That’s a relief, eh?”
Eli glared back in stony silence, biting back a retort. Claiming no wish to kiss Olive was a lie, but admitting he’d already done so would only give the marquess more kindling to use against her.
His father gestured toward a sideboard.
The entire retinue scrambled to prepare his glass of port.
“All you need is a ‘yes,” the marquess said as though he were speaking to a child, “so that you can say ‘no.’”
“I’m aware of the terms.” Eli had hated them then. He hated them even more now.
Father settled in a comfortable chair and raised his glass of port.
Eli stayed on his feet, port-less. He would not be staying long.
“Don’t ruin this,” his father warned. “I could not have devised better revenge.”
If only Mr. Harper had never sent that cursed offer of reconciliation!
Eli’s father never forgave. The only thing the Harpers could offer the marquess was their utter humiliation.
So he’d set out to engender it.
Mr. Harper wanted a betrothal? He could have one. As soon as his daughter agreed to the match, Eli was to jilt her—the more publicly, the better—embarrassing her and her father both. The Harpers would be mortified to realize that neither they nor their farm held any interest to the marquess and his son. The current scheme was no more than a moment’s entertainment, like burning an ant with sunlight and a shard of glass.
That was the marquess’s plan.
Eli had been interested in Olive from the first moment he’d heard of her. His father was petty enough to enact vengeance for any slight, no matter how small, but the Harpers were the only foes daring enough to deserve a feud.
When he’d met her, that interest had coalesced into something deeper. She was everything his father feared and more: clever, talented, beautiful.
And forbidden. Then, as now.
The first of the marquess’s many stipulations to this wretched venture was that neither of the Harpers could suspect Eli’s interest wasn’t in earnest. He couldn’t simply tell Olive what he was about, then feign a betrothal and a messy split, and hope to pull the wool over his father’s eyes.
The marquess would know if Eli had followed instructions. The marquess would send spies to verify.
The marquess was here, now, because he rightfully suspected his son’s disinclination to cause Olive pain, no matter the reason.
“Be quicker,” said his father, “and I’ll give you two years instead of one. Deny me, and I’ll have you barred from your precious physic garden.”
There.
That was the reason. The carrot and the stick dangling in front of Eli’s nose.
The marquess knew his son wanted to devote himself to the science of botany, and why. Eli half-suspected his father had forbidden it all these years, just to have something to barter with when the appropriate situation arose.
Eli’s situation started the day he was born.
His mother, God rest her soul, had seemed fine at first, but the placenta had broken during the delivery, and the resulting infection stole her life within a fortnight.
Eli had blamed himself for years. Not that an infant had any control over whether a uterus properly expelled a placenta. A chemist, on the other hand… there was potential. If only he could find the right ingredients. A plant that could prevent tragedy.
“I’ve found a chemist who can turn our theory into reality,” Eli explained urgently.
The marquess looked bored. “You can lose him just as easily.”
Finding a path to the cure hadn’t been easy at all.
The year Eli was born, a group of scholars founded the Linnean Society to study natural history and define taxonomies. Their star, the great physician William Withering, had just discovered the healing properties of foxglove. It was proven to aid previously untreatable heart irregularities, including paroxysm of the heart. Foxglove’s full applications were still unknown, but countless experiments were underway for everything from inflammation to influenza.
Not for combating childbed fever, however, no matter how common death was. Women’s anatomy was not a priority when it came to research.
No cure or preventative measure would be discovered, unless Eli did so himself.
So he’d tried. Learnt everything he could about botany, about natural philosophy, even alchemy. It was plants he came back to, time and again.
“My research—” he began.
“I don’t give a damn about your research.”
“You should,” Eli said softly.
When he learned that the famous women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft had died the same way as his mother, Eli corresponded with her physicians, and amassed a web of chemists and apothecaries interested in preventing such a terrible fate from happening to more