The Duke Is Mine - Eloisa James [22]
“Stop!”
“I’m sorry,” Olivia said, wrinkling her nose. “I start to babble when I’m miserable. I know it’s a fault, but I can’t bear to cry, Georgie. I’d much rather laugh.”
“I would cry,” Georgiana said, scooting over and tugging gently at a lock of Olivia’s hair. “The very idea of Rupert’s taking down his breeches makes me feel tearful.”
“It was worse than I had imagined. But at the same time, Rupert is such a good soul, poor cluck. He really—there’s something very sweet about him.”
“I think it’s wonderful that you are able to respect his merits!” Georgiana said, with rather more enthusiasm than called for.
Olivia shot her a sardonic look.
“At any rate,” Georgiana added hastily, “I suspect that such intimacies are always embarrassing. Most of the dowagers refer to the experience in the most disdainful terms.”
“But think of Juliet Fallesbury and her Longfellow,” Olivia pointed out. “Obviously, she didn’t run away with a gardener because of his horticultural skills. At any rate, since Rupert is off to the wars at the crack of dawn, you, Lucy, and I will be taken to the country to meet the Duke of Sconce and his mother.”
“A lovely prospect,” Georgiana said, her eyes darkening. “I can’t wait to see the duke’s eyes roll back in his head from the utter tedium of sitting next to me.”
Olivia gave her a tap on the nose. “Just smile at him, Georgie. Forget all those rules and look at the duke as if he might be likable. Who knows, maybe he is? Just smile at him as if you were a pig and he the trough, promise?”
Georgiana smiled.
Six
Her Grace’s Matrimonial Experiment Commences
May 1812
Back in his study following the evening repast, Quin was dimly aware that his mother’s house party had commenced. There had been a great deal of commotion in the entryway shortly after the meal, which suggested that at least one prospective wife and her chaperone had arrived.
He had a reasonable amount of curiosity about the young women his mother considered suitable candidates for matrimony. But just at that moment a cascade of giggles bounced its way up the stairs and into his study.
The giggler would surely fail his mother’s tests regarding enjoyment, innocent or otherwise, so it would be a waste of time to greet her. He pulled off his coat and cravat, threw them over a chair, and sat back at his desk.
He had discarded polynomial equations for the moment, and returned to the problem of light. He’d been puzzling over light since he was a boy, ever since he’d met a blind man and realized that to him the world was dark. He had asked his tutor whether that meant that light existed only because we have eyes; the man had guffawed. He hadn’t understood the larger question.
For a moment Quin gazed through the window of his study at the growing darkness outside. His study faced west, and its windows held the oldest glass in the house, the kind that was bottle thick and blurred, slightly bluish in hue. Quin liked that because he was convinced that, somehow, glass held the answer to the mystery of light.
He’d been taught at Oxford that light was made up of particles streaming in one direction. But light came through his old glass in ribbons, and the ribbons didn’t act like a flowing river. It was more as if they were waves coming into the shore, bending slightly, adapting to imperfections in the glass . . .
Light came in a wave, not a flood of particles. He was convinced of it.
The problem was how to prove it. He sat down at his desk again, pulling over more foolscap. Light splits into separate color ribbons in rainbows. But rainbows are impractical and hard to pin down. He needed to . . .
By the time he raised his head again, the house was quiet