Always the Bluestocking Read online

  Fire sparked in her heart, and Mariah opened her mouth to eagerly retort that she would say just the thing—but before she did, something caught the corner of her eye.

  A gentleman. He was not close, perhaps ten feet away, but close enough to hear her conversation. He was watching her closely.

  He was not a gentleman she recognized, though that was hardly saying much. He was tall, taller than she was, and broad. His waistcoat was elegantly cut, and his eyes did not look away from hers as they met.

  A faint blush tinged Mariah’s cheeks. The stranger was handsome, evidently fashionable, and had a clear interest in her. What could he possibly want?

  Attempting to ignore the sensation of his gaze on her, Mariah said calmly, “Yes, I am. Women should be educated just the same as gentlemen, and if anything, with better facilities.”

  It was not just Mr. Worcester who scoffed at her words. They had carried around the room, and a few other gentlemen shook their heads with barely concealed mockery.

  Their reactions were not new. Mariah had been forced to face them everywhere she went, whenever she spoke about the need—the right—for women to be educated.

  Despite the fact that she was far more intelligent than almost every gentleman she met, Mariah knew the world could not accept the idea that she, a woman, would attend university.

  “Why do you laugh?” she said aloud with a glare at Mr. Worcester. “Do you really believe it to be beyond the realms of possibility that a mind could exist that loves knowledge and simultaneously exists in the body of a woman?”

  “Women are not made for such things,” Mr. Worcester said with a wry smile. “Their minds are not suited to such effort. They are better placed in the home where they belong.”

  Mariah took a step forward, closing the gap between herself and Mr. Worcester, who took a hasty step backward.

  “And yet, I have outwitted you in every element of this conversation,” Mariah said calmly. “Does that mean that your place is in the home?”

  There was laughter beyond Mr. Worcester, and his ears turned a deep shade of red. “I rescind my offer to dance, Miss Wynn.”

  Mariah smiled coldly. “I never believed you made it honestly in the first place, and this confirms it. Good day, Mr. Worcester, if you are capable of such a thing.”

  Mr. Worcester did not reply. A curt nod was followed by a stalk away, with the room watching him go. Chatter grew once he was out of sight, and more than a few glances were cast her way.

  Mariah smiled. She would not allow them to see the pain in her heart.

  Mr. Worcester, Mr. Sawyer, Mr. Jones from just a few days ago…were all gentlemen so closed-minded? Would she ever meet a gentleman who could comprehend that a woman may just have as much desire to learn as he did—perhaps more?

  Seating herself in the nook where she had taken refuge, Mariah picked up her book and dropped her gaze to the page.

  A small part of her hoped Letitia would rescue her, requesting her presence elsewhere. An even smaller part of her hoped Edward would ask her opinion on something, and she could leave the room with her head held high.

  But this was their wedding reception. They would be busy being polite elsewhere, and even her adoptive brother could not rescue her from her own embarrassment.

  Mariah swallowed down the desire to leave. She should be one of the guests of honor, but instead, she was here, sitting in the corner of a room, lost in a book rather than trying to engage with the world.

  And it was not even the book she wanted.

  Closing it in a moment of fury, she looked up and saw the gentleman who had found her so fascinating during her conversation with Mr. Worcester still staring.

  His dark eyes were sharp, focused, and unwavering. The way he carried himself was intoxicating, even from this distance. It was clear he was wealthy, nobly born. Only a gentleman who has been given every one of life’s advantages held himself like that. It was the way Edward and her father had always stood in public.

  There was a young lady beside him, and Mariah felt an unexpected rush of envy. She was drenched in diamonds and was attempting to gain the gentleman’s undivided attention.

  Mariah smiled. It was rather like a comic opera, seeing such a beautiful woman so clearly interested in a gentleman, and that same gentleman oblivious to her charms.

  And then Mariah felt heat rush through her body as he winked.

  She looked away quickly and read the same page in her book. What did a gentleman like that mean by winking?

  He gave the impression of being able to read her thoughts, that they had shared the opinion for a moment that the young lady was being foolish in attempting to gain his attention.

  A shared connection, a fleeting instant of agreement that surely could not be correct.

  Mariah tried to calm her breathing, as though that would remove the redness from her cheeks. It was rationally impossible to have known his thoughts, and yet something had happened. Something she did not understand.

  When she was certain her face was composed, Mariah looked up from her book.

  The gentleman was gone.

  Disappointment tugged at her heartstrings, which was completely irrational. She did not know him, did not even know his name. The moment they had shared could have been a complete misunderstanding. He could have had something in his eye or been winking at someone else. Perhaps she had mistaken the wink for a blink.

  Mariah sighed. He was not interested in her. Many people had been attracted to the noise of her argument with the ridiculous Mr. Worcester. That gentleman, handsome as he had been, was surely no different.

  She was a bluestocking, and would always be a bluestocking and never a bride. Bluestockings did not wed, not those truly dedicated to the cause.

  And Mariah was. It was time to put her plan into action.

  She would be attending university if it was the last thing she did.

  Chapter Two

  God, he had never expected to be back in this place.

  Patrick O’Leary, Viscount Donal, scuffed one of his high riding boots on a stone on the pavement and cursed to high heaven in his mother tongue. A lady walking toward him stopped dead, looked utterly outraged, and then walked past him with her eyes averted, as though his bad temper was catching.

  Colin Vaughn, Duke of Larnwick, snorted. “My God, Donal, you do have a way with women, and no mistake!”

  Patrick grinned lazily and kept walking. “Tosh, Larnwick, you know damned well these boots cost more than that chit’s gown, and they are scuffed to hell now! I’m due a little blue language in those circumstances.”

  Larnwick shook his head, hair falling over his eyes as they walked along the street.

  Patrick was not concerned. Oxford had not changed that much, then. It was still easy enough to shock the local ladies, just as when he had been a student.

  A magpie swooped down past him, stopping him short. One for sorrow. There was something strangely mournful about the place, though he could not put his finger on it.

  “’Tis a glorious day, don’t you think?” Larnwick was looking around with that boyish eagerness he had had when Patrick had first met him. “I always loved the summer term.”

  Birds were singing in the trees, and the scent of the air was heady with flowers. It was always like this in Trinity term. Oxford had almost as many flowerbeds as trees, and the atmosphere was heavy with it.

  Patrick nodded but said nothing. He should be happy. Nothing was wrong, nothing out of place. No disaster had befallen him.

  But God’s teeth, he was bored. After years of escaping this place, where his Irish lilt had been bullied out of him, and his rural ways had been mocked for years, he was back.

  Larnwick had been the only one to take him seriously, to take him under his wing in that first year. It had been Larnwick who had convinced him to come back when they had received their invitations, and it was Larnwick alone who understood his reticence. He had made a few good friends during his time at Oxford, but Larnwic
k was the first.

  Patrick’s dark eyes scanned the buildings up and down Hollywell Street and frowned. “Absolutely nothing has changed. It is exactly the same town I remember from our days here, and isn’t there something strange about that?”

  Larnwick glanced down the street. “Strange? It’s Oxford. This is what Oxford is.”

  “Everywhere else has progressed, changed, grown, or collapsed,” Patrick said uneasily. “London is larger than ever, even Bath is heaving during the Season, and as for Ceallach back in Ireland, there are paved and cobbled streets there now, a ridiculous dream of the townsfolk when I was a child.”

  His companion grinned. He remembered now: Larnwick was from one of those big Scottish baronies up in the north. If there was anyone who understood the time it took to change a village, it was him.

  “But Oxford is like an insect in amber. It remains as it was, never growing, never adapting, just…existing.”

  Patrick could hear the petulance in his voice, but there was no other way to describe the discomforting sensation in his gut. Oxford should have changed. It had been ten years since he had last stepped foot in it, and yet he almost expected to see that younger version of himself come around the corner.

  But Larnwick was laughing. “Donal, the whole point of Oxford is that it does not change! We studied here in the same way that Wren did, and as Donne did before him.”

  “Nonsense, I did nothing so impressive as build St. Paul’s,” Patrick teased his friend as they started walking again. “I was too busy learning how to survive in my first year, and how to enjoy myself in the rest!”

  Larnwick snorted again, his head twisting to stare at his friend. “What you are really saying, Donal, is that you need constant change, otherwise you get bored.”

  It was not possible for Patrick to deny that, so he did not bother. “The worst of it all is the only change is all these bluestockings.”

  He cast a dark eye up the street as he spoke. When a whippersnapper, come up from Ireland onto the mainland for the first time in his life, the streets of Oxford had teemed with gentlemen just like himself. Hurried, harassed, and in some cases, slightly hungover.

  All gentlemen.

  Now, as he looked out at the inhabitants wandering up and down the street, it could not be more different.

  Ladies were everywhere, and not the simpering, shopping young ladies who were an absolute delight to behold. No, these were not ladies of leisure, but studious young things, faces furrowed with concentration, ruining those beauteous looks.

  Some of them, shamefully, were carrying books with them, almost as though they were students themselves!

  Did they know no shame? Patrick shook his head. These bluestockings, women who had naught to do but shame themselves with the desperation to be like gentlemen.

  Larnwick was laughing. “The bluestocking? Land sakes, Donal, you must have them in Ireland, we have them in the north all over the place. ’Tis all the fashion now, you know.”

  “Not with me,” Patrick said as one young lady hurried by them in a pelisse of black, almost as though it were a gown. “’Tis shameful. What in God’s name do their parents think?”

  His eye was caught by another woman. She was petite, buxom in a heady way that would have taken a younger gentleman’s sense. Her eyes caught his gaze, and he grinned, layering on the O’Leary charm.

  That was before he noticed the three books tied together by string, dangling from one arm. She saw his attention move, and when he looked back, there was a silent rebelliousness in her gaze as she refused to look away.

  And then she had passed them, and Patrick was shaking his head. “Ach, ’tis not to be borne.”

  There was the lilt. No matter what he tried to do, it always returned when speaking from the heart.

  “Some parents are encouraging it,” Larnwick said cheerfully. “I imagine it is the same instinct that in times past would send daughters to a convent.”

  Patrick snorted as they reached the corner of Catte Street. “No gentleman of any respect would surely allow their daughter to do such a thing. Why, education belongs—”

  But he was interrupted as they turned the corner by someone who walked into him, dropping their books all over the ground.

  “Damn,” Patrick muttered, quickly dropping to help the poor chap pick them up. “I do apologize, old thing, I was not—ye gods!”

  It was not a gentleman, but a lady who had been rushing around the corner and had dropped her precious cargo to the ground. With burning cheeks and averted eyes, she pulled the book out of Patrick’s arms and walked away quickly.

  He stared after her with his mouth hanging open, and only Larnwick’s laughter brought him to his senses.

  “You hardly knew what hit you,” his friend chuckled, brushing dust from his coat. “God in heaven, I thought you were going to have a fit!”

  “Sh-she—it was a she!”

  Larnwick only laughed all the harder. “You have not been back to Oxford in a while, have you?”

  Patrick sighed. “No, and now I remember why. What has got into these ladies’ heads?”

  His friend shrugged. “Come on, we are but a few streets away, and just in time, too. There’s the bell.”

  But Patrick could barely focus on their intended destination. “This all has to stop, Larnwick, this madness. The very idea that a young lady could learn in the same way as a gentleman! It’s ridiculous!”

  But it was clear his companion could not care less whether young ladies were living on the moon.

  “Ten years ago, we graduated from these halls, and now we have been invited back for a little extravagance,” Larnwick said easily. “A few weeks of lounging around, dining well, drinking even better, and you can disappear back to Ireland if you so wish.”

  Patrick sighed. “I have plenty to do on the estate back in Ireland. Ceallach needs me more than a bunch of gentlemen I have had no wish to see for the last ten years.”

  Larnwick stepped aside for a pair of young ladies giggling over a new piece of gossip and grinned. “Do not be daft, Donal, or I shall be forced to shake it out of you. I know you hardly go back there! You haven’t been to Ireland for almost as long as I haven’t been to Scotland. Even the accent has gone!”

  Patrick grinned. “Ach, I can always revive it, ye ken, when the lasses need to hear a bit o’the old country.”

  It was certainly something he was careful with. In London, it simply would not do to allow his childhood accent to rear its head. The Irish were not popular there.

  But in Oxford, or Bath, or parts of Chichester, a little lilt was enough to turn a lady’s head—and his natural charm enough to seal the deal.

  “Try to leave some of the ladies for the rest of us,” Larnwick said with a chuckle, but he was prevented from saying much more as they had just arrived at Wessex. Their college.

  Patrick sighed. “They haven’t even bothered to mend the signs.”

  His eyes raked over them. Right by the porter’s door were the same missives: threats promising dire retribution if anyone should return to bed after curfew; a list of library books currently missing, which to Patrick’s eye, looked remarkably similar to the list when they had graduated; and a note bewailing the loss of a beloved pet.

  The porter bowed low as he stumbled out of his room. The only reason the poor man bowed so low was the ridiculous cap and gown they were wearing. He could not remember the last time he wore his graduating outfit, and even now, it was itchy and uncomfortable.

  Larnwick, on the other hand, was born to it. His gown hung around his shoulders as though it had been made for him—which, Patrick reminded himself, it probably had been. His own had been third-hand, and he had never got around to having it adjusted.

  “Welcome, honored sirs,” the porter was muttering, gesturing that they should enter. “You will find the lecture beginning in…”

  Patrick found it a challenge to pay attention beyond the irritating pleasantries. This was everything he had hated about O
xford, even then. The posturing, the propriety, the rules and regulations about every blasted thing.

  But then, every O’Leary had been to Oxford for the last four generations. His father had been determined that Patrick would be no different.

  “Coming, Donal?”

  Patrick shook himself to return to the present. He could think of nothing he wanted less, and yet he had come all this way, hadn’t he? Why else, if not to see all those faces who had discouraged and discounted him? Wasn’t he here to show them what he had become, how their words had not halted his growth in the slightest?

  Patrick took a deep breath and nodded. “If this is going to be anything like the lectures we had to endure as students,” he muttered to Larnwick as they walked through the archway into the quad, “I will need you to wake me about…say, in ten minutes?”

  Larnwick chuckled but was prevented from replying when he opened the door to the lecture hall. All was quiet and settled inside. They must have been two of the last people to arrive.

  Adopting a somber face quickly and striding in, he looked around imperiously. Yes, there were the faces he knew so well. Some a little lined, some a little more bald than he expected, but there they were.

  Patrick swallowed. This was not the time to lose his poise. He was an O’Leary, and where he came from, that meant something.

  “Look at all of you,” he said calmly into the silence. “Do not fear, chaps, we have arrived.”

  There were some muffled chuckles from behind him, and he turned to see Larnwick wink. A few mutters grew in the crowd, and Patrick could make out a couple.

  “Is that—sure not O’Lanky?”

  “God’s teeth, I did not even think he had graduated…”

  Patrick’s jaw clenched, but he did not allow the pain to spread to his face. He and Larnwick sat in two empty seats at the end of a row, facing the empty stage in silence.

  O’Lanky. How had he managed to block out that particular insult? Hearing it muttered in the crowd made it feel like only yesterday he had been tripped up in the quad outside with the laughter of others ringing around it.

  He was of two minds whether to say something to the gentlemen who had attempted to make his time here a misery, but then a gentleman rose from the front row and stepped onto the platform.