like there to be.”
“Easily said for an able-bodied man with a nice accent. No. I’ll have to think of some way to make this work.”
Work, work, work. She picked up the fingerboard she’d been sanding earlier, then returned it to its spot. Was it finished? She wanted it to be. She wanted only to be done with it, to remove it from the list of things she needed to do. Poor violoncello; it deserved better.
At her side, Simon stood again. “Do you ever do something just because you want to?”
Oh yes, and that violin needed a new sound post. She looked over her racks of wood, built in and carefully sorted, to find a piece she could sand to fit. Spruce would be best. “I want to save this business. So yes, everything I do is because I want to.”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m asking if you ever do anything only for the joy of it.”
“Read How to Ruin a Duke?” She laid hands on a spruce dowel. “Kiss you again, perhaps? I’d also rather like to go to Venice. Do you own a ship?”
“I don’t,” he said. “And I don’t think kissing you again is exactly what you want right now either.”
“I suppose not. Light that lamp, will you? I’ll place this sound post. That’ll make tomorrow’s list of tasks shorter.”
He lit the oil lamp she’d indicated, sliding it close to her side. Before she asked, he handed her a short, sharp knife and a pair of tweezers. “For cutting and placing the post.”
Impressed, she said, “You’ve been paying attention.”
“I have been.” He puttered around the room idly while Rowena took measurements. “Look here. Can I tell you a story?”
“A How to Ruin a Duke kind of story? Or a story about you?”
“Both. It’s about me, but it’s got some ruin in it too. I just thought…I don’t know. You seem troubled, and I thought it might help you to hear it. It’s got problems you don’t have to solve, just like in Gothic novels.”
She wanted to look up, to look him deep in the eye, but instinct kept her head down and eyes on her work. If she watched him, he might go silent. “Of course I want to hear it.”
So he told her, as he paced the room—watching where he placed his feet, she noted, to avoid Cotton—of his birth to a vicar and his wife in a village near Wolverhampton. When illness swept through the village, fourteen-year-old Simon had been orphaned.
Rowena cut the spruce dowel to length, wishing she could take his hand. “I’m so sorry. Losing a parent is terrible, and losing both abruptly must have been more so.”
“It was a long time ago,” he said, setting the subject aside. “A tinsmith in the village agreed to take me on as an apprentice. It was a kindness—Glennon Lines was a fair and kind master—and he said I could work off the apprenticeship fee by completing extra tasks. Sometimes I worked as a groom and sometimes as a maid, and Lines kept careful account.”
Rowena had just picked up the dowel in her tweezers, and she bobbled it. “You were an indentured servant!”
“So are all apprentices,” Simon replied. “And I learned many skills working for him. How to handle horses, how to talk to customers, how to clean virtually anything. But not…” He drew in a ragged breath. “Not enough about metalworking.”
Rowena ignored the fallen dowel, ignored everything else, as Simon spoke on. About the older apprentice, Elias Howard, who treated Simon as a brother would. About the accident with boiling ore that Simon had caused.
“I don’t quite know what happened,” he said quietly. The lamp’s light flickered over his face, limning every groove of sorrow. “All the times I’ve thought of it over the years, but memory shifts and changes. All I know for certain is the result: Howard was horribly burned on his right hand and arm.”
“Your friend,” Rowena said softly. “Your friend whom you try to help. You mentioned him the day we met.”
“I didn’t help him at the time,” Simon said bitterly. “Once the surgeon had been called, I ran. I was fifteen years old then, and I ran and left my friend, and for thirteen years I’ve wondered what I could have done or should have done differently. He was only nineteen, and he lost the use of his right hand. His chance to become a master tinworker. He was courting a woman, and he wed her, but he’s had lifelong