And also utterly bored.
What a waste.
“Bolderwood jilted Mrs. DeWitt, you know,” he said, and enjoyed that he had surprised Das. “Three weeks before their wedding. Which is why her father asked me to marry her.”
“Interesting.”
“No, actually. Not interesting at all.”
Das waved Isaac’s letter. “In that, Lord Bolderwood also claims you flirted with his wife.”
“I what?” Joshua’s memory offered the image of a pale woman who kept tittering at him at Lady Featherstone’s card party and ruined his enjoyment of the game. As he recalled, he’d been rude to her. Clearly not rude enough. “Wives,” he said. “They disrupt everything. Never get one, Das.”
“I already have one.”
“You what? This a recent acquisition?”
“We’ve been married nearly five years.”
“You’ve worked for me for four years.” He considered this a moment. “Huh. Devoted woman. To follow you all the way to Britain.”
“Coming here was Mrs. Das’s idea, actually,” Das said. “There was some family opposition to our marriage, and I had a, ah, disagreement with a senior official in the East India Company, so it seemed prudent to make a home elsewhere. Padma thought Britain would suit us well enough, as the British had been interfering with my family for generations. She has an odd sense of humor, my wife.”
Joshua’s brain buzzed with questions but he shut them down. He did not want to know about Das and his wife, and why they wanted to be married so badly they left their whole life behind, and how Das had annoyed the East India Company and, no, no, he did not want to know. He knew nothing about his secretaries. They did their jobs and went home so he could forget about them.
“Huh,” was all Joshua said.
“Mr. Newell has a wife too, as well as six children.”
“That many.”
“Mr. Putney has a wife, as does Mr. Allan. And Mr. Cosway is courting Miss Sampson.”
Joshua rubbed his neck, aghast. His secretaries had seemed so sensible and reliable, when the whole time they’d been going around getting married behind his back.
“Work, Das,” he said, returning to more productive topics of conversation, as they strode into St. James Park. “We need a contract, patents, investors. We need to make the most of this finding. Electrical power!”
“It is exciting, but the inventor himself admits he sees no immediate practical application,” Das said. “This will not make any money.”
“I don’t care.”
Joshua stopped short, startled by his own words. He stared at Das, who stared back at him.
“I don’t care,” he said again, wonderingly. He looked away from Das, at the sky, at the gardens, at the horses and birds and people. “How would you say I make money, Das?”
“You observe what people will want in the near future and you act fast to invest in those things.”
“When Dammerton blathers on about penal reform, he says it’s not about whether forgers should be hanged, but what the whole country will look like in fifty years. I have money, Das.” He pivoted, saw the world anew. “If I stopped working now, the money would keep rolling in.”
“Indeed.” Das was watching him cautiously. “You could spend time in the countryside with your charming wife, start a family, and—”
“What the blazes? Have you taken leave of your senses?”
“Your life revolves around your work.”
“Which is precisely how I like it.”
“I think—”
“Do I pay you to think, Das?”
“Yes, sir. You do.”
Joshua paced over to a tree, paced back to Das, back to the tree, back to Das. He had wanted to be rich; now he was rich. That had not been enough. He had wanted high society to receive him; now they did. That was not enough.
Now he wanted, he wanted…
He thought about his factories, turning out millions of metal objects a year: buckles and buttons and bobbins. His barges, carrying those metal objects through the canals he’d helped build. His ships, exporting them all over the world. His mines. His furnaces. His warehouses. His bank.
Every one of those made him money. And not one had ever excited him as much as new ideas like this.
“What about if I look beyond the near future?” he said. “Ideas that have potential, that might lead to something, even if it’s not in our lifetime, but should continue simply because of their own worth? What do you think?”
“I think someone would still need to run your business.”
Joshua waved a hand. “Oh, I could do that too. But everything could change. Get Buchanan to—”
“Buchanan resigned.”
“What? He go off to get married too?”
“Said it was too much work.”
“There is no such thing as too much work.” Joshua rubbed his hands together. “The one thing we can be sure of in this life, Das, is that there is always more work. And isn’t that grand?”
Chapter 4
Mr. DeWitt could be as ill-mannered and unreasonable as he pleased, but he would not disrupt her plans to launch Lucy, Cassandra vowed the next morning, with strengthened resolve.
“Every marriage is different,” Arabella had proclaimed at the theater the night before, with the wisdom of someone who had been married a whole five months. “We must each find what works for us.”
And what worked for the DeWitts was to never see each other.
To this end, Cassandra timed her arrival at breakfast carefully. According to the housekeeper, Mr. DeWitt took a substantial breakfast at eight o’clock sharp before starting work, as was the practice of businessmen, so Cassandra made sure to be there at half past eight: late enough to avoid him, but not so late as to disrupt the staff.
She was highly satisfied, then, to sail into the breakfast parlor and find only Mr. Newell, a copy of The Times beside his plate.
“Today is going to be a marvelous day, Mr. Newell,” she said, as she surveyed the spread of eggs, ham, pears, rolls, and cake: a far cry from her usual, much later breakfast of bread and jam. “I can feel it in every fiber of my being.”
She helped herself to a pear and a generous serve of pound cake: fresh, spicy, and loaded with currants.
“You are in good spirits, Mrs. DeWitt,” Mr. Newell observed. Always pleasant, was Mr. Newell, unlike some people she could name. “I trust you had a good time at the theater last night.”
“Oh, it was splendid! And my grandmother has agreed to meet me today—at the British Museum, of all places—and I am certain she will take on Lucy.”
She took a seat and smiled at the footman who brought her tea, in a fine china pot painted with gloriously fat cherries. The tea was hot and fragrant and just as it ought to be. Yes, everything was going to work out beautifully—ill-mannered, unreasonable husbands notwithstanding.
“What’s more,” she went on, breaking into her cake, “I have recovered from the shock of meeting my husband, and I am reconciled to the fact that he is dreadful. For better or for worse, after all.” She ate a chunk of cake and considered the vows she had naively made. “Those are cunning vows, really,” she added. “It sounds lovely if you don’t think about it too hard, but what they’re really saying is: Too late! No complaining now!”