A Man Above Reproach by Evelyn Pryce

with me addressing you in this way, again, you are free to burn this letter after you have read it.
    Ye gods, he was infuriating even when he was not present.
    My research is taking longer than expected, so I regret that I cannot call you by your real name, as yet.
    Cad.
    Finding information on the subject we discussed a few days ago has proven nettlesome. I do hate when a puzzle goes unanswered, but I am tenacious. My sources tell me that you have not been back to our meeting place. I understand this, but I do hope that you can accommodate a visit from Lord Thackeray, my sister, and I on this Thursday afternoon. I would like to talk more about your publishing ventures and my sister hopes that Sally can help her find some appropriate novels for her personal shelves. Nicholas is simply always bored. If it is agreeable that we come, you need not reply to this letter.
    I cannot stop
    He had left the crossed-out phrase in, instead of rewriting the letter. She thought it out of place, since he seemed so fastidious, from his frocks to his measured speech.
    I have been overly occupied thinking about you. Now you surely must burn this. –L.
    With much satisfaction and without a second reading, she put the end into the flame of a candle and set it in an empty bowl. Josephine watched the thing burn to ashes as she tried to decide whether or not to reply.
    She kept coming back to the fact that he had said he had forty-eight copies of
On Society’s Ills and the Real Price of Prostitution
in his foyer, after the wretched mistake of the kiss. Obviously, there had been one copy in the room with them. She had sent fifty, the whole lot. No one had ever bought it before. That left one book unaccounted for. Where was that book? What if it was missing? Or worse, what if it was in the hands of someone from her youth, someone from Staffordshire?
    Blast it all to hell; she would have to let him call on Thursday.

C HAPTER F IVE
----
    “If it makes you uncomfortable to think of a world of educated women, then I suggest you might instead examine your fear as a deficiency in yourself. What about an educated woman makes you feel less secure about your own person? What harm would it be for you to give the fairer sex a fair shake? What, gentlemen, are you afraid of?”
    —F ROM
O N S OCIETY ’ S I LLS AND THE R EAL P RICE OF P ROSTITUTION
BY J OSEPHINE G RANT
    “This book is outrageous,” Nicholas seethed.
    Elias was shaving and he regarded his friend through the looking glass, rinsing his razor in the bowl of water beside him.
    “Pardon?” He ran the razor carefully down the edge of his cheek. Dryden still tried to shave him every so often, the same way he tried to tie Eli’s cravat, but it was the principle of the thing. Elias had never been completely comfortable having a valet, but Dryden had been with the family for years; he was a part of it. Thusly, Elias tried to do whatever he could with his own hands and enjoyed it. Men of leisure’s brains rotted, as his favorite professor at Oxford had always told him. Elias would have taken his letter to Miss-Lady-Whomever-Grant on his own, if he wasn’t so conflicted about setting eyes on her again.
    “This book that you gave me, Lennox. It is shocking.”
    “You will have to be more specific, Nicholas.” He tapped the razor again, before turning his attention to the other cheek. He probably shouldn’t have let himself go two days without shaving. He was irritated, all around, and they would soon have to get in the carriage. Alessandra was very excited to go to London with her big brother. “I have 1,235 books in my library, ranging wide in era and points of origin, exactly which one are we talking about?”
    “This Miss Grant tosh. The one there are fifty copies of, the lot sitting downstairs. Don’t suppose you have counted them in your scholarly total yet.”
    Oh.
Elias had forgotten that he had given the copy to his friend in the first place, and he most definitely had not expected