Chapter 19
Beatrix Harper, I wanted you.
She couldn’t stop thinking of that. It echoed in her head as Theo walked her home, the remembered words louder than his. It grabbed at her the next day when she did something smart, something capable, something with magic. It haunted her.
There was nothing romantic about it at all, and yet it made Theo’s declaration look weak and thin by comparison. When had he ever said he wanted her for everything she was? He’d said he wanted her for what she was not. Now she was unable to see that as anything but insufficient.
“You’re very quiet today,” Theo said after work, the late-afternoon light filtering down on him through the trees. “Troubles or deep thoughts?”
“Both,” she admitted.
“Tell me.”
She couldn’t very well ask him why he cared for her—did anyone get good results from that loaded question? But troubles weren’t in short supply. She reached for a different one.
“Just wishing women would be treated equally now, when it might do me some good.”
“Why—what would you do?”
“Get a grant to go to college.”
“There are grants already. Though I suppose,” he added, frowning, “they all have age limits.”
“Yes. For ‘young ladies, seventeen to twenty.’ Because of course all ladies are married shortly thereafter and would never again be in a position to want or need work,” she said, trying for an ironic smile rather than a bitter one.
“But it’s not simply that. Those grants are only for training teachers and nurses, and I … ”
She tried to think of the words to explain it to him. Into the pause, he said, “You want to go to Hazelhurst.” As if he thought it perfectly natural.
She let out a breath. “You understand.”
He squeezed the hand she’d rested on his arm and the tight feeling in her chest eased.
Surely he’d meant he was drawn to her for all the ways she was not like D.C.
socialites. Surely he wouldn’t be bothering with her—thirty-three and not especially pretty—if he didn’t sense real affinity between them.
“Really, any capable woman should be able to get a college education,” she said. “Society would benefit.”
“I agree,” he said.
She replayed the conversation in her head so many times, she dreamt of it that night.
The next afternoon, as she chopped parsnips for a concoction that required Blackwell’s assistance, he said out of the clear blue: “What, in your ideal world of gender equality, would all the very well-educated women do, Miss Harper?”
Whiplash. “What?” she said, gripping the knife harder.
“If you’re going to share conversations with me overnight, I may occasionally want to continue them.”
She glared at the table, considered her options, and decided to simply answer his question. “They would work, of course.”
“All of them?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Unemployment is already at ten percent,” he said, fetching garlic and the garlic press. “Where would all these jobs come from?”
“It’s not going to happen overnight, Omnimancer. Women would enter the workforce slowly. More people, more buying power. More buying power, more businesses able to add jobs. It’s a virtuous cycle.”
“Let’s say that’s true. Who would bear and raise the children, or is your ideal world intended to die out after a few generations?”
She set down her knife, giving up the pretense that she could cut lengths of precisely one barleycorn, one poppyseed while arguing with him. “Only women can have children, but nothing stops fathers from raising them.”
“Except for deeply ingrained societal norms.”
“If everyone shared money-earning and household duties, there wouldn’t be ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work.’ It would be a fairer world.”
“But it isn’t a fair world.” He glanced up at her, then back at the garlic he was skinning.
“Let me tell you what I think would happen. Women would only grudgingly be accepted into jobs beyond teaching, nursing and”—his lips twisted—“assisting. They’d have to fight tooth and nail for every tiny advancement.
They would be paid less than men for the same work.
And when they’d go home at night, physically and mentally exhausted from this battle, they would still be expected to cook dinner. ”
She pressed both hands flat on the table. “Worth it.”
“I’m not surprised you feel that way. Your entire adult life has been a battle without the chance for advancement.” He snapped the press shut on the garlic—she had the mental image of a guillotine—and scraped the results into a glass jar. “But consider that many would sooner stay out of the fray.”
She wanted to chuck a parsnip at his head. Because, damn him, he was right.
“Yes,” she hissed, “some women quite happily stay home and let men work. And some women would lead the charge to keep things that way for everyone. But nobody—least of all you, Omnimancer—will convince me that a real choice about what sort of life to pursue would be anything but good for women. And men, too.”
He looked up at her, silver hair glinting as the light from the ceiling caught it. “Yes, I agree. I’m merely pointing out the difficulties in getting there from where we are now.”
“You agree with me? You called me a ‘shopkeeper revolutionist’ the day you got back to town!”
“Very revealing, the things people say when they’re provoked.”
“Shall I say a few of the things that come to mind with this provocation?”
His lips quirked. “Go right ahead. I hope you know some curse words I don’t.”
“Of course not,” she said, aiming for icy but unable to get past red-hot aggravation. “I’m a woman. My delicate ears would burn right off should anyone let an expletive slip in my vicinity.”
Now he was laughing. How she hated him.
“I don’t believe for a moment that you’re in favor of women’s rights,” she said.
“Oh? I hired you.”
She gripped the table. “You needed someone who could do magic, and any adult male here had proved himself incapable at the age of thirteen!”
“Why would I pretend to opinions I don’t have?”
She wanted to shake him, cast a spell on him—anything to wipe that grin off his face and smother the laughter in his throat. But all she had were words, so she aimed them well. “Because you’re the most manipulative person I know. A trait you probably inherited from your father.”
It worked.
She was so ashamed of herself, she dropped her eyes from his stricken face and stared at the knife marks in the table.
“As my father abandoned my mother and me,” he said, clipped, probably through gritted teeth, “I would think it’s self-evident why I hold the views I do.”
She had to apologize. “Omnimancer—”
“And while we’re on the subject of things that should be self-evident: Just because Wizard Garrett pats you on the head and says he sees things your way, it doesn’t necessarily mean he really does.”
They finished the prep in silence. It was five-ten when he cast the last of a dozen spells the brew required—too many for her to do on her own—and turned to the detested end-of-day routine.
As he checked through her hair, she squeezed her eyes shut and hoped he wouldn’t say anything except, “Now you may go.” But her luck was as good as usual.
“What would you do with a university degree?” he asked.
She swallowed, throat dry. “Research.”
“To lower the rate women die in childbirth?”
“Yes,” she stuttered, taken aback. He’d correctly guessed what she’d told nobody—not even Ella—and had never once dreamed of while sleeping, if many times while awake.
“You’d need a graduate degree at the very least.”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“If you start saving now, you might be done just in time to retire.”
Her “yes” was more sigh than word. It wasn’t as if this hadn’t occurred to her.
“So you’re giving up and trying for marriage instead,” he said, circling back.
She lifted her chin. “I’m not giving up.”
“You’d better find out what Wizard Garrett thinks of that, then.”
He meant it to rankle. And it did.
“Good-bye, Miss Harper,” he called after her as she stalked out of the brewing room. “Have fun railing against the magiocracy at your sister’s conference.”
Good heavens, the conference. He was so distracting that she’d momentarily forgotten, after helping plan it for months and months, that the event started tomorrow.
It was hard to concentrate on anything but him after yet another day of repeated explosions.
What horror was she helping him accomplish?
She had to redouble her efforts to pass some scrap of information to Theo, even if it meant she did nothing but choke on pomegranate the whole way home.
Maybe some detail would fly off her tongue.
Maybe this time she could force her hand to write a note.
Maybe, by watching her fail and fail and fail again, he would realize the compulsion she was under.
But as she crossed into the woods, she discovered he wasn’t there at all.
She lingered for a moment. Finally she set off alone, realizing he must be detained at work but unable to prevent herself from feeling disappointed and uneasy. After nearly five weeks of finding Theo waiting for her, morning and late afternoon, she had come to rely on it.
She was halfway home when she heard the cracking of twigs breaking underneath running feet. Not from behind, though. From Cedarlawn. Lydia came crashing into view, the bottom inch of her dress caked with mud.
“Bee!” she cried. “Bee, the hotel claims we booked them for next weekend, not this one!”