William shrugged. “I mean, it’s a little bit funny. The glass sliced right under Great-Aunt Gertrude’s nose. It looks like she grew a proper mustache.”
“And if anyone had been in this room at the time, a sawbones would be busy digging glass fragments from their body.”
Oh. He was angry. Guilt settled in her stomach. He was right to be. She’d just destroyed one of his drawing rooms and endangered his household. Someone could have been seriously hurt.
Edward squeezed her shoulder. “Tell me this won’t happen again.”
But she couldn’t, because she had no idea why it had occurred in the first place. It made no sense. “I dunnae ken what happened,” Fiona said, standing up and walking over to her work area. “I’ve had accidents before but never spontaneous combustion. When I packed up yesterday afternoon, I checked it all. There were no open flames; all the chemicals were put away. I can’t see a cause.”
The stool she usually sat on had been knocked over. The bookshelf she had repurposed to hold jars of chemicals still stood but was covered in glass fragments and pools of sharp-smelling liquid. Only a handful of bottles on the bottom shelf remained unscathed.
Beneath the bench was the scorched remains of the box that held the finished prototypes. The soot-covered metal box was hanging open and all that was left was a pile of ash at the base—her diagrams and test results gone.
Absolutely, for certain, she had not left that box open, and it had been tucked away under the bench where no explosion would have knocked the lid off. “Someone has been in here.”
“Impossible,” Edward said. “This house is full of staff. Someone would have noticed an intruder.”
She turned to him. “Full of staff or nae, someone has been in this room since I left it.”
William sank farther down into the couch, his usual confident expression faltering. It did not go unnoticed.
“William,” Edward said.
The younger Stirling brother held up his hands in surrender. “Look, I’ll admit I was in here last night, after the ball.”
She sighed. “Good God, Will.” She pressed her hands together, tapping her fingers on her lips. It was all gone. All the prototypes, most of the materials required to make new ones. Thank God the formula had been burned into her brain, because her notebook was included in this pile of ashes.
She had nine days to create a new set. Not impossible, but if she was going to succeed, she needed to get started immediately. She needed to seek out a supplier of the raw materials. The sun had continued its rise while they were attending to the accident. Businesses would open soon.
Edward rounded on his brother. “Curse it, William. What in the blazes did you think you were doing coming in here?”
Will stood, hand on heart. “I was just looking. I swear. I put everything back exactly the way it was. There was no chance that this is because of anything I did.”
Fiona took a deep breath in. “Just looking” would certainly not have created an explosion. Especially not one of this size.
The thought pulled at the knot of unease that had twisted up inside her from the moment she’d heard the blast. She turned back to her bench. Almost all of her stock had been destroyed in the fire. “Huh.”
“What ‘huh’?” Edward asked.
“There were at least thirty bottles here this morning and now there’s only five. Given how much was destroyed, the fire really should have been bigger than that.”
The information made Edward even angrier. “You could have killed somebody,” he yelled at his brother. “What if Charlotte had been in the room? What if one of the servants had been in here?”
William flushed red. “This isn’t my fault, somebody else must have been here.”
“I’m done with your excuses,” Edward said. “Get out of here. Charlotte, you too. I don’t want you down this hallway until Fiona’s project has been cleared out.”
The siblings left, William with his hands balled by his sides, his eyes shining—whether with tears of anger or embarrassment, Fiona wasn’t sure. “Because Wilde is so bloody perfect,” he muttered on his way out.
Edward turned to Fiona, who was accepting a pair of slippers from a footman who looked like he could not get out of the room fast enough.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with him.” Edward sighed. “It doesn’t matter what I say, what punishments I mete out, I just can’t get it into his head that he is no longer a boy. There are consequences to his blasted actions.”
Fiona righted her stool and grabbed one of the empty sand buckets. “He needs a purpose in life. He’s flailing. Nae wonder he knocks things over.” She squatted down, collecting the larger pieces of shattered glass and dropping them into the wooden bucket with a sharpting.
Edward grabbed the broom that usually rested between the bench and the wall but was currently lying on the floor. With short, sharp strokes he began to sweep the debris into the center of the room. “I’ve offered to purchase him a commission or find a suitable parish, but he refuses to enter the military or the clergy.”
She paused and looked up at him. “Are there truly no other options? Because I can see how neither would appeal to a man like him.”
