"How would I even manage it?" she heard herself asking. "The library is locked at night, and Graves has eyes like a hawk during the day."
"Where there's a will, there's a way," Harriet said with the confidence of someone who'd never actually had to break into anything. "Besides, you work there. Surely you could find a reason to stay late, or arrive early, or... I don't know, claim you forgot something?"
The idea took root in Eveline's mind like a particularly pernicious weed, growing throughout the evening despite her attempts to focus on more sensiblethoughts. By the time she returned home, she'd half-convinced herself that it was actually her scholarly duty to investigate those hidden books. After all, how could she properly catalogue a library if she didn't know what it contained?
That night, she lay in bed staring at the ceiling, her mind racing through possibilities and implications. The locked cabinet haunted her thoughts, its very prohibition making it irresistible. What knowledge was being kept from her? What texts had been deemed too dangerous, too inappropriate, for her eyes?
By midnight, she'd made her decision.
***
The journey from her family's modest townhouse to Everleigh Manor took on an entirely different character in the dead of night. Streets that seemed perfectly respectable during daylight hours became shadowy corridors filled with uncertain sounds and questionable figures. Eveline clutched her dark cloak tighter, grateful for the clouds that obscured the moon and made her progress less visible to any watching eyes.
She'd told her mother she was feeling unwell and retiring early, then slipped out through the servants' entrance with the kind of stealth she'd previously only employed when avoiding particularly tedious social calls. The key to Everleigh Manor's servants' entrance, the one Graves had given her with such reluctance, felt heavy in her pocket, weighted with the impropriety of what she was about to do.
No duke shall dictate which books I may or may not see,she told herself firmly as she approached the imposing façade of Everleigh Manor.Knowledge belongs to whoever seeks it, not whoever can afford the fanciest locks.
The servants' entrance was blessedly unguarded at this hour, though she held her breath as the key turned in the lock, half-expecting Graves to materialize from the shadows like some butler-shaped specter of disapproval. But the hallway beyond was empty and silent, lit only by the few candles that kept burning through the night.
She knew the path to the library by heart now, could navigate it with her eyes closed if necessary. Her slippers made barely a whisper against the floors, and she gathered her skirts carefully to prevent any telltale rustling. Her heart hammered against her ribs with enough force that she was certain it must be audible throughout the house, but no doors opened, no voices called out, no one appeared to challenge her presence.
The library door opened with a soft creak that sounded like thunder in the silence. She slipped inside and closed it carefully behind her, then stood for a moment letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. Moonlight filtered through the tall windows, casting everything in shades of silver and shadow, making the familiar space seem foreign and somewhat magical.
The locked cabinet waited in its alcove, the brass lock gleaming like a challenge in the dim light. Eveline approached it with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious relics, pulling a hairpin from her carefully arranged curls.She'd never actually picked a lock before, but she'd read about it in one of those sensational novels her mother pretended not to know she borrowed from the lending library.
How difficult could it possibly be?she wondered, inserting the hairpin into the lock with more confidence than skill.
The answer, it turned out, was considerably more difficult than novels suggested. After several minutes of futile prodding and increasingly creative Latin profanity, she was ready to admit defeat when the lock suddenly clicked open with a sound that seemed to echo through the entire library.
She froze, waiting for alarms to sound, for Graves to burst through the door, for the Duke himself to appear and demand an explanation. But the silence continued, broken only by her own rapid breathing and the distant ticking of the library clock.
The cabinet door swung open on well-oiled hinges, revealing shelves that seemed to glow with promise in the moonlight. Eveline reached for the nearest volume with trembling fingers, angling it toward the window to read the spine.
Ovid's Ars Amatoria.
The Art of Love. She knew of it, of course, any serious classical scholar did, but she'd never actually read it, as it was considered wildly inappropriate for unmarried ladies. Her Latin professor had always skipped those particular poems with meaningful looks and vague mentions of "mature themes."
She opened it carefully, squinting at the Latin text in the dim light, and felt her cheeks burn as she translated the first passage she encountered. Ovid was... considerably more direct about certain matters than was appropriate. The poet wrote of kisses that should linger, of touches that should wander, of the importance of mutual pleasure in ways that made her pulse quicken.
The next volume made her gasp audibly; an illustrated French text that appeared to be some sort of manual for married couples, though the activities depicted seemed to require impressive flexibility and a marked absence of clothing. She'd had no idea the human body could bend in quite those configurations, and the expressions on the illustrated faces suggested considerable enjoyment of the proceedings.
"Good heavens," she whispered, unable to look away from a particularly detailed engraving that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. The French text beside it waxed poetic about pleasure and passion in terms that would have had her mother reaching for her smelling salts.
She set that aside with trembling fingers and reached for what appeared to be an Italian collection of poetry. This proved even more scandalous, if such a thing were possible—sonnets devoted entirely to describing intimate encounters in metaphors that barely qualified as metaphors at all. References to "sheathing swords" and "exploring grottoes" that made their meaning abundantly clear.
A medical text on human anatomy came next, though the particular areas of anatomical focus and the detailed descriptions of sensitivity and response seemed selected for purposes that had nothing to do with healing the sick. Shefound herself reading about nerve endings and blood flow and the physiological responses to stimulation with a mixture of scientific fascination and mortified heat.
"This is what they keep from us," she muttered, half-indignant, half-mesmerized. "This knowledge, this understanding of our own bodies and desires, locked away as if ignorance were virtue..."
She pulled out another volume, this one appearing older than the others, bound in worn leather that felt soft beneath her fingers. Opening it revealed handwritten pages in various inks, and she realized with a start that it was some sort of private journal or multiple journals, bound together. The dates suggested they spanned several generations.
The entries were... illuminating. Detailed accounts of romantic encounters written by various members of the Everleigh family, apparently. She read about a duchess from a century past who'd taken a footman as a lover, describing their assignations in prose that would have been purple if it weren't so earnestly passionate. A younger son writing about his introduction to physical pleasure at a notorious London establishment. Even what appeared to be the current Duke's grandfather, chronicling a lengthy affair with a French opera singer in terms that left nothing to the imagination.
She was so absorbed in a particularly vivid passage about the opera singer's talents both on and off stage that she didn't hear the library door open, didn't notice the approaching footsteps until a shadow fell across the page she was reading.
"Do you break into every man's library, or only those of dukes?"
Chapter 7
