Page 34 of Til Death Duke Us Part
“Why is that?” he asked.
“Most men did not like how tall she was. But she was lovely.”
“I did not meet a tall Miss Smith.”
“Perhaps that means she found happiness, then. I do hope so.” She tugged her bottom lip between her teeth. “Most of the women of my acquaintance were likely all married before this year. I am quite old, as you know.”
She was quite the perfect age. “Most of the women I was introduced to were young. I suppose that is one of the reasons none of them took.”
“You didn’t offer for any of them?”
“No.”
“Did you almost offer for any of them?”
“No.”
“That is odd. Especially since you needed the money and alchemists’ pockets are quite full. Overflowing you might say.”
“Mine will be, too, once I find a damned invention.”
“Grave work.”
“Grave. Exactly. The fellows are dead. What do they need work for? They’re supposed to be resting. And their widows or their children might benefit more from their prototypes.”
She was quiet and untangled her body from his side.
“Did your husband take any work to the grave with him?” he asked.
She shook her head. “He was a wonderfully imaginative man. He could dream up such… beautiful things. Impossible things. His skill did not meet his creativity, nor his ambition. He turned to various potions to increase his skill, brewed in back alleys. And it helped a little, but not enough. So he kept taking more and more until he couldn’t seem to do anything without it. The Alchemist Guild did not help matters. They rejected every one of his inventions, so they were never made known to the broader public.”
“That’s unfortunate. Perhaps if they’d given his inventions a chance, you would not now be so destitute.” But nor would she be in his bed, so perhaps he owed the Guild a basket of flowers in thanks. A glamoured one, of course. Couldn’t afford the real thing.
“Unfortunate, but not unlike your own society. Do you share your transcendent talents with anyone?”
“You’ve seen me share them with an entire room.” Where was this going?
“But you cannot teach them. You cannot give them to anyone else to use.”
“Of course not. The talent only flows through the veins of particular men. And that’s why alchemy is not a true magic. It’s a skill acquired through labor, practice. While transcendent talent is divinely bestowed.” Did he sound like a prat just then? He’d learned the fact about his future talent, his divine right to it, with his letters, and it had always sounded like any other fact—the sky is blue, transcendents were chosen. But just then… he’d sounded like a prat.
She’d heard it and snorted. “Alchemy looks like magic to me. And it’s stronger than your talent, as even you have noted plenty of times.”
Uncomfortable not to be able to argue an inconveniently valid point.
“Your beliefs contradict themselves.”
Where was his quick wit? His razor-sharp tongue? His mind felt dull as bread beneath her analysis.
“Oh,” she chuckled, “Do not worry overly much about it. It is only that… perhaps we should investigate contradictions in our beliefs. Find out why they exist and what we should do about them. If anything.”
“You’re philosophical for a grave digger.” The bench he sat on was inexplicably hard.
“There’s nothing much else to do when digging a grave. With your mind at least. The body is busy with a repetitive task it knows well, so the mind wanders. You will have thoughts. And I suppose the nature of the location being a graveyard and all, it does make me a bit philosophical. Please do not tell the other men. They will refuse to let women dig graves if they know it leads to a philosophical mind.”
None of the women he’d courted in the last year had talked with him the way she did. None of them had put him in his place. None of them had shown their minds, the depth and breadth of them. But speaking with Persephone was like approaching an ocean. You couldn’t see the end of it in any direction, and it would lap up at you, tickle your feet in surprising ways. He wanted to walk right into it, submerse himself so far under that the sounds of the world faded away. He wanted to rock in the waves of her mind.
Oh God, now he was getting philosophical, and perhaps maudlin, and something else he didn’t want to even name.
