Chapter 15
“It was no longer credible. I adjusted accordingly.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, on realizing that the false alibi she had claimed from her son had been disproven.
* * *
They had left Nick at the Merton gate at half past ten.
Millie had known within thirty seconds of watching him speak with the porter that it was not going to be straightforward.
The bullish expression that stated the man spent his days turning people away from those lauded halls, a polite mask of rebuttal.
He received Nick’s inquiry with the immovability of a post that had been planted in this position since the thirteenth century and did not anticipate a change.
But Nick had said he could handle it, and there was little Millie could do about this from the street.
This was one of the several facts about being a woman in Oxford that she had made her peace with over the years.
On the basis that spending energy resisting facts that were not going to change was an inefficient use of the energy available for other activities.
She had not stopped finding it thoroughly, comprehensively ridiculous.
She turned to Betty, and they walked. Because standing still in a cold street in March did not progress her goals.
And she had never been a woman who stood still when walking was available.
The first hour, they had managed with something approaching composure.
They went twice along the length of Merton Street to the gate and back, keeping a slow, purposeful pace as if they had somewhere to be and were taking their time about it.
Then they turned into the High Street, where the morning business of Oxford conducted itself with the brisk, indifferent energy of a very old city long accustomed to continuing regardless of individual human concerns.
They went to the Covered Market. Millie bought a currant bun she did not really need because the stall was there and the woman behind it was frowning at her and purchasing one of her wares felt like the courteous response to occupying the space.
She ate it with the indifference she brought to matters she had classified as a logistical necessity. It was a good currant bun. She did not particularly taste it. Then they went back. The gate was still closed. They turned and walked again.
In the second hour, they visited a small bakery near the corner of the High Street where Betty acquired a soft roll and Millie bought a second currant bun. Also unnecessary.
Then the haberdashery farther along, where Millie bought Betty a length of blue ribbon because it was a better color than the one Betty already had and it gave them a reason to stop and examine wares for several minutes without appearing to be doing precisely what they were doing.
Which was determined loitering, two women who had nowhere else they planned to be.
Millie could have waited at home, but she was too excited to do so.
They were so close to … well, something.
Something that mattered a great deal for reasons she could not quite name, but she knew it would please her father if she could tell him all they had uncovered.
Her driving need to know, to be able to tell him about it, was impossible to ignore.
She knew, without any evidence, that it would make Papa lucid, even if only for a little while.
His curiosity regarding the contents of the journal would attract his academic mind into the present, and she could have one last conversation with him.
Maybe even more than one. But even one would make all this worth it.
It was in the second hour that she began to really see Oxford.
She had grown up with Oxford until it had become invisible.
Background. The spires and the stone and the smell of the baking on the wind and the particular quality of the light on a March morning.
Gray-gold and cold. The way it had looked on every March morning she could remember.
She had walked these streets since childhood.
Had waited on these pavements and in these bakeries and outside these gates since Papa first brought her to Oxford and explained what was inside the buildings and why it mattered.
And then had gone inside without her because she could not go in.
Had never been able to go in. And the prohibition was so old and so established that most of the people enforcing it had stopped noticing it was a prohibition at all.
She watched two young men in academic gowns walk through the Merton gate without breaking their conversation.
The porter stepped aside. The gate closed.
Millie watched it close and felt the familiar frustration she had been carrying since she was old enough to understand what it meant.
Which was most of her life. She did not make a scene about it.
She had never made a scene about it. Scenes were inefficient and changed nothing.
The energy required for a scene is better deployed elsewhere.
She had long since concluded this, and she concluded it again now, watching the gate.
“It is entirely ridiculous,” she said to Betty.
“Yes, miss,” Betty said gently, clearly understanding the frustrations of the morning and willing to listen.
“The gates and the porters and the reading rooms and the records and all of it.” She was not speaking loudly.
She did not raise her voice in public streets.
But she was thinking aloud, which she did when her occupation was insufficient to keep the thoughts from surfacing.
“A woman cannot enter. She cannot enter the library that holds materials she has a legitimate scholarly interest in, that she might be better equipped to interpret than some of the men currently sitting inside it, because the rules were written by men who did not consider the possibility that she might exist and wish to use them.” She paused at the end of the street and turned them back.
“And the rules are very old and very settled and there is no mechanism for revising them because the people with the power to revise them have never found it convenient to do so.”
Betty walked beside her with the unobtrusive presence she had developed over two years, attentive without being intrusive. Of being there without making her presence felt unless it was needed.
“Papa was tolerated,” Millie said. The word was stated with the inflection she reserved for issues that were simultaneously intolerable and accurate.
“When his mind was reliable and his purse was open, he was tolerated. He donated to the college libraries. He endowed the research fund at the Bodleian. He went to the manuscript viewings and the dinners and the candlelit discussions in the cloistered rooms, and he was never quite accepted because his money came from trade and trade was a factor the university establishment accepted the benefits of while maintaining the polite fiction that they were above it, but he was tolerated. He had access. The doors opened when he presented himself at them.”
She stopped and then continued. Because what she was saying had been on her mind for some time and the bitter March street and the closed Merton gate had apparently decided this was the occasion for it.
“And then his mind began to go and the access went with it. Not gradually. The invitations stopped. The letters went unanswered. The men who had eaten his dinners and admired his research and expressed their distant warmth over his donations had other concerns to attend to, and none of those other concerns involved him. The same men who took his money for twenty years decided, when he became inconvenient, that they had not especially known him that well after all.” She glared at the gate.
“That is how it works. You are useful until you are not, and then you are not.”
“That is very cruel, miss,” Betty lamented quietly.
“Yes,” Millie agreed. “It is.”
She felt Betty’s light, comforting touch at her elbow.
The brief press of a hand that understood when words were not the point and presence was.
Then they turned back toward the High Street and the third currant bun that Millie was not going to buy because she had reached the limit of what currant buns could reasonably contribute to this particular day.
It had been a lonely few years. She had known this while it was happening and had managed it with the stoic acceptance she brought to most facts that were not going to change.
Which was the same way she had managed everything since Papa’s mind had begun its retreat.
She identified the shape of the thing. She built her life around the shape. She continued.
Betty had been a crucial part of how she had continued.
Not because Betty was exceptional in any obvious way, but because she was reliable and discreet and could tell, in a manner that Millie found genuinely useful, when to be present and when to be invisible, and had never once made Millie feel that the arrangement cost her anything.
She was grateful for it. She did not say so because Betty knew and saying so would make them both uncomfortable, which was its own kind of consideration.
They were at the far end of Merton Street when Betty spoke, in a guarded tone as if she had been composing a sentence for some time and had finally decided to deliver it. “He seems quite taken with you, miss.”
Betty’s expression was sober, like she was weighing whether to say what was on her mind, then decided she should, and was now standing by her decision.
“Mr. Scott,” Betty added. “He seems quite taken with you.”
Millie turned back to the gate. “He is employed by me,” she said. “That is what he is.”
“Yes, miss,” Betty said, in the tone that meant she had heard what was said, had formed her own view of it, and was maintaining the discretion she was paid for.