Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
By the fourth day, Amelia had approved menus she could not properly picture, addressed cards in a hand that cramped by the second hour, and stood through two separate fittings for a ball gown that felt, increasingly, like armor for a battle she had not chosen to fight.
She had not written a single word in four days.
She had not, she realized somewhere around the third fitting, had a single hour entirely her own since the ball was decided.
I am disappearing into this house the same way I feared I would the day I accepted him.
The thought arrived with force, standing very still while a seamstress pinned silk at her waist, the Dowager Duchess's voice carrying on uninterrupted in the next room about seating arrangements for the dowager countesses.
I said yes to Sebastian. I do not recall agreeing to become invisible in his mother's ballroom.
She excused herself the moment the fitting ended, claiming a headache she did not entirely have to invent, and headed for the drawing room with the specific, urgent need of a woman who has not been alone with her own thoughts in far too long.
It was blessedly empty. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, closing her eyes for just a moment, and sighed in relief.
Then she sat at the small writing desk in the corner that had, by unspoken agreement, become hers, drawing out the half-finished essay she had not touched since the wedding.
The Question of the Fragment, the title read, in her own careful hand, and beneath it, three paragraphs she had been circling for a fortnight without managing to finish a fourth.
She dipped the pen and stared at the page a long while, the house's noise reduced to a distant, muffled hum beyond the closed door, and found, when she finally set the nib to paper, that the words came slower than she wanted, cautious and small.
What is the use of finishing it? She set the pen down, pressed her fingers briefly to her eyes, feeling the exhaustion of four days spent being useful to everyone but herself.
No journal in London would publish a woman's reading of the fragments, however careful the scholarship.
I would simply be handing three months of work to men who will dismiss it before finishing the first page, the same way half that ballroom has already decided what I am worth, based on nothing but the scandal attached to my name.
"You are hiding in here."
She startled, looking up to find Sebastian in the doorway, his temper from earlier in the week apparently spent, replaced by something gentler.
"I am recovering from your mother's opinions on lily placement."
"A wise strategy. I generally require several hours' recovery myself, after prolonged exposure.
" He smiled at her. "I have been looking for you.
" Sebastian crossed to stand behind her chair, and she felt his hand settle warm at her shoulder before he saw what lay open on the desk.
He went quiet a moment, reading, and she resisted the urge to close the pages, to fold this small, uncertain thing away before he could find it wanting too. "This is new."
"It is old, mostly. I have simply not finished it."
"Why not?"
"Because I do not know what the use of finishing it would be.
" She said it lightly, the way she had learned to say most things that cost her, and felt him hear straight through the lightness anyway, the way he always did now.
"No respectable journal will print a woman's scholarship, Sebastian, however sound the argument.
I would simply be handing three months of careful work to men eager to dismiss it unread. "
"You do not know that until you have tried."
"I know it well enough. I have read every journal Whitfield edits. Not one has ever printed a woman's name beneath a scholarly argument, and I have no reason to believe mine would be the first exception."
"Some of them, certainly." He came around to crouch beside her chair, bringing himself level with her rather than looming over the desk, and something in the gesture undid her more than any argument could have.
"Though I notice you have already decided the verdict before a single one of them has read a word of it, which is precisely the reasoning you dismantled rather thoroughly at that first ball, if I recall. "
"That is different."
"It is not remotely different." His voice was gentle, but there was no give in it at all.
"Amelia. Your intelligence is not something to be tucked into a folio and left in a drawer because the world has not yet caught up to what you're capable of.
You stood in the middle of a crowded ballroom and told four dukes that our conclusions were lazy because we had decided the outcome before examining the evidence.
You are doing precisely that now, to yourself, with rather less mercy than you extended to me. "
She felt something tighten in her throat. "It is easier to argue on someone else's behalf than my own."
"I know." He reached up, tucking a loose strand of hair back from her face with a tenderness that made the words that followed land harder rather than softer.
"I have spent eight years perfecting the very same trick.
It is why I kept an apartment no one could reach, rather than simply say plainly that I was afraid.
You are doing the same thing now, only with paper instead of rooms. Deciding the rejection before it arrives, so it cannot surprise you. "
"And if I send it, and it is rejected."
"Then it is rejected, and you write another, and you send that one too.
" He said it simply, without flinching from the possibility the way she had half hoped he might, out of some old instinct to be protected rather than believed.
"I am not going to tell you it will not hurt, Amelia, because I think you would see through the lie immediately, and rightly resent me for offering it.
I am telling you that your ideas deserve to exist in the world whether or not the world is currently prepared to receive them, and that the version of you who stood in that ballroom and told a duke his argument was lazy has never once, in the entire time I have known her, been afraid to be wrong in front of witnesses. "
"That was different. That was you."
"That was precisely the same thing, and you know it.
" Something warm moved behind his eyes, quiet and certain.
"You risked being disliked by a man whose good opinion you had no reason to want, because you believed the argument mattered more than his comfort with it.
I am asking you to extend yourself the same courage you have never once hesitated to extend a stranger. "
She looked down at the three paragraphs, unfinished, and felt something in her chest loosen slightly, some small, stubborn knot she had been carrying since the fitting room. "You truly believe it is worth finishing."
"I believe it is worth finishing whether or not a single journal in London ever prints it, because the alternative is you deciding, on their behalf, that your own thinking does not merit existing on paper.
I have watched you dismantle better men's arguments over considerably less evidence than you have gathered for your own. "
He took her hand, turning it over the way he had over the small breakfast table, tracing the ink already staining her fingers with something that looked almost like reverence.
"Finish it, Amelia. Send it out under your own name and let them refuse you to your face, if that is what they intend to do.
I would rather see you fail loudly at the thing you actually want than watch you succeed quietly at hosting my mother's ball. "
She laughed, unexpected, something in the tightness of the last four days finally beginning to ease. "That is a rather unromantic thing to say to your wife."
"I have never claimed to be romantic. I have only claimed to notice you, which I have found, rather to my own surprise, amounts to considerably more."
She looked at him a long moment, at the quiet certainty in his face, entirely undiminished by four days of his mother's fabric samples and seating charts, and felt something settle in her chest that no amount of ribbon or place cards had managed to disturb.
"Give me an hour," she said, drawing the paper back toward her, pen already finding the fourth paragraph she had abandoned a fortnight ago. "I believe I know, finally, how to finish it."
"Take two," he said, rising, dropping a kiss against the crown of her head before he left her to it. "I will tell my mother you are indisposed. It will not even be entirely a lie."