Free At Your Pleasure by Meredith Duran Page A

could not look away. Her pulse began to race.
    Rivenham’s expression darkened. He glanced back to the note in his hand, and she felt as though she could breathe again. “Also,” he said, his voice flat, “some hubbub regarding a paper presented at the Royal Academy. An alchemist claims to have produced an incalescence of mercury and another mysterious substance which he will not divulge, the projection resulting in pure silver.”
    “But how extraordinary,” she said. “I wonder—may I see the letter?”
    Rivenham passed it over. “You still study alchemy, Lady Towe?”
    The words seemed to leave him reluctantly. She felt Lord John’s curious gaze cut between them. “Not recently,” she said as she skimmed the relevant passage. Her husband had not liked the pursuit, thinking it too near to witchcraft when practiced by a woman.
    The letter held no true details, only a layman’s rough summary. She handed it back.
    “Alchemy!” Lord John looked caught between intrigue and disapproval. “What business has a lady in such dealings?”
    “Why, I think a lady best suited to it,” she said. The slight sharpness in her voice was for a man now dead, who had not appreciated her logic. “Are not women’s bodies the very crucibles of transubstantiation? They take a seed and make a child of it: what else can that be but alchemy?”
    Rivenham laughed. It was a beautiful sound, low and husky, and it brushed along her skin like fingertips, making her shift in her seat. “First blood to the lady, Lord John.”
    Lips thinning, the boy inclined his head in acknowledgment.
    All at once she could not bear to remain here a moment longer. To have Rivenham laughing at her cleverness, lauding it to another man—to feel, even for a second, this camaraderie and connection—seemed infinitely more dangerous than her explicit purpose.
    She rose, and the men rose as well, their courtesy ingrained. “I must resume my business,” she said, “but I wished to invite you both to take supper with me tomorrow. Let it never be said that the Colvilles do not treat their guests with courtesy.”
    “If Lady Towe wishes to play the hostess, I see no harm in it. Let her entertain us! God knows I languish in such rustic climes.”
    Adrian nodded. For fully an hour now, Lord John had been complaining about his refusal of the marchioness’s invitation.
    To explain why he found it suspicious would entail truths he had no interest in sharing. But he felt great skepticism at the prospect of Lady Towe uncovering in herself the desire to preside over an elegant table laid for her brother’s persecutors.
    “Ware of poisons,” he murmured, only half in jest.
    The boy’s laugh held a derisive edge, which faded when Adrian met his eyes. “Your fancies run wild, Rivenham.”
    “No doubt.” Adrian returned his attention to packing the leather bag on the bed. On his return from catching Lady Towe this morning, he had found the great hall filled with farmers who disliked the long arm of the king in their fields—unwilling, on the eve of an uncertain harvest, to sacrifice even a single sheaf of grain to the tramp of careless hooves. Braddock had stood in their midst, sword drawn, threatening them with harm if they did not disperse. These Londoners had no notion of how to reason with men who knew their own dignity and rights and guarded them fiercely.
    It would be a fine piece of irony if his own men, with no help from David Colville, sparked an insurrection in the northeast.
    The Colville men had ever been careless of their domestic administration. Adrian’s request to their steward for a detailed map of the holdings—one that might suggest routes for his men’s watch that would avoid thetenantry—had been answered with a blank look. These maps did not exist. He saw no choice for it then but to go to Beddleston. In his library were accurate charts of the whole area, drawn by his brother and himself not seven years before. It was only half a day’s