Page 56 of What's an Earl Gotta Do?
Michael reluctantly accepted Hugh’s offer, and fifteen minutes later, he found himself standing on the street, gazing up at Anne’s window.
Well, this was a setback. He’d lost that battle.
But that didn’t mean he was going to lose the war. He spun on his heel and headed back to Cranfield House to plot his next move.
Chapter 20
An hour later, Anne found herself climbing the steps to the Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy mansion, a great Gothic pile of grey stone complete with crenellations and faux towers that stood out like a peacock in a henhouse amongst the sedate Palladian town houses that surrounded it.
How she was going to get through this meeting when her mind was flying in a thousand different directions, she had no idea. One minute she was furious (with Michael, obviously), the next crushingly disappointed (that she wouldn’t be marrying Michael after all). She would then segue into terror (that she might now be pregnant with no prospect of a wedding on the horizon), then she would work her way back around to furious.
How dare he belittle her work. How dare he. For any other man to have said such a thing would not have surprised her. Indeed, she heard cutting remarks about her “little charity” every week, if not every day, and her placid smile never faltered an inch.
But she had never expected it from Michael, who knew how hard she worked, who knew that the Ladies’ Society meant everything to her.
“Lady Wynters.” The Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy butler bowed as he held the door for her. “Please follow me.”
Anne’s footsteps echoed off the flagstones as she followed the butler across the spacious entryway. The foyer of the Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy mansion matched the building’s Gothic exterior, with pointed arches above the windows and ribbed vaults crisscrossing the high ceiling. Suits of armor bearing halberds were arrayed along the walls, and… Anne squinted at the pièce de résistance displayed on a square pedestal in the center of the room. It was a partially ruined statue in black marble, depicting… a man’s naked rear end? Anne peeked over her shoulder as they mounted the stairs, thinking she must be mistaken, but no, it was definitely a man’s hindquarters. How very odd…
Instead of showing her into one of the stately public rooms, the butler led her up two flights of stairs and toward the back of the house.
The room he indicated was a cluttered space, more workshop than library, with a pair of long workbenches covered with strange contraptions made of brass running the length of the room. As she made her way down the row, she felt the crunch of metal shavings beneath her slippers.
The room was also, Anne could not help but notice, covered with a fine layer of what appeared to be soot.
A maid hurried over. “You can sit right there, m’lady,” she said, gesturing to an elaborately carved shield-backed chair that had been positioned before the desk. “I brought that one in from another room, just to make sure it’s completely clean.”
“Er… thank you,” Anne said, seating herself. The maid continued bustling about, wiping down everything in the room. After a moment, Anne asked, “Is Mr. Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy on his way?”
A great clattering arose from the room next door, followed by the sound of shattering china. The maid made a sound that was half chuckle and half sigh. “I warrant that’s him right there.”
Surely enough, Mr. Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy came bustling into the room. He was of around Anne’s age, but this was no frivolous young dandy. He had left off his jacket and was clad in only a shirt and plain grey waistcoat. His brown hair was sticking up in what was not so much the fashionable windswept look, as the a-family-of-owls-has-been-nesting-in-my-hair look. And much like his workshop, he was lightly coated in soot
But in spite of these idiosyncrasies, it was the object cradled in his arms that drew Anne’s eye.
She hadn’t the faintest clue what it was, but it had a large bushy brush, almost like four brooms fitted together in the shape of a flower, connected to a series of short pipes, each the length of her lower arm and slightly flared on one end. A rope had been strung through the pipes, connecting them to the brushes. Mr. Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy had folded about a dozen of the pipes under his arm, but another dozen dragged behind him on the floor, clanking as he made his way down the length of his worktables.
“Ah, Lady Wynters,” he said, circling around to deposit the mysterious contraption on top of his desk with a cacophonous clatter. He started to reach out to take her hand, then recoiled, seeming to recall that he was covered in soot. “Excuse me,” he said, using his handkerchief to scrub at his face and hands.
Once he finished, he said, “I apologize for the mess. Probably I should have rescheduled and made myself presentable. But I was so excited about this”—he gestured to the tangled heap on his desk—“and knowing how excited you will be about it, I couldn’t bear to delay.”
Anne was at a loss, but she forced herself to smile. “I… I’m sure I will be.”
“I got the idea when I saw that article in The Times,” he said, settling into the chair behind his desk. “That was marvelous, what you did for those climbing boys.” He shook his head. “It started me thinking—why do sweeps even use climbing boys? I thought there had to be a better way, some device that could clean a flue just as well, without putting children in such a dangerous situation.”
He began sifting through a pile of papers on his desk and pulled out an architectural plan. “I did a bit of investigation and learned that the real problem is that our chimneys are so convoluted. Look at this,” he said, turning the drawing around so Anne could see it. “See how the flue makes three ninety-degree turns and has a U-bend?” He shook his head, genuinely affronted. “Appalling design. I should know—when you’re in the business of making iron, you know how air moves around a fire. But the fact is, half the buildings in London have a flue that’s not straight, and nobody’s willing to tear down half the buildings in London to fix them. I realized that what we needed,” he said, reaching for a pipe, “was a very long broom, with a handle that could bend through those corners.”
Mr. Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy pulled the rope taut, and Anne watched in astonishment as the tangled heap on the desk transformed into a long-handled broom. “It can bend?” she asked.
“It can.” He demonstrated how the handle could be straight or malleable depending on the amount of tension in the rope. “I was so excited, I stayed up all night building my prototype.”
“Does it work?” Anne leaned forward to examine it more closely. If this contraption could truly take the place of a little boy squeezing himself into a chimney…
“It does indeed. Now, for the worst flues, like this one,” Mr. Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy said, tapping the diagram he had showed her, “this alone won’t work. What you’ll need to do is insert a little door right here at the bend. But this should work well enough on ninety percent of the flues in London. I’ve been testing it all morning.”
“On fourteen different fireplaces!” the maid called from the corner, where she was still scrubbing.
“Yes, hence the mess.” Mr. Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy rubbed the back of his head. “I didn’t realize you were supposed to drape a cover over the fireplace before you cleaned it. I am sorry about that, Maggie.”
