He was already marching out when I opened my mouth to apologize even as I jumped up, sloppily gathering the book and the rest of my things. My stomach growled as if protesting the fact that it hadn’t been fed enough, so I stole a fresh roll off James’s plate and shoved it into my mouth.
“Hey, that was mine!” he snapped. “Get your own!”
I sketched a theatrical bow. That was one of the things I loved about being a boy—absolutely no one sitting in my vicinity cared about whether one was being a mannerless swine or not. Will could spit half his soup over the table, and we would laugh uproariously about it. But I could not even imagine Lady Rosalin or any ladies of her acquaintance behaving similarly. My mother would have a coronary if she saw her precious, perfect daughter with half a bread roll sticking uncouthly out of her mouth, crumbs falling everywhere. And yet, I had never been happier to defy the rules that governed my alter ego.
“Thanks, mate! I owe you one,” I told a seething James—who seemed much too angry over a trifling piece of bread—as I hurried behind St. Clair toward the library. “See you later, lads,” I said to the others. “Duty calls.”
“More like penance,” I heard Harold mutter.
I bit back a chuckle. He wasn’t wrong.
Despite our unexpected moment of bonding last week, I had a feeling St. Clair was going to put me through the wringer, and while I had gotten some refreshed reading ofPrincipiadoneduring the carriage ride to and from London, I wasn’t close to being finished.
St. Clair didn’t seem like the type to accept or appreciate any excuses…not even wildly inventive ones that involved juggling secret identities and switching lives between Cambridge and London, which required the patience and planning of a master engineer.
I sighed and braced myself. This was what I’d signed up for, and the only thing to do was to keep moving forward even if I wasn’t prepared. It was written in the very book I carried—one could only stay in motion if onekeptin motion.
If I stopped…the game would be over.
Chapter Nine
We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising.
—Isaac Newton
Hustling out to the lush green quadrangle of Nevile’s Court while brushing the remaining crumbs from a scone off my cravat and making sure my gown, gold tassels, and cap along with the rest of my disguise were firmly in place, I finally caught up with my tutor inside the Wren Library at the top of the black marble staircase. He strode down the black-and-white diagonal-checkered floors, light streaming in from the huge windows on the east and west sides.
I felt a brief twinge of disappointment that only men were able to enjoy a place that most women, if given the chance, might love as well.
One day, perhaps.
I swallowed my usual rush of wonder at being within these hallowed halls with their polished woodwork topped by plaster busts of philosophers and mathematicians, filled with so much knowledge and history. The walls on each side of the longrectangular room were lined with oak bookshelves all the way up to the sills. At evenly spaced intervals, elegant racks winged out toward the middle of the room, forming three-sided, book-filled celles, or nooks, where a person could sit to read or study. On each side, there were fifteen celles, which included a reading desk, a lamp, and benches.
Right now, some of them were filled but most were empty. St. Clair kept walking toward the gorgeous stained glass window at the south end. There were two rooms on either side that had doors, unlike the rest of the open study nooks, and he walked into the one on the west side before closing the door behind us when I followed.
The room was small, and his presence seemed to dwarf it. It didn’t help that all I could smell was him—that divine chocolate-and-snow scent that made me feel warm and breathless. Even though his frosty demeanor was the opposite of warm.
“Sit,” he said, indicating the wooden bench closest to the door and walking to the chair on the other side of the reading desk. I jumped at the terseness of the abrupt command. “What are the three laws of motion?” he asked without preamble and without waiting for me to get settled.
Still standing, I gathered my thoughts for a second. “Er, firstly, an object will not change its motion until another force pushes or pulls it. Secondly, the force on an object is equal to its mass times its acceleration. And thirdly, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
Thick brows rose as he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Excellent. Of all the theories covered in the book, which is the one that stood out the most to you?”
My brain decided right at that moment to go blank as I sagged down into the seat opposite him. “InPrincipia?”
“Were you reading some other book perhaps, Lord Ansel?” The slightest hint of amusement in his words had me peering up at him, considering it wasn’t a tone he typically reserved for me or how he’d started this session.
Usually, he was blunt, mocking, or caustic. Or all three. But there was no mockery on his face, only what appeared to be genuine interest in my answer. I frowned. Was this a trick?
“Er, no, sir?”
“Then which idea inthatbook was most appealing to you?”
I composed myself and exhaled a breath. “Considering the main theory pertains to the law of universal gravitation, then I would have to say that what appealed to me the most was understanding how motion and gravity impact the movement of visible celestial bodies like planets, comets, the Earth, and the moon.” His intense gaze bored through me as I went on. “Every object in the universe pulls on every other object with the force we know as gravity. When things are closer together, the pull is stronger, and when they are farther apart, it’s weaker. The bigger the objects, like the sun, the stronger the pull. Gravity keeps the planets in orbit around the sun.”
“So, everything has gravity,” he concluded.
“Yes, even the two of us, to each other and to the Earth. The Earth keeps us grounded, and though we have some pull on it as well, it would be impossible to feel because of the size of it versus the size of us.”
