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Far more frequently, she would bustle them off to the machine shed and illustrate how to sketch a design using a ruler, with crucial parts identified as Fig. 1 and Fig. 2. Silvester still remembered sketching a design for an improved link-motion for steam engines, though he never knew exactly what it was meant to do.

Stella walked silently beside him out of the castle. Silvester didn’t fool himself about his wife’s reaction to the Grange. She was appalled. Of course, she was appalled. He felt a stab of guilt. He could at least have sent a team down from London to have the cobwebs and dust swept away.

“The Dower House was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and built around a hundred years ago,” he said as they walked through the neglected gardens. He made a mental note to hire gardeners.

Stella murmured something.

He led her off to the left, through a gap in the high hedge. In sharp contrast to the Grange, the Dower House was symmetrical in design. There were five windows on the upper floor and two on each side of the door. Two dormer windows jutted from the roof.

The brick gleamed in the afternoon sun, having been recently pointed and cleaned. What’s more, a wisp of smoke came from the chimney, suggesting that such maids as remained could be found here.

Sure enough, when he opened the door, three women came trotting from various parts of the house and dropped into curtsies, congratulations bursting forth.

Stella beamed, greeting each one and asking about their responsibilities.

It didn’t take long to walk around the ground floor of the Dower House, since it had only two drawing rooms, a dining room, a study, and a small parlor lined with empty bookshelves.

“I love that chaise longue,” Stella remarked when they entered the parlor.

It was upholstered in cherry-colored velvet and positioned before a window to catch the best light.

“The color?”

“Yes, and it’s so blissfully close to the floor,” Stella said. “Even I couldn’t spill my teacup from that height.”

“We can move it to the Grange,” he suggested.

“The room couldn’t do without it. The cherry is designed to complement the gray wainscotting.”

“I employed the same company for the Dower House that worked on the London townhouse,” Silvester told her. “We can hire them for the Grange, and you may have a chaise longue in every room, with legs that scarcely clear the floor, if you wish.”

He escorted her upstairs to inspect the bedchambers, trying to pretend that his skin wasn’t prickling. That his whole body wasn’t taut with desire. That he was interested in inspecting the new water closet.

Stella, on the other hand, was fascinated by Bertha’s explanation of how water was heated before it reached the bathtub. Silvester stopped listening and watched his wife’s arse as she bent over to open the tap.

“There’s hot water in the nursery on the floor above as well,” Bertha reported.

Disappointingly, Stella straightened. “Why is there a nursery, if this was designed as a dower house?”

“No idea,” Silvester said. “My mother will probably turn them into workrooms.” He led her from the water closet through an adjoining door into the largest bedchamber. It was furnished with more bookcases and comfortable chairs positioned before a tiled fireplace. It wasn’t ducal, like the chamber the Frenchmen had designed, but it was comfortable.

Stella beamed. “Your mother has marvelous taste.”

He followed her gaze to another chaise longue, upholstered in dark purple velvet.

“My mother had nothing to do with it,” Silvester said. He jerked his head, and Bertha backed out of the room, closing the door behind her.

Stella was chattering about wainscotting when Silvester lost every fragment of patience he had left in his body, scooped her up, and brought her over to the bed. Luckily, she began giggling, so he felt free to pull out her hairpins and start the elaborate process of unclothing his wife.

“Didn’t you promise that you would wear only a chemise for the first days of our marriage?” He rolled her to the side so he could tackle some irritating laces.

“You suggested that,” Stella said. She smiled at him as he eased her gown from her shoulders. She was blushing, but her eyes were happily desirous. How had he even considered sleeping with other women, given that no one had looked at him with this expression, this precise combination of desire and curiosity?

“I meant it,” he told her.

“You imagined me running down corridors in the Grange wearing a chemise? I’d be mistaken for a ghost! Not that there’s anyone to scream, except you.”

“I wouldn’t scream,” he promised. His heart was beating in his throat so hard that the words scarcely emerged. She let him remove her glasses, and her lashes swept her cheeks. He wanted to lap her up, taste her, bite her, make her his. He ripped her chemise, but thankfully it wasn’t that one, the one that caught on her hips and made him feel dizzy with lust.