Perhaps he didn’t need her help at all. That was deflating.
John took off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “IfI can find a way to generate and store electricity.IfI can find a way to have the electrical signals converted to something visual.Ifyou’re correct and this proves something that people will spend money on. That’s a lot of ifs and a long time before those questions are answered.”
“So not a guaranteed solution, then?”
“Not quite.”
“What about this one?” She walked over to his desk and picked up another contraption.
“I’m looking for a way to filter sewage.”
“Sewage?”
“Human waste,” he said. “Excrement,” he added when she didn’t respond.
Charlotte dropped the device, sniffing her fingers hesitantly, relieved when all she could smell was rose-scented silk. “Charming.” She crossed to stand in front of him. His head still rested on the glass. One arm was casually thrown over a device with a series of sharp blades that looked like a torture machine. “And what is that one?”
He sighed. “Wouldn’t it be nice to cut lawns with exact precision and little effort? Even with the sharpest scythe, there is variation in length of the grass purely because of the arc of the swing, and the amount of labor involved is considerable. This could bring hours back to a gardener’s day—if I can make it work.”
She had never really consideredhowlawns were cut. All she knew was that the greater the size of the estate, the more likely it was that there were goats.
“So you’re creating all of these things at once? How do you hold it all in your head?” Creating a single one of them seemed more complex than she could imagine.
He chuckled, but there was nothing amused to his tone. In fact, it seemed rather grim. “It’s not something I have any control of. Trust me; I’d give almost anything to be able to forget.”
Given he’d still made no attempt to stand, she sank cross-legged in front of him, shifting aside a hunk of metal and a spool of wire so that she could spread her skirts neatly.
“How does it work? Your memory?” She’d heard Fi mention it before, that he never forgot a thing. It couldn’t be possible that he rememberedeverything, though.
John gave a wan smile. “I simply need to see something and the image of it is burned into my brain. Anything that I want to recall, I retrieve in the same way one searches through the stacks of a library. Once I’ve found where the image should be, it springs to the front of my mind. I can see it as perfectly as if it were in front of me.”
It sounded remarkable. And completely unbelievable.
“What was I wearing the first time we met?” Not that she could prove him wrong. Even she didn’t know the answer to that.
He gave her a smile. “It was in your brother’s room. Wilde and I were doing very secret boy stuff and you burst in. You were perhaps ten years old? Eleven? Your hair was lopsided, as though your maid had been half-drunk, and you were wearing a yellow pinafore with green leaves printed across it and lace on the hem.”
She remembered that pinafore. It had been one of her favorites. Her hair had been lopsided because she’d put it up herself. She’d been too young to have a lady’s maid and Edward had braided her hair every morning and every night. When she’d heard that the boy from across the garden had come to visit, she’d begged a housemaid for some hairpins and clips, and fashioned it into an up-do herself. She’d thought it was pretty. She’d have been mortified to learn how amateurish it had truly been.
“The next time we met?” she asked.
John closed his eyes, as though he were rifling through his thoughts. “You were no longer in a pinafore and pantaloons. You were wearing a proper dress that came down to your ankles and had sprigs of holly all over—it must’ve been around Christmas time.”
Charlotte’s throat tightened at the way he recalled her so vividly. She had memorized everything about him—what meals he ate fastest, the way he took off his spectacles whenever her mother was in the room, how he always gave William an apologetic shrug when Edward shooed his younger brother away.
It made her giddy to hear that he remembered the details about her as clearly.
“And the last time we met?” Her voice barely made it through the viselike squeeze her heart had on her throat.
His eyes flew open. “Last night?” He searched her face and then sighed. “You were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and your expression when we said good night was the worst. That is an image I wish I could somehow forget.”
What on earth was she supposed to say to that? It was so at odds with his sentiments the night before. Dash it, this man made no sense. She pointed to the mass of wire that lay next to her. “Tell me more about this one,” she said. “What does it do?”
“It makes electricity.”
“Electricity? It makes light?”
He shook his head. “Not quite. Electricity canmakelight, but it is not light. Some of it cannot be seen at all. There is an idea about this that is bouncing around in my brain, but I cannot grasp it. I know the seed of it is within a book, but I cannot remember which one.”
