She reached to grab him by the wrist. “Got you, you little monster.” She dragged him out. “Now, I cannot blame you for being intimidated, but you must mind your manners. Guests don’t hide under tables.”
“I want to go home.”
“Guests don’t say things like that, either. It’s very rude.”
Jewel rose, brushing off the mint green skirts that Ford had spent half an hour struggling her into. “Here.” She offered Rowan a biscuit, and he reluctantly climbed to his feet. “Eat this, and then I’ll show you Uncle Ford’s laboratory.”
“No you won’t,” Ford said. Not again. He’d taken her to his laboratory yesterday afternoon, hoping she’d sit quietly while he worked. Ten minutes later he’d hauled her out—just before she’d managed to destroy the place.
“Please, Uncle Ford?”
“No.”
“Puleeeeeze?” The look in Jewel’s green eyes bordered on pathetic. Chase eyes, like Kendra’s. Just what he needed…another Chase lady who could wrap him around her little finger.
She must have realized her feminine wiles were working, because she turned her lavish charm on Rowan. “You must stay,” she told him. “Uncle Ford has magnets, and bottles of smelly stuff, and a pen-pen—”
“Pendulum,” Ford supplied, remembering too late that she didn’t like to be helped.
But she was so intent on convincing Rowan, she failed to take notice. “Yes, a pen-du-lum. And lots of clocks and a telescope. That’s a thing to see the stars.”
“Is it?” Lady Violet asked, interest lighting her eyes. “I’ve never really seen the stars.”
Scant moments ago, she’d looked like she was ready to haul Rowan home. Not that Ford could blame her, but his own sanity depended on Jewel successfully befriending the boy. He had to keep the Ashcrofts here. Whatever it took.
He wouldn’t go crawling back to his brother for help.
“I think Rowan might find my laboratory interesting,” he said with an inward grimace. “And although the telescope cannot help you see stars in the daytime, if you stay until dark—”
“I cannot stay until dark!” Violet exclaimed with a horrified gasp.
Criminy, these sheltered country girls. Ford had never met a lady so stuck on propriety—since, of course, such a lady would have been laughed out of King Charles’s court.
He kept those thoughts to himself. “Shall we invite your maid in to chaperone?”
She shook her head. ”I wasn’t planning to stay at all. I had thought to introduce Rowan and then leave—”
“Leave me?” Rowan interrupted, looking even more horrified than she had. “I told Mum I didn’t want to come here!” He turned to his sister, burying his face in her dark blue skirts. “Would you really leave me, Violet?”
She patted him on the head. “Of course not. You must have misunderstood me.” She glared at Ford as though to say, This is all your fault. And he knew, then and there, that his happy visions of working while she and her brother entertained his niece were just that—visions.
Lady Trentingham’s fairy dust wasn’t going to work. Violet's mother wasn't his savior, and her suggestion that the children play together wasn't the answer to his prayers. As a man of science, he should have known better than to imagine such flights of fancy, even for a moment.
Lady Violet wouldn’t prove useful to him, after all.
SEVEN
THE NEXT MORNING, Ford managed to get Jewel up and dressed by nine o’clock, at a cost of only two shillings. He was getting much better at this child care business. A good thing, because his dreams of hiring additional help had been dashed last night.
A letter from his solicitor had arrived, hinting at financial concerns and asking for a meeting in London at Ford’s earliest convenience.
Egad, he thought—it certainly wasn’t convenient now. Maybe after his niece went home. In the meantime, the two of them were getting along famously this morning. Having learned what she preferred for breakfast—bread and cheese, with warm chocolate to drink—he no longer had to pay her to eat at all.
Now, if only he could bribe that little Rowan fellow to play with the girl, life would be rosy. True, after he’d suggested they stay into the evening, Lady Violet had hurried her brother home so fast she’d tripped over his threshold on her way out. But today was a new day, and he’d awakened with a new determination.
Desperation bred courage and ingenuity.
Getting the children together hadn’t been Violet’s idea, he reasoned, but Lady Trentingham’s. Perhaps the mother would be willing to try again. That goal in mind, he settled Jewel in front of him on his horse and began riding toward Trentingham Manor.
“What do you call her?” she asked.
“Why, my lady, of course. I would have to be much more familiar with her to use her given name.”
Jewel’s little hands tightened on his where he held her around the waist. “You’re not fa-mil-i-ar with your horse? That’s sad. Papa is friends with his horse.”
“My horse?” He was feeling thickheaded again. Women always seemed to do that to him, to his constant irritation. “Of course I know my horse. But he’s not a her. He’s a boy.”
“Oh.” His niece was silent a moment as they reached the Thames and turned to ride alongside it. “What do you call him, then?”
“Galileo.”
“Gali-who?”
“Galileo. Have you never heard of him? He was born in the last century, though he lived into this one.”
“Was he a horse?”
“No.” Ford choked back a laugh. “He was an astronomer and a physicist and a mathematician.”
“That sounds boring.”
“Oh, but it isn’t.” Sunlight glimmered off the water, a beautiful morning to visit. Ford was sure this encounter would end better than yesterday’s. “Galileo invented a horse-driven water pump, and a military compass, and something called a thermometer that measures hot and cold. And a much better telescope than the one invented before it.”
“Like the one in your laboratory?”
“Well, that one is called a reflecting telescope. It’s a newer one, invented by another man named Isaac Newton, only about five years ago. But he wouldn’t have invented
