In the corridor, the house went about its quiet afternoon business—a maid with linens at the far end, the distant sound of Letitia’s voice from somewhere upstairs, the measured tick of the longcase clock outside the drawing room.
Cecily walked back toward the stairs slowly.
Indispensable is a useful thing to be.
She went upstairs to dress for the evening.
CHAPTER 12
Inever asked him about the library this afternoon.
The thought came as she was changing for the evening, somewhere between her maid setting down the hairbrush and picking up the pins, and it came with mild exasperation.
She had gone to the study with two purposes—the library for the girls, and the question of the orphanage—and Mr. Harwood’s careful answers had displaced everything else so thoroughly that she had left without mentioning the books at all.
Well, the study was closed now, the evening well advanced, and William was presumably occupied with whatever occupied him at this hour. The library, however, was not closed. And she knew roughly where it was.
She dismissed her maid, kept her evening dress on, and went to find it.
She found it at the end of the east corridor, a heavy door that opened onto the particular smell of a room that had been full of books for a very long time—paper and leather and old bindings and the faint sweetness of a fire recently lit. She stood in the doorway for a moment and simply breathed it in.
Then she went to work.
The library was genuinely good. Not arranged for show—the spines were worn in the places they had been touched most, and the shelves had the slight irregularity of a collection that had been added to over time, rather than installed all at once. She moved along them slowly, tilting her head to read the titles, letting the inventory in her head take shape.
History, for Isadora—a substantial section, military particularly, organized with a precision that felt personal. Poetry, thinner than she’d have liked but workable. The novels were pushed to the far end of the middle shelf, as though they had been permitted rather than welcomed. Essays, a full shelf she hadn’t expected and was pleased to find.
She pulled three volumes and set them on the reading table by the fire, along with a history book she thought Isadora would find more honest than popular accounts.
She found Cowper and set it on the reading table. Found the less popular essays—serious, honest, the kind Isadora would read twice and argue with on principle. A volume of published letters, well-observed and wryly written.
That was Isadora. Letitia remained unsolved.
Letitia needed pace. A heroine who moved through the world, made decisions, and was funny without trying to be. Cecily ran her finger slowly along the novel section and found it not quite right.
She pushed the rolling ladder to the far end of the shelves and climbed, checking the upper reaches where books went when they were no longer fashionable enough to display but too good to be thrown away.
That was where she found the gap.
It was two volumes wide, between a collection of sermons and a manual of Latin grammar. The books on either side were nudged together in a careful, unconvincing way, as though someone had noticed the gap and tried to address it without quite closing it.
She moved the collection of sermons aside. The book behind them was slim. Dark red cloth this time, gilt lettering on the cover, the kind of binding that had been chosen to be beautiful and had succeeded.
She opened the first page.
She read the first paragraph.
She read the second.
She stood on the third rung of the library ladder for a long moment, and then she climbed down carefully, because it seemed unwise to read this particular book at height.
The fire had burned considerably lower by the time she surfaced.
She had drawn her feet beneath her at some point without noticing, her hair was somewhat looser than it had been, and she was… well. The French, she had always maintained, understood certain things about human nature that the English considered impolite to examine directly. Now Cecily was revising this assessment significantly upward and telling herself she would find something for Letitia in just a moment.
The book was not merely scandalous. It wasspecifically, technically, enthusiasticallyscandalous in ways that she was fairly certain would have caused Miss Tully to need medical attention. She had read forty pages of it without once thinking about Letitia or Isadora or the respectable volumes sitting untouched on the reading table.
She turned the page.
