And Then He Kissed Her (8 page)

Upon his arrival at Brooks’s, he found two of
his closest acquaintances were also there, seated at a table in one corner. He crossed the room toward them.

Lord Weston was the first to see him. “By all that’s wonderful,” he cried, standing up to give Harry a hearty clap on the shoulder, “glad you’re here, Marlowe. We’re having a bit of a dispute, and you’ve arrived just in time to settle it.”

“Indeed?” Harry greeted the other man at the table, Sir Philip Knighton, then pulled out a chair. “What are the two of you arguing about this time?”

“I say the four-in-hand tie is still perfectly acceptable, but Sir Philip says it is now
comme il faut
.”

“I’m not the one saying so, Weston,” Sir Philip protested. “The Bartleby woman was quite emphatic about it in her column last week. The four-in-hand is out.”

“That tears it!” Harry jumped to his feet so violently he knocked over his chair. “Damn it all, can’t a man even go to his club anymore?”

All the gentlemen around him, including his companions, stared at him in astonishment. Harry drew a deep breath. “Forgive me,” he said with a bow, “but I must go. I just remembered that I have an important engagement.”

He left his club and called for his carriage, but when it came, he waved it away. Instead, he took a long walk.

He went over everything he could recall of Miss Dove’s manuscripts—which wasn’t much, for he hadn’t read much. And what he had read
had so failed to capture his interest that he could only remember a few things. Something about how a girl-bachelor could decorate her flat. Stuff about how to give an Afternoon-at-Home. The proper way for a lady to ride in the park. Just thinking about these topics, and he was already bored to distraction. So what was making her a success? He just didn’t see it.

That, he realized with dismay, was the crux of the problem.

Though he could not see the appeal of Miss Dove’s writing, other people did. Somehow, in the space of two months, her Mrs. Bartleby character had become a sensation. How could he have been so wrong about her appeal to the reading public?

Her accusation came back to slap him in the face.
You are too closed-minded.

Was that true? He had always prided himself on being open to opportunities. Had he somehow become closed-minded without even realizing it? He thought of his editors, of all the manuscripts they had recommended over the years that he had rejected. How many more Mrs. Bartlebys were in the rubbish heap? There was no way to know.

He had always trusted his instincts, and they had never failed to tell him the truth. His success as a publisher had always come from his ability to know what people wanted to read and providing it for them at just the right time.

Was he losing that ability? Were his instincts deserting him? Self-doubt, something he seldom
had cause to feel, whispered through his mind. Were the qualities that had made him Britain’s most successful publisher deserting him?

He paused at Hyde Park Corner, where a boy in a cap stood amid stacks of newspapers. Three of his own were there, along with the
London Times
and the
Social Gazette
. Harry bought a copy of the latter, found himself an empty bench in the park, and sat down. He read every word of today’s
All Things London
, by Mrs. Honoria Bartleby.

When he had finished, he knew all about the giving of wedding breakfasts, but he still felt no more enlightened as to why she’d caught the public’s fancy than he had before. On the other hand, he knew his private opinion of her work no longer mattered.

Harry sat back on the bench and considered the situation as objectively as he could. Publishing was a cutthroat business, always shifting and changing. He could not afford to become closed-minded. Some of his most profitable ventures over the years had sprung from unexpected events that he turned into opportunities. Perhaps this was such a moment. Harry began to get an idea, and his innate optimism began to return.

After about an hour, he stood up, knowing there was only one thing to do. He’d meet with Barringer and accept the terms of sale the earl had outlined. He had to do it now. The way things were going, if he delayed, Miss Dove’s success would cost him another fifty thousand pounds.

Emma loved her new life. She loved spending her afternoons exploring London shops in search of information to share with her readers. She loved exercising her ingenuity, inventing ways to transform the commonplace into the unusual, so that even the most frugal matrons could arrange elegant meals for their families and even the busiest girl-bachelors could make their flats comfortable and cozy. She loved writing, and she loved seeing her compositions in print. She loved Mrs. Bartleby, because every morning when she sat down to work, when she typed the advice of that fictional character, she could hear dear Aunt Lydia’s voice again. It was almost as if Auntie were sitting beside her, helping her along, sharing her newfound success.

And she was successful, surprisingly so.

Despite her former employer’s rejections of her work, Emma had always felt that her particular knowledge and experience could be of use to others. But she was astonished by the extent of her popularity and the speed at which her success occurred. Within a month, she had become the talk of the town every Saturday morning, and when she asked for an increase in her wages, Barringer granted it, enabling her to stop dipping into her savings so that she could live comfortably on her writing income alone.

Within two months, she was receiving stacks of letters, so many that she couldn’t answer them all in a timely fashion. Sometimes she heard the name of Mrs. Bartleby while standing
with others on a street corner waiting for an omnibus or while waiting her turn in a grocer’s shop. All this notoriety gave her a thrill, rather, although if the letter she received or the opinion she overheard was negative, she felt depressed for hours and was compelled to eat far too many chocolates.

Despite the occasional minor bout of depression over criticism and the resulting bilious attack, she had never been more content. What she was doing now was far more useful than making sure one erratic, thoughtless man got to his appointments on time. It was certainly more gratifying than buying his presents for him.

On the other hand, her new job was not an easy one. She had to accustom herself to writing under a deadline, and that was hard. She had to be painstaking in her research and judicious with her advice. She was also required by Lord Barringer to keep her identity as Mrs. Bartleby a secret, and that was hardest of all, for she was by nature a person of scrupulous honesty. However, as Barringer pointed out, secrecy whetted public curiosity, and that could only assist in her success. Even more important, she was dispensing advice under the guise of a matron, and her credibility would be hurt if it was discovered that she was unmarried. After all, no one wanted advice from a spinster, which was why she had adopted a pseudonym in the first place.

While she appreciated the reasons for the subterfuge, she didn’t understand how it would be possible to maintain it. Marlowe knew the truth
and had every reason to reveal it publicly, but when she had pointed out this fact to Barringer, the earl had given her a strange little smile and assured her that Marlowe would be the last person in the world to give the secret away.

Though baffled by how the earl could be certain of Marlowe’s discretion, she had agreed to keep mum, and it was soon understood by all who knew her that she had left the employ of Lord Marlowe and had accepted a post as secretary to the now-famous Mrs. Bartleby. Emma felt a bit guilty about the deceit, but whenever she thought of Marlowe’s opinion that what she wrote was silly, her guilt was easy to vanquish.

With each week that passed, Emma found it a bit easier to play her part. On Sunday afternoons when she took tea with the other girl bachelors in the lodging house, she became quite adept at fielding their questions about the beloved etiquette writer without telling any outright lies. And Sunday afternoon tea had its rewards. Sitting in Mrs. Morris’s genteel parlor, with its faded, cabbage-rose wallpaper, potted ferns, and plum-colored mahogany furnishings, Emma listened to her friends discuss her latest column and saw first hand the results of her influence. Emma found Sunday afternoons most gratifying.

“Mr. Jones proposed.”

There was a delicate clinking of porcelain cups being set on saucers, followed by five exclamations of surprise as the women already enjoying their tea looked toward the doorway
where Miss Beatrice Cole, always the last to appear for Sunday tea nowadays, had just entered the room.

“Oh, my dear Beatrice!” Mrs. Morris set her cup on the tea table beside her and turned toward the younger woman. “This is a happy day indeed.”

Beatrice took her usual place in a wingback chair of somewhat worn brocade stripe. Her face glowed with satisfaction, partly due to true love, no doubt, and partly due to the triumph of securing that item so rare in a girl bachelor’s life: a young man with prospects.

“To think it was all due to Mrs. Bartleby.” Beatrice hastened to pull off her gloves and show everyone her ring of engagement, a silver filigree band. “If it hadn’t been for her, my fate would probably be to die an old maid.”

Miss Prudence Bosworth and Miss Maria Martingale both winced at that, but they expressed their congratulations in the true spirit of friendship and tried to hide their understandable envy.

Mrs. Morris and Mrs. Inkberry set aside their tea and exclaimed over the ring with a happiness untarnished by any less savory feelings. Unlike their unmarried companions, they had no cause to worry about the security of their future. Mrs. Morris, a widow, had inherited the lodging house upon her husband’s death and did very well on her own. Mrs. Inkberry’s husband owned a bookshop near Fleet Street, and though the couple did have to live in the cramped
quarters above the shop, their home was cozy, the shop was prosperous, and they’d managed to raise four daughters quite comfortably. Though Emma was firmly on the shelf at thirty and had rather given up on the notion of matrimony, she was not immune to the green-eyed monster. Nonetheless, the envy she felt upon hearing Beatrice’s news was nothing in comparison to her satisfaction at the part she had played in securing her friend’s present happiness.

“Beatrice, you must explain,” Mrs. Inkberry said and took a sip of her tea. “How is it that you give Mrs. Bartleby the credit for your engagement?”

“That’s right, you’ve been away at Yorkshire, so you don’t know how it all came about.” Beatrice accepted a cup of tea from Mrs. Morris and reached for a crumpet from the tray on the central tea table. “You know of Mrs. Bartleby, of course.”

Mrs. Inkberry nodded. “Of course! I’ve been trying to read her column whenever possible, but it’s much harder to get the
Social Gazette
in Yorkshire.”

“Well,” Beatrice continued, “Mr. Jones has been asking for ages if he could walk with me on my way home from the shop, but Mrs. Morris advised me it wouldn’t be proper for us to walk together, both of us being unmarried, you know. People might think things.”

“Quite right of you, Abigail, dear, to advise caution,” Mrs. Inkberry said with a nod to Mrs. Morris. “A young woman without family
cannot be too careful in her relations with the male sex. She must have a care for her reputation.”

“I know, Josephine,” Mrs. Morris answered, “but I was in error. Mrs. Bartleby said in her column it was quite acceptable for Beatrice to walk with her young man.”

“She did?” Mrs. Inkberry was clearly dumbfounded. She glanced around the room, and all five of the other women present nodded in the affirmative.

“She wasn’t referring to me specifically, of course,” Beatrice said and went on to explain the rule Emma had outlined six weeks earlier. “So you see, Mrs. Inkberry, it was quite all right. I’ve known Mr. Jones four years now. I mean, we see each other nearly every day, with me closing up the shop for Mrs. Wilson at six o’clock most evenings, and him always leaving the barrister’s office at the same time, and us living two streets apart and always walking home the same way. As for his good character, Mr. Jones would have to have that, I should think, being a barrister’s clerk. And sometimes when we’re queued up at the costermonger’s cart for lunch, I’ve seen him buy two pork pies just so he can give one to that poor indigent woman who’s always rummaging in the alley rubbish heap. That says a great deal about a man, doesn’t it?”

Emma was in complete agreement. The entire reason she’d written that particular column, which did bend the rules just a bit, was solely so poor Beatrice could walk home with her chival
rous young man. Mrs. Morris had a kind heart, but she was a rather silly woman, truth be told, and inclined to be overly punctilious about these things. Even Auntie, who’d been Mrs. Morris’s friend for years, had always thought the other woman rather narrow.

“Well,” Mrs. Inkberry said, “if Mrs. Bartleby said it was all right, Beatrice, then that settles the question once and for all.”

“Reading that made me so happy,” Beatrice said, “and it so relieved my mind. I told Mr. Jones straightaway. If Mrs. Bartleby says it’s all right, I told him, then we can be sure it
is
. He and I have been walking home together every work day since, Mrs. Inkberry. Sunday afternoons, too, in the park. That’s where he proposed, not more than an hour ago.” She looked down at the ring on her finger and began tilting her hand this way and that so the silver would catch the afternoon sunlight through the windows. “We’ll be married before Christmas.”

Emma smiled to herself and took a sip of tea. Yes, she decided, her new life was a very satisfying one indeed.

She was still feeling quite happy with her new life Thursday afternoon when the delivery boy from the
Social Gazette
came to pick up her column, despite a four-day bout of what she believed was called “writer’s block.” Now, with young Mr. Hobbs knocking on her door, she typed the last paragraph with frantic fervor.

“Wait a bit, Hobbs,” she called to the closed
door as she whipped the last page out of the typewriting machine. “I shall be with you in a moment.”