Chapter 2
"If I am to be dismissed as a bluestocking, I may as well make something of it."
Harriet Fairweather paused mid-sip of her tea, her delicate china cup suspended halfway to her lips as the afternoon sun streaming through Gunter's Tea Shop windows caught the horror dawning across her features in rather spectacular detail.
"Oh dear," she said, setting down the cup with the sort of care one might reserve for handling explosives. "That's your revolutionary voice."
"I don't have a revolutionary voice."
"You absolutely do, and it's the same voice you used before informing the Vicar that his translation of Corinthians was theologically suspect."
"Well, it was! He'd turned 'faith, hope, and love' into something about duty, obligation, and knowing one's place, practically rewriting Saint Paul."
"And you felt compelled to explain this during his sermon, from the pews, in front of the entire congregation."
Eveline took a defiant bite of her lavender ice. "Someone had to."
"That someone didn't have to be you, loudly, at the precise moment he was attempting to make his theological point.
" Harriet leaned forward, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that suggested she was rather enjoying the prospect of scandal.
"Now tell me what has prompted this particular revolution.
Have you been arguing with clergymen again? "
"Not clergymen, just one insufferable gentleman at Hatchard's yesterday."
"Oh?" Harriet's eyes lit with the particular gleam that meant she scented romantic possibility, the same look she got whenever an unmarried man under sixty wandered into their general vicinity. "Do tell."
"There's nothing to tell, really. He was blocking the entire Roman history section, standing there like some sort of particularly well-dressed monster, and when I politely suggested he might move..."
"Politely?"
"...relatively politely suggested he might move, he had the audacity to imply I was only buying books to appear intellectual at dinner parties."
"The monster." Harriet's lips twitched with barely suppressed amusement. "What did he look like, this beast of yours?"
"He's not mine, and I barely noticed."
"Of course not."
"He was tall-ish, with dark hair that looked like he'd been running his fingers through it while contemplating his own magnificence, and grey eyes that managed to look both bored and amused, as if the entire world existed solely for his entertainment."
"You barely noticed quite a lot of detail."
"It was difficult not to notice when he took up so much space with his presence.
" Eveline stirred her ice with perhaps more vigor than necessary, remembering the way he'd stood there, all languid aristocratic grace and casual authority, clearly a man who'd never been told 'no' in his life and wouldn't recognize the word if it bit him.
"We ended up discussing different political and philosophical matters. "
Harriet blinked slowly, as if processing this information required considerable effort. "You discussed such matters with a strange man in a bookshop?"
"And other theories in general, which was unexpected because he actually knew about them rather than just memorizing a few quotes to impress people at dinner like most gentlemen do."
"But not this gentleman?"
“No, he was genuinely educated, which made his condescension all the more insufferable. He even asked if I was buying books to display them, as if I'd waste good money on books I didn't intend to read,” she said while she could still hear his cultured voice in her mind.
"Perish the thought, though you must admit that half of Mayfair does exactly that."
"Which is precisely why I refuse to be the same as them." Eveline pulled out a folded newspaper cutting from her reticule with the air of someone producing evidence in a trial. "Which brings me to my revolution."
Harriet took the paper, reading aloud with increasing alarm: "'Sought: Learned individual to catalogue and organise private library.
Must possess fluency in Latin, Greek, French, and Italian.
Knowledge of ancient and modern history essential.
Apply by written correspondence to...'" Her voice rose to a pitch that caused several nearby patrons to turn with expressions of polite disapproval. "The Duke of Everleigh?"
"Keep your voice down!"
"The Duke of Everleigh," Harriet repeated in a horrified whisper that was somehow more dramatic than her shriek.
"The one who was jilted by Lady Juliette in the most public humiliation of the decade?
The one who supposedly turned so cold after the broken betrothal that frost forms when he enters a room? "
"I hardly think meteorological phenomena..."
"Eveline, you cannot be serious about applying for this."
"I'm not thinking of applying, I am applying."
"For a position as an employee in the home of an unmarried duke."
"As a cataloguer in his library, not a visitor in his bedroom."
"Eveline!"
"What? It's true that I'd be working with books, not engaging in whatever scandalous activities you're imagining.
" Though even as she said it, her mind unhelpfully supplied an image of her mysterious bookshop adversary in shirtsleeves, surrounded by ancient texts, which she immediately banished.
"I have all the qualifications they're seeking. "
"You have something else too...a reputation to maintain."
"What reputation would that be? I'm already three-and-twenty, firmly on the shelf, and known throughout the ton as that peculiar Whitcombe girl who reads too much and quotes dead languages at inappropriate moments. At least this way, my peculiarity would have purpose."
Harriet reached across the table to grasp her hand with the urgency of someone trying to pull a friend back from a cliff's edge.
"Evie, think about this, really think about what you're suggesting.
If you take employment—any employment, but especially this—you'll be ruined completely.
No respectable family will receive you, no gentleman will court you. "
"What gentleman courts me now?" The words came out sharper than intended, carrying years of accumulated disappointment that she usually kept carefully locked away.
"Should I wait for Mr. Harland to compare me to more farmyard animals?
Hope that Lord Witherly's ancient bones hold together long enough for a proposal?
Accept it, Harriet...I'm already invisible to eligible men, so at least this way I'd be invisible while doing something meaningful. "
"You're not invisible, you're selective."
"I'm selected against, which is quite a different thing entirely."
They sat in silence for a moment, the cheerful chatter of the tea shop flowing around them like water around stones, before Harriet sighed with the resignation of someone who knew a lost cause when she saw one.
"You're going to do this regardless of what I say."
"Probably."
"Definitely." Harriet picked up her tea again with the air of someone requiring fortification. "So tell me your plan, and I assume you have one that's slightly more sophisticated than marching up to Everleigh Manor and announcing your qualifications."
"I shall write a formal application, and Professor Blackwood has agreed to provide a reference..."
"Your father's friend who taught you Greek and thinks women should be admitted to Oxford?"
"The very same, and his recommendation carries considerable weight in academic circles."
"The Duke of Everleigh hardly moves in academic circles."
"No, but he clearly values education or he wouldn't need a proper cataloguer for what must be an extensive collection.
" Eveline pulled out her small notebook, pages already covered with her neat handwriting that sprawled across the pages like tiny soldiers marching to war.
"I've been making lists of what to include; my translation of Plutarch, the comparative analysis of Homer translations, perhaps that piece on Tacitus that Professor Blackwood particularly praised. .."
"You're actually excited about this."
Was she? Eveline considered the question, thinking about how the prospect of eighteen thousand books, or even more, made her pulse quicken in a way that had nothing to do with scandal and everything to do with possibility.
"Can you imagine, Harriet? A library that size, needing organization, would be like being asked to chart unexplored territory, to create order from chaos itself."
"You have very unusual fantasies."
"And you fantasize about marriage proposals and wedding breakfasts."
"At least my fantasies don't involve social ruin."
They finished their ices while Harriet continued to list every possible disaster that could befall Eveline, from complete social ostracism to ending up killed in the Duke's library.
"Books are quite heavy, you know—excellent weapons", she had mentioned but Eveline half-listened while her mind was already composing her letter of application.
***
That evening, barricaded in her father's study with its familiar scent of leather and pipe tobacco that still clung to every surface, Eveline faced her newest enemy: a blank sheet of paper that seemed to mock her with its pristine emptiness.
How did one apply for a position never intended for a woman? Should she be forthright about her sex, apologetic for her presumption, or defiant about her qualifications?
The first draft was a disaster of excessive humility that made her cringe even as she wrote it:
Your Grace, while I understand that my sex renders me an unconventional candidate...
Into the fire it went, because she was not going to apologize for existing.
The second attempt swung too far in the opposite direction, reading like a philosophical treatise on equality:
Your Grace, a person's qualifications should matter more than society's narrow prejudices...
That followed its predecessor into the flames, as lecturing a duke about prejudice seemed unlikely to secure employment.