The Science of Limerence

Chapter One: Parsnip

A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks. -Oscar Wilde

Late October 1899

Lord Parsnip Peasblossom of Blackthorne and Sundley watched the dullard of a gentlefae go. The gentlefae seemed to have no redeeming qualities. He was polite and charming enough, but he had all the brains of overboiled cabbage.

At least you can make litmus paper from cabbage, he thought. Cabbage is useful; it feeds the masses and clears the complexion. I like cabbage.

He sighed and resisted the urge to throw himself into the fireplace so he wouldn’t have to see the next applicant, but it wouldn’t even do any more than ruin his new wool trousers, and he quite liked these trousers. They were aubergine in color and fit him as snuggly as was proper. Perhaps I should remove them so they can be passed along to one of the staff?

No, there were too many people who depended on him, and his affairs were not in order enough to disappear from the earth. He sighed again, feeling like an angsty teen.

Maybe the next applicant wouldn’t even show up. He thought. I wonder if I could be so lucky as not to have to see the next one.

Dramatics aside, he was becoming desperate. He wanted, needed, to change the world. The Age of Fae needed to end, and not with the death he read about every morning and evening in his papers. When the gossip rags bothered to mention the growing number of victims of this age, then you knew there was a problem.

It was impossible. He was never going to find an assistant to help him with his experiments. In the past week, he had interviewed dozens of socalled calculators, mathematicians who would do the computations for him, and they were all wrong for the position. And these were the best of the applicants! He didn’t want to even think about the ones that he had turned down.

Of the ones he invited for an interview, there was the charming young gentlefae woman who seemed to think everything that Parsnip said was funny. Sure, the lordling was witty, and he usually found gigglemugs charming, but there was a limit to it. And she found it. She acted like she was on a date, not at an employment interview, and giggled when he asked her to check his figures. At least she didn’t ask me to check her figure. He shuddered at the thought.

He wasn’t opposed to hiring a woman. Far from it. He had no fondness or attraction for the fairer sex, so hiring one would keep him from being distracted. Not that he had been distracted since Samson, but things could change. Hiring a woman could keep his mind on the task at hand. But no, she had to be insufferable.

There was the seemingly ancient gentlefae who seemed offended by being asked to demonstrate his ability. “I went to Cambridge,” he’d said as though that actually meant something. “I don’t have to show you a damned thing!” He then walked out of Parsnip’s parlor-come-laboratory without so much as a glance back.

Parsnip had actually admired his gumption for walking out at first. Then he realized that he was missing a teaspoon from the table setting. The lordling rolled his eyes. He supposed his butler was right to insist upon not using the good silver. He hated being wrong as much as Davies liked being right.

Then there was the applicant who was decent with math, not brilliant but decent, but all he wanted to talk about was Parsnip’s failed steampowered pleasure chair.

“Did you always have a fondness for the industry of the night?” He’d asked. “You would put the fair girls out of business!”

The lordling didn’t want to talk about it, so he tried to steer the conversation back to the job he was offering when the Fae called him podsnappish! Of course, I don’t want to discuss or acknowledge the unpleasant affair, he’d thought as he ushered him away. Besides, he had just demonstrated a base misunderstanding of to whom the gadget was aimed. It wouldn’t put the girls out of business.

Elfie Swinton, the church bell of a woman who didn’t shut up long enough for him to even introduce himself, was insufferable. She spoke as loudly and insistently as a church bell on Sunday morning, and like a church bell, she didn’t allow him to interrupt her, even to offer tea. She served herself!

Then there were the twins. Apparently, they came as a matched set, and though it would have been helpful to have a third pair of hands in the lab, they didn’t have a brain cell between them. Parsnip imagined the two of them relying on their static electricity to fire up their missing neurons and still coming up short.

Besides, they were uncanny. They seemed to move as one and finished each other’s sentences in the middle of speaking. They just made him uncomfortable.

The latest one, Lupine Wolfsbane - ridiculous name, really - was nothing more than an insufferable bore and worse, a yesman. Not that Parsnip objected to being told yes with regularity, but every opinion, regardless of how absurd, was met with emphatic head nodding and wholehearted agreement.

The problem was that when he asked the gentlefae to look at his latest figures - figures with the maths so glaringly wrong it hurt him to write them out. Parsnip was terrible at math. He couldn’t consistently add up the same three-digit sums four times in a row. If he knew the math was wrong, a small child could perceive the error.

But Mr. Lupine Wolfsbane said they were correct! He glanced over them and frowned as if he saw the error, but then he congratulated Parsnip on the figures and complimented his mind.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he also refused tea when offered.

Mr Woldsbane claimed he was a proper English gentlefae, and he refused tea and cakes when offered. It was inconceivable! Tea wasn’t a question. Tea is a social foundation, a pillar of polite society.

To refuse tea was to refuse someone’s company and to deny their inherent worth. He should alert the Queen and let her know that there was an agent of the Boers in their midst. It was unpatriotic and antithetical to the Empire.

Maybe Mr. Wolfsbane was so put off by his erroneous sums that he no longer wanted the job. Maybe he was as smart as wallpaper putty and half as useful. Maybe he had been struck in the head on his way to Shiny House and could no longer formulate a cohesive thought.

The worst part? Mr. Wolfsbane had been the most promising applicant in three days! Three days of duds! He wailed inside the padded interior of his mind. I may be subjected to the indignity of my steam-powered and clockwork trinkets for all eternity. Maeve knows that I have been working on this long enough - 200 years!

He shook himself and took a sip of tea. Tea was the only thing that could help him carry on. If he could carry on, did he even really want to?

No, he was quite sure he was never going to find an assistant to help him in his work, which meant that he was always going to be relegated to the mechanical machinations that kept him out of the poorhouse despite his audacious spending over the history of his life.

His clockwork inventions were charming, to be sure, but they didn’t help to elevate his standing in the scientific world. They were safe for children of all ages, aside from the steam-powered pleasure chair, and they sold well in the better shops, especially at Yule. The smaller ones were popular at Ostara, which kept him flush with cash.

Some of his dolls could cry and crawl after just one winding for hours - best seller of the last few decades - and there were dancing dolls and bears that had a Victrola inside them that could be used to play a miniature record of a book or even music.

He made clockwork soldiers for the little boys and more bloodyminded girls. He made a clockwork turner for skipping ropes. Then there were the more advanced steam-powered trinkets like the miniature steam train that several families set up to go around their chopped-down evergreens in their parlors for Yule.

He also invented steam-powered machines that could wash and wring clothes and others that could sanitize baby bottles and nappies. They were useful and sold in droves, thanks to the low prices he insisted Harrods sell them at.

In fact, the department store stocked all of his inventions and trinkets - he had a lucrative contract with them. It kept him in Fairy Wine and chartreuse and absinthe and afforded him the funds to research his true purpose.

Immortality!

Sure, not all of his inventions were great. He was lucky he wasn’t still the laughingstock after the affair with the steam-powered pleasure chair. He didn’t want to think too hard about that one.

Luckily, no one had been hurt, but even if it had worked, he realized that it still would have been lauded as a joke. Its invention had branded him a rake in most of polite society, resulting in most of the invitations drying up, except those from rakes and ne’er-do-wells, which he politely declined.

He still had his club. He should; he helped fund its establishment a few hundred years ago. But even behind its doors, too few would speak to him.

He looked around the room and remembered fondly bitching the pot with the lads in his library until it was time for dinner. He had snapshots of him and his friends, absolutely sauced on Fairy Wine and absinthe, jousting across his formal dining room, and trading hats.

When the Post reported the ill-fated invention’s failure, they all stopped talking to him. Two of them had even quit the Oxbow Club in favor of a more discerning establishment. The Oxbow was still home, but even it wasn’t the same anymore.

Sighing, the lordling turned his attention back to his latest clockwork apparatus - a miniature menagerie featuring the big cats of Africa that danced and rang tiny bells in time to each other. It was little more than a moving music box, but it would delight his staff’s family.

Speaking of his staff, someone was clearing their throat in a rather annoyed manner at the door. Parsnip looked up and saw his valet standing there. For a moment, he wondered what Ignatius was doing, but then he remembered that his butler was in an interview of his own for a new underbutler.

“A Mr. Henry Seay to interview for the assistant position,” he intoned. No one was better at sounding bored and above it all than Ignatius Pembrooke. “Shall I send him in?”

Parsnip nodded by way of answer but turned his attention back to his tinkering. There was no reason the day had to be a total loss. He could feel his way through another clockwork toy to sell.

When he heard the applicant enter, he said, “Thank you for coming, but you are of no use to me unless you are adept at maths.”

“I am, sir,” said a voice that sounded all too human - slightly nasally and too much breath in the words. There was a hint of allergy to the voice, but that couldn’t be. Fae were immune to the changing of the seasons. The only way that there would be a nasality to his voice was if he were mortal.

Human? It can’t be!

Parsnip spun on his heel and faced the interloper. He wasn’t a gentlefae like he had supposed him to be, but a gentleman! He was tall for a mortal, as tall as Parsnip, but he was a shoddy dresser. His brown waistcoat had two columns of tarnished brass buttons, and it clashed with his black and gray pinstriped trousers. His collar was simple, and his cravat a solemn black tied in the sloppy overhand knot and wedged into his dour waistcoat.

Parsnip couldn’t even think about his jacket; such horrors were best ignored, like a child in the night does to the boogeyman in the closet. He considered turning him away based on his looks alone.

“I don’t think-”

“Are these your sums?” the mortal asked, crossing the room to the ersatz summations Parsnip had tested the others with. He nodded and watched as the mortal picked up the fountain pen lying beside the papers and made sloppy, but accurate, corrections to the stack of papers.

Smiling, the mortal handed them to Parsnip and said, “You’ll never get anywhere if you treat your figures like that.”

“How did you?”

“I studied first at Eton, then at Oxford with a specialization in maths.”

“Forgive me, but how did you pay for such an education?” Parsnip wanted to stop himself from saying more, but the words had already tumbled out. “You are a mortal, so I don’t see how you could have come into the not-insignificant fortune it would take to pay for that.”

For the barest moment, Mr. Seay pursed his lips, but then resumed his neutral expression and said, “My mother worked very hard for Eton, and so did I. We saved every spare penny and oftentimes went without. In my final year, a visiting lecturer - a mathematician - became so impressed by my mind despite my meager parentage, that he insisted on becoming the patron of my education.”

“Oh, so you’re nothing more than a charity case.” Again, the words tumbled out without Parsnip wanting them to. It was the bored gentlefae affectation he adopted at parties, but it wasn’t what he really thought. He had no idea what he was doing, saying such a thing to him.

“I may have accepted charity, like so many mortals before me, but that does nothing to diminish my merit and worth.”

Parsnip was dumbstruck and opened his mouth to apologize, to beg the mortal’s forgiveness, but Mr. Seay cut him off.

“I think I’ll be going now.” He turned and walked to the door.

“STAY!” Parsnip blurted as heat curled up his cheeks.

Mr. Seay turned around with his hand on the knob. “Please, stay.” Mr. Seay swallowed hard, and Parsnip tried not to be too distracted by the motion of his Adam’s apple, but he didn’t leave. He nodded and crossed his arms over his chest.

“I apologize for my frankness.” He took a deep breath. “It was poor form.”

“Apology accepted, so long as it doesn’t happen again. I may be a mortal, but I have my pride.”

“And rightly so.” Parsnip cleared his throat and walked closer to him. “I’m looking for an assistant who can assist me with my maths.”

Mr. Seay chuckled.

“I’m not quite as bad as the computations on those papers. That was a test to assess candidates.”

“I take it I passed.”

“With flying colors!” Parsnip smiled, what he hoped was a warm and earnest smile. He was out of practice in putting others at ease. It had been a long time since there had been anyone that he wanted to put at ease.

“May I ask what you’re working on?” Mr. Seay made himself comfortable on the settee and stretched one long arm out along the back as he raked his thick brown hair with the other.

“Have you heard of the Philosopher’s Stone?”

“Of course! Every poor mortal dreams of it.” Mr. Seay chuckled. “Being able to create gold or silver - it could end so much suffering and toil.”

“Right, but you’re missing something.”

“What’s that?”

“The Stone can be used to create a draught that can restore life to the dying and grant immortality to the drinker.”

“Say! You can’t be serious.”

“As your eventual grave, Mr. Seay.”

“And how do you suppose we go about creating The Stone?”

“The secret of the Alchemist’s Magnum Opus came to me in a dream.” Parsnip’s expression grew stern. “I will not share any more details with you unless and until there is an agreement, preferably one with legal ramifications, between us.”

“I suppose that sounds fair.”

“So, will you take the job?”

“I will, so long as my name will appear in findings alongside your own.” Mr. Seay smiled. “I will not play the role of invisible laboratory flunky. I want a true partnership.”

“You drive a hard bargain.” Parsnip laughed.

“I know my worth, and though it may be hard for me to find something else suitable, I will not compromise.”

“I will put your name first,” Parsnip promised. “I have the means and the theory, but it means nothing without the proper application of the maths.” Parsnip stuck out his hand, and Mr. Seay shook it.

“I wish to hear more about what the experiment will entail,” Mr. Seay said, sitting back down in the chair he had just vacated.

“When I say I have the means, I mean that I have acquired enough material to craft The Stone exactly twice.”

“That doesn’t leave a lot of room for error.” “We will have only two chances to get this right, but, as The Stone is self-healing with the draught, we can make more once we have a successful draught, but-”

“We have to get it right first.” Parsnip nodded. “That’s why the math is so important. It’s the foundation of everything.”

“No pressure,” Mr. Seay said with a dry chuckle.

“None at all.” Parsnip stood and went to the bell pull to summon one of his many servants. When one appeared in the room, he said, “Please bring a tea tray and cakes.”

“A bit late for tea,” Mr. Seay said.

“Are you turning it down?”

“Not at all,” Mr. Seay said. “I was just remarking on the late hour.”

“Do you have somewhere to be?”

“My boardinghouse has no curfew.”

“Good! I may need you at odd hours.” “I keep odd hours,” Mr. Seay said. “So you may be summoned at any time. That being said, your days off during the week are sacred. I will never bother you on your days off.”

“Days off?”

“I give off every Sunday, and, for you, I will give off every Wednesday and third Thursday.” At Mr. Seay’s confused look, he said, “One cannot pour from an empty vessel, and I expect you to pour your all into our work.”

Mr. Seay opened his mouth to say more, but was freed from that burden by a young woman carrying in a tea service. Parsnip smiled and inhaled the heady aroma of bergamot and black tea. This was turning into a very good day.

After tea, the lordling decided that there was no reason that they shouldn’t jump right in. He showed Mr. Seay around his laboratory at the back of his front parlor. There was still the sitting area near the fireplace, but most of the room was taken over by heavy tables and laboratory equipment.

There were shelves filled with notebooks and glassware, along with various samples of the elements. Then there were the gears - they were everywhere.

“It looks like a grandfather clock regurgitated its contents all over,” Mr. Seay said. There was a note of awe in his voice as he looked around.

“My grandfather clock and the mantel clock are both safe. They are all that remains of my parents’ legacy now, so they will remain as they are.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

Parsnip held up a hand, shaking his head. “It was a long time ago.” A wave of sadness swept him, but Parsnip mentally shook himself free of the memories and continued, “I am a patron of every watchmaker in town, though.”

“I’m sure they love you,” Mr. Seay said. When Parsnip looked at him, Mr. Seay flushed and looked away. “I mean, your business, patronage.”

“They tolerate me, but they love my money.”

Mr. Seay smiled, walked over to the bookcase, and selected a volume. He thumbed through the black leatherbound book for a few pages before he set it down on the table and picked up a pencil. He scratched something out and scribbled something new before handing it back to Parsnip.

“Will that make it viable?” the lordling asked, looking over the correction. It was a schematic drawing for the steam-powered pleasure chair. “Will it work?”

“I don’t see why it shouldn’t. You just had this part set too high without compensating for the differential here.” He pointed at two points on the drawing. Parsnip was impressed that he didn’t blush over it.

He felt like blushing over the corrections. It’s such a simple fix, he thought. Maybe he doesn’t know what it’s for or what it’s designed to do.

“You’ll make a fortune selling it to brothels across Europe!” Mr. Seay laughed.

I guess he does know what it is supposed to do.

Parsnip saw Mr. Seay to the door himself instead of allowing his butler to do so. When he closed the door, he scrubbed his face with his hand and dropped his shoulders. It had been a long day, and he should be bone tired.

Instead, he felt exhilarated!

He had a new assistant, a true partner, with whom to share his work. He would be able to help thousands, maybe millions, and end the vast caste system that separated mortals and fae. Mr. Seay could go on with his life when they were done.

Maybe I could share my life with him.

The thought came unbidded, and it scared him. He was still shaking when he sat down to dinner.