Part I
I was therefore entered at Oxford and have been properly idle ever since.
—Jane Austen,Sense and Sensibility
Chapter One
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.
—Isaac Newton
London, 1820
When my cousin asked me to dance, I let out the smallest of sighs. I brushed the satin and tulle skirts of my new gown and reached for the cool, practiced poise of Lady Rosalin Chen that had become second nature by now. I was certain the request was made under duress from his mother, my aunt, again. Not that I minded—Ansel was a safer partner than anyone else.
Glumly, I followed him to the middle of the ballroom floor.
Truth be told, I was getting rather sick of this game I’d been playing for so many years—acting like a besotted gentleman-obsessed fool, while chasing any serious and usually ill-matched suitors off in secret, with everyone else none the wiser. Not even my best friends knew of my scheme. All thetonsaw was poor Lady Rosalin…the eternal bridesmaid and never the actual bride.
Little did everyone know that Ichoseto be unwed. Because, honestly, who wanted to be married off to a troglodyte of a peer who thought the Earth was flat or an abacus was a type of fungus?
Notme.
This season, subdued because of King George III’s death, did not have the same vibrancy and color of previous years. For obvious reasons, since the entire country was in mourning following the passing of its monarch. Months had passed, and while some events had started to resume, there was a lingering cloud of somberness over theton.
My father, the Duke of Delmont, had to be here for Parliament, and while there had been some deliberation between my parents about remaining in West Suffolk out of respect for the former king, in the end my woefully unwedstatushad forced their hand. So, here we were. Back in Mayfair. With new wardrobes and a slew of freshly renewed hopes—at least on their parts.
Though this year was different. My normally too-busy father had suddenly taken notice of my impending spinsterhood, andthatwas immensely dreadful. What the duke wanted, the duke got, and if that meant a husband for me, my efforts to stave off marriage didn’t stand much of a chance. I shivered. This was it—this was the year that I might be wedded to an absolute dunce for the sake of precious aristocratic bloodlines, if I couldn’t secure an acceptable match on my own.
The mere thought of it made me wither inside.
Technically, this would be my fourth season in theton.Unheard of, really. I’d had my first at sixteen, and now at nineteen, I was firmly on the shelf. I fought back a grimace of dread, keeping my face neutral and pleasantly placid. By all accounts, I couldn’t even be called a spinster…I was practically a fossil. An old-maid fossil—passed over, discarded, and deemed utterly undesirable. I squashed down the pervasive trepidation creeping through my veins.
It wasn’t that Ididn’twant to marry. I did…eventually. But I’d always hoped for a love match. A true connection with a person—intellectual, emotional, and physical. That magical space where that special someone understood, appreciated, and celebrated all your complexities. Like binary stars, existing in each other’s orbit.
Silly, I knew.
Because the truth was that falling in love simply wasn’t as easy as all the poets made it out to be. I could simper and swoon with the best ladies of London high society, but when it came to stifling my intelligence, together with my tendency to fixate intently on an interesting subject, I could come across as off-putting. No gentleman wanted to be humiliated by a woman who understood the world better than he did. I’d even gone so far as to simplify my opinions, to distill them down to barely any hint of provocation.
I was smart. Prodigy-level smart, especially when it came to numbers. I was able to calculate sums in my head without resorting to parchment or an abacus. I’d inherited the skill from my father, who was a genius with figures. Our estate ledgers were unfailingly correct, and from the time I’d been a small girl, he’dallowed me to sit on his knee in his study and check his work for fun. Papa would test me, too, hiding incorrect numbers in the columns, beaming with pride when I pinpointed the errors.
My proficiency for numbers had been a delightful novelty as a child…not so much as an adult woman whose only goal was to ensnare a titled husband. I’d taught myself to be coy and play the ingenue, but something in my expression would invariably display some veiled contempt that a puffed-up gentleman could sense. They wanted to be fawned over and coddled. Finding a diamond suited to me, even one in the rough, had been next to impossible.
And I did not want an arranged marriage.
Oh, I supposed an arranged match had turned out fine for my parents. They got along well, even if they weren’t the most passionate of people. My father traveled far too much, and my mother was quite busy with family obligations and her numerous charities. However, they’d conceived me, and then my little brother over a decade later, so some measure of intimacy had to have happened at least twice.
The thought of my straitlaced parents engaged in any romance was laughable.
Though I’d been an only child for the first fourteen years of my life, until Bowen was born, my cousin Ansel lived with us. After a tragic carriage accident that claimed my uncle’s life when Ansel was young, he and my aunt had moved in. It’d been nice during my childhood years, though the competition between us was brutal at times, especially in the schoolroom. I wasn’tofficially allowed to attend Ansel’s lessons, though that didn’t stop me. I copied whatever I could find and memorized his schoolwork.
My cousin would show me the problems, and we’d race to complete them. I held my own, especially in mathematics and physics. Irelishedbeating him at sums, and later on, more complex equations and problems. When he went off to Cambridge University three years ago, I’d been left behind, forced to supplement my education with books from my parents’ extensive library and stealing Ansel’s rather sparse notes when I could. I was livid that girls were denied any right to enroll—the injustices to my own sex a bitter pill to swallow.
But swallow it I had, just like every other woman born in England before me. I loved Ansel dearly, but I also deeply resented him. I begrudged his autonomy because he was male, which granted him the freedom to travel and be who he wanted, the ease to flirt and converse with whomever he desired, the ability to go toCambridgeand study whatever he wished.
Gracious, I’d sell my soul to go to university even for a day…a measlyhour.
I loved reading about intrepid women who defied convention—where there was a man theorizing about some academic subject, there was usually a woman in the background going toe-to-toe with him. No one ever heard aboutthem,of course. Émilie du Châtelet, a woman I greatly admired, was a capable mathematician in her own right, though most only knew her as the French philosopher Voltaire’s mistress. If she’d been born a man, herwritings and works would have been revered. I once read that she had commissioned men’s clothes to enter a meeting place that welcomed only male scientists!
