As I drifted into sleep, lulled by languorous satiation, I felt the last vestiges of my shame dissipate and I slept deeply and dreamlessly in a way I hadn’t since I was a child.
Chapter 20
‘For heaven’s sake, girl, stop fidgeting.’
My uncle glowered at me. The carriage jolted across the North Bridge as the pale morning light crept over the city.
‘No one likes a scowling woman,’ he reprimanded. ‘You shouldn’t have any thoughts in your head except dress fittings and what to serve at the wedding breakfast; you certainly shouldn’t be sitting there memorising how many bones there are in the human body.’
‘Two hundred and six,’ I replied absent-mindedly. I wondered if he realised that I was in my second term and what on earth he thought I’d been learning up until now.
‘Utterly useless information,’ he groused. ‘It won’t help you run a household or raise a family.’
I supposed he would have said the same thing or worse about the obstetrics journal article I had hidden in a dull but improving novel the night before as we sat in front of the fire. God forbid women understood the processes their bodies went through before they birthed their husbands’ heirs. Then again, if Uncle Hugh thought that counting bones was the pinnacle of a first-year medical education, he probably knew just as little about his own flatulent corpus. I wrinkled my nose and shuffled discreetly closer to the window.
The truth was, my mind wasn’t on my studies or even on Clara Wilson’s unsolved murder. A solution – perhaps the perfect solution – had been given to me last night, one that would sweep me away from a disapproving family and a pleasant but bland man whose own relatives clearly had no intention of letting me practise medicine.
Dare I marry Gregory Merchiston? Uncle Hugh and Aunt Emily would be furious if I threw over Miles for another man – but then their opinions wouldn’t matter any more. I would be free . . . of them, at least. I had grown used to the idea of spinsterhood, to dismissing as a fairy tale the dream of a husband who understood my ambition and loved me for it. Was it really possible that I would be at liberty to live as I pleased? More likely, I told myself sternly, we would occupy separate rooms, separate lives, our partnership rooted in a shared love of medicine and detection than any of the warm, wicked fantasies my mind had conjured up as I tried to sleep. I felt my cheeks pinken like the dawn light outside – how on earth could I face him after that?
‘That’s what I like to see,’ my uncle said approvingly. ‘A girl daydreaming about her young man.’
I had never been so grateful to arrive at our destination. I highly doubted that Uncle Hugh would have approved of either the contents of my daydreams or the young man himself.
When I arrived at the university, the place was in uproar.
‘It’s Georgina Robinson and Professor Lyell!’ Alison blurted out before I had even taken off my coat. ‘She reads history and he teaches the Elizabethan era. Apparently they’ve been courting for months and yesterday they ran away to Gretna Green and she left a note in her boarding house asking them to send her things to his home in Colinton.’
‘The other students are fuming,’ Edith said conspiratorially.
‘I’m not surprised. You’d have thought they’d at least wait until the weekend so he didn’t have to cancel his lectures.’ I hoped that the levity in my voice hid the way it shook.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Gilchrist!’ Julia snapped. ‘Haven’t you seen the way the men are looking at us? They’re laughing, placing bets on which of us has set her cap at the faculty. All that time we spent proving ourselves, and Robinson has to throw it all away on some fusty academic twice her age.’
‘She hasn’t thrown it all away,’ I tried to reason as my heart pounded deafeningly in my ears. ‘At least she’ll have the edge on the rest of them when it comes to how we defeated the Spanish Armada.’
Edith shook her head. ‘They’re saying she’ll be sent down. She can’t stay, not when she’s married to one of the professors. She’ll be accused of getting preferential treatment if she does well and of being distracted by her duties at home if she doesn’t. And anyway,’ she added crisply, ‘it was your lot who defeated Spain. Scotland stayed well out of it.’
A minor verbal scuffle about our nations’ respective military triumphs broke out, but for once no one’s heart was really in it. It was as though with Georgina Robinson’s marriage reality had scaled the ivory tower we had sealed ourselves away in.
Things had been tense with our male peers ever since the examination results were posted, but at least they had stayed reasonably civil. Now, the jeers had a different tenor. Overnight we had gone from bitter, sexless spinsters – not so much women as deformed lesser men – to little more than streetwalkers.
That, it turned out, was far from the worst of it. When Professor Cameron, a doughty gentleman with greying hair and a detailed – if extremely clinical – knowledge of the female reproductive system, entered the room, he did so with considerable trepidation. Glancing around, he breathed an audible sigh at the sight of the chaperones, presumably worried that without their presence we would march him to the university chaplain and marry him en masse. Chemistry was much the same, and I dreaded the thought of what Professor Williamson would say during our anatomy practical. He had never bothered to hide his opinion of opening the gates of medicine to women – ‘an unmitigated disaster, but since you’re all here now you might as well attempt to learn something’ – and doubtless he would either be full of praise that Robinson had seen the light and withdrawn to her correct sphere, or drip some condescending bile about how her marriage proved that none of us had the intellectual fortitude to be here in the first place.
All that would be a trifle compared to what awaited me at lunchtime. Hanging back while the others headed to the refectory in search of something more substantial than the stale sandwiches their landladies packed for them, in some sort of culinary protest at where they would be eaten, I made my way towards the faculty rooms with a heavy heart.
The door was open slightly and I didn’t knock, wanting to enjoy one quiet moment of just watching him before he noticed I was there. As I stepped into his office, I took a moment to breathe in the smell. Chemicals mixed with coffee, both equally acrid, and something earthier too – the salt-sweat tang of his skin. He had walked from Newington, I guessed, rather than hail a cab from the cosy house I had imagined myself occupying – and more – last night. It currently straddled the uncomfortable chasm of housing a bachelor who had once been a family man, but it felt more like a home than the tasteful elegance of the Greenes’ residence, or my aunt’s house, which contained more furniture than it did fondness. It could be my home, if I chose. But would it be worth the sacrifice? Could anything?
At least I could be at home in his office, I told myself.
A grinning skull sat on top of a precariously piled stack of books, and a small set of shelves beneath the window was crammed with more; on top, a taxidermied otter lounged comfortably on a copy of William A. Guy’s Principles of Forensic Medicine. Some of the faculty displayed their books the way they hung the thick, Latin-inscribed parchment of their degree certificates, visual proof of their brilliance. Merchiston’s books were tools, well thumbed, with corners turned down and scribbles in the margins. An old copy of The Lancet was open on a chair, its yellowing pages inscribed with Imbecile! in fresh black ink.
He gave me a warm smile, the kind I could be met with every morning for the rest of my life. Over the breakfast table, beside me in our bed . . . In that moment, I felt loved and I felt safe, and whatever had happened to me before we met mattered so very, very little.
‘Arriving without a chaperone? Scandalous behaviour, Miss Gilchrist. I’m really quite shocked.’ I had never noticed before that he had a tendency to dimple slightly when he smiled.
‘If Aunt Emily knew I was here alone, you’d have another murder on your hands.’
‘If your aunt knew half the things you get up to
, she’d turn to strong drink. Roaming the slums alone, consorting with women of ill repute, accompanying a man to an autopsy unchaperoned . . .’
‘And rejecting his offer of marriage.’
If I had truly believed that his proposal was out of sexless charity, the expression on his face told me differently. He sat very still for a moment, his grey-green gaze locked on mine with a depth of hurt exposed that I could never have imagined.
Then the spell was shattered and he turned away, shuffling papers with a hand that shook ever so slightly. Although I could no longer see his face, the tension in his rhomboid muscles spoke volumes, and I ached to reach out and soothe them, stroking from his shoulders to his spine until the rigidity subsided and he could look at me again.
‘It’s not you.’
‘Finally seen the merits of your fiancé?’
I tried to laugh, but all that came out was an angry gush of breath. ‘Hardly. It’s Georgina Robinson.’
His eyes widened and he opened his mouth to speak, but although he tried to form words, they weren’t coming and I realised that he had misunderstood me entirely. Evidently Julia and Edith’s queer fondness for one another wasn’t entirely unheard of, then.
‘She studies history, or she did until she ran off with Professor Lyell. They’ve eloped; it’s all over the quad. I don’t think there’s been such a scandal since they let us in.’
‘Lyell? Decent chap, if a bit absent-minded. I’m surprised he even noticed her; I’ve seen him walk into three students in a row without realising. Still, that’s nice for them,’ he said with a trace of bitterness. He looked at me, confused. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘The whole university is in uproar. They’re saying she only matriculated with the hopes of bagging a husband, and two thirds of the history faculty are calling for her to be sent down for improper behaviour.’
‘And the other third?’
I shrugged. ‘Probably eyeing up the remaining students and trying to choose their own brides.’ I winced. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’
‘But it’s what you said. Perhaps what you thought – I can hardly blame you for having a dim view of my sex, Miss Gilchrist.’
Last night he had called me Sarah, and if I had realised it would likely be the only time he did so, I would have savoured it more. Made him say it again and again until his voice grew hoarse and his tongue numb.
Returning his attention to the stack of papers, which he reshuffled yet again – he would make rather a fine bridge partner, had I not burned all of mine – he refused to look at me. ‘It’s clear I overstepped my boundaries last night. I apologise, Miss Gilchrist.’
‘It’s something I’ll treasure for the rest of my life,’ I whispered. ‘A kindness I couldn’t possibly deserve. But no matter what I do, I risk having to give up my studies. I can get out of my engagement to Miles somehow, I know I can. But with you . . . I’m rather afraid I wouldn’t want to.’
I turned to leave before he could see me cry.
‘Sarah.’ His voice was low, and oh, it was just as sweet as I remembered. ‘I won’t ask you to change your mind. You’re quite right, it would be disastrous, at least now. But you must know that I didn’t propose out of friendship. God knows I want to see you complete your studies and go on to a future of your own choosing, but I’m afraid my motives were less altruistic. They were selfish and they were base. I want you for you, mind and body both. You may feel free to slap me for my impertinence, but it’s the truth. Even among your peers, you’re like no one I’ve ever met before, man or woman. You’re fearless and clever and a life with you would be one enriched beyond belief. I don’t want to marry you to save you from a life of tedium; I want to marry you because you would save me from worse.’
I could have gone to him then. I could have cast my doubts to the wind and kissed him, dragged him to the nearest church and then back to his bed and he wouldn’t have protested beyond calling for someone to take his morning lectures. But afterwards, what would happen? I couldn’t continue my studies here, and were I to go elsewhere for my education, the women I left behind me would suffer in my stead. We had collectively survived our first term, proved that we were as capable as the men and more so. I had witnessed first-hand how one woman’s actions could taint the others. I had already been the rotten apple who risked spoiling the whole barrel. I had worked hard not to be judged by my past, and by marrying Gregory Merchiston, I would become the embodiment of everything society had believed about me.
What I felt for him would need very little encouragement to bloom into love. But I already knew love of a different sort, a fierce, wild longing that meant I would sacrifice anything to see it fulfilled.
My voice was thick with tears I couldn’t allow myself to shed. ‘It was the kindest of offers. The nicest I could possibly hope to receive. If you were to ask me in five years, my answer might be different, but now . . .’
‘I understand,’ he said softly. ‘Please know that you will always have a place at my side, regardless of your answer.’
I pressed the most fleeting kiss on his cheek and left his office, keeping my eyes fixed straight ahead of me lest I be tempted to look back.
I was so lost in my own thoughts that I nearly walked into a woman as I entered the lecture theatre for botany. Steadying myself, I gazed up into the wide eyes of an ashen-faced Aunt Emily, looking even more out of place here than my mother had.
‘It’s Miles,’ she said in a hoarse whisper. ‘He’s been arrested.’
Chapter 21
If ever there were a reason to miss two hours of botany, it was having my fiancé arrested for the murder of both his father and his maid. Damn Miles Greene! Not even at the altar and he was finding a way of blocking my path to education.
Perhaps it was the way my mind still whirled, perhaps it was that I couldn’t imagine the mild-mannered Miles doing anything worth the police’s attention – or mine, for that matter – but the first words out of my mouth had been ‘For what?’
Aunt Emily had broken the news to me as gently as she could – which, under the circumstances, wasn’t very – but if she had expected me to fall into a swoon and return home immediately she had been very much mistaken. It wasn’t until after the day’s lectures were concluded that I found myself once again in Gregory Merchiston’s company, albeit with Elisabeth and Randall playing reluctant chaperones as we sat in the abandoned lecture theatre.
Merchiston grimaced. ‘The autopsy on Colonel Greene revealed considerable arsenic poisoning over a prolonged period of time. Their fractured relationship was well known, apparently.’
‘You can’t honestly think he murdered his own father?’
‘They weren’t exactly close.’
‘I’m estranged from my mother and I’m not putting arsenic in her tea! Anyway, isn’t poison traditionally a woman’s tool?’
‘You’ve read the papers I gave you, then.’ Merchiston’s delight was painfully out of place.
‘Not just that. I’ve come face to face with a murderer. What I saw in her eyes – I’ve never seen that in Miles’.’
‘You didn’t see it in Fiona’s at first.’
‘What was his motive? That he disliked his father? Half his household disliked the man. That’s not a motive, that’s good sense.’
‘The poisoning had been going on for some time. A gradual build-up until his system simply couldn’t handle it. Hence the stomach problems, vomiting, hair loss.’
‘Then why not seek treatment?’
‘He was a proud man who didn’t want to admit he was getting older. He drank too much, ate too much and probably thought it was finally catching up with him. He was never going to live to an advanced age. If it hadn’t been for Clara’s death drawing our attention to the family, it would have been ruled natural causes and no one would be any the wiser.’
‘Besides,’ said Elisabeth, looking rather ill, ‘not everyone has your encyclopedic knowledge of poisonous substances.’
‘She has a goo
d teacher.’
‘Whose remit does not cover autopsies and God knows what else,’ Randall warned. ‘Sarah might be close to this whole sorry mess, but I’m not at all convinced that she should be involved in your investigation, Gregory.’
‘I’m not involved in his investigation. He’s involved in mine. My fiancé has just been arrested for a murder none of us is sure he committed. If that doesn’t put me right in the middle of this—’
‘You don’t even like the man. You should be counting your lucky stars that you’ve found a way to get out of it. It’s not as though anyone will expect you to marry the wretch now.’
‘I might not want to marry him, but I don’t want to see him hang.’
‘You were all set to accuse me of murder in front of a room full of police officers with very little proof, but you’re sure a man you barely know is innocent?’
‘You can hardly blame me for being suspicious of you. Miles, on the other hand, wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone his father – he was terrified of the man.’
‘Fear makes us do strange things. So, it seems, does love.’
‘Stop acting like I have any choice in the matter. No, Miles isn’t terrible. Yes, I could probably do worse. And while I don’t exactly have a line of suitors waiting to save me from spinsterdom, I’m perfectly happy with that! I don’t want to marry Miles. I don’t want to marry anyone. What would the august Gregory Merchiston do if he were forcibly betrothed to a perfectly pleasant but drippy young woman who was accused of murder?’
‘I’d think she was a damn sight more interesting than I’d assumed and proceed with caution.’
The Unquiet Heart Page 15