She looked at him skeptically. “Is that not what your brilliant memory should do?”
John scrubbed at his eyes again. “Yes, but I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours, so my memory is proving fallible.”
Charlotte looked at the mountains of books strewn around the room. It would take a year to search every page of them. “If you found this missing clue, it would, what? Tell you what to do next?”
John picked up his spectacles from where they lay beside him and cleaned them with the edge of his rumpled shirt. “I don’t know what the clue is going to tell me. There’s just a tiny voice in my mind telling me there is a piece of information I need. It was on page sixty-four. The margins were wide, and it was about a third of the way down the page, but for the life of me, I can’t remember the title.”
Charlotte cocked her head. “Can you remember what the cover looks like?”
His jaw dropped open. “It was blue.” His voice was more animated than it had been since she walked in.
“Dark or light?”
“Light blue, which meant it was an issue ofPhilosophical Transactionsor an issue ofAdvancements in Physics. Charlotte, you’re a genius.” He climbed to his feet and offered her his hand. As his fingers enclosed hers, she felt a frisson of energy shoot through her.
“Help me find the article,” he said as he started searching through the haphazard piles of journals and books. Every third or fourth journal he pulled out of the stack and tossed into the sky-colored pile on the floor.
“Here,” he said, handing her one. “Page sixty-four. We are looking for the wordkinetic.”
They both spent several minutes in silence sorting through the stacks until John looked up. “You came with an idea,” he said, as though he was only just now hearing her words.
“Yes, but it’s not nearly as interesting as any of yours.” She would never have an idea as important as his. He was like Fiona. He was going to change the world. He already had. The steam engine he’d designed was far less likely to decapitate its operators than previous iterations. The newspapers said it had saved many, many lives.
“It was a way to get out of the engagement, though,” he said. “Some other way to come up with the blunt.” He looked at her with all the hope of a wallflower wanting to dance.
“If you won’t marry your way out of debt—”
“I won’t.”
“And it will take too long for you to find a way out with your new devices—”
“It will.”
“Then there is only one solution. We earn your way out. Every ball has a gambling room. We make a list of who you owe money to, find out which parties they’ll be at, and we play until we win.”
Chapter 10
The hack dropped Charlotte on the street outside the building housing William’s apartment. Now that she didn’t have urgency overriding her senses as she did with her last visit, she was very much aware of the street and how out of place she must look. Her caramel-colored silk pelisse, which had felt suitably plain when she dressed, now seemed rather ostentatious with its clean white lace on the hem and matching white gloves. She had paid little attention to her footwear when she’d put her slippers on, but against the muddy wooden boards that ran alongside the road, the jeweled clips looked decidedly unsuitable.
There was a tug at her sleeve, and she looked down to see a street urchin with a dirty face and wide eyes looking up at her. The girl must have been no older than eight, and her arms poked like bare winter branches out from a torn and ragged dress.
“’Scuse me, ma’am. Do you have a coin?”
Charlotte reached a hand into her pocket to draw out her purse. Before she could extricate it, five other children appeared, grubby fingers outstretched.
She had little money on hand—the stores she frequented extended lines of credit to her family—but at the bottom of her reticule was a roll of pennies and two wrapped peppermints. She distributed the pennies and apologized to those who missed out, giving them a sweet instead. It was clearly not an inferior alternative. The peppermints were quickly unwrapped and popped into grinning mouths. The children who received the coins looked on with jealous expressions.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” she promised. “I’ll bring more sweets with me then.”
The children scampered and Charlotte once again faced her brother’s building, fortifying herself with a deep breath and brushing down her skirts, trying not to notice the marks made by dirty little hands.
Private Thomas James opened William’s door. His uniform was crumpled, his red coat unbuttoned, and the white cotton of his sling had greyed. He bowed awkwardly and stepped aside.
Charlotte gave him a tight smile and crossed the room to where her brother lay sleeping, putting a hand on his forehead. His fever might have broken several days ago, but until the festering wound on his leg healed, she would be hypervigilant against its return.
“The sawbones was here this morning,” Thomas said, sidling up next to her. “He said the captain is making good progress.”
“That’s good news.” She dropped a quick kiss on William’s forehead and then turned to the boy who had been acting as nurse. The shadows under his eyes had deepened since she’d last been there. His curls had become tangled knots, and he had a hand lying unconsciously on his belly, like his stomach needed a good filling. “You look as though you haven’t slept in a week,” she said.
