Aunt Nora hadn’t said anything. Not yet. But she would, and soon, if Evelyn didn’t return from London with a proposal of marriage in hand.
“I’ll take him for another gallop tomorrow,” she said. “If you can have him ready at sunrise?”
Lewis bobbed his head.
* * *
The next morning, Evelyn left the house at dawn for her ride in Rotten Row. Hephaestus danced and pranced beneath her, tossing his head as they entered the park. She put him through his paces, just as she had the previous morning, riding him until his neck, shoulders, and flanks were damp with sweat.
No one else was about, save a few stragglers walking on the mist-covered grass. Working people, by the looks of them. As Evelyn rode, she kept an eye out for Julia Wychwood. But there was no sign of her, or her outsized black hunter. No riders at all to speak of.
Perhaps Miss Wychwood had resumed riding in the afternoons, during the fashionable hour, with Lady Anne and Miss Hobhouse?
The three Furies.
Evelyn smiled to think of it.
She’d rather be thought of as a Fury than a wallflower or a bluestocking. The Grecian Furies were formidable sisters. Women of justice—and vengeance.
The thought appealed to her.
Which only went to show that she was a bluestocking at heart.
Smile fading, she urged Hephaestus back into a trot as she exited the park, Lewis following close behind them.
She was going to have to work on making herself more agreeable, if for no other reason than to appeal to the eligible gentlemen she’d meet during the season. No man wanted to court an oddity. Gentlemen wanted ladies who were soft and sweet. Who would listen to them in awestruck silence, only opening their demure little mouths to agree with a man’s ideas or to laugh at his feeble witticisms.
It wasn’t her. It had never been her.
You don’t have to change, she assured herself. Not really. It’s only a game. A game you must play for a very little while.
Once she met a suitable gentleman, she could revert back to her true self. She’d do it in stages, little by little. Who knows? The gentleman in question might come to like her as she really was. Perhaps he might even fall in love with her.
An impossible dream.
She daren’t give any weight to it. Such dreams only led to disappointment.
Better to be pragmatic. To stick to her plan. Marriage was a business, after all. Any gentleman of wealth and rank would say the same. She was resolved to view it as such. As for the rest of it . . .
She wouldn’t dwell on the messy particulars. The intimacy that came at the end of a courtship and proposal. The kisses and embraces.
The wedding night.
And all to be endured with a stranger. Someone Evelyn would marry, not because she loved him, but because he was wealthy and powerful and able to help her family.
It was no small thing.
Returning to Russell Square, she washed and changed and repaired her hair. The day stretched empty ahead of her, no appointments or visitors to break up the monotony. She was still keeping herself to herself, hidden indoors, waiting for the moment she could properly make her debut.
Her final fitting with Mr. Malik was tomorrow morning. She had a whole day yet to get through. Feeling as restless as Hephaestus, she summoned Agnes to accompany her to Hatchards Bookshop.
“My uncle’s taken the carriage,” she said, slipping on her bonnet, gloves, and paletot, “but we can take an omnibus. It isn’t too far.”
Agnes didn’t appear enthusiastic at the prospect.
The nearly two-mile ride—jolted to and fro against strangers inside a cramped omnibus—did nothing to improve her mood. When the pair of them were finally set down on Piccadilly Street, outside the famous bookshop, Agnes peered up at the front window with a frank look of distaste.
“You needn’t come in if you don’t want to,” Evelyn said. There were benches in front of the shop, presently occupied by what looked to be the servants of other customers—a young girl in a black stuff dress and two tall footmen in livery. “You can wait here if you like.”
“If you don’t mind, miss?” Agnes exchanged a private glance with one of the footmen. “I never could see much use in books.”
“Very well. I shan’t be long.” Evelyn entered the shop alone. She was at once assailed by the scent of fresh ink, paper, and new leather bindings. A delicious fragrance. She breathed it in, feeling at once both excited and oddly at peace.
For a reader, a bookshop was rather like a church.
A fanciful thought to be sure. Aunt Nora would call it sacrilege. But to Evelyn, it seemed an apt comparison.
She and her younger sisters loved reading. It was one of their only means of escape. Indeed, every dry dusty tome remaining in Papa’s library was a passport to a different world. Volumes on Ancient Egypt, Rome, and Greece cluttered the shelves, along with collections of philosophical essays and treatises on the flora and fauna of distant lands. A testament to Papa’s love of travel. The Maltravers girls had read them all at one time or another.
But books were a luxury.
It had been ages since Evelyn had bought a novel. If not for the small circulating library in Combe Regis, she’d have had to go without entirely. As it was, she’d missed out on Mr. Dickens’s latest. The library hadn’t had a copy of it to lend.
Which was why, on entering Hatchards, she wasted no time in inquiring after a copy of Great Expectations.
A busy clerk at the front counter directed her to a row of shelves against the wall. There, Mr. Dickens’s works were neatly arrayed with works by other authors. She scanned their names on the spines—Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, and Anthony Trollope. And something by George Eliot, too.
She was tempted. Very tempted.
But no.
She’d come for one book in particular. It was located on a shelf far above her head. Standing on her tiptoes, she stretched her hand up to reach it. Her gloved fingers barely brushed the gilt-stamped spine.
Botheration.
The clerk would have to fetch it for her. She was just about to summon him when a gentleman came to her aid. Evelyn felt his presence before she saw him—big and tall and masculine. His large, black-gloved hand reached up over her head to pluck the novel easily from the shelf.
“Allow me,” he said.
Her heart thumped hard. Only two words, but she’d recognize that deep voice anywhere. Turning sharply, she found herself staring up into a pair of familiar obsidian eyes. “Mr. Malik.”
He was dressed in an elegantly cut suit, his thick coal-black hair gleaming in the sunlight that poured through the leaded-glass windows of the shop. “Miss Maltravers.” He offered her the book. “Is this the volume you wanted?”