Estella stepped out onto Bond Street with her reticule still full of the coins she'd scraped together, and a feeling very much as she had that time Charlotte had rearranged all the books in the library by color instead of author.
Everything was where it should be, technically. And yet nothing made sense.
Someone had paid her milliner's bill. Not Papa. Papa didn't even know she'd ordered the bonnets, and even if he did, he hadn't the funds. Not her mother's cousin Mrs. Digby, who was currently in a tea shop around the corner with a novel and strict instructions to stay comfortable until Estella came to collect her.
Mrs. Digby was a dear, but she was seventy-three, prone to napping in public, and could not be relied upon to chaperone anything more demanding than a potted plant. She'd been arranged as Estella's companion for the Season through means Estella had never quite pinned down. Her father had been vague about it, and Mrs. Digby herself seemed cheerfully unclear on who had suggested the arrangement.
At the time, Estella had been too grateful to question it. A chaperone was a chaperone, even one who fell asleep during the soup course.
But now, standing on Bond Street with a mysteriously settled account, Estella felt the faintest prickle of something at the back of her mind. The same prickle she'd felt when Mr. Phelps vanished to Cornwall. When Mr. Ashby received his surprise inheritance…
It was a prickle that said someone was meddling in her affairs.
She tucked the thought away for later examination and turned her feet toward Hatchard's. She had an hour before tea with the duchess, and her nerves were wound far too tight. But there was no problem in this world that couldn't be temporarily improved by a bookshop.
Hatchard's was everything a bookshop should be—warm, quiet, and smelling of leather and ink. Estella felt her shoulders drop the moment she stepped inside. This, at least, was familiar territory.
She wound her way toward the back, past the popular novels and the volumes of sermons, to the shelf where the more practical texts lived. Household management. Estate accounting. The sort of reading that would bore most young ladies to tears but that Estella had been studying since she was seventeen, when she'd opened her father's account books and discovered that the word "solvent" no longer applied.
She reached for a slim volume on agricultural improvement. It promised new methods of crop rotation that might, if she was very optimistic, improve the Langley estate's yield by enough to matter.
Estella's fingers collided with someone else's. She pulled back. "Oh, I'm so sorry…"
The other hand did not pull back. It belonged to a young woman about Estella's age, perhaps a year or two older, with dark hair pinned in a style that suggested function over fashion and spectacles perched on a pert nose.
The young woman looked at Estella. Then at the book. Then back at Estella. "You want Whitmore's agricultural treatise?"
"I—yes. I was going to?—"
"Are you a farmer?"
The question was so blunt and so genuinely curious that Estella laughed before she could stop herself. "Not exactly. My family has an estate in the country, and the current tenant yields are…" She searched for a diplomatic word.
"Dismal?" the young woman offered.
"I was going to say 'disappointing,' but yes. Dismal is more accurate."
The other woman gave a thoughtful nod. "Hmm. Whitmore's methods are sound, but his mathematics are hopeful. He assumes ideal soil conditions and a growing season that doesn't account for late frosts." The young woman pushed her spectacles up her nose. "You'd do better with Humphry Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry. It's considerably more useful."
Estella blinked. "You've read both?"
"I've read everything on this shelf." It wasn't a boast. It was delivered with the same matter-of-fact tone one might use to note that it was raining. "I'm working through a theory about nitrogen content in soil and its effect on crop rotation cycles, but I keep getting distracted by the accounting texts. Did you know that most estate ledger systems haven't been updated since the last century?"
Estella stared at her. She'd never, in her entire life, met another young woman who had opinions about estate ledger systems.
"I'm Estella Hale," she said.
"Theodosia Evermore. But you can call me Thea." The young woman extended her hand with none of the ceremony a proper introduction required, and Estella took it without hesitation.
Anyone who had read every book on this shelf and had thoughts about ledgers was exactly the sort of person Estella needed in her life.
"Tell me about the Davy’s book," Estella said.
Thea's face lit up. It transformed her entirely. She went from severe and slightly intimidating to animated and pretty, her dark eyes bright behind her spectacles. "The key insight is that he separates the chemical composition of the soil from the mechanical composition, which means—" She stopped herself. "I'm sorry. Most people's eyes glaze over at this point."
"My eyes are not glazed," Estella said. "Keep going."
Thea regarded her with an expression that hovered between suspicion and delight. "You're not at all what I expected to find in the agriculture section."
