Regina Scott by The Courting Campaign Page A

Rotherford.”
    Heads jerked in his direction, faces slack with shock. Nick had gripped the back of the pew in front of him to keep from rising. “That cannot be,” he told them all. “I was careful in my calculations. I even had Davy review my work.”
    “He did indeed,” the famed chemist piped up. “It seemed fine work to me, completely in accordance with the circumstances.”
    Fredericks’s smile was hard. “Circumstances that had changed since I originally made those calculations. Oh, yes, gentlemen, it was easy for me to determine what had gone wrong once I recognized the problem. I accuse Nicholas Rotherford of plagiarism.”
    The murmurs grew in volume, forcing Nick to his feet. “I deny it. That was my own work, and it should have held up in the field.”
    “Certainly I do not make such an accusation lightly,” Fredericks said, voice as ponderous as his look. “I have proof. I request that a group be commissioned to review the information objectively. And when that commission determines the truth, I ask that you not allow such an offense to go unpunished.”
    Nick had sat, unblinking, certain it was all a mistake. The commission would review his work, exonerate him, identify the true problem that had cost those miners their lives.
    “These are serious matters,” Sir Joseph had said, thick fingers bound around the arms of his chair. “You can be sure we will give them due consideration.”
    They had. It had taken the commission Sir Joseph had appointed a full week to order Nick from the society, to refuse to share any further information with him. Only Sir Humphry Davy had taken his side.
    “This is a travesty, Rotherford,” he’d said as he shook Nick’s hand in farewell that day in London. “I’ll keep pushing for a more thorough investigation.”
    Nick had heard nothing further in the four months since. It mattered not. He knew he hadn’t plagiarized Fredericks’s work. But the thought that his mistake had caused the accident haunted him.
    So Nick had retreated. He thought at least a few said he was hiding. He had another reason for moving to Derby. The distance provided a buffer. With him more than a hundred miles away from Fredericks and any other scientist, no one could claim his work, or any mistake, was anything but his own.
    Of course, first he had to actually achieve something from the effort. It was one thing to work in theory—determine how a combination of liquids and solids might interact with the gaseous firedamp dozens of feet underground. It was another to combine those materials and test their efficacy without endangering others. So far, the results had been less than satisfactory.
    Still, he kept at it that day and the next, until someone knocked at the door of his laboratory.
    Nick pulled out his pocket watch and consulted it. Not time for tea or for someone to remind him of a dinner he was about to miss. Ears attuned for any other sound, he glanced out the window. No one seemed to be calling for help on what appeared to be a sunny day. Surely his staff knew he was not to be disturbed.
    Someone knocked again.
    He should ignore it. It was an interruption, a distraction. He had more important things to do. He enjoyed confronting impossible problems, failing to find solutions. In fact, failure was his bread and butter lately.
    Nick rose and opened the door. Alice clutched a bunch of lavender in her tiny hand. “We picked flowers for your laboratory, Papa. Miss Pyrmont said they would make it smell better.”
    Miss Pyrmont would certainly have some knowledge of smells, given the way she’d recently rescued him. “How thoughtful,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s rather important that I know how my work smells. That’s one of the ways I can be certain I’ve combined the chemicals properly.”
    Alice’s face folded in on itself as it was wont to do when she was unhappy about something. “Don’t you like flowers, Papa?”
    Flowers had rarely appealed to him, but he liked