Clenching his fists, he straightened himself and moved away. He’d already made a mess of things twice. It was time for him to think carefully and to calculate his every move if he still intended to make her his wife. He looked out of the window at the pouring rain. “I have only read a few parts of it, not the entire thing.”
“I don’t know how you could possibly put the book down once you started reading,” Mary muttered. “He describes here, for instance, a procedure that he developed: litigating the temporal artery to prevent migraines.” Mary looked up from the book with a puzzled expression. “I always thought Paré developed the litigation of arteries, but apparently al-Zahrawi came up with it six hundred years earlier.”
She leafed through the pages to another section. “And here,” she said, pointing to a diagram. “Look at that: forceps to help in delivering a baby.”
“It is quite remarkable,” Ryan said, unable to take his eyes off Mary and hoping to keep up the amicable conversation. Her sudden interest in the book had made her forget how angry she was with him.
“It is more than that. There are roughly two hundred surgical instruments illustrated here that al-Zahrawi invented. His contribution to medicine is profound, Ryan. You must read this book if you have any interest in becoming a physician; promise me that you will.”
“I promise,” he told her sincerely. “But for now, it will have to wait, I’m afraid, unless we want Alex to come looking for us.”
“Oh dear,” Mary said, putting the book back on the shelf. “I completely forgot.”
“Yes, it rather seems as though you did,” he said with a grin. “But I must admit that you never looked more fetching than when you were standing there in your evening gown and white gloves, your head completely immersed in that book.”
Mary frowned. “I was trying to concentrate,” she replied in an irritated tone.
Ryan sighed. “I didn’t mean. . .” He gave up trying to explain himself. What was the point if the woman was bent on being contrary? Perhaps he should just concede and acknowledge defeat. At least then he could start looking at all the women who would be more than eager to marry him—Lady Stephanie, for instance. His head reeled at the thought of it. As pretty as she was, she was nothing but an empty shell, with a venomous streak to her that ought to send any young man running for the hills.
No, he had to have Lady Steepleton; there simply wasn’t any other way around it. His mind was made up, and so help him God if he wasn’t going to do everything in his power to make it happen.
“I was just telling Lord Willowbrook about your father,” Alexandra said to Mary from across the table a short while later.
Mary looked up somewhat flustered from her plate. The truth was that she hadn’t been paying the least bit of attention to the conversations around her. She’d been thinking about Lady Warwick instead and wondering how she might be faring now that she had her displeased son to contend with.
“I remember your father quite well, Lady Steepleton,” Lord Trenton’s father told her. “I cannot say that we were close friends or anything like that, but I did go to him once for treatment.”
That got Mary’s attention. “Really?” she asked. “For what,, if you do not mind my asking?”
“Not at all,” Lord Willowbrook told her with a smile. “As it happens, I had a cataract on my right eye, it must be at least five years ago by now. Your father operated on me, and, I must say, he did a mighty good job.”
Mary stared at Lord Willowbrook. She remembered her father telling her about it at the time, how angry she’d been that he hadn’t allowed her to attend. Apparently, she was now sitting down to dinner with the patient himself. “Did it hurt a lot?” she asked.
Lord Willowbrook nodded. “Like the devil. But I knew I was in capable hands. Your father came highly recommended, you know, from the Regent himself.”
The Regent?
Mary had always felt so close to her father, had loved him with all her heart, and had blindly trusted everything he’d ever told her to be the truth. Yet there were clearly two sides to the man she’d known, and he’d worked very hard at keeping one of those sides hidden from her. “I had no idea,” she muttered, feeling suddenly quite faint and unwell. “I am terribly sorry,” she said. “Would you please excuse me?”
“Are you quite all right?” Alexandra asked anxiously.
“Yes, I will be fine,” Mary told her, almost knocking over her wine glass in her haste to leave the room. “I believe the wine may have disagreed with me. I just need some fresh air.”
“Perhaps I should—” William said as they all watched Mary escape through the dining room door.
“I will go,” Ryan cut in, pushing his chair back and hurrying after her.
“Our brother has certainly set his cap,” William remarked as he caught Alexandra’s eye.
“Yes. . .I do believe he has,” she replied. “But whether or not she will have him still remains to be seen.”
“What?” chimed in. “I thought the matter was settled. After all, he did propose in front of the entire ton.”
“Yes, Papa,” Alexandra said with a sigh, taking a sip of her wine and then licking her lips. “But he did so without Mary’s consent, and since then he has not exactly been very good at persuading her to accept his impromptu proposal.”
“What the devil is that supposed to mean?” Bryce demanded to know.
“Just that Ryan will not allow Mary to continue doing what she does when she becomes his wife, and Mary refuses to give it up. Things were said and, well, to cut a long story short, Ryan is doing his best to patch things up again.”
“He is the one who will need patching up again if he mucks this up,” Bryce fumed. “I want that woman for my daughter-in-law. So what if she is a bit eccentric? This family is comprised entirely of eccentric people.”
“And what exactly is so eccentric about Lady Steepleton, Lord Moorland?” Michael’s mother, Isabella, asked. “She seems perfectly respectable to me—not as flamboyant as one might expect, considering her title, but I find that rather refreshing.”
“She is a surgeon,” William said simply.
“Madre mia!” Isabella exclaimed. She looked about cautiously, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “Is that even allowed?”
“No,” Alexandra told her. “She doesn’t have a license, and it is also unlikely that she will ever get one as a woman. But she was taught by her father since she was fourteen years of age and had assisted him on his surgeries. And at Waterloo, where nobody cared one way or the other about who did the cutting and suturing as long as it just got done, she lost only three of the eighty or so men that she treated.”
“Blimey,” Lord Willowbrook muttered. “Those numbers are nothing short of astounding.”
“That practically makes her the best surgeon in the country,” Cassandra piped in. “What a pity it would be for such talent to go to waste—and when you think of all the people whom she might still save. . .”
“Here, here,” William and Bryce concurred in unison.
“Perhaps if we were to back her up,” Isabella suggested. “We could speak to Lord Woodbridge. Surely he must have some influence as the Master of the Royal College of Surgeons.”
“All he can do is put it to a vote,” Michael told her. “And even then it may need to be sanctioned by Parliament.”
“Good luck with that,” Alexandra grumbled, taking a slow sip of her wine. It had begun to dawn on her just how difficult it would be for Mary and Ryan to find happiness together.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Mind if I join you?” Ryan asked as he walked out onto the terrace. It had stopped raining, leaving the air fresh and the hydrangeas dripping wet.
Mary sighed. “I thought I knew him,” she murmured as Ryan stepped closer. “He was my father and my only parent for so many years. We never kept secrets from one another—at least, I did not think so. But as it turns out, everything about him was one big lie. I didn’t really know him at all.”
She squeezed her eyes shut to stifle the tears that were already threatening to trickle down her cheeks. Ryan offered her a handkerchief, but she shook her head and turned away. “I am sorry,” she said. “I must look a frightful mess.”
Ryan shrugged. “You look no worse than I did when Mama died.”
She nodded with understanding. “That must have been a terrible blow to your family.”
“It was, in a way. But in a sense it was also a relief; she suffered quite badly toward the end, you see. Alexandra was most affected by it, I suppose. Not only was she the youngest, but she was also there during Mama’s final moments. Papa’s reaction had a great impact on her. I must admit that I did shed a great deal of tears myself, but the pain does get easier to bear with time—even if it doesn’t feel that way right now.”
“You are right; it doesn’t feel that way at all. In fact, it rather feels as though a knot has been tied around my heart, squeezing it so tightly that it aches with pain.” She turned away from him and looked out over the drenched garden, the branches on both trees and bushes hanging limply under the strain of the newly fallen rain.
“You know,” Ryan told her softly, moving one step closer to her, “it is possible that, in spite of all the secrets he kept, you did know the real Lord Steepleton after all. I cannot help but think that every moment you spent with him was genuine. And the person that he truly was was the man that you knew him to be: an excellent surgeon who never gave a wit for his title or his fortune.”
“But why would he keep it from me? What right did he have to do that?” she sniffed, turning around to face him.
“Think about it, Mary,” he quietly urged her. “You have never told me about your mother. Was she from a wealthy family?”
“The truth is I scarcely remember her,” she told him. Her voice grew distant. “I was six when she died, and though I still recall the pain of losing her, I cannot seem to picture her face. But as far as I recollect, her father was a blacksmith in Stepney, where we lived.”
“It seems, then, that in order for them to marry, your father was forced to move down a few steps on the social ladder, because he knew it would be difficult for her to move up. He set up his practice in the small house that you grew up in, and when your mother passed. . .well, he made the decision to pursue his dream: the accumulation of medical knowledge.
“It may be true that he swept a few details under the rug, but he gave you an education that many society women would be green with envy over. And while you may be hurting now, in time I do think that you will come to realize that your father did what was best for you in the long run. He loved you dearly, and he held you in the highest regard. If he had not, he never would have trusted you with his life’s work.”
Mary stared at Ryan in astonishment. She’d been so caught up in her own little rift with him that she’d failed to realize what a great judge of character he actually was. He’d seen something that she hadn’t: that it was the man she’d traveled Europe with, the one who’d struggled to teach her French and Latin and who’d opened her eyes to the wonder of medicine, that defined her father. He was precisely the person she’d known him to be, because all the rest of it—the title, the estates, and the vast fortune—was something he’d turned his back on before she was even born.