den. She had tried a number of wholly reasonable excuses, the most reasonable being that she had nothing to wear for the occasion. Her trunk, tightly packed with Lady Mabel’s walking dresses and evening gowns from seasons past, was currently thudding about on the carriage roof. Lucie herself had stayed back—she was a known radical, and the duke didn’t suffer radicalism gladly.
The duke is not home.
Even if he were, it was highly unlikely that he’d remember a woman like her. Crossing paths with commoners must be a wholly unremarkable experience for him. Still. Was it truly just reading Thucydides that made her feel ill? The last time she had been inside a nobleman’s house, it had been a disaster . . .
She moved the carriage curtain and peered at the landscape slipping by. Snowflakes flitted past the window, leaving the hills and sweeping ridges of Wiltshire white beneath a cloudy morning sky.
“Will it be long now?” she asked.
“Less than an hour,” Hattie said. “Mind you, if it keeps snowing at this rate, we might become stranded.”
Hopefully, the roads to Kent would remain clear. Be back in Chorleywood on December twenty-second, Gilbert had written. A little over a week from now, she would be scrubbing floors, making pies, stacking firewood, all with a fussy child strapped to her back. Hopefully, three months of scholarly life hadn’t made her soft. Gilbert’s wife, like her or not, needed all the help she could get.
“Say, just what made you become interested in this?” Hattie was eyeing The History of the Peloponnesian War in Annabelle’s lap.
She studiously avoided glancing at the dancing letters. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I had a choice in the matter. My father taught me ancient Greek as soon as I could read, and the wars in Messenia were his specialty.”
“Was he an Oxford man?”
“No, he went to Durham. He was a third son, so he became a clergyman. He mostly taught himself.”
“If only they had educated women sooner,” Hattie said, “there would be fewer books about carnage, and more about romance and beautiful things.”
“But there’s plenty of romance in these books. Take Helen of Troy—Menelaus launched a thousand ships to win her back.”
Hattie pursed her lips. “Personally, I always found a thousand ships a little excessive. And Menelaus and Paris fought over Helen like dogs over a bone; no one asked her what she wanted. Even her obsession with Paris was compelled by a poisoned arrow—what’s romantic about that?”
“Passion,” Annabelle said, “Eros’s arrows are infused with passion.”
“Oh, passion, poison,” Hattie said, “either makes people addle-brained.”
She had a point. The ancient Greeks had considered passion a form of madness that infected the blood, and these days, it still inspired elopements and illegal duels and lurid novels. It could even lead a perfectly sensible vicar’s daughter astray.
“Plato was romantic, though,” Hattie said. “Did he not say our soul was split in two before birth, and that we spend our life searching for our other half to feel whole again?”
“Yes, he did say that.”
And he had found the whole notion ridiculous, which was why his play about soulmates was a satire. Annabelle kept that to herself, for there was a dreamy glow on Hattie’s face that she did not have the heart to wipe away.
“How I look forward to meeting my lost half,” Hattie sighed. “Catriona, what does your soulmate look like? Catriona?”
Catriona surfaced from her book, blinking slowly like a startled owl. “My soulmate?”
“Your other half,” Hattie prompted. “Your ideal husband.”
Catriona blew out a breath. “Why, I’m not sure.”
“But a woman must know what she desires in a man!”
“I suppose he would have to be a scholar,” Catriona said, “so he would let me do my research.”
“Indeed. How about yours?” Catriona asked quickly.
“Young,” Hattie said. “He must be young, and titled, and he must be blond. That rich, dark-gold color of an old Roman coin.”
“That’s . . . quite specific,” Catriona said.
“He will sit for my paintings,” Hattie said, “and I can hardly have a grandfatherly Sir Galahad, can I? Think, have you ever seen a knight in shining armor who wasn’t young and fair?”
Annabelle bit back a snort. Small village girls talked about knights and princes. Then again, for a girl like Hattie, knights and princes weren’t just creatures from a fairy tale, they came to dine with her parents in St. James. And if one of them married Hattie, he would shelter and indulge her, because at the end of the