Chapter 48
Chapter
That night, I lay curled in the crook of Henry’s arm as he snored.
I’d had every intention of going back to my little room at the boardinghouse, with my stiff pink sheets and the dirty mirror, and I would, tomorrow.
But tonight was a celebration, and I wanted to celebrate with the man I loved, rumors be damned.
The sheer canopy around the four-poster bed frame danced with the summer wind. We’d flung open the balcony doors to let the moonlight in, and the sounds of the crickets and owls came with it.
I was happy. The ache in my spine and the tension in my neck were gone. I felt like I could breathe freely, for the first time in a long time. This was what happy felt like.
By rights I should have drifted off hours ago, to wander blissfully through dreams.
Except every time I started to fall asleep, I thought of Lucy, and then I thought of Buckland. Or I thought of Buckland, and then of Lucy. Either order, either way, their faces appeared in my mind’s eye and dashed away the cobwebs.
I slipped out of bed, studying Henry for a moment. His lashes were long and dark. His face was smooth in sleep, lips parted.
I kissed his eyebrow and then slipped on one of the dressing gowns we’d tossed on the floor earlier.
On the terrace, I crossed my arms on the rail and met the moon’s coy smile over the hedges and black trees.
I was happy. I couldn’t lie about that, not even to myself. I was a geomagician. Of course I was happy. But without my friends to share this, it was a lonely sort of happiness.
Henry was lovely. But he’d been absent from my life for fifteen years. It was Lucy and Buckland who were with me then. They had walked with me through failures, and celebrated my successes, and, in Lucy’s case, listened to me talk about ichthyosaurs long after her genuine interest had waned.
In all those years, I’d never imagined I would find myself in Henry Stanton’s bed after I was elected a geomagician.
I’d imagined that after my election, Buckland would hug me, maybe lift me off my feet and spin me round like a child.
I would laugh and act flustered, and he would grow serious, those bushy eyebrows merging, and say, I’m so proud of you, Mary. It was silly. Foolish, really.
But I knew what Lucy would do. Would’ve done. She would have squealed and squeezed me so tight I couldn’t breathe, pinning my arms to my sides. I knew you could. I knew it.
A thick tear landed on my cheekbone and tracked down, falling like a raindrop onto the flagstone far below.
“You should talk to him,” Henry said softly.
“Gah!” I jumped, batting his arm. “I thought you were asleep.”
He caught my hand and spun me, so that my back pressed against his chest, and wrapped both our arms across my waist.
“Like I could sleep through all that dramatic sighing.”
“I was doing nothing of the sort.”
“Of course not.” Henry chuckled and kissed the top of my ear, sending a pleasant shiver down my neck.
He turned me around and laced his hands with mine. “I mean it, though. You ought to talk to Buckland.”
I laughed as I pressed the back of my hand to his forehead. “Are you ill? Shall I call for the physiomagician?”
Henry shrugged a little sheepishly. “Feuding seems a bit juvenile, now that I’ve won the presidency. You were elected. And he did nominate you. Maybe it’s time for all of us to move on.”
I responded with a noncommittal grunt.
“Well, you know best.” He kissed my brow, and went back to the bed. I stared awhile longer at the moon, my pride and regret at war, and then climbed in beside Henry and fell asleep at last.
“What do you want? Father isn’t here, if you’re looking to scold him some more.” Elizabeth Buckland stood in her doorway, arms folded and glaring.
“Oh—I’m sorry I bothered you, then.”
My formal initiation was this afternoon at one o’clock; I would just have to try to find a private moment at Palmanaeus.
“Wait.” Elizabeth exhaled as I started down the steps.
I turned, and yes, waited.
“I want to show you something.”
Warily, I followed Elizabeth down the hall until she disappeared into Buckland’s office.
I paused at the threshold. It felt too much like stepping into Buckland’s private sanctum. I hadn’t been invited here. But Elizabeth gestured impatiently.
“Come on, then.”
She navigated around the mess of papers and books to open the glass doors of a cabinet. But her face was a hard scowl.
“What is all this?” I asked, studying the rows of mounted trilobites and ammonites and belemnites, carefully labeled in Buckland’s tiny script.
“We call this his Mary cabinet,” Elizabeth said.
“His—what?”
She pulled open one of the drawers. It was filled with letters.
“Why…these are…”
“All from you. Yes. He saved every one, I think.”
Elizabeth met my eye, and her glare was hard.
I thought at first she must be showing me all this to try and help us reconcile—See, he has loved you all along.
I traced my own handwriting, my heart aching.
That was how it touched me, at least, and I wanted to run and find him right this second, and beg his forgiveness.
But Elizabeth’s face was cold iron. “How could you? How could you do that to him?”
Ah. It wasn’t an attempt at reunion. She wanted me to feel guilt. I closed the drawer with a bang. “Your father lied to me. If he lov—cared—for me so much, why would he do that?”
She scoffed. “Would you have backed him if he told you the truth? If he told you what he planned for the bylaws?”
“What plans?”
Her mouth fell open. “You must be joking.” She laughed, a harsh grating sound. How on earth did Lucy stand it? “You don’t even know what you’ve done.”
“Then tell me.”
“Father was going to amend the bylaws for—for all women.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I realized she was trying not to cry.
I stood very still, my hands hovering, and trembling.
If he had told me his true plan, I would have begged him to reconsider. If he’d changed the bylaws so drastically just before my own nomination? I would have lost. I had no doubt.
I was under no illusions. Probably half the men who’d voted for me did so because it was only me.
One woman threatened little enough. With Henry’s carefully tailored amendment, they weren’t making some kind of statement about the intellectual capabilities of women—a statement they surely wouldn’t support.
Very likely, I would have lost. And it would have been worth it, to Buckland; I would have been a sacrifice, for the future of his daughters.
For Elizabeth.
And I couldn’t even say he was wrong. I would have wanted my own father to make that trade.
“If that’s true, then…” I cleared my throat and licked my lips, but my mouth was still dry. “Then he was right not to tell me.”
Elizabeth looked up sharply, her face slowly losing its sheen of anger. “Let me get you some tea.”
I stared for a long time at the cabinet, trying to unknot the thick braid of sorrow and anger that hung around my neck, and thinking of Charlotte Murchison, and Marged Davies, and Ann Mantell. They had asked me to teach them, and I’d refused. It would hurt my reputation, I thought.
But I’d been jealous, too.
Because the shameful truth, a sick thing rotting in the pit of my stomach, was that I thought I was the only woman who deserved to be a geomagician.
I had fought through tragedy and poverty and a lack of education to carve a name for myself in a field of men—and, yes—yes, fine, I had believed it made me worthier than other women.
I sat heavily on the couch and stared at the wall.
Now that I’d pulled the dark thing up and raised it to the light, I could see all of its slimy, stinking flaws. I wasn’t any worthier. I was smart, and I had worked hard, but I was also lucky.
It was luck that I was born in Lyme Regis, where fossils were as common as stone.
It was luck my father had learned and taught me to search for them.
Luck that I’d survived the lightning strike, and luck that brought me to Buckland.
Luck that brought me to Henry, who shared his books with me.
Luck that I was the one who found Ajax, and the one who could wake him.
Or, not luck. God Himself has blessed you, my father told me, long ago. The gratitude welled, hot and fast, and I pressed my hands to my face, overcome with emotion.
“Mary?” Elizabeth frowned from the doorway. “Are you all right?”
I nodded, struggling to speak. Elizabeth came and sat next to me.
“I’m sorry,” I said thickly. I shook my head. “All I ever wanted was to be a geomagician. All I cared about was getting in. About kicking down the damned door to the Society.”
Elizabeth frowned.
“But I realize now that I’ve locked it shut behind me. And I swear to you, Elizabeth,”—I touched her hand, tentatively—“I will help pry it open again.”
We drank our tea in an uneasy silence.
“Mary.” Elizabeth said my name very softly.
“Hmm?”
Elizabeth fiddled with the handle of her cup. “Have you spoken with Lucy lately?”
I tried not to look guilty as I shook my head. No need to let Elizabeth know all that had happened between us.
Elizabeth had spoken lightly, and I might have attributed the fidgeting to her crush, but there was an almost fearful energy to her movements that felt more serious.
“Why do you ask?” I set my own cup down on its saucer.
“She came by, yesterday, while Father was at the Society,” Elizabeth said. Her eyes darted to the doorway. “She wanted…”
I leaned forward, now anxious myself. “What is it, Elizabeth? What are you not saying?”
“I think she’s planning something. Something dangerous. I don’t want her to get hurt.” Her eyes were huge, wet with tears. “Can you talk her out of it?”
“What is it she’s planning?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say. She said it would be dangerous for me to know. But she wanted me to search Father’s study for some kind of…blueprints? Drawings, she said. She said…she kept saying she had to destroy it.”
My heart stuttered, as I understood.
Lucy was going after the Loom.