bring me something?”

  “I will try to remember to do so,” he said. He patted her “journal”. “And I shall bring this with me to read.”

  The girl’s gap-toothed grin made a curious warmth bloom in his chest, and she hugged him. “Thank you, Uncle Edward! God speed.”

  Christopher and Edward stood when the duchess did, and she pecked Edward on the cheek. “Take good care of yourself and your rakish friend, Mister Bledsoe. His violin will be missed at the summer concerts.” She swept out with Mary in tow, leaving Edward to his brother.

  “Cream puffs?” asked Edward.

  “Of all that just transpired, you would remember the pastries. Your sweet tooth hasn’t changed, brother.” Christopher rang the bell for the maid. “But as much trouble as I’m in with Pauline over what I told you in front of Mary, it’s good you know the rumors. You had best be on your guard on your travels.” He paused and gave Edward a look that mixed affection, tolerance and concern. “More than you normally would be.”

  Grange House, 07 June 1870

  Iris stuck the spade into the black soil and relished both the sound as it sliced through the dirt and the feel of it as the grains gave way. Her father’s voice came to memory: If you were on a dig, you’d have to be more careful than that, but pay attention to the dirt. It will tell you if it hides something valuable. She’d never been able to communicate with the ground like he had, but she was pretty sure there wasn’t anything valuable hiding in the tomato plot. In fact, she relished the lack of images, sensations, and thought fragments in the plain old garden soil. Sometimes moving through the world gave her a sensation of constantly being called to, the inanimate objects like beggars on street corners who wanted to take her time and mental energy with their stories.

  She reached for a baby tomato plant, which her father had started from seed a few months before, and which had been growing in a patch of sunlight in his study.

  “Don’t you have servants for that?”

  The male voice startled Iris, and she looked up to see Lord Jeremy Scott, one of her father’s students, leaning on the fence between the street and the garden. Oh, lovely. Of all the students they’d had to the house, he was her least favorite. He’d always studied her with the air of a collector looking at a beautiful thing to add to his glass cases, and she recalled her father complaining how the young nobleman had a sharp mind, which he more often turned to how to get others to do mundane, hands-on tasks for him rather than what he was supposed to learn.

  “Some of us aren’t afraid to get our hands dirty,” she said. “I find the garden to be relaxing.” She lifted her eyebrows and cocked her head, hoping he would get the hint she wanted to be left alone.

  “I was curious whether Professor McTavish is in,” he said. “I’d like to speak to him.”

  Iris stood and brushed her hands on the duster she wore over her oldest day dress. Some relief came with being able to look Jeremy in the eye rather than be literally looked down on by him. She sensed he viewed her with an air of superiority, particularly since it was difficult to have a lot of dignity in her current attire, complete with old straw bonnet. At least now she could disappoint him face-on and with relish.

  “Doctor McTavish is not available,” she said, and before he could ask when he would be, “He’s still out of the country.”

  “Oh.”

  Iris could almost hear Jeremy’s brain ticking along like the steameograph her father used to copy tests for his students, so she interrupted his scheming with a polite, “Is there a message you’d like me to give him for you, should he return earlier than expected?”

  “That I’ve been invited to join a dig in Italy, and I was hoping he could give me the benefit of his expertise before I go.”

  No doubt so you can position yourself as the expert and figure out how not to do any real work. But she nodded with as much seriousness as she could muster around her uncharitable thoughts.

  “And there was something else, but I suppose I should talk to you about it first since you have achieved your majority since I saw you last.”

  “Oh?” Iris’s heart gave a dull thump. Oh, please let him not be thinking of marriage.

  “Yes, I shall meet you inside. This isn’t the proper place for such a discussion.” He gestured to the garden. “There’s so much dirt.”

  “Well, yes, it’s a garden. And I’m in the middle of summer planting. Perhaps you could return another time?”

  He ran his eyes over her attire, his gaze pausing at her dirty hands, and nodded. “If our discussion goes well, you shall not have to soil your hands like this again. Tomorrow for tea, then?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know my schedule. Something has come up,” she said, thinking of the journey she was about to undertake. Under false pretenses, her conscience reminded her.

  “Oh. Perhaps I should send word to your father via telegram? I can get my answer quickly and not inconvenience you.”

  “Please don’t disturb him. Tomorrow teatime should be fine,” Iris told him. Telegrams! Confounded things.

  “Until then.” He tipped his hat and walked off. Iris watched him go, a seed of anxiety sprouting into dread in her stomach.

  I hope this isn’t what I think it is. She pictured Jeremy being the first in a long line of suitors. Whereas most young ladies her eminently marriageable age of eighteen would be looking forward to a season in London so they could catch a husband and settle down, she dreaded the idea. One of the few good things about being orphaned and without other relatives—no one would force her to put herself on display, or at least the self deemed most acceptable for the marriage market, which was not her true self.

  Iris knelt and put the tomato plant in the hole she’d dug for it. She hoped the feel and damp, earthy smell of the soil plus the sharp odor of the tomato plant itself would keep her in the present. But her mind dragged her back to the past, when she’d discovered she had more in common with her father than their interest in ancient times and high dirt tolerance.

  Chapter Five

  Grange House, 15 April 1864

  Iris listened for the combination of splashing sounds and sigh that told her Adelaide McTavish settled in the bath. She hid in the hallway, waited for Sophie to leave the lady’s bedroom, and tiptoed in. Iris’s mother hummed, and through the cracked door Iris saw Adelaide’s head of dark hair above the lip of the tub. She stepped back to ensure she wouldn’t be seen should her mother turn around, and the pain shooting through her abdomen made her suppress a gasp. It had been that way since last night, when her courses started for the first time. She made Sophie, two years older and much more versed in such things, promise not to tell Adelaide, who would want Iris to start doing things in a “womanly”—that is, stifled and not fun way. She wanted a few more weeks before she’d be stuck in long dres
ses and—worst of all—a corset. It was bad enough she had to walk around today with a tied-up bunch of rags pinned to her bloomers. She felt sure everyone must see her waddling and know her secret, but she was discovering theirs in unexpected and delightful ways, so perhaps it was fair.

  From her childhood, her father had told Iris how objects all told stories, and the ancient ones had the best stories of all. She hadn’t understood what he meant until she picked up her fork that morning and saw a flash of the kitchen maid’s joy in the beautiful day and the prospect of her day off once the family was done with breakfast. Then she’d gone into her father’s study and touched one of his pens, feeling pride in the student he’d written the recommendation letter for that morning. Hearing her mother humming in the parlor across from the study made Iris drop the pen and sneak back into the hallway.

  Adelaide sometimes spared a smile for her only child, but Mrs. McTavish always had an air of loneliness about her, especially when Irvin was away on expeditions or spent long hours at the university. Of course she hadn’t confided anything in Iris, but always having been a sensitive child, Iris knew her mother wasn’t happy. She tried to be good, but she seemed unable to avoid getting in trouble, which usually meant getting dirty. So when Adelaide’s mood lightened, Iris wanted to know why. Would she at the wise old age of twelve be a big sister? With babies being as messy as they were, she would have something to excel at, and maybe her mother would finally approve of her lack of squeamishness and ability to tolerate soiled things. So Iris had followed her mother around all day at a distance, watching for a chance to get in her bedroom without getting caught. She could have waited until the evening, when her parents would be at the opera, but she was curious now.

  So once Adelaide was safely ensconced in her bath, where she would be for at least forty-five minutes, Iris tiptoed into the bedroom and headed for the dressing table, which should hold objects that her mother touched every day and would be exposed to bedroom thoughts. As luck would have it, Adelaide’s wedding ring sat in the center between two tortoiseshell combs. Iris licked her lips, and a thrill of excitement edged the cramping pain from her consciousness. She held the ring between her forefingers and thumbs, a technique that seemed to give her the clearest pictures.

  Instead of a fat, dimple-cheeked baby, Iris saw a handsome young man. Now an unfamiliar feeling between her legs, heat and pressure, made her cheeks go red simultaneously with the sensation the blood ran from her head. Then an image of her father and hatred and resentment and worst of all, the itchy, burning sensation of contempt like a poison oak rash in the middle of her chest. The last sounds she heard before she fainted were the clattering of the wedding ring on the floor and its rolling away guided by a groove in the wood.

  She woke to smelling salts and the concerned faces of Sophie and Adelaide, to whom Iris had to confess about her courses starting. Her mother strapped her into a corset the following week, but Iris couldn’t blame it for the stifling sensation she now had at the thought of her gift. Now the girl who played in the dirt became the one who wore gloves all the time, even when she ate. The only good thing to come out of it all was that Irvin allowed Iris to help him more at the office, where she got the faint sense of past stories from the objects he brought back from his digs.

  As for Iris, she vowed never to marry because she couldn’t bear the thought of touching her husband’s things and finding out he loved another and pitied her or worse.

  Grange House, 07 June 1870

  Iris caressed the leaves of the tomato seedlings. Her heart hurt for her father. He had to have known of Adelaide’s indiscretions, but he wept at her funeral two years before as a heartbroken husband should. Iris tried not to touch his things at the time because his emotions were too much to bear on top of her own conflicting ones—relief that Adelaide and Irvin would no longer suffer because of each other and sadness for herself because of the limitations her gender put on her, specifically the pressure she would be under to follow in her mother’s unhappy path.

  And now it begins… For what else could Jeremy want to speak with her about? She wondered if he would find her so attractive if he knew how her mother’s and then her father’s medical care had drained the family’s coffers. He came with family money, though, so it might not matter so much to him.

  All the more reason to go on this expedition and achieve my own fortune.

  Now if only she felt more confident she could pull it off. Sophie appeared with a folded piece of paper and said, “Tea is ready, Miss, if you would like to take it. Cook has made tarts.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.” Iris took the note from Sophie and ignored the throb of disapproval emanating from her. Iris unfolded the slip of paper to find a message from Johann Bledsoe: Edward Bailey will be packing tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. Suggest you help him.

  Why would he want me to help him? I thought he wanted me to stay away from him. A drop of sweat trickled down Iris’s temple. What sort of game is he playing?

  Aetherics Department, Huntington University, 08 June 1870

  When Edward arrived at his office, he found his old friends the water stains Hickory, Dickory and Dock had been painted over. The sun shone through the windows with obscene brightness, and he had to squint to make out the jumble his carefully organized books, journals and other things had become when the shelving had been moved away from the walls.

  “Now I’ll never be able to pack,” he lamented to anyone who might be in earshot. As it was summer and the department therefore quiet, his complaints met no ears but his own. Still, grumbling under his breath provided an outlet for the frustrating pressure that built from his middle. It was bad enough his biological schedule had been thrown off since Monday, when he’d had to take his morning tea twenty-one minutes early, and the cream puffs at his brother’s house the day before had seduced him into a heavier teatime than usual, which meant he ate his dinner on a non-empty stomach, which led to indigestion all night. Now here he was, his stomach unsettled along with his brain, and he would have to organize and pack with his mental faculties at the lowest they’d been in years.

  A knock on his door startled him, and he yelled, “Come in.”

  The two women from the meeting on Monday opened the door.

  “I can’t help you right now,” Edward snapped.

  The more petite of the two smiled with the same patient look in her eyes his mother had when he was demanding she do something he thought was reasonable but she didn’t. “We’re here to help you. Your friend Mister Bledsoe suggested it.”

  “What, why?”

  The woman, whom Edward recalled was named Miss McTavish, gestured to the mess. “He seemed to think you would require some assistance packing for our expedition, at least with regard to academic materials. I often helped my father pack for his trips, so I have some expertise in the matter.”

  Edward looked around the office and closed his eyes against the chaos. “I cannot be bothered to determine what is important and what isn’t, so I shall take everything.”

  Miss McTavish’s eyes widened, and he noticed their unusual dark bluish color, that of her namesake the iris. Fickle things, they bloomed for a short time in the late spring, and he supposed he couldn’t count on her to be constant for much longer than that. With her striking eyes and light blond hair, she was the type Johann went for—the dramatic ones like actresses and singers—so it wasn’t a surprise his friend had taken an interest in her. If Edward were to care about matters of the heart, he might allow himself to feel disappointed, but as it was, his friend was welcome to her and her meddling ways.

  “You mean to take…everything?” Miss McTavish asked.

  The other young woman, Miss Smythe, coughed. “I believe he does, Miss McTavish.”

  “Well, of course,” Edward said. “While the rest of you are off traipsing about large cities that harbor who knows what diseases, I shall continue my work a
s best as I am able.”

  “So you mean to bring equipment as well,” Miss McTavish said. “I assume you have a separate lab.”

  “Of course. Some of my devices are too delicate to trust to the crudeness of our transportation systems, but I shall take what I can.” He thought through his laboratory and what could be transported. “It should only require five or six crates. Let’s say six to be safe.”

  “You haven’t traveled much, have you?” Miss McTavish asked him.

  “I’ve journeyed enough. My brother has an estate in the countryside. It’s a good ten miles outside of town. It can take an hour by steamcoach if the weather makes the roads muddy.”

  She tugged on the edges of her wrist-length gloves and flexed her fingers. “Let’s think this through, Professor Bailey. If you look at the itinerary, you’ll see we leave the continent of Europe at some point, and with it access to wheeled conveyances. Thus, you have to think about packing in terms of what you can fit on a horse or camel.”

  “A horse? You mean we may have to ride?” Edward spent as little time as possible around those smelly, biting brutes, and he pushed away the mocking voice from his memory. “What, are you scared of them? Is poor little Eddie afraid of the big bad horsie?”

  “I’m afraid so. This isn’t a pleasure trip.”

  “No, that is apparent.” He took a deep breath and tried to blow out his frustration, but it didn’t help. If anything, it contributed to his anxiety about the whole thing being too big for his insides. No wonder he had an almost constant state of indigestion. Speaking of which… “Excuse me,” he told the two ladies and bolted from the office.

  “Big hairy ox’s bollocks.” Iris allowed herself to swear after the professor left the room.

  “Miss!” Sophie looked at her with a shocked expression.

  “I don’t know who to be angrier at, the ridiculous Professor Bailey or his friend who has gotten me into this situation.”