Chapter Three
Meanwhile, back at Oxford…
The Bodleian was Theresa’s at night, not by right, but by ritual.
Once the last scholars trailed out with their ink-stained fingers and their half-sketched ideas, she stayed behind with broom and cloth, putting order back where they had left chaos.
Dust brushed from ledgers, scraps of blotting paper gathered, tables polished smooth.
No one noticed her hands when the library was alive with footsteps, but in the hush of evening, she became the keeper of its bones.
She tucked a stray sheet into a bin, then found something wedged between a volume of Celtic history and the carved oak edge of the shelf. A sweet wrapper. Cinnamon, from the smell. John’s.
The small scrap made her smile—and then ache.
His habits were careless in the way of a man who had never truly been alone; hers were careful because she had been.
Graduation loomed, and with it the end of everything she had here: his quiet thanks when she refilled an inkpot, his eyes finding hers across the tables, the secret parcels of sweets.
When he left Oxford, would she only become a memory for him?
She finished her rounds and drifted toward one of the leather-bound volumes, an old translation of Aristotle standing solemn on the shelf.
By candlelight, she bent over the words, lips whispering over the printed wisdom: Justice is often considered the greatest of virtues, and in justice is virtually all good contained.
Knowledge had been the only thing she claimed as her own since fleeing Vienna. They could strip her of family, station, beauty—but not her mind. And she fed it in secret, just as others chased frivolous rewards.
She shivered as she approached her narrow nest tucked beneath the eaves—not from cold but from missing John’s strong arms around her in her—and opened the little box where she kept her few belongings.
The brooch gleamed faintly, gold catching the candle flame.
She had worn it the day she fled, the morning her brother had come home with bloody knuckles, boasting of a fight with the Jewish apprentices.
Their father had laughed, poured him a schnapps, and called him a man.
She had hated them then—with a clarity that felt like fire in her chest. Violence as sport.
Cruelty as proof of worth. That was the Hofst?tter way.
She set the brooch aside and reached for her diary, its old leather soft from use.
On one page, she had crossed out her family name again and again until the ink tore the paper.
Beneath it, she had written another name, a simpler one, and practiced her new signature over and over until it filled the page and her new identity.
The scrawl of a girl remaking herself. Not that it mattered—she would never sign marriage papers. Not as a servant girl who swept floors.
And yet… she thought of John. His laugh, low and warm. His way of looking at her. But as a marquess, destined for estates and halls she would never enter, he could not be hers.
And she’d never want anyone else but him.
But what if he knew the truth? What if he knew she had been highborn, that her hands had held more than broom handles? Would it make a difference? Or would he hate her when he learned the identity of her father and brother?
She pressed the diary shut and hid it away.
From below, voices drifted up the stairwell—students leaving the buttery late, indulging in too much wine. She heard them clearly when they passed near the library doors. “…delegation from Vienna… Hofst?tter himself… Oxford and London on the list…”
The name scraped raw inside her chest. Her breath stilled, and she gripped the edge of the desk until the voices faded.
Slowly, she drew a breath, steadying herself the way she always had. She was no Hofst?tter now. She was Theresa, quiet as the dust she swept, safe in the hush of the library. And if the world came hunting, it would not find her here.