“There’s something about you that’s just—mine,” he said. “Male, female…I’m not so sure it would really have mattered.”
“I’m glad I’m a female. So what exactly did you and Villiers say to each other in Latin?”
He frowned. “I can hardly remember. I thought up the test. Obviously, if you didn’t know Latin, you were a woman. And you didn’t. But then Villiers took the opportunity to tell me that if I allowed Kitty anywhere near you in a state of undress he’d take off my head.”
“I love Villiers,” Harriet said with satisfaction.
“Now love me,” Jem said, rolling over.
Days passed like strings on a pearl necklace: luscious, erotic, sweetly spaced, beautiful.
Harriet understood the Strange household now. Its secret revolved around the Game. No wonder Jem rarely came downstairs to meet new guests. It was the Game that mattered, and half the new guests were merely there to provide entertainment for the players.
And now Harriet knew why the Graces stayed so long at Jem’s house, though Jem himself showed no interest in their talents. And how sundry other young ladies came by their jewels and the smiles in their eyes.
Sometimes the Game continued until two or three in the morning. One night Lord Sandwich started a conversation about how to raise three hundred thousand pounds for the use of the Home Secretary. Villiers suggested a poll tax. Jem shook his head. Harriet suggested a wine tax.
“And why is that, young man?” Sandwich said.
“Wine is a luxury,” Harriet said. “Alcohol is the primary cause of most criminal incidents adjudicated in the family courts.”
“I don’t know who you are,” Sandwich grumbled.
“You must study your Debrett’s more closely,” Villiers said, with a cutting edge to his voice. “I have very few relatives, Sandwich. I can’t afford to have any ignored.”
“It’s scurvy few relatives you have on the right side of the blanket,” Sandwich said.
“Young Cope is one of them,” Villiers said, unruffled. “A wine tax is a fine idea.”
“I don’t like it,” a man said, who turned out to be the Lord of the Privy Seal.
But conversation evolved around Sandwich’s love of fine claret, and in the end the idea of the wine tax carried. It was a heady sensation. She, Harriet, had influenced the policy of England.
Jem began coming to dinner every night. And luncheon, many days. Some nights he sat beside her, and others he sat at the head of the table and flirted with Isidore.
The heady pleasures of being male—of being able to ride freely, fence, and argue—grew more and more dear to Harriet. She found every conversation interesting. One night she got into an argument with one of the scientists about the recent discovery of a new planet called Uranus. Mr. Peddle argued that the head of the Royal Society shouldn’t have given Herschel, the man who discovered the planet, a Copley medal.
“What did he really do? The man spends his time stargazing, that’s all. And now he’s elected a fellow of the Royal Society! For nothing. You know, Sir Giles, down there—” He nodded down the table at bespeckled professor. “—Sir Giles identified the genus of the Purple Swamphen. Now that’s a good reason to become a Fellow. This man just looks at the sky and notices a star. Bah!”
“But we need to map the night sky,” Harriet said. “We have to understand our world. And stars are no different than wings on a butterfly, to me.”
“I disagree,” Peddle said. “When you’re older, you’ll understand how very different it is to spend a lifetime doing exacting scientific analysis, versus sitting outside of an evening with a glass of wine and waiting for a star to catch your attention!”
Jem elbowed her. “Turned down as a Fellow of the Society,” he murmured into her ear. “Migratory habits of the grasshopper not considered an adequate topic. The study took him seven years.”
“Strange was admitted to the Royal Society by right of his experiments on frog’s legs,” Peddle said. “No one can dispute that.”
Harriet raised an eyebrow at Jem. “Indeed.”
“Changing all sorts of things to do with electricity,” Peddle said, rather vaguely. “Frog’s legs and metals; you must have read about it.”
“It was five years ago,” Jem said. “Frogs are well in the past.” He had that secret smile in his eyes. He was proud, but he was pretending it didn’t matter.
Harriet turned to Mr. Peddle and asked him about how grasshoppers make music.
Later that night Harriet enquired about frog’s legs, but Jem wasn’t interested in them any longer. “They twitch,” he said. “It was all rather fascinating, but then I wrote up everything I knew. It pointed toward mathematics, so I followed my nose and I never ended up back with frogs.”
Harriet shook her head. “Aren’t you proud of being made a member of the Royal Society?”
He shrugged. “Proud…I’m proud of this.” And he got out of bed, buck naked. It turned out that what he was proudest of was a bridge. “Five arch ribs,” Jem said. “Over one hundred feet across the river.”
“It’s beautiful!” Harriet said, tracing the drawing with her finger.
“I couldn’t have done it without Darby’s cast iron. See, each one is cast in two halves?”
She nodded. She was beginning to understand how the combination of Jem’s wildly powerful mind and his inventiveness were changing the world. Literally changing the world.
“What are you most proud of?” he asked her later.
There were no bridges to mention so she said, “In the town where we live, the judge is a drunkard. So sometimes, if he was incapable, my husband would sit in the court.”
“Is that legal?”
“It’s always been done that way.”
“Aristocrats,” Jem said, amused. “So the country squire would stride in and save the day, would he?”
Should she tell him? She should…she should…I am a duchess. How hard was that to say aloud? Very hard. The words made her afraid. She couldn’t help thinking of Jemma’s words—that no one makes love to a duchess without thinking of the rank. The title changed everything.
“I can see Villiers doing that,” Jem said, idly tracing a pattern on her shoulder with one fingertip. “What happened after your husband died? Did the next squire take over?”
“I did.”
He sat up and his mouth fell open in a very satisfactory manner. But then he snapped it shut and said, “Of course you did. Of course you did!”
They ended up talking about Loveday Billing and women like her, women whose lives could be changed, perhaps, by a sympathetic voice and two pounds. “It’s amazing what a very small amount of money can do,” Harriet found herself saying. She told him things she’d never told anyone, about her view of the world and its injustices.
But he liked stories of Sibble best, Berrow’s most creative criminal. “He plagues the town,” Harriet said heart-feltedly. “No one is safe. It’s all a game to him.”
Jem laughed and laughed.
One night Jem rose from dinner and announced that the men would retire to take port together. The ladies left for the sitting room with looks of discontent. The men sat around the flickering candlelight for hours, arguing about slavery, tax relief, advances in taxidermy, whatever came to mind. There was no Game that night.