The boy nodded and scurried away. Peter barely registered the thump, click, and sway as his footman closed the carriage door and the driver moved into the traffic, so fixed was he on Booklover’s words.
I can’t not take this opportunity.
Of course she couldn’t. Booklover had a voracious appetite for knowledge, even more so than his own. It was the thing he admired most about her.
He reached into his satchel for the pencil he used to make notes in the margins of books and a fresh leaf of paper.
Dear Booklover,
If you must take this opportunity, please do me a favor and arm yourself accordingly. I’d hate to lose a fellow scholar. Will you share your discoveries with the world? I would love to read it. Although, I’ll never be able to point to it on a shelf and say “I know the author” because I won’t know it’s you.
…
Eleanor veered toward the desk, where the porter was waggling his eyebrows. Yet he remained frustratingly silent. She sighed. He was going to make her ask. “Roland, has anything come for me?”
He whipped the letter out from beneath his desk and held it out. Just as her fingers were about to grasp the envelope, he flicked it out of her reach.
“Who are you writing to with such frequency?”
“A friend.”
“You’ve never written to a friend so often before.”
“He is a new friend.”
“Just a friend?” Roland’s tone was sly, and his slow wink made her flush.
“The Captain is just a friend. I don’t even know his name.”
Roland’s face crumpled with a disappointment that matched hers. “How are you going to marry a man whose name you don’t even know?”
“Who says that I plan to marry any man?”
He frowned. “You’re too pretty to remain single forever.”
It was both a compliment and a frustrating reminder of what wider society expected of her—that her focus on her work would be a temporary diversion and that, eventually, she would settle down, swap her typecase for a purse, and exchange hours spent over a compositor’s table with hours spent over a stove or wiping food from children’s mouths.
She couldn’t bring herself to want that. Never in her life had she looked at one of the babes thrust in her direction and thought,I’d like one of these. On the occasion that a husband had flitted into her fantasies, it was at the thought of kissing him goodbye as theybothwalked out the door and to their work.
She tried not to make Roland the sole recipient of a lifetime’s frustration and smiled tightly. “You won’t be rid of me that easily.”
She dumped her typecase by the door and plopped into the armchair. She would have only a few minutes to herself before needing to curl her hair with tongs and prepare for her first ball. Baskerville bumped his head against hers, demanding a meal, but he would have to wait. She contorted her arms so that she could read the Captain’s letter over him.
… The world is brilliant in my alternate reality, where the Roman Empire still stands. The Dark Ages never happened. The industrial revolution occurred centuriesago rather than decades, and our technical and social progress far outstrips what we have today.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully aware of the many issues with the Roman Empire, in particular the constant threat of war, but one can’t deny that it achieved incredible things.
I am facing my own alarming affair, though not quite a precipice. A gaggle of gossiping girls, my youngest sister chief amongst them. Pray for me. I may not come out of tonight’s event with my sanity in check.
Chapter Six
“If Medusa ever lowered herself to take the form of a human man, you would be it, brother.” Meg wrapped a hand around Peter’s arm, leaning into him more heavily than she ordinarily would.
“You should have skipped this ball,” he said. “In fact, skip every ball this week. It is too much for you in your current condition.”
“Shush,” Meg replied. “It’s Winnie’s first week of her first season. Let me enjoy it.”
Two young women approached from the side, peeping over their fans to stare at him, edging closer but shying away from direct eye contact.
