She didn’t see Robert standing behind the curtain. She had set her head to one side and was eyeing the chess set the way a member of the Temperance League might look at a cask of brandy: as if it were an evil to be stamped out with prayer and song—and failing that, with martial law.
She took one halting step forward, then another. Then, she reached into the silk bag that hung around her wrist and retrieved a pair of spectacles.
Glasses should have made her look more severe. But as soon as she put them on, her gaze softened.
He’d read her wrongly. Her eyes hadn’t been narrowed in scorn; she’d been squinting. It hadn’t been severity he saw in her gaze but something else entirely—something he couldn’t quite make out. She reached out and picked up a black knight, turning it around, over and over. He could see nothing about the pieces that would merit such careful attention. They were solid wood, carved with indifferent skill. Still, she studied it, her eyes wide and luminous.
Then, inexplicably, she raised it to her lips and kissed it.
Robert watched in frozen silence. It almost felt as if he were interrupting a tryst between a woman and her lover. This was a lady who had secrets, and she didn’t want to share them.
The door in the far room creaked as it opened once more.
The woman’s eyes grew wide and wild. She looked about frantically and dove over the davenport in her haste to hide, landing in an ignominious heap two feet away from him. She didn’t see Robert even then; she curled into a ball, yanking her skirts behind the leather barrier of the sofa, breathing in shallow little gulps.
Good thing he’d moved the davenport back half a foot earlier. She never would have fit the great mass of her skirts behind it otherwise.
Her fist was still clenched around the chess piece; she shoved the knight violently under the sofa.
This time, a heavier pair of footfalls entered the room.
“Minnie?” said a man’s voice. “Miss Pursling? Are you here?”
Her nose scrunched and she pushed back against the wall. She made no answer.
“Gad, man.” Another voice that Robert didn’t recognize—young and slightly slurred with drink. “I don’t envy you that one.”
“Don’t speak ill of my almost-betrothed,” the first voice said. “You know she’s perfect for me.”
“That timid little rodent?”
“She’ll keep a good home. She’ll see to my comfort. She’ll manage the children, and she won’t complain about my mistresses.” There was a creak of hinges—the unmistakable sound of someone opening one of the glass doors that protected the bookshelves.
“What are you doing, Gardley?” the drunk man asked. “Looking for her among the German volumes? I don’t think she’d fit.” That came with an ugly laugh.
Gardley. That couldn’t be the elder Mr. Gardley, owner of a distillery—not by the youth in that voice. This must be Mr. Gardley the younger. Robert had seen him from afar—an unremarkable fellow of medium height, medium-brown hair, and features that reminded him faintly of five other people.
“On the contrary,” young Gardley said. “I think she’ll fit quite well. As wives go, Miss Pursling will be just like these books. When I wish to take her down and read her, she’ll be there. When I don’t, she’ll wait patiently, precisely where she was left. She’ll make me a comfortable wife, Ames. Besides, my mother likes her.”
Robert didn’t believe he’d met an Ames. He shrugged and glanced down at—he was guessing—Miss Pursling to see how she took this revelation.
She didn’t look surprised or shocked at her almost-fiancé’s unromantic utterance. Instead, she looked resigned.
“You’ll have to take her to bed, you know,” Ames said.
“True. But not, thank God, very often.”
“She’s a rodent. Like all rodents, I imagine she’ll squeal when she’s poked.”
There was a mild thump.
“What?” yelped Ames.
“That,” said Gardley, “is my future wife you are talking about.”
Maybe the fellow wasn’t so bad after all.
Then Gardley continued. “I’m the only one who gets to think about poking that rodent.”
Miss Pursling pressed her lips together and looked up, as if imploring the heavens. But inside the library, there were no heavens to implore. And when she looked up, through the gap in the curtains…
Her gaze met Robert’s. Her eyes grew big and round. She didn’t scream; she didn’t gasp. She didn’t twitch so much as an inch. She simply fixed him with a look that bristled with silent, venomous accusation. Her nostrils flared.
There was nothing Robert could do but lift his hand and give her a little wave.
She took off her spectacles and turned away in a gesture so regally dismissive that he had to look twice to remind himself that she was, in fact, sitting in a heap of skirts at his feet. That from this awkward angle above her, he could see straight down the neckline of her gown—right at the one part of her figure that didn’t strike him as severe, but soft—
Save that for later, he admonished himself, and adjusted his gaze up a few inches. Because she’d turned away, he saw for the first time a faint scar on her left cheek, a tangled white spider web of crisscrossed lines.
“Wherever your mouse has wandered off to, it’s not here,” Ames was saying. “Likely she’s in the lady’s retiring room. I say we go back to the fun. You can always tell your mother you had words with her in the library.”
“True enough,” Gardley said. “And I don’t need to mention that she wasn’t present for them—it’s not as if she would have said anything in response, even if she had been here.”
Footsteps receded; the door creaked once more, and the men walked out.
Miss Pursling didn’t look at Robert once they’d left, not even to acknowledge his existence with a glare. Instead, she pushed herself to her knees, made a fist, and slammed it into the hard back of the sofa—once, then twice, hitting it so hard that it moved forward with the force of her blow—all one hundred pounds of it.
He caught her wrist before she landed a third strike. “There now,” he said. “You don’t want to hurt yourself over him. He doesn’t deserve it.”
She stared up at him, her eyes wide.
He didn’t see how any man could call this woman timid. She positively crackled with defiance. He let go of her arm before the fury in her could travel up his hand and consume him. He had enough anger of his own.
“Never mind me,” she said. “Apparently I’m not capable of helping myself.”
He almost jumped. He wasn’t sure how he’d expected her voice to sound—sharp and severe, like her appearance suggested? Perhaps he’d imagined her talking in a high squeak, as if she were the rodent she’d been labeled. But her voice was low, warm, and deeply sensual. It was the kind of voice that made him suddenly aware that she was on her knees before him, her head almost level with his crotch.
Save that for later, too.
“I’m a rodent. All rodents squeal when poked.” She punched the sofa once again. She was going to bruise her knuckles if she kept that up. “Are you planning to poke me, too?”
“No.” Stray thoughts didn’t count, thank God; if they did, all men would burn in hell forever.
“Do you always skulk behind curtains, hoping to overhear intimate conversations?”
Robert felt the tips of his ears burn. “Do you always leap behind sofas when you hear your fiancé coming?”
“Yes,” she said defiantly. “Didn’t you hear? I’m like a book that has been mislaid. One day, one of his servants will find me covered in dust in the middle of spring-cleaning. ‘Ah,’ the butler will say. ‘That’s where Miss Wilhelmina has ended up. I had forgotten all about her.’”
Wilhelmina Pursling? What a dreadful appellation.
She took a deep breath. “Please don’t tell anyone. Not about any of this.” She shut her eyes and pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Please just go away, whoever you are.”
He brushed the curtains to one side and made his way around the sofa. From a few feet away, he couldn’t even see her. He could only imagine her curled on the floor, furious to the point of tears.
“Minnie,” he said. It wasn’t polite to call her by so intimate a name. And yet he wanted to hear it on his tongue.
She didn’t respond.
“I’ll give you twenty minutes,” he said. “If I don’t see you downstairs by then, I’ll come up for you.”
For a few moments, there was no answer. Then: “The beautiful thing about marriage is the right it gives me to monogamy. One man intent on dictating my whereabouts is enough, wouldn’t you think?”
He stared at the sofa in confusion before he realized that she thought he’d been threatening to drag her out.
Robert was good at many things. Communicating with women was not one of them.
“That’s not what I meant,” he muttered. “It’s just…” He walked back to the sofa and peered over the leather top. “If a woman I cared about was hiding behind a sofa, I would hope that someone would take the time to make sure she was well.”
There was a long pause. Then fabric rustled and she looked up at him. Her hair had begun to slip out of that severe bun; it hung around her face, softening her features, highlighting the pale whiteness of her scar. Not pretty, but…interesting. And he could have listened to her talk all night.
She stared at him in puzzlement. “Oh,” she said flatly. “You’re attempting to be kind.” She sounded as if the possibility had never occurred to her before. She let out a sigh, and gave him a shake of her head. “But your kindness is misplaced. You see, that—” she pointed toward the doorway where her near-fiancé had disappeared “—that is the best possible outcome I can hope for. I have wanted just such a thing for years. As soon as I can stomach the thought, I’ll be marrying him.”
There was no trace of sarcasm in her voice. She stood. With a practiced hand, she smoothed her hair back under the pins and straightened her skirts until she was restored to complete propriety.
Only then did she stoop, patting under the sofa to find where she’d tossed the knight. She examined the chessboard, cocked her head, and then very, very carefully, set the piece back into place.
While he was standing there, watching her, trying to make sense of her words, she walked out the door.
Want to read the rest? The Duchess War is available now.
Other Books by Courtney
The Brothers Sinister Series
The Governess Affair
The Duchess War
A Kiss for Midwinter
The Heiress Effect
The Countess Conspiracy — December 2013
The Mistress Rebellion — 2014
Not in any series
What Happened at Midnight
The Lady Always Wins
The Turner Series
Unveiled
Unlocked
Unclaimed
Unraveled
The Carhart Series
This Wicked Gift
Proof by Seduction
Trial by Desire
Author’s Note
I’ve done my best to make sure that the timing of this story parallels the history of the Reform Act of 1867, which extended the franchise to many (but not all) working-class men in 1867.
The gathering I describe in Hyde Park really did have more than a hundred thousand people attending, and it really did freak out the government—resulting in a much more liberal extension of the franchise than had been previously contemplated. If you’d like to read a surprisingly sarcastic newspaper account of that event from The Daily News of May 7, 1867, I’ve reproduced it on my website at:
http://www.courtneymilan.com/heiresseffect-dailynews.php.
The paper says nothing about a group of women at the park, but it does mention a woman in a sailor hat who was said to “harangue” the crowds about equal rights for all. I suspect that any woman who spoke loud enough to be heard in that large a crowd would have been said to “harangue,” and so I’ve assumed that she was as reasonable as the men.
Today we would understand that Emily has epilepsy with partial seizures. At the time, however, epilepsy was very poorly understood. Doctor Russell (who Emily refers to in the book as one of the physicians who treated her) was perhaps the one who best understood the disease; he was one of the first to employ the “numerical method” to epilepsy.
You can read his book on the subject here: http://bit.ly/150aVdY.
In any event, Russell, advanced as he was, believed that it wasn’t epilepsy unless there was a lapse of consciousness; hence the reason why Emily claims that her fits are not epilepsy.
If you’re ever feeling like you need to be more grateful for modern medicine, consider perusing the above book for a list of treatments that were tried on epileptics. All of the “treatments” that Emily experienced in this book were ones that I found mentioned in various medical texts of around this period.
A brief note on the timing of Anjan’s education: In the US today, it would be ridiculous to have someone in school and studying for law examinations in January and then practicing law in May, but it was perfectly possible then. When Anjan says that he is “going out,” he means that he’s near the end of his time at the University; the final year for students there was not quite a full year. Anjan is studying for the Law Tripos, an examination (or, rather, a set of grueling examinations that would determine whether a student graduated with honors, and what honors those were) that would have been delivered around Easter. Anjan would have to return to Cambridge for commencement, but that was just a formality.
More importantly, he wouldn’t have needed a degree to be admitted to the bar. The requirements for bar admission varied, depending upon which bar you were planning to join, but usually required that you get some current members of the bar to vouch for your character, that you passed a basic examination, and that you “kept terms” with the Inn of Court—in other words, you had dinner with a bunch of barristers a number of times. In many cases, you could substitute two years’ of Oxbridge education for the part where you ate dinners. Anjan, being a careful planner, would have knocked off the requirements for the bar sometime in the year before.
In terms of trying to accurately portray Anjan’s experience, I read a handful of accounts written by Indian students who studied in Britain in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and I’ve tried to do my best to extrapolate what Anjan’s life would have been like. The most famous of those accounts is obviously Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography. But I also drew heavily on a description of life at Cambridge written by S. Satthianadhan, who would have attended Cambridge around the time that my fictional Anjan Bhattacharya would have done so.
Satthianadhan never talked about racism directly, but there were a handful of times when it felt as if he was giving advice out of the corner of his mouth. His praise for the English was over the top, almost as a warning. One passage in particular said (and I paraphrase), “The English might seem like jerks, but that’s because they think they’re better than us. Pretend that they’re right and they’ll be nice to you.”
I reproduced this passage on my tumblr, for those who want to read it, at http://bit.ly/12j72Ch.
One way in which I’ve diverged from historical usage is that at the time, Indians in England were often referred to as “blacks.” I think that use would be unduly confusing to modern, and particularly American, readers.
One last note about Anjan: Some people might think it over-the-top to have the epilogue for this book mention that Anjan was interested political office in 1874. But the first Indian Member of Parliament, Dadabhai Naoroji, was elected in 1892 at the age of 67. In 1874, Anjan would have been 27—young enough that if he started working toward that goal, by the time he was in his mid-fifties, that barrier would already have been breached.
Finally, I need to echo what I said in the Author’s Note for The Duchess War: This series effectively rewrites the
scientific history of evolution and genetics. While Mendel’s experiments with pea plants were performed in 1830, their import wasn’t understood until much later. In the book, I’ve assumed that having Darwin and a prominent geneticist in the same place and time would accelerate the pace of scientific advancement.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to Robin Harders, Megan Records, Rawles Lumumba, Keira Soleore, Leah Wohl-Pollak, Martha Trachtenberg, and Libby Sternberg for various forms of editing and copy-editing, and for putting up with me and my total inability to deliver a book when I say I’m going to deliver it while still handing me extraordinarily thoughtful remarks back in an extraordinarily short period of time. I wouldn’t be able to produce books like this without you all, and I’m deeply grateful for your help.
Thanks also go to Kristin Nelson, my agent, for her unstinting support, and to the rest of her agency staff for all the many ways that they help: Angie Hodapp, Lori Bennett, Anita Mumm, and Sara Megibow. I’d like to thank Melissa Jolly for the support she’s given me. And finally, Rawles again, for everything she’s done in the last few weeks to make my life easier.
Rose Lerner deserves a special thanks for a breakfast in Seattle in January, where we were complaining about…well, everything, including some of the limitations of the subgenre. Anjan is the direct result of that conversation. Thanks, Rose, for pushing me where I needed to be pushed. (If you like historical romances and you didn’t get a chance to read Rose’s books when they were available from Dorchester, they’re all going to be reissued by Samhain Publishing, so keep watching.)
I’m indebted to Rozina Visram for her many books documenting Asians in historical Britain. My sister Tami helped with a few items of research by providing sooper sekrit access to sources that I couldn’t get any other way. Sssh, don’t tell her university.
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