Cecilia Grant - [Blackshear Family 03] (2 page)

“Indeed I have. But you
own
that volume of the
Vindication of Women
, and every other volume, too. Surely you’re the last person who ought to be questioning someone else’s borrowing habits.”

“
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, it’s called. The meaning is entirely different. And my purpose wasn’t to borrow a book, but to begin making myself known.” She drummed her gloved fingers on the volume’s binding,
a rhythmic accompaniment to the ring of their heels on the pavement. “The more library clerks and booksellers I make aware of my project, the more likely it is that they’ll mention me in discussions with one another—perhaps even in discussions with publishers. In fact, I think it very likely that publishers spend time in just such establishments. One day I may well be overheard, and approached by some enterprising man who sees that the time is ripe for a book like mine.”

Oh, she’d be approached, certainly enough. Behind those false spectacles and taut-pinned hair and the sensible Quakerish garments she favored, Vi had her share of the Westbrook beauty. One day some man would see past her brusque manners to notice the fact, and if he was enterprising, it would surely occur to him to feign an interest in her book, perhaps even to present himself in the guise of a publisher.

That was why Kate could not allow her to undertake these errands alone. For a young lady of intellect, Viola was shockingly ignorant in some matters.

“I wonder, though, if a more gradual kind of persuasion might be to your benefit.” At the corner she turned east, steering her sister along. “If perhaps you concentrated your efforts at first on pleasantries—on asking the clerk to recommend an interesting book, for example, or even speaking on commonplace topics such as the weather or an amusing print you recently saw—then by the time you introduced the subject of your own book, you might have a reservoir of goodwill already in place. Even a clerk who doesn’t necessarily subscribe to your book’s ideas might be disposed to advance your cause with his publisher friends, simply as a favor to a charming customer.”

“But I don’t want to be a charming customer.” Viola’s voice sank into the low passionate chords of the instrument with which she shared a name. “I want to be taken
seriously. I want to know my book is appreciated on its own merits—not because the reader finds me sufficiently
charming
. I’m sure Thomas Paine never concerned himself with whether or not he was
charming
.” The word apparently furnished endless fuel for disgust. She jabbed at
Pride and Prejudice
. “Your Mr. Darcy isn’t the least bit charming, and yet everyone tiptoes about him in awe.”

It’s different for women
. She needn’t say it aloud. Vi knew well enough.

Kate shifted the volumes to the crook of her other arm, and fished in her reticule for a penny as they approached the street crossing. She wasn’t without sympathy for her sister. The constraints of a lady’s life could be exceedingly trying. Demoralizing, if one allowed them to be.

The trick was not to allow them to be.

“Lord help us all if you mean to pattern yourself after Thomas Paine. Perhaps he wouldn’t have got into such trouble if he’d spent a little effort on charm.” She paid the crossing sweep, a ragged dark boy, with the penny and her sweetest smile. “And Mr. Darcy had ten thousand a year and a grand house to his name. Much will be forgiven in the manners of such a man.” She caught up her skirts and stepped into the street, sister alongside.

“What of his Elizabeth, then?” The unavoidable legacy of a barrister father: progeny always on the lookout for an argument. “She never takes pains to charm anyone, least of all Mr. Darcy, and yet— Where are we going?” She halted, abrupt as a fickle cart horse. “We ought to have turned north by now.”

“The girls won’t be through with lessons for nearly an hour.” Kate took her sister’s elbow to usher her the rest of the way across. “That gives us time to go by way of Berkeley Square.”

“Berkeley Square?” The way Vi pronounced it, you’d
think she was naming the alley where the meanest residents of St. Giles went to empty their chamber pots.

“Berkeley Square, indeed. I have a letter for Lady Harringdon.” Might as well serve up the objectionable news all at once, rather than by spoonfuls.

“On what possible subject can you be writing to that … woman?” She knew how to pack inordinate amounts of meaning into a pause, Viola did, this time suggesting she’d groped for a word suited to Lady Harringdon’s perfidy and found none strong enough.

“She’s just married off the last of her daughters this week. I’m offering my congratulations, as civil people do on such occasions to their kin.”

“
Kin
, do you call her?”

Yes, she’d known that word wouldn’t pass without remark. “She’s married to our father’s elder brother. That makes her our aunt.”

“Well, somebody ought to tell that to her. Her and Lord Harringdon and whatever mean-spirited offspring they spawned.” Viola walked faster, swinging
Vindication
, volume one, in a pendulum motion as though she were winding up to brain one of that family with it. “Good lord, Kate, do you secretly correspond with the dowager Lady Harringdon as well? With all the aunts and uncles who refuse to know us? I would have thought you had more pride than to truckle to such people.”

“I don’t secretly correspond with anyone. I’ve already told you the occasion for this note, and I hardly think a word of congratulations can be construed as truckling.” To keep her voice light and unruffled required a conscious effort, but she had plenty of practice in the art. “Indeed I should think it will provide an instructive example of proper manners to Lady Harringdon, while proving that her own lapses in civility do not guide the behavior of Charles Westbrook’s children. You see, I’m partly motivated by pride after all.”

Partly. But in truth she had grander ambitions than to simply make a show of unbowed civility to her aunt.

They weren’t really so unlike, she and her sister. She, too, intended to be known. One day the door to that glittering world of champagne and consequence—the world that ought to have been her birthright—would crack open just long enough to admit a girl who’d spent every day since the age of thirteen watching for that chance, readying herself to slip through. Even at two and twenty, she hadn’t given up hope. Enough attentions to people like Lady Harringdon, and
something
must finally happen.
Someone
must recognize the aristocratic blood that ran through her veins, and the manners and accomplishments worthy of a nobleman’s bride. Then she’d dart through that open door, take her place among her own kind, and single-handedly haul her family back into respectability.

“Do what you must.” Viola’s shoulders flexed, as though the insult of a trip to Berkeley Square had an actual physical weight that wanted preparation to bear. “
My
pride shall take the form of waiting across the street while you go about your errand. Anyone looking out the window may see that
I
am not ashamed of our mother.”

That was petty; the argumental equivalent of jabbing her with a sewing pin. And it smarted every bit as much. “Neither am I ashamed of her. Only I’m not willing to dismiss Papa’s family as a lot of villains because they objected to his marrying an actress. No family of good name would desire such a union for one of their sons.”

“ ‘Such a union?’ To a woman of character and intelligence, you mean, daughter of a proud theatrical family, who studied Sophocles and spat on indecent offers from gentleman admirers? Yes, doubtless any reasonable family must abhor that match, and strive instead to get their son shackled to some insipid chit who hasn’t any interests or passions of her own and whose talents
extend only to a few polite pluckings on the harp.
There
is a recipe for conjugal felicity, to be sure.”

Kate made no answer, beyond a small inward sigh. Really, it must be very pleasant to live in Viola’s world, with everything drawn in such broad strokes. People and actions easily classified as righteous or knavish; no margin granted for human fallibility or the claims of society. No energies squandered in pondering extenuating circumstances. No time wasted on doubt.

One of the
Pride and Prejudice
volumes was pressing a sharp edge into her forearm, so she switched to a one-handed grip, like Viola with her
Vindication
. Conjugal felicity, indeed. That came in several guises, surely, or at least you might get there by more than one path. If Mr. Darcy, for example, had come to
her
with that first grudging proposal, openly acknowledging his abhorrence at so lowering himself, she would have swallowed her pride long enough to choke out a
yes
. Affection and understanding could come afterward—or if they never came at all, she would have a good name and the grounds at Pemberley on which to build all the felicity she required.

As they made their way into the residential streets of Mayfair, she tipped back her head for a view of remote upper windows. Surely somewhere in London was a gentleman who would suit her needs. Surely some aristocrat—some marquess ripe for stupefaction—must appreciate a beautiful bride with such pragmatic expectations of the wedded state. Surely someone, someday, could be brought to lower himself as Mr. Darcy had, and spirit her out of that middling class in which she had never truly belonged.

Surely that man did walk and breathe. The trick was only to find him.

R
OUND THE
landing, down the stairs, and through the heavy oak front door, Nicholas Blackshear spilled out into the cold sunlight of Brick Court, black robes billowing in his wake. T
IME AND
T
IDE TARRY FOR NO
M
AN
, warned the inscription on the sundial where he paused to confirm the hour. It told the truth, that inscription, but far from heeding its exhortation to haste, he always seemed to stop here an extra moment, reflecting on the hallowed figures who must have consulted this same timepiece as they’d gone about their business in the Middle Temple.

William Blackstone and Oliver Goldsmith had each surely stood here—he had only to glance up at Number Two Brick Court to see where the jurist and the writer had slept and studied a few generations ago.

But so it was throughout the Inns of Court. Just as he always had to stop at the sundial, so must he quietly marvel, every time he took a meal in the Middle Temple Hall, at the serving table whose wood came from the hull of Sir Francis Drake’s
Golden Hind
. So must he always attempt, mid-meal, to picture all the details of the evening, some two hundred years ago, when the benchers and students had been privileged to witness the very first performance of
Twelfth Night
in that same room.

To be a London barrister was to live surrounded by the best of everything England had to offer, all from men who’d charted their own courses to greatness. A fellow might end up anywhere, who began here. If he was literarily inclined, he could look not only to the example of Goldsmith but also to the poet Donne, the satirist Fielding, the playwrights Webster and Congreve—onetime barristers all. If he aspired to etch his name in big bold letters upon the pages of English history, there were Francis Bacon’s footsteps to follow in, or, more recently, William Pitt’s.

And if his ambitions ran to the idealistic, he might
pattern himself after William Garrow, reforming the practice of courtroom law before gaining a seat in Parliament, and a role in all the glorious wrangling through which the nation’s daily business was managed. One day, if he, Nick Blackshear, was scrupulous in both personal and professional conduct, he might restore the family name to such respectability as would make any ambition possible. In the meantime, the law itself must be his purpose, a fit exercise for his faculties, a consolation for disappointments old and new.

Nick swung out from Brick Court into Middle Temple Lane and headed north. Bewigged, black-robed gentlemen made a steady traffic both ways in the lane. His tribe. His species, with all their quirks and crotchets. Some argued as they went along in twos and threes, sawing at the air or jabbing with peremptory fingers. Some presented a hazard to their fellows as they barreled blindly ahead, never looking up from the pages of a brief. He wove through their ranks, long legs and five years of practice steering him clear of collisions while his robes whipped with each sharp turn. At the end of the lane stood the gatehouse, with the Old Bailey looming on the far side of Fleet Street, and—

“Blackshear!”

He’d know that voice in his sleep. Partly because he’d spent a good year studying with the man; partly on the merits of the voice itself. Most barristers made an effort to speak well, and almost all had the genteel accents of the well-born, but few could spit a word like Westbrook. His consonants snapped like a flag in high winds; his vowels poured out in measures as precise as medicine into a spoon.

Nick pivoted, finding the man and stepping clear of traffic in one economical move. He liked to be early to court, and he’d tarried a bit too long already at the sundial.