Chapter One
Kilcreggan House , London , 1816
Richard, the third Earl of Kilcreggan, picked up his
newly delivered package of books, crossed his legs, clad in tight-fitting
pantaloons and polished leather boots, and settled into his favourite wingback
chair. Amongst the bundle was a new German edition of Gauss, but as he idly
flicked through the uncut pages, the book he had been so eagerly awaiting failed
to hold his attention.
The library, his favourite room, was located at the back of
Kilcreggan House, which itself stood on the south corner of Cavendish Square.
Sash windows looked out onto the garden where Richard kept his treasured
telescope, made to one of Mr Herschel’s designs. Much of the library’s wall
space was taken up by glass-fronted bookcases, but a large mahogany cabinet with
a rosewood veneer stood in the corner by the fireplace, its innumerable drawers
containing the most prized of Richard’s specimens—butterflies and insects,
semi-precious stones, fossils, and a plethora of other curios he had amassed on
his extensive travels. His famed exotic botanical specimens, also collected
abroad, were cultivated at his country seat in a number of expensively heated
custom-built succession houses. These featured in the background of the painting
that hung above the mantel.
Richard’s portrait, by the renowned Scottish artist Henry
Raeburn, was, even he conceded, a good likeness. It depicted a tall man with a
darkly brooding face, too forbidding to be considered classically handsome, but
arresting enough to be unsettling. Mr Raeburn had captured the earl’s air of
amused detachment, as if the sitter took neither the portrait nor himself too
seriously. A volume of Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia was
held open in his hands but his golden-brown eyes gazed out intently at the
viewer, something that Richard’s friends and family found so disconcerting that
he had been forced to move the portrait from the dining room, in which it had
originally been hung. ‘Can’t eat with you staring over my shoulder like that, my
dear fellow,’ his friend Nick Lytton had joked.
Richard drummed his fingers on the frontispiece of a volume of
poems. He was bored. No, not just bored, he was malcontent, though it pained him
to admit it, for there was no logical reason to be so, and he was a man who
valued logic above all else. Getting to his feet, he strode over to gaze out of
the window. He was in no mood to be convivial, he had no urge for intellectual
debate, and even the thought of whiling away an afternoon making love to a
beautiful woman roused in him little more than mild ennui. Despite the endless
opportunities with which his acknowledged charm and considerable wealth
presented him, the pleasure he derived from lovemaking was becoming ever more
unsatisfactory, leaving him spent but not sated. The sense that there was
something vital missing from his life nagged at him.
He sighed heavily. Nick Lytton insisted that what he needed was
a wife. Nick, who had for years forsworn matrimony, had recently been felled by
a beautiful French heiress and had now become a staunch advocate of the married
state. Richard was not persuaded. Love was a transient illusion, a trick of
nature designed to ensure the continuation of the species, nothing more. There
was no such thing as eternal love, nor such a woman as the perfect mate. Richard
had never even come close to being mildly infatuated, never mind beguiled. Now,
at six-and-thirty, he considered himself pretty much immune to emotions of that
sort. As a man of science, he held that to be an entirely appropriate state of
affairs.
Outside, the rain started to fall, the kind of soft grey
drizzle that enveloped one like a damp blanket. It matched Richard’s mood
perfectly. He pressed his forehead against the windowpane and closed his eyes.
There was much to be said for the reassuring predictability of science, but
sometimes, just occasionally, it would be nice to experience the thrill of
Kilcreggan House , London , 1816
Richard, the third Earl of Kilcreggan, picked up his
newly delivered package of books, crossed his legs, clad in tight-fitting
pantaloons and polished leather boots, and settled into his favourite wingback
chair. Amongst the bundle was a new German edition of Gauss, but as he idly
flicked through the uncut pages, the book he had been so eagerly awaiting failed
to hold his attention.
The library, his favourite room, was located at the back of
Kilcreggan House, which itself stood on the south corner of Cavendish Square.
Sash windows looked out onto the garden where Richard kept his treasured
telescope, made to one of Mr Herschel’s designs. Much of the library’s wall
space was taken up by glass-fronted bookcases, but a large mahogany cabinet with
a rosewood veneer stood in the corner by the fireplace, its innumerable drawers
containing the most prized of Richard’s specimens—butterflies and insects,
semi-precious stones, fossils, and a plethora of other curios he had amassed on
his extensive travels. His famed exotic botanical specimens, also collected
abroad, were cultivated at his country seat in a number of expensively heated
custom-built succession houses. These featured in the background of the painting
that hung above the mantel.
Richard’s portrait, by the renowned Scottish artist Henry
Raeburn, was, even he conceded, a good likeness. It depicted a tall man with a
darkly brooding face, too forbidding to be considered classically handsome, but
arresting enough to be unsettling. Mr Raeburn had captured the earl’s air of
amused detachment, as if the sitter took neither the portrait nor himself too
seriously. A volume of Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia was
held open in his hands but his golden-brown eyes gazed out intently at the
viewer, something that Richard’s friends and family found so disconcerting that
he had been forced to move the portrait from the dining room, in which it had
originally been hung. ‘Can’t eat with you staring over my shoulder like that, my
dear fellow,’ his friend Nick Lytton had joked.
Richard drummed his fingers on the frontispiece of a volume of
poems. He was bored. No, not just bored, he was malcontent, though it pained him
to admit it, for there was no logical reason to be so, and he was a man who
valued logic above all else. Getting to his feet, he strode over to gaze out of
the window. He was in no mood to be convivial, he had no urge for intellectual
debate, and even the thought of whiling away an afternoon making love to a
beautiful woman roused in him little more than mild ennui. Despite the endless
opportunities with which his acknowledged charm and considerable wealth
presented him, the pleasure he derived from lovemaking was becoming ever more
unsatisfactory, leaving him spent but not sated. The sense that there was
something vital missing from his life nagged at him.
He sighed heavily. Nick Lytton insisted that what he needed was
a wife. Nick, who had for years forsworn matrimony, had recently been felled by
a beautiful French heiress and had now become a staunch advocate of the married
state. Richard was not persuaded. Love was a transient illusion, a trick of
nature designed to ensure the continuation of the species, nothing more. There
was no such thing as eternal love, nor such a woman as the perfect mate. Richard
had never even come close to being mildly infatuated, never mind beguiled. Now,
at six-and-thirty, he considered himself pretty much immune to emotions of that
sort. As a man of science, he held that to be an entirely appropriate state of
affairs.
Outside, the rain started to fall, the kind of soft grey
drizzle that enveloped one like a damp blanket. It matched Richard’s mood
perfectly. He pressed his forehead against the windowpane and closed his eyes.
There was much to be said for the reassuring predictability of science, but
sometimes, just occasionally, it would be nice to experience the thrill of
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