It was practically the only dress she owned. She was much more comfortable walking through the factory in soft breeches and a comfortable shirt. Dresses got in the way. They were cumbersome; they restricted her movement; and flowing skirts were more likely to catch alight as she walked past an open flame. Besides, in a dress she always felt constricted—tightly laced and buttoned up, lacking the freedom to even breathe deeply without the gentle reminder of the constraints the patriarchy put upon her sex.
The frustratingly restricting bonnet she wore—honestly, why did women consent to having their peripheralvision obscured?—itched more than the wig she’d donned for the protest yesterday. But it was proper, wearing a bonnet and gloves, and she needed to be properif she was to have any success here in London. Asking businessmen to work with a woman was one thing. Asking them to work with a woman in pants was potentially a step too far.
“What should I do, miss?” Andrew asked. Her footman had recovered from yesterday’s misadventure with a hot chocolate and a good meal—proof that young men were ruled by food—and had been waiting at the foot of the stairs, ready to chaperone her again.
“Nothing, Andrew. When he calls me in, you wait here.”
“Is that proper?”
Fiona sighed. Perhaps yesterday had made him less pliable than she’d hoped. “I need to be taken seriously, and that won’t happen if he’s reminded that I can’t be trusted without a sixteen-year-old boy there to supervise me.”
Andrew nodded, but the way he rubbed his palms against his breeches showed his unease. She clasped her hands in her lap to stop from mimicking his body language. He was not the only one whose nerves were on high alert.
Against her skirts leaned her worn leather satchel with copies of all the patent office forms, the most relevant design sketches of her matches, and her most recent testing results.
What should’ve been a relatively simple process, able to be conducted from her home in Abingdale, had become a series of complicated back-and-forth letters that became more obscure with every response. Which was why she was here to see Mr. Jones in person.
Finally, the door to his office opened, and he appeared—short, round, and with a disapproving look on his face. “Miss McTavish?”
Fiona stood, smoothed out her dress once again, and picked up her satchel. “Yes. That’s me.”
In the office, she perched neatly on the edge of her chair and laid out all the documents in neat piles in front of her. She had color coded each pile with a bookmark.
Mr. Jones didn’t smile. He didn’t talk.
Nervous, she attempted to take control of the conversation. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Jones,” she said, careful to speak with her mother’s perfect English accent rather than her usual mishmash of Scots and English. “We have been going back and forth on the papers for this application for a while now.”
“Yes, well, we need to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. I take it you brought your latest round of test results with you as well as a working sample of your…invention.”
“I have, though I can’t see why the test results are necessary.” She took the folder marked with a green bookmark and handed it over the desk.
Mr. Jones took the papers from her. He sifted through them quickly, giving ahmphand head nod as he looked at each page. “I believe these shall be sufficient,” he said sliding them into the file in front of him. “And the sample?”
Fiona retrieved a small metal box from inside her bag. Lead-lined, this box weighed more than everything else in the bag combined. Gently, she placed it on the table, unlocked the latch, and opened the box, pulling out the matches. She looked up at him. “Would you like to see it work?” she asked.
“Very much so,” he replied.
It had been eighteen months since the first iteration of her matches had nearly set her hair on fire. Since then, she’d lit thousands of them. But even after all those trials, she still felt a slight giddiness every time she created flame at her fingertips. She had mastered fire in a way no one else had. It was one of mankind’s most basic needs, something she knew better than most, having near frozen to death night after night on the side of the Great North Road.
Striking the thin wooden match against a sheet of sandpaper, she smiled at the responding hiss.
Mr. Jones seemed equally awed, his eyes fixated on the flame. “Exceptional. Very exceptional,” he said.
She breathed a sigh of relief. “So it’s all settled then? You can sign off on the patent?”
He shrugged. “Well, there is the issue of having your documentation certified by a third party who can attest to the fact that it is your work. I believe there are several men as part of your business partnership, correct? A Mr. Asterly and a Mr. Barnesworth? Their signatures will do.”
Her fingernails bit through her gloves into the palms of her hands. “The application said nothing about additional certification to prove the ownership of my work. Do you ask all applicants to do this?”
“Well, this is a singular situation.”
“Singular how? Because I’m a woman?” It was all she could do to keep her voice measured.
“It is irregular to see a patent request being filed by a woman, given she clearly has no schooling or education that would give her the knowledge to create such a product. Surely you can understand the need for something like this to be verified.”
Her jaw ached from clenching. She may not have had a man’s schooling, but she’d spent six years working under the very intense private education of John Barnesworth, one of the country’s preeminent philosophers. Her instruction had been of a higher quality than that which the men of Oxford received.
“Is it necessary? It will take at least a week for the papers to reach Benedict and return. I’m in Londonnowspecifically to seek a distributor. I must have that patent.”
