Talk Sweetly to Me (Brothers Sinister #4.5)(3)
Rose had not. Her stomach clenched at the very thought. “How could I leave you, when Dr. Wells will not return from his tour of duty for more than a week yet? I promised him.”
Patricia’s husband was a naval physician. He’d bent sent to Sierra Leone around the time Patricia had realized she was with child, and Rose had come to attend her sister in his absence. But it wasn’t just her sister’s welfare that had Rose worried. Their parents lived in London—so close, and yet impossibly far from the Royal Observatory. At her father’s house, there would be no computations, no comets.
No Mr. Shaughnessy to set her nerves on edge.
“You know,” Patricia said, “you know that he is the most incredible rake.” She did not say who he was. She didn’t need to.
Rose set the oranges in a bowl, refusing to look at her sister. “He’s never once offered to seduce me. I don’t even think he’s thought of it.”
“He’s thought of it,” Patricia said dryly. “And frankly, Rose, the way he’s talking to you? I don’t think he’ll even need to offer.”
Rose let out a long breath and shut her eyes. It was, unfortunately, true. Mr. Shaughnessy was…well, he just was. His name had been on all the ladies’ lips since Rose was seventeen, when he’d earned renown—or infamy, depending on who was speaking—as the first man to write a column of advice for the Women’s Free Press, a radical paper that Rose should not have enjoyed nearly as much as she did. In the five years since his first column, he’d only built upon that reputation. He’d published four novels. His books were called “masterpieces of satire” by some, and “dangerous rubbish that was best burned unread” by others.
They had, by all accounts, sold well—and those who harrumphed about setting bonfires with them were the ones most likely to furtively purchase them in brown paper packaging.
Mooning after Mr. Stephen Shaughnessy was foolish. She knew how they looked, sketched to scale. Socially speaking, if he were an orange in Westminster, she was…an elderberry, somewhere in the vicinity of Tanzania.
“I love you, Rose.” Patricia sighed. “And I know you’ll make a good marriage, one as brilliant as mine. But you have to remember that most of the men who look at you won’t be seeing you. They won’t see that you’re clever and amusing.” Her sister came forward and took Rose’s hand in her own. “They’ll see this.” She rubbed the back of Rose’s hand. Dark skin pressed against dark skin. “It doesn’t matter how respectably you dress or how much you insist. Most men will see only that you’re black and they’ll think you’re available. So please take care, Rose. I don’t wish you hurt.”
Rose polished the last apple with a towel. “Don’t worry about that,” she said softly. “I won’t do anything foolish.”
She didn’t say anything about getting hurt. There was no point worrying about that. She thought of Mr. Shaughnessy’s smile, of the wicked gleam in his eye. She thought of him asking her about oranges and comets, of him looking at her and saying in that dark, dangerous, lilting tone I love it when you talk Sweetly to me.
She’d also seen the notes about him in the gossip column. He was utterly outrageous, and no matter how he made her feel, the last thing she needed was an outrageous man.
No, there was no point worrying about getting hurt.
At this point, pain was already inevitable.
Chapter Two
OF ALL THE WAYS that Stephen Shaughnessy had ever decided to torment himself, this one had to be the most diabolical.
There was a slight musty smell to the offices a few streets from the Royal Observatory, as if the windows were not often opened. The books on the shelves around him ranged from an ancient set of Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica to a report on something called spectroscopic observations; the walls were a yellowing whitewash over which charts had been tacked year after year, until only a few spots remained bare.
The room was, in short, little better than a dingy pit, the only decorations a celebration of mathematics—a subject he had never excelled at, and, until recently, had never found interesting.
Which was precisely what made his next sentence so shocking.
“Yes,” he heard himself saying aloud. “It is a real pleasure to meet you, Dr. Barnstable. I’m terribly impressed by your work.”
Even more shockingly, the statement was true.
“No, no. The pleasure is assuredly all mine.” Dr. Barnstable caught Stephen’s hand in his and gave it a few enthusiastic pumps. “I cannot believe you’ve heard of me—and that you follow astronomy.” He smiled bemusedly. “Truly, I feel dazed by the prospect.”
He could hardly feel as dazed as Stephen himself. It had taken him almost a month to realize what was happening and another four weeks to succumb to utter madness. Or mathematics; he wasn’t sure there was any distinction at this point.
Dr. Barnstable was an older man in his sixties, with six inches of white beard as proof of his age. But there was nothing fusty about him; he shook Stephen’s hand with a firm grip.
“Your paper on the orbit of double stars is a true classic,” Stephen said.
The point when Stephen had read it, searching for any hints of Miss Sweetly’s contribution to the piece, was the point when he’d known that it was over. It had been like a newspaper headline printed in two-inch type: There’s no use struggling, Stephen. You’re well and truly caught.