What the Duke Doesn't Know Page 5

  “So they do not teach them, and then they blame them for not knowing?”

  “Exactly!” Ariel seemed delighted at her immediate grasp of the point. “Even though some of them are quite bookish.”

  “Bookish?” Here was another word she didn’t know.

  “They love books, and have taught themselves a great deal.” Ariel looked briefly guilty. “I read mostly plays, however.”

  Kawena didn’t see why she shouldn’t, if that was what she wished to do.

  “And so, many of them treat me like a…pet, or an appendage of Alan’s. It seems as if some of the older professors can’t even hear me when I speak. As if my voice was too high-pitched for their ears. Like a bat.”

  She giggled, and Kawena smiled.

  “It’s happened to me over and over,” Ariel continued. “I say something, and they ignore me. Then Alan says precisely the same thing, and they all leap upon the idea. It drives me mad.”

  Although Kawena thought that such people were not worth bothering about, she saw that Ariel was really annoyed. And she’d been so kind. “I don’t see how I could help with people like that,” she began.

  “Oh, I don’t need help with them,” Ariel responded. “I’ll show them, eventually. But it would be lovely to have a friend in the meantime. You listen to me.”

  “Of course,” said Kawena. Not to attend when someone was speaking—it was graceless. “I would be honored to be your friend. But I must also pay you back for your generosity to me.” Suddenly assailed by doubt, she added, “If I can recover my father’s fortune.”

  “You will. I’m sure of it.”

  “How can you be?” Kawena wondered.

  “There was a time in my life when I had nothing,” Ariel replied. “I nearly despaired, but it all came out right in the end.”

  Although Kawena didn’t see how this applied to her own case, she appreciated her hostess’s optimism. She nodded and smiled once again.

  Four

  “We all should go,” Ariel told James and Kawena the following evening. “The speaker is a good friend of Alan’s. Or, a valued colleague, at least. And it is an unwritten law of Oxford that you help fill the seats at your friends’ special lectures. With all the people you can muster.”

  “You’ll find it fascinating,” Alan added, entering the parlor in time to hear the last bit of this. “Sissingdun is discussing Sir Humphry Davy’s method of passing an electric current through compound liquids to break them down into their constituent elements.”

  Kawena glanced at James to see if he had understood what she did not. He looked pained, and a shudder appeared to pass over his frame. It didn’t look like comprehension.

  “You can use the process to isolate sodium, potassium, and the alkaline earth metals,” Alan continued, seemingly unaware of his audience’s attitude. “Davy has also demonstrated that the hydrogen in acids can be partly or totally replaced by metals, which then reconstitute into salts and water.”

  James groaned audibly.

  Alan laughed. “The process has many important practical applications.”

  “So it may,” his brother replied. “But I won’t understand ’em. So why must I sit there like a stuffed owl while some fellow I don’t know maunders on and on about it.”

  “They expect us to bring our whole household,” Ariel began apologetically.

  “As a favor to me,” Alan said at the same moment.

  “Blast.” James couldn’t refuse his youngest brother a favor, particularly not when he was enjoying the hospitality of his house. The Gresham brothers rallied ’round when called upon. It was a knockout blow, as Alan very well knew. “Devil.”

  Alan merely grinned evilly back at him.

  The talk was even worse than James had feared it would be. Two parts gibberish to one part school-masterly complacence. He couldn’t believe the way people around him nodded and smiled as if each word was another pearl of wisdom. Frankly, he didn’t think they understood above half of what was being said. It just wasn’t possible. His only comfort was Kawena, an enticing presence next to him on the deucedly uncomfortable wooden chairs. He’d seen her dark eyes glaze with boredom a few minutes into the droning. Indeed, they’d threatened to fall closed at one point, and her shoulder had rested against his until she caught herself and jerked upright. It had been a very pleasant sensation. “Feeling sufficiently edified?” he whispered.

  “My mind feels like a bit of seaweed left in the sun too long,” she murmured. “Shriveled down to nothing.”

  James laughed, earning a barrage of glares. He was forced to subside for the rest of the oration. Half a lifetime or so, he estimated.

  Afterward, there was only tea and some sickly sweet wafers. James was about to duck out a side door, brother or no, and find a pint of ale when he noticed Ariel approaching with a pretty blond. It was the same girl he’d noticed at the garden party, he realized, before that event had disintegrated into mayhem. The one he’d thought Ariel might be introducing as a potential bride. She was a taking little thing, with bright golden hair, big blue eyes, and a neat figure.

  “James, may I present Lily Randall,” Ariel said when they drew near. “Miss Randall, Lord James Gresham, my husband’s brother.”

  The girl dropped a curtsy, murmuring something like, “So pleased.”

  James gave her a bow and his best smile. “Delighted, Miss Randall.”

  “You are both…” Ariel began, but broke off at the sight of something over James’s shoulder. When he looked, he saw that Alan was beckoning rather urgently. “I’m sorry,” said Ariel, “if you will excuse me.” She rushed off, leaving the new acquaintances alone.

  “Enjoy the talk, did you?” James asked the girl.

  Miss Randall clasped her hands at her breast, inevitably drawing the eye to a most enticing bodice. Her sigh increased the effect. “Oh, it was perfectly splendid, wasn’t it? So very deep.”

  It wasn’t the response James had expected. “You’re interested in acids and, er, hydrogen then?”

  Her eyes grew even wider. James would have said that wasn’t possible. “Oh, it was all far too complicated for me to understand,” she assured him.

  James had felt the same. But now, stubbornly, he told himself he could have followed the fellow’s line of reasoning, if he’d wished to devote the time to study. “Why come to hear it then?” he asked.

  “Oh, we must.”

  Did Miss Randall begin every sentence she uttered with “oh”? James waited for her to offer a sounder reason to sit through an incomprehensible oration. But she said no more. “So it might have been a load of hogwash, for all we know,” he suggested.

  She gazed up at him, blinking her big blue eyes, apparently profoundly shocked. “Oh no.”

  “It might have been, though. How would we know, since we didn’t understand it?”

  “Oh, that isn’t possible…” Her soft voice trailed off.

  James was seized by a desire to convince her. His reasoning was sound. You couldn’t judge the merits of a discourse you didn’t understand. He wanted her to admit this, to come over to his side. And he wanted to penetrate below her surface parroting of what she’d been told. “Well, it’s possible,” he argued. “He could be mistaken. There are other…theories.” There always were, according to what Alan had told him about scientific investigation. “Who’s to say this fellow isn’t completely wrongheaded?”

  Miss Randall was shaking her head. “Professor Sissingdun is the wisest man I know. Everyone at Magdalen says that his work is vitally important.”

  “Well they would, wouldn’t…?”

  “And he is my uncle.” Her blue eyes seemed less liquid now, and more hawk-like.

  “Ah.” He’d put his foot in it. Why had Ariel abandoned him? She should’ve stayed at her post to guide him through the crosscurrents of Oxford society.

 
“And I think the fellows at the college know a good deal more about what is true than you,” Miss Randall added. Her tone said that this was the deathblow to his argument.

  At least I’ve gotten her to stop saying “oh,” James thought. “No doubt,” he muttered.

  “I believe my mother is looking for me.” With barely any acknowledgment, Lily Randall turned and walked away.

  James found he didn’t care very much. A little of Miss Randall’s company had been quite enough for him. It wasn’t the hint of steel beneath the fluttery facade. He wasn’t looking for a spiritless female. No, it had been her refusal to so much as consider his point that put him off. She’d treated him like an idiot.

  James looked around at the diminishing crowd. Spotting his party, he walked across the room to join them and, he hoped, convince them they had stayed quite long enough. But when he reached his brother’s side, he found he couldn’t get a word in. The older gentleman who’d been talking about turtles at the garden party had backed Kawena up to a wall and was rather looming over her. Alan and Ariel both looked a bit tense.

  “Surely you could have someone send me a few specimens,” the man was saying. He sounded aggrieved. “It’s a simple enough request. By the word ‘specimen’ I mean—”

  “I know what it means,” Kawena interrupted. “Turtles to cut up.”

  The man seemed astonished to be cut off in midsentence.

  “It’s a very long voyage,” Alan put in. “Here’s my brother. He’s a navy man and can tell you better than I. It takes weeks for a ship to reach Valatu, doesn’t it, James?”

  “Months,” he replied. “Depending on the type of ship, your luck with the weather, could be the greater part of a year.” Noticing Kawena’s suddenly stricken expression, he added, “Might be a bit less.”

  “Indeed,” said his brother. “So simply to send a message and receive any sort of…result would require a very long time.”

  “I will be back home by then,” Kawena declared. It sounded as if she was convincing herself.

  “Splendid, then you can send me specimens—”

  “Turtles cannot stay on a ship for so long,” she broke in on him again. “They would die and rot away.”

  He glared at her. “Perhaps you will allow me to complete a thought, young woman!” He tapped his chin with one finger. “Some specimens preserved in salt would be better than nothing,” he concluded.

  “I won’t send turtles off to die,” Kawena replied.

  “Do you care nothing for the cause of science?”

  “Nothing,” Kawena agreed.

  The older gentleman looked outraged, then resigned. He sighed and turned to Alan. “One can’t expect women to understand the importance of our endeavors, I suppose. It’s a great pity, but… Ah, well. Send her over to my house tomorrow afternoon. I can, at least, question her about island fauna. She must have noticed something, living among them her whole life.”

  James started to object to his tone. Ariel opened her mouth to speak. Alan looked distinctly uncomfortable. But Kawena forestalled them all. “No,” she said.

  The turtle enthusiast frowned down at her.

  “I do not wish to come to your house,” she continued. “Or to talk to you about island ‘fauna.’”

  “It means simply—”

  “Animals. Yes, I know. A man who visited my father used this word. He trapped many, many birds and killed them and took their skins away with him.”

  “Someone has been there before me?” The professor whirled on Alan. “You must order her to come and tell me all she knows.”

  James feared that his brother would retreat under the beetling eyebrows and fierce stare of a senior collegian. But happily, Alan was made of sterner stuff. “Miss…Kawena is a guest in my house. I don’t command her time.”

  “You would let some stupid native girl’s whim stand in the way of scientific—?”

  “We do not ‘let’ our guests be insulted,” said Ariel. “I think you must excuse us.” Gathering her party with a glance, she headed for the door. James felt like letting loose a cheer as he followed her.

  Relieved to be away from the furious old man, Kawena welcomed the soft evening air with a deep breath. It was just past sunset. The western sky still showed streamers of red and gold. She matched her steps to Ariel’s.

  Alan appeared at her other side. “I don’t believe you have told us your last name,” he said. “At least, I do not know it. And it is awkward to call you Miss…uh.”

  “Benson,” she answered. It sounded a bit rusty on her tongue. Her father’s name was seldom added to her own on the island. And she hadn’t used it while traveling dressed as a young man.

  “Thank you,” her host said.

  “I am sorry if I made any trouble for you,” she told him, though she didn’t know how else she could have answered the studier of turtles. Even if she’d been inclined to help him, which she emphatically was not, her mother would have forbidden it. After the bird killer, her mother had vowed that no such person would be allowed on the island again.

  “Harris will get over it,” Alan replied. “His temperament is quite impervious.” He dropped back to walk next to his brother.

  Ariel took her arm. “Are you all right?” she asked. “I’m sorry for the way he spoke to you.”

  Kawena shrugged. “He has nothing to do with me. But I understand better what you said about the way they treat you here.”

  “You’d think that intelligent, educated men would be more open-minded,” she responded. “They’re always talking about testing out theories and shifting their ‘hypotheses’ when they prove faulty. My hypothesis is: they put too much stock in their schooling. They’ve worked so hard at it, are so proud of their scholarly accomplishments. If you don’t have that…stamp of approval, you’re inconsequential.”

  Clearly, Ariel had thought a great deal about this. Because she had to live her life here among them, Kawena supposed. She was glad she didn’t. “At least Lord Alan isn’t like that,” she offered. She’d discovered at the lecture that her host and his brother were supposed to be addressed as “lords”—another new custom to remember.

  “Now,” Ariel agreed. “When I first met him…” A reminiscent smile crossed her lips. “It was quite a while before he acknowledged my abilities.”

  There was a whole, tender tale in her expression. The glow in her hazel eyes made Kawena a bit envious. Even in the short time she’d been here, she’d observed that Ariel and her husband shared a special bond. “You’re fortunate,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  That one brief word was full of love. As Ariel glanced over her shoulder at her husband, Kawena wondered whether she could hope for such a marriage. Sadly, it seemed unlikely. At home on her island, there was always a…distance between her and the young men. That was partly—no, mainly—her father’s doing. He had not encouraged such connections. But she knew it wasn’t only that. With all her father had insisted she learn and do, the island men found her unsettling, foreign in a way that put off rather than intrigued. She intimidated some, irritated others. She’d been told as much, during a fumbling, humiliating encounter at age fourteen. She felt it from her side, too. She wasn’t like them.

  And here, on the other side of the world, amidst the other side of her heritage, she felt even more alien. Of course, until the last few days, it had been critical to hide the fact that she was a woman.

  “You’re very silent,” said Ariel. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Kawena nodded. “Just thinking.”

  “It must make your head spin, sometimes, so many new things to absorb.”

  These professors are fools to dismiss this woman’s abilities, Kawena thought. Ariel saw right to the heart of things.

  Her mind did feel muddled at times like this. Kawena was a foreigner at home, and a foreigner here. The E
nglishmen she’d met so far treated her as an oddity, even more than her childhood companions had done. Except Lord James. He seemed different, less rigid. Perhaps it was because he’d spent so much of his life at sea. On their recent walk along this same lane, she’d felt comfortable and stimulated and curious and…

  But he—any Englishman—would expect her to live in this country, and she couldn’t imagine doing that. It wasn’t home, would never be. And yet, home wasn’t quite home any more either, with her father gone. Add the long ocean voyage, and her life had been turned upside down. She didn’t know what she thought half the time.

  As they reached the house and went inside, Kawena gave herself a mental shake. Once she recovered her father’s fortune, she would have many choices. That was her mission, and must be her focus. If she failed…

  She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. The alternative was simply inconceivable.

  Five

  Only four days later, James received an envelope franked by Nathaniel. Opening it, he was surprised and pleased to discover that his eldest brother had actually managed the thing. “Nathaniel found us an admiral who’s willing to help,” he told the others at dinner that evening. “He’s written to a friend at the Admiralty offices to smooth my way.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Kawena.

  “Unofficial access to navy records,” he told her. “I can get a look at the addresses where they’re sending half pay without filling out a pile of forms. I’ll go up to London to talk this ‘friend’ and—”

  “We will go,” said Kawena.

  James shook his head. “That won’t wash. He’ll talk to me, because his old friend vouched for me and asked him to, and I’m a navy man as well. But he’d balk if other people show up, particularly a lady. He won’t be accustomed to dealing with females on matters such as these.”

  “I don’t see why—”

  “Aren’t I right, Ariel?” James added.

  His brother’s wife nodded, though her bright eyes crackled with annoyance. “I’m afraid that’s all too likely, Kawena.”