Stroke of Genius by Emily Bryan Page A

gift from the gods? Pygmalion would have said it was merely a matter of survival.
    Twenty-two years earlier
    Peel’s Abbey, a Cheapside house of pleasure
    The garret was an icebox in winter and a furnace in summer, but it was his. The air was ripe with mustiness and the ratter was long overdue, but when Crispin retreated to the garret, it was as if he escaped into a castle of his own and drew up the drawbridge. He made a pallet for himself among the old trunks and dressmakers’ dummies and stashed his few treasures in one of Madame’s cigar boxes.
    He opened the box now to assure himself it was all still there. The broken Horn book he’d taught himself to read with. A scrap of chalk, a few sheaves of precious paper, the finished black king and queen from the chess set he was carving from a length of discarded teak he’d found down on the wharves. He’d talked the butcher on the next block over into saving him bone scraps. That should do for the white pieces when he got to them.
    Everything he made had a purpose, but there was no reason it couldn’t also be beautiful. In the squalor of Cheapside, beauty was his refuge, his sanctuary. And since he could find so little of it, he was forced to create it every chance he could.
    His black king had a fierce scowl on his royal face, terrible to behold. He thought the black queen looked a little sad, and a little like the woman he barely remembered. The one he’d called mother.
    There was one more thing in his cigar box. He rarely took it out, but he did so now, carefully unfolding the bit of fine linen. It was all he had left of his mother, and it didn’t even really belong to her.
    It belonged to that nameless him.
    Crispin spread the handkerchief across his thigh and traced the faded monogram. The gold threads were starting the fray, but he could still clearly make out the CRS. The R was much larger than the other two, so he knew it stood for the family name of the man to whom it had once belonged.
    But since Crispin didn’t know what that name was, he’d gotten into the habit of reading the letters in order and thinking of the unknown “gentleman” as “Cris.”
    So close to his own name. Crispin. Cris. Close as two sides of the same penny.
    But there was no question which side of the coin had landed facedown in the dirt.

Chapter Ten
    Pygmalion spent most of his time by himself, but it never occurred to him to be lonely. Unless he was in the company of others.
    “What the devil is this?” Horace Makepeace demanded, forking up a paper-thin slice of meat and eyeing it with suspicion.
    “Ham,” Lord Jasper Washburn informed him loftily. It was bad enough he’d been seated by the husband of his American cousin. Did the man have to display new depths of uncouth manners at every turn?
    “How can you tell?” Makepeace pinched off a bite and wolfed it down. “Can’t hardly taste it. Why, it’s so thin, I could read a newspaper through this thing!”
    “Horace, dear, that’s the point,” Cousin Minerva said, beside him. “Imagine the skill it takes to carve ham that thin. Vauxhall is positively famous for it.”
    She and her husband debated the respective merits of beefsteak versus a crock of beans for “filling a body up” while Jasper glared down the table at the spot that should have been his, right between his sister and Cousin Minerva’s surprisingly comely daughter. He wasn’t that late in arriving for this interminable supper. They ought to have saved him the choicest place in deference to his title at the least.
    Instead, the plum seat was occupied by a big, hulking commoner, a Mr. Hawke.
    Jasper shouldn’t have been surprised. Like calls to like.
    “So, since we’re new to each other,” Mr. Makepeacesaid between bites. “A little about me. I started working in cotton as a lad, learned a bit about the fabric game. Then I got to tinkering with a mechanical spinner one day, and damn me, if the output didn’t increase out of all knowing with the