CHAPTER TEN THE RAKE RETREATS #3
“Julian was not locked in the cellar,” Eleanor said. “Beatrice was.”
“An unnecessary distinction. The experience improved us both.”
Arabella looked toward Eleanor.
“Gabriel has confused leaving first with avoiding abandonment.”
“I know.”
“He believes departure is control.”
“I know.”
“Do you intend to pursue him?”
Eleanor turned from the window.
“No.”
The answer brought silence. Frances stopped eating.
Beatrice frowned. “Why not?”
“Because I cannot drag a man into a relationship and call it freely chosen.”
“You may not need to drag him. Gabriel follows temptation readily.”
Catherine glanced at Frances. “That is not helpful.”
“I was going to suggest seducing him into submission.”
“That was obvious.”
“It might work.”
Amelia, seated near the fire with a legal document in her lap, studied Eleanor.
“Do you want Gabriel as he is,” she asked, “or the man you believe love might make him?”
Eleanor considered the question.
“As he is.”
“Including the intelligence work?”
“If he is honest where it affects me.”
“His past?”
“Yes.”
“His fear?”
“I do not require him to become fearless.”
Amelia folded the document.
“Then do not make his reform the condition of your love.”
“I have not.”
“No. But he may believe you have.”
Eleanor looked down at her hands. Gabriel had admitted he did not know how to be wanted without offering pleasure, entertainment or usefulness. Perhaps her belief in the man beneath those things felt less like acceptance to him than expectation. Sophia spoke quietly.
“I understand disappearing before dependence forms.”
Every gaze moved toward her. Sophia rarely discussed her own past. The Society knew only that she had lived beneath several names and learned to leave households before questions became dangerous.
“If you depart first,” she continued, “you may tell yourself the loss was chosen. It does not feel like rejection if no one was given the opportunity to reject you.”
Arabella’s expression softened.
“And does it work?” Frances asked.
“For a time.”
“What changes?”
“You eventually discover that loneliness is still abandonment, even when self-administered.”
Eleanor looked toward the window again. She wanted Gabriel.
Her body remembered him with humiliating vividness.
She still felt the imagined weight of his head upon her breast, the slow depth of him inside her and the way he had held her gaze as pleasure overcame them both.
The physical longing would have been difficult enough.
She also missed translating with him. She missed his absurd arguments, his accurate Latin and the secret pleasure he took whenever she laughed.
She missed the moment before his smile appeared, when the unguarded man still occupied his face. Love had made absence physical.
Yet chasing a man committed to fleeing would only prove his belief that affection meant pressure.
“I will not pursue him,” Eleanor said. “I will not pretend not to love him, and I will not wait in a doorway he has chosen to close.”
Beatrice’s mouth tightened.
“What will you do?”
“Continue the investigation.”
Clara looked up from the ledgers.
“Then you should see this.”
She arranged three records side by side: the copied Mercury payment list, Dr. Finch’s publication history and the programme recovered from his study.
“I compared every known payment with the release date of Finch’s translations,” Clara said. “The payments occur in two stages.”
“Before and after publication?” Eleanor asked.
“Yes. An initial sum when the altered text is delivered, then a larger payment after the coded instruction has been used successfully.”
Sophia moved nearer.
“Used for what?”
“Meetings, transfers and blackmail arrangements. Each publication activates a sequence.”
Clara pointed to a row of dates.
“The latest payment has been authorised but not completed.”
Eleanor read the entry.
THESSALIAN MATERIAL — RELEASE PENDING
Her stomach tightened.
“Release of the manuscript?”
“Possibly,” Clara said. “But the wording may also refer to releasing Dr. Finch from an obligation.”
Eleanor took the recovered programme. The margins bore handwriting copied from her own. She compared it with the line numbers Clara had marked.
“The date is wrong,” she said.
Clara frowned. “It matches the programme.”
“The printed date does. The Greek uses an inclusive count. The third lecture is not three lectures after the payment. It is the third lecture in Dr. Finch’s current series.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow evening.”
Beatrice rose.
“What does the message say?”
Eleanor opened her father’s Callimachus edition and located the quoted passage. The programme attributed it to Homer, changing the order of three lines and replacing four nouns. She wrote the correct words. Then the altered ones. The message emerged slowly.
THE DAUGHTER’S THESSALIAN PAPERS PURCHASE RELEASE AT THIRD LECTURE.
No one spoke. Eleanor read it again. Her unpublished research would purchase her father’s freedom from Vesper’s network.
“And the European appointment?” Amelia asked.
“Likely part of the same exchange,” Catherine said.
Clara searched another ledger. “A payment to a university intermediary in Vienna was scheduled for the day after the lecture.”
Beatrice’s expression became murderous.
“Your father intends to give them the manuscripts.”
“He no longer has the originals,” Eleanor said.
“He may have copies.”
“He does.”
The earliest Thessalian notes remained in the Finch study, while the complete manuscript had been removed to Gabriel’s secure cabinet. Dr. Finch would not know every page was gone until he attempted the exchange.
“He may deliver incomplete work,” Arabella said.
“Vesper will recognise that,” Sophia replied.
“And blame Eleanor,” Catherine added.
Frances placed her biscuit upon the saucer.
“What occurs at the lecture?”
“My father is presenting newly discovered evidence concerning Thessalian rites,” Eleanor said. “The public address is held in the main hall, but visiting scholars may inspect private manuscripts in the archive room afterward.”
“Women?” Sophia asked.
“Not admitted to the archive.”
Frances brightened.
“Then Eleanor should not attend as a woman.”
Beatrice stared at her.
“For once,” Frances said, “my instinct is scholarly.”
Eleanor looked at the sketchbook in Frances’s lap. One drawing showed a narrow young man in academic robes, spectacles and an expression of severe disappointment.
“Who is that?”
“You.”
“As whom?”
“A provincial scholar. Poor enough to be ignored, clever enough to gain access and unattractive enough to escape romantic complications.”
Arabella examined the drawing.
“The jaw is too narrow.”
“Padding beneath the cravat,” Frances said.
Sophia looked at Eleanor. “Can you sustain a male identity under questioning?”
“I sustained Mrs. Grey.”
“Men and women are questioned differently.”
“How?”
“A young woman is asked who protects her. A young man is asked whom he knows.”
Eleanor considered.
“My father’s former assistant corresponded with several provincial copyists. We could construct a reference.”
Clara turned another page.
“The archive exchange is expected after the third bell.”
“The wording repeats the Mercury Club pattern,” Eleanor said.
Arabella’s gaze sharpened. “You intend to attend.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
The refusal came from Beatrice. Eleanor looked at her.
“You have no token, no knowledge of who will collect the papers and no escape route.”
“The lecture hall is a public building.”
“The archive room is not.”
“Julian’s men can cover the exits.”
Beatrice’s eyes narrowed. “You sound like him.”
“Then marriage has infected us all.”
That earned no smile. Eleanor placed both hands upon the table.
“My father intends to exchange my work. The person collecting it may be linked directly to Vesper. I am the only one who can identify whether the manuscripts are genuine, which codes they contain and what wording has been altered.”
“You are also the person Vesper identified as the source,” Catherine said.
“Which is why they must not know I am present.”
Sophia studied the sketch.
“Mr. Elias Fenwick,” she said.
“Who?” Eleanor asked.
“Your identity. A copyist from Derbyshire, employed by Reverend Thomas Fenwick, an amateur scholar who died last year.”
“Did he exist?”
“Yes. His nephew does not.”
Frances clapped once.
“No one claps over fraud,” Arabella said.
“Then society removes most of my pleasures.”
Over the next two hours, Mrs. Helena Grey disappeared and Mr. Elias Fenwick took shape.
Sophia created his history. He was twenty-two, the son of a village schoolmaster and had travelled to London hoping to secure copying work.
His knowledge of Greek came through Reverend Fenwick’s library.
He possessed little money, no title and sufficient ambition to overlook rudeness from established scholars.
Frances transformed Eleanor’s appearance.
Her hair was pinned tightly beneath a dark cap to create the impression of a shorter masculine cut.
Loose academic robes disguised her waist and breasts, while padding broadened her shoulders.
Dark powder thickened her brows. Plain spectacles altered the shape of her face.
Her boots contained hidden lifts. The first time Eleanor stood in them, she nearly fell into the pianoforte.
“A commanding masculine entrance,” Frances said.
“A broken nose will make the disguise more convincing,” Amelia replied.
Sophia taught her to occupy space differently.
“Men are not trained to apologise with their bodies,” she said. “Do not gather your elbows inward. Stand as though the floor was built for your convenience.”
“Should I interrupt?”
“Only if you want them to respect you.”