“Yes, Your Ladyship. I might only set one newspaper page a week, but I read them all.”
“What is the square root of nine hundred sixty-one?”
Where on earth was the dowager duchess going with this? “Thirty-one.”
“Who is currently winning the war in Chile?”
Eleanor’s temper rose slightly. She’d never had her intelligence questioned by another woman. If Sophie weren’t in need of this deal, she’d give the old bat the same response she gave men who presumed her stupid. “The war is over, Your Ladyship. Balmaceda lost. Britain’s investors can breathe easily. I hear the nitrate trade is stabilizing already.” She grunted as Sophie kicked her, a not-so-subtle request that she adjust the tone of her voice. She coated it in sugar. “Is there any other information you’re lacking, Your Ladyship? I’m more than happy to help.”
Next to her, Sophie sighed. Lady Wharton’s eyes widened and the footman who had been unsettlingly quiet until then coughed. After a long and awkward moment, Lady Wharton turned back to Sophie. “What are your terms?”
Sophie exhaled the breath she’d clearly been holding. “Asgood as you’ll get elsewhere. Hopefully better. Fifteen percent royalties with forty pounds in advance. Our distribution network is large and I am confident that we can sell just as many copies as anyone else. More, even, given your book will beart.”
“I need more.”
Sophie’s confident bearing slackened. “I presented my best offer. I wouldn’t attempt to underpay you. Fifteen percent is well above standard.”
“Then it will have to be something else.”
Eleanor and Sophie looked at each other. What else could there be?
“I need a companion,” Lady Wharton continued.
“Pardon?” Sophie blinked. Eleanor was equally confused.
Lady Wharton stared at them as though they were not all there. “The season has only just begun, which means I have months of social events with insufferable people, most of whom aren’t even aware that therewasa war in Chile. I need someone who can extricate me from banal conversation and provide a modicum of intelligent discourse or I might expire of boredom. I am at my limit. Miss Wright’s curiosities amuse me.”
The compliment was satisfying, but still… “Your Ladyship, I have a job.” Several, in fact.
“Do you work at night?”
Eleanor smiled tightly. “Not often.”
“Good.” Lady Wharton thumped her hand on the table, the heavy thud as decisive as a judge’s hammer. “You can work during the day and be my companion in the evening. Go see Madame Laurent tomorrow and tell her you need some new clothes posthaste. Her studio is on Regent Street. You can put it on my account.”
“I can afford my own clothes,” Eleanor said through gritted teeth.
“Even better.”
The conversation had gotten wildly out of hand. Lady Wharton wasn’t even looking at her now. She had signaled for a piece of paper, which her footman handed over, and was now sliding a note across the table to Sophie. “The terms are agreed upon, then. You can send the contract to this address.”
Eleanor cleared her throat. “I apologize. There has been some sort of confusion.”
Lady Wharton looked up, somewhat peeved, and waved her hand dismissively. “I will pay you, of course, and then at the end of the season, I will sign the contract.”
Sophie looked at Eleanor, pleadingly. The publishing house could expand. More women could be hired. Sophie would have the success she deserved.
“For heaven’s sake, Miss Wright. You strike me as a woman who likes to learn things. Why wouldn’t you want to be my companion for a time?”
That, too, was a perfectly reasonable argument. A chance to experience the beau monde in real life would be even better than another of Lady Wharton’s novels. Eleanor would be privy to those details Lady Wharton described, and the ones edited out.
Please,Sophie mouthed.
But what if a couple of months immersed in a different world shifted things in hers? Life was perfect as it was. She was content. She didn’t want anything to change. Not all knowledge was passive. There were things she’d learned in the past that had changed her perspectives and altered her behaviors.Through knowledge she had gainedandshe had lost—lost friendships, lost dreams, lost a sense of who she was at times.
Lady Wharton raised an eyebrow, her look the equivalent of a gauntlet thrown.
Galvanized, Eleanor steeled her taffeta girdle. There wasn’t a book she wouldn’t read. There wasn’t a perspective she didn’t want to understand. On the occasions that knowledge had shifted things, it had been for the better. Besides, lifewasperfect as it was. There was nothing the aristocracy could show her that would change it.
