Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
"You are going to have to start charging me for the time I spend standing in your shop," Amelia said.
Mr. Bell looked up from his ledger.
"I have considered it, Miss Hartwell."
"And?" Amelia set the borrowed volume on the counter, its spine considerably more worn than when she'd taken it out a fortnight past, and watched the bookseller's mouth twitch.
"I fear I should become a very rich man."
She smiled and ran her gaze over the bookshelves.
"Did you receive the new Greek histories?"
"Yesterday."
"Where?"
Mr. Bell pointed toward the back shelves.
"Third case. Upper level. I have not yet had time to arrange them."
"I shall do it for you."
"I knew you would."
She moved toward the shelves, already forgetting that she had promised herself she would not spend another hour in the shop.
She had made it precisely three cases into the history section, trailing one finger along a row of spines trying to decide which was worth borrowing, when a voice she recognized instantly, and with considerable dismay, spoke from directly behind her.
"Gibbon. I would not have taken you for a Gibbon reader. Miss Hartwell."
Amelia did not turn round immediately, using the extra moment to arrange her face into something less startled than she felt.
For one ridiculous second, her mind supplied the memory of candlelight and dark eyes and a carriage far too small for two people who were supposed to dislike one another. Then sense returned.
"You know my name."
Sebastian's mouth shifted at one corner.
"Mr. Bell told me when you returned the book."
"So you were listening."
"I was standing beside the counter."
"Listening."
"Observing."
"That is a very elegant word for listening."
"I thought you appreciated precision."
"Only when it is deserved."
His amusement deepened.
"I would not have taken you for a man capable of noticing what a woman is reading over her shoulder without being invited to look."
"I was not looking over your shoulder. Mr. Bell is not, I think, in the habit of lowering his voice for the benefit of my discretion.
" Sebastian came round to stand properly before her now, and she found, with some annoyance, that daylight suited him rather better than candlelight had, there was no lamp to blame for the sudden unsteadiness in her own pulse.
"You did not strike me as a woman who reads Gibbon for pleasure, given how thoroughly you disputed my own use of primary sources not a week past."
"I read Gibbon precisely because I intend to dispute his use of them as well, when I've finished forming the argument properly. Unlike some scholars, I prefer not to publish my conclusions before I have fully tested them."
"A fair point, delivered with considerably more edge than fairness generally requires."
"I find edge is the only tone certain scholars respond to.
" She lifted her chin, refusing to be the one who looked away first. "Have you reconsidered your position on women's natural unsuitability for rigorous thought, Your Grace, or are we destined to have this argument in every bookshop in London until one of us relents? "
"I have not relented. Nor I suspect, have you, which makes the argument considerably more entertaining than most I am subjected to."
"You are not subjected to this one. You are an active and enthusiastic participant, which is a different thing entirely."
"Is it." Something warmed in his expression, reluctant amusement breaking through the composure he generally wore like a second coat.
"I confess I have thought a great deal, since the ball, about several of the points you raised.
I have not yet decided whether I agree with all of them.
I have decided I no longer find them easy to dismiss, which is, for a man of my temperament, a rather significant concession. "
"How gracious of you to admit it, three whole sentences after refusing to actually say so directly."
"I said precisely what I meant to say."
"You said precisely as little as you could manage while still technically answering the question, which I have come to understand is rather your particular talent.
" She said it lightly, though something in his answering smile made her considerably less steady than the tone she'd aimed for.
"You are working on a new paper, I take it, given the ink stains on your left hand that no amount of scholarly dignity has managed to disguise. "
He glanced down at his hand with faint surprise, as though he'd forgotten it entirely. "A response to Whitfield's critique of my sourcing. It is proving considerably more difficult to argue than I anticipated."
"Perhaps because Whitfield is correct, and you have simply not yet permitted yourself to consider it."
"Perhaps," he said, and the word carried none of the defensiveness she'd expected, only a genuine, weighing consideration that surprised her more than any argument could have.
A bell sounded somewhere near the front of the shop, and he glanced toward it, something shifting back into place behind his eyes, the careful public composure reasserting itself.
"I am promised at my solicitor's within the quarter hour. I ought to go."
"Then go, Your Grace. I shall not keep you from your obligations."
"No," he said, with a faint, rueful smile that she did not entirely understand, "I do not imagine you would," and inclined his head, and left her standing among the shelves with her pulse considerably less settled than she cared to admit even to herself.
It was only after the shop bell had rung a second time, marking his departure, that she noticed the small stack of papers left behind on the reading table nearest where they'd been standing, several pages of close, slanted handwriting, ink still faintly fresh at the edges.
She glanced toward the door. He was already gone, striding up the street beyond the window without a backward glance, entirely unaware of what he'd left behind.
I ought to have Mr. Bell send a boy after him.
She thought it, and did not move to act on it, some contrary impulse holding her still until the moment for easy correction had passed, and by then, she told herself, it would be considerably more trouble to chase him down the street than to simply see the papers returned by more ordinary means.
She gathered them instead, tucked them into her basket beneath the fresh volume of Gibbon, and told herself, quite firmly, that she had absolutely no intention of reading a single word of them before they were returned.
She held to that intention for the better part of an hour after arriving home.
She held to it through tea, and through half of a very tedious letter from her aunt in Bath, and through nearly twenty minutes of staring resolutely at her needlework while the papers sat, entirely too visible, on the corner of her writing desk.
"This is absurd," she said aloud, to no one, and reached for them.
They are his private notes. Unfinished thoughts, not meant for anyone's eyes but his own.
She knew it even as she unfolded the first page, and found she did not particularly care, curiosity winning out over conscience with an ease that would have alarmed her under any other circumstance.
His handwriting was quick and slanted, corrections crossed through and rewritten in the margins, whole paragraphs struck through entirely and replaced with sharper, more considered versions, and she found herself reading not merely the argument but the process of it, the visible workings of a mind reconsidering itself in real time.
"Absolutely not."
He is wrong here. She reached for her own pen almost without deciding to, and began, in the narrow margin beside his third paragraph, to explain precisely why.
And here. A second note, longer, disputing his characterization of a source she happened to know rather better than he apparently did.
She sat back. Her pulse had quickened. This was ridiculous. She was arguing with him in the margins of a paper he did not even know she possessed. She turned the page.
Then smiled despite herself. He had anticipated the objection. He had answered it in the following paragraph.
Amelia's smile disappeared. "Oh, you clever man."
She read his answer twice. Then wrote beneath it.
Better, but still insufficient and here, though I grant this point has some merit, however grudgingly given.
By midnight her handwriting had grown smaller, more urgent, crowding into every available margin, and by the sixth page she had entirely abandoned any pretense of restraint, filling the reverse side of one sheet with a counterargument three full paragraphs long, growing more irritated with each line, though the irritation, she noticed distantly, carried a great deal more warmth in it than irritation generally did.
On one page, she drew a line beneath a paragraph and wrote:
If you were standing in front of me, I would ask you to defend this.
She stared at the words. Then, after a moment, added: And I suspect you would.
She closed her eyes. This had gone too far. She gathered the pages together. She should return them.
Tomorrow.
Without another word written. Amelia placed the papers carefully on her desk. Then looked at them. She picked them up again.
One last page. Only one.
She opened it and found herself smiling before she had read the first line.
"The Duke of Ravensmere is here."
Mary delivered the news at a volume entirely unsuited to the drawing room, bursting through the door with a speed that left the ribbon in her hair listing badly to one side, and Amelia felt her stomach drop straight through the floor.
"Here. Now?"