Seven Minutes in Heaven(89)
“You and I have not seen the last of each other,” she promised Lizzie. “I shall ask Mr. Reeve to allow you to pay me a visit in London. Would you like that?”
“Yes, I would!” Lizzie exclaimed. “Do you truly have to leave, Mrs. Snowe?” Her mouth wobbled.
“Indeed I must,” Eugenia smiled, although her cheeks felt stiff. “My father is waiting for me.”
She saw the pain that streaked through Lizzie’s eyes, and pulled her into an embrace. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m truly sorry about your father, Lizzie.”
“Miss Midge said that all things have their season. She said my father is in heaven.”
Hopefully Miss Midge, for all her failures when it came to evening prayers, had provided some comfort. Eugenia gave Lizzie another squeeze, then went to Otis, hugged him, and gave Jarvis a little pat.
“I thought we were to take supper with you,” Otis complained.
“Ruby will bring you supper in the nursery,” Ward said. His eyes were flinty.
The butler held the door open for the children and was turning to go when Ward stopped him.
“Gumwater,” he said, “would you be so kind as to summarize the content of your tent-talk? Mrs. Snowe somehow did not catch the essence.”
“I regret I was unaware that any women were present,” Gumwater said, his tone plummy with ill-disguised disdain. “Until afterwards, of course. There were those who felt only women of a certain class would attend a tent-talk, but I gave them your name, Mrs. Snowe, and assured them you were a widow of good standing.”
“You cannot imagine how distressed the unfavorable judgment of your acquaintances makes me feel,” Eugenia remarked.
“The talk wasn’t intended for ladies,” Gumwater said, flashing her a look of potent dislike. “No tent-talk is.”
Eugenia skewered him with a gaze that she had learned at her father’s knee, a stare that spoke to generations of aristocrats as ancestors. It made it clear that she was capable of summoning a servant to have a commoner’s head cut off.
Or at least, she would have been three hundred years before.
“What, exactly, is a ‘tent-talk’? I understood from the placard outside that you were offering a lecture on ‘chemistry in proof of the scientific sublime.’ Furthermore, no one barred me and Miss Darcy from entering.”
Gumwater cleared his throat. “I was expounding on the benefits of chemistry. Teaching the local men about the composition of water.”
“You were billed as ‘diffuser of useful knowledge’; what, pray tell, has that to do with the composition of water?”
“I have a gift for humor,” the butler said, his bushy eyebrows twitching madly. “It was my free afternoon.”
“Give us a précis of the content,” Ward said.
“It’s the way I teach it. So that it sticks in men’s brains, as most are simple-minded.”
“I fully understand that most men have simple minds,” Eugenia agreed.
“I put it in terms of relationships. Hydrogen is like nitrogen, a dependent friend of oxygen, continually forsaken for new favorites.”
Eugenia had the strange feeling that she was performing in a Punch and Judy show, but without lines. What on earth could be offensive about hydrogen?
“Come to the point, Gumwater,” Ward said, folding his arms over his chest.
Suddenly Eugenia remembered a phrase from the tent that was followed by a roar of male laughter and Lizzie’s body shaking with giggles. At the time, it had seemed innocuous, but . . .
“I suppose that you explained chemical relations by drawing an analogy to intimate matters,” she stated.
Gumwater nodded. “The connection between oxygen and hydrogen is much more friendly in the state of water.” He coughed. “It takes two hydrogen atoms to satisfy an oxygen atom.”
Her father would say Gumwater was a prick, Eugenia thought. A woman-hating prick, who probably thought she shouldn’t know that word, and never mind it went back to the time of Shakespeare. “In other words, you turned the chemical composition of water into a jest about the difficulty of satisfying a woman?”
“The men always laugh when I explain what it would take to see water split up,” Gumwater elaborated. “It wasn’t meant for a young lady. I’ve never had a woman enter the tent before and certainly no governess would bring her charge to something meant only for men, as is a tent-talk.”
Ward had stood silently through this entire exchange. Now he indicated the door with a jerk of his head.
He said nothing until Gumwater left, at which point he turned to her. “Why in God’s name did you enter that tent? Even if you didn’t understand the aim of a ‘tent-talk,’ surely you noticed that the audience was entirely male?”