“I heard that you want the journal you gave him last summer to be the final one. I assume that means you’ve given him several.”
She glanced over at him, a layer of dullness covering the eyes that were normally so bright and curious. “You don’t look surprised.”
Mikhail leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. The steady patter of rain filled the silence between them, and for a moment the world felt smaller—as if it contained just the two of them sitting in the mud beside the creek. “I wish I were surprised, but that first book Richard published, the one about the Yukon River and his time with the Athabaskans, half of that was stolen too. When he started publishing field guides five years ago, I should have known he’d found someone else’s work to steal.”
But even if he had been skeptical and suspected that Richard was working with another writer, he never would have guessed the field guides’ origins to be a woman with fiery red hair and soft hazel eyes.
“I gave Richard my first journal.” Bryony looked down and fiddled with a page of her journal, not seeming to care about the rain splattering it. “The thought of being published, of seeing something I wrote in print and knowing that people were reading it, made me happy. I knew that no one would read a field guide written by a woman. But Richard had connections with publishers from his first book, and he said we could split the royalties as long as I gave him all the credit for the book.
“I agreed and signed a contract stating that Richard was the sole author. The book sold well, so we published my field guide from our next expedition. And the one after that, and...” She twirled her hand in the air, then flashed him a faint, humorless smile. “You can imagine the rest.”
A hollow cavern opened inside his chest. “I can imagine it, yes. But that doesn’t make it right.”
“Our plan worked for a while, but now it’s time to marry.” She pinned her eyes to the creek as she spoke, preventing him from seeing the tears he imagined were still flowing. “Everyone wants me to marry Richard, but I don’t want to. And it’s not just him. I don’t want to marry anyone else I’ve met either. That means I need to find a way to support myself, which was why I wanted to go to Wellesley this fall and study education, but now...”
Her voice cracked, and she ducked her head, hiding her face beneath the edge of her hood, though she couldn’t hide the shaky, erratic plumes of white breath against the cold air. “Oh, I don’t know what it means. What am I going to do? How will I be able to support myself if I can’t teach? Father won’t write me a letter of recommendation to be a research assistant at the Smithsonian. He says a woman has no place in a science lab, and?—”
“He told you that?”
She turned to look at him despite the hood still pulled low over her head. “Yes, why?”
The hollow sensation in his chest turned into an ache. “Because you clearly have something to offer the scientific community.”
Her cheeks flushed, and she swallowed, just a subtle movement of muscles, but he couldn’t help but notice the way the slender column of her neck moved. “I don’t think that’s how the world sees it.”
He reached out, setting his hand atop hers on her knee. “That just makes the rest of the world fools then. I can tell based on how intricately you draw sketches of the plants your father needs and how painstakingly you categorized all of his findings this summer. And don’t tell me that wasn’t you. I recognized your handwriting when your father showed me his notes. None of them are written in his hand.”
Bryony looked down at the open journal on her lap. He was tempted to tell her to put it inside her coat, that if the pages got any wetter, the ink might start to run, but she hunched forward, using her body as canopy as the rain pelted her back. She flipped through pages until she stopped at one with a map that he recognized from the other night.
Then she flipped back a page to the sketch of the tree beside the creek, while her handwriting filled the opposite page. She stared at the sketch for a moment before bringing her gaze up to meet his. “Did you like what you read last time? Richard says my writing is too flowery and useless without his editing, but you seemed to like my ramblings well enough.”
He pressed his eyes closed. How could he answer such a question when he couldn’t actually read? “Read the page to me again.”
Her brow furrowed, just as he’d known it would. It had to seem like the world’s oddest request. “I want to hear your words in your own voice.” Guilt rose in his throat, but he swallowed it down, hoping she wouldn’t see through him.
She didn’t, because a moment later she picked up the journal and began reading.
High among Alaska’s granite peaks, a glacial lake lies as still as morning light, like a mirror cradling the surrounding cliffs. The water, a deep, ancient blue, is fed by the melting ice fields above, each drop a fragment of forgotten winters drifting from the glacier’s turquoise streams.
The cliffs lean in protectively, as if shielding this sacred pool from the world beyond. In such a place, one feels both the weight of ages and the timeless peace of nature.
The words were beautiful, just as he’d known they would be. She was so observant of everything around her and took so much care with her sketches and maps. He’d expected her words to be detailed and careful too, but he hadn’t realized they’d be so lovely.
He might not have been in that glacial valley with Bryony, but after hearing her description, he felt like he’d lived there all summer.
“I’ll help you get this published,” he whispered. “Without taking so much as a cent from the royalties.”
She straightened, then closed her journal, tucking it back into her parka. “You’d do that? Why?”
“Because someone should. And because you deserve the chance to do what you love without having to rely on a man like Richard to give it to you.” He nodded toward the hidden journal. “All that knowledge you have? It deserves to be shared with people who’ll respect it.”
Her lips pressed together, and she shook her head, causing a tendril of damp hair to cling to her neck. “That’s where you’re wrong. No one wants anything a woman’s written. And Father has been clear. He wants me to marry Richard. In the spring. If I’m not going to marry him, then I need some other way to support myself. And the only thing I can think to do is become a teacher. That’s why I wanted to go to Wellesley. And while I don’t relish the idea of teaching English or history, I’ll get to teach science to my students, so it can’t be all that bad.”
A teacher, when she was such a talented artist and cartographer, when she was both a skilled writer and research assistant. What was wrong with the world that it forced talented women into roles that didn’t suit them, just because some roles seemed more womanly than others?
“At the very least, you should have money to pay for whatever kind of college degree you want, seeing how you’ve been getting royalties from your book sales. I mean, Richard’s field guides are pretty popular. Are you sure you can’t just live on those?” Then she’d at least have freedom to write and sketch whenever she wanted, even if she wasn’t working with her father.
“I wish they were enough, but they come to maybe a hundred dollars a year. Even if I move into the cheapest apartment I can find, I’d still need twice that to be able to live.”
