“I had not expected you to understand.” She had, and was disappointed. “But I take my appointments seriously; they matter to me because the Cause matters to me, and I . . .” To her dismay, her throat tightened. “Where are my shoes?”

She spotted one, near the chair. Lying on its side, laces sprawling, like some creature that had been hit by a carriage and left on the road. She sat down hard on the chair and stuffed her foot into the boot.

Tristan went down on one knee, plucked her hands off the shoe, and laced his fingers through hers.

“Let me help.”

“You,” she said, looking down at him with surprise. “Help.”

“I am trying not to take offense at your incredulity.”

“I do not need help.”

“Very well. Allow me the pleasure of making myself useful then, oh stubborn one.”

She hesitated. “But you know nothing about my work.”

His left brow arced. “You talk about your work constantly.”

“I do?”

“Constantly,” he drawled.

“And you . . . listened?”

He shrugged. “I listen. When I’m interested.”

“Oh, and for how long have you been interested in women’s suffrage?”

“I never opposed it. And I am interested in you—that suffices.”

Very well. He looked serious enough.

Perhaps it was time they both found out whether the Cause could be interesting to him in its own right. The meeting with Lord Melvin had been soundly missed either way—she might as well try and proceed with work on other fronts, such as the mail at home.

Her breathing was still a little shaky. What an emotional outburst. She was learning she was that, emotional.

“I shall go ahead,” she said. “I shall leave the kitchen door unlocked for you.”

Chapter 29

When Tristan spotted the three bulging hemp bags at the center of her drawing room, he stopped dead in the doorway and whistled through his teeth. “When you said bags of mail, it was not an exaggeration.”

He strolled toward the desk while shrugging out of his jacket, then briefly derailed her focus by rolling up his sleeves and exposing muscular forearms. He looked enticingly purposeful, doing so.

“What do I do?” He turned to her, his face expectant.

Kiss me.

She cleared her throat. “You pick a letter. You determine whether the writer is a married woman and whether her woes pertain to her marriage. Whenever that is the case, you sort the letter into a category.”

She turned to unlock the doors to the cherrywood cabinet to take out the labeled boxes and the notebook for the tally.

“There are five main grievances married women experience,” she said as she set the boxes down next to each other on the long table. “Emotional, physical, or financial maltreatment, melancholia due to a lack of purpose, or a combination of the four.”

Tristan was silent, and when she glanced at him, he wore a frown.

“Right,” he said, and waved. “Continue.”

“You allocate each letter to a category and add up the numbers in this ledger. That is all there is to it.”

“I see,” Tristan said, his tone suspiciously neutral.

“Help yourself.” She presented the opened bag with a little flourish.

“Lucie.” The frown was back in place. “What, on God’s earth, is the purpose of this . . . ghoulish exercise?”

“Ghoulish? This is research.”

“Toward which end?”

“Do you know what the main argument of the opposition to a Property Act amendment is?”

He had the decency to look vaguely contrite. “I’m afraid not.”

“They argue that we must keep the legal status quo because unless a woman’s person is completely subsumed in that of her husband, it threatens the harmony in the home. They reason that only when a woman is completely dependent on her husband in all things will he feel obliged to care for her despite his selfish male interests. In the same vein, she will be deterred from nagging her provider and act like a good wife.”

His lips quirked without humor. “There is a logic to it.”

She shot him a dark look. “Logic matters not when its predictions are not grounded in reality. We have collected ample proof that coverture does not protect women from neglect or outright harm. We could in fact go as far as to claim that the opposite is the case. Which means the main case against amending the act is hollow, morally and also factually, and people who continue to insist upon it will have to do it in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This,” she said, and made a gesture to include all the bags of mail, “is our case against the Property Act.”

He gave her an unreadable look, but she could hear his mind working from here.

He shook his head and reached for the letter opener.

He took one of the envelopes from his bag and sliced it open with a smooth flick of his wrist.

“My dear lady,” he read out. “It has been thirty years since Florence Nightingale sailed to the battlefields of Crimea, where she near single-handedly saved thousands of our wounded soldiers from certain death.

“Unfortunately, the existence of women such as myself has not changed despite Miss Nightingale demonstrating the tenacity and abilities of the female sex. And I call it an existence, rather than a life, because we much resemble a fancy bauble, decorative but ultimately useless, our place decided by others. I can’t help but feel that our lives lack meaning, filled artificially by chores and rituals that are empty and do nothing to better our minds, or the cruel realities blighting this world—the poverty, the spread of diseases, the ill-use of children, to name only a few. There are days when I feel I cannot breathe, and my heart is racing, as I watch my life running through my fingers like sand through an hourglass . . . huh.”

He dropped the letter onto the middle of the table and looked at her with raised brows. “I suppose this one is for the melancholy category?”

He selected the next envelope from the top of the pile.

“From a Mrs. Annie Brown. . . . My dear lady . . . I am increasingly convinced that the struggle for a married woman’s rights will be a longer and a harder fought battle than any other that the world has known. Men have been taught that they are absolute monarchs in their families, ever since the world began, and that to kill a wife by inches, is not murder—”

He faltered. “Bloody hell,” he said after a pause, and that was all he said for a while.

At first, she tried addressing him now and again, and he reacted with absentminded grunts, until she gave up. He did not touch the biscuits or the cup of tea she served him when the clock struck eleven. He waved away the brandy she offered, too. A focused Tristan, with furrows between his brows. She kept stealing glances at him in between letters. So many sides to a man she had once thought as shallow as a puddle.

Her bag had emptied and been replaced by the next as his looked still half-full, but then, she had developed a keen eye for the gist of the matter, and rarely needed to read to the end. He startled her by abruptly coming to his feet and staring into a nothingness.

She lowered her letter into her lap. “Would you like some tea?”

“No,” he said absently, and then most ungentlemanly cracked his knuckles in his palms.

“If it is too tedious, you could also—”

“Oh no. This is interesting.” The jeering note in his voice alarmed her. “Very interesting.”

“In truth?”

His smile was positively sardonic. “Oh yes. It has been a veritable treasure trove of insights. So many gems. This one is my favorite.” He picked up a letter he had set aside.

“My dear lady,

“I turn to you in confidence, in the hope that you could help me on a matter about which a woman should be silent as a grave, but I cannot be silent any longer.

“I know a man who tells his wife, ‘I own you, I have got a deed to you and got it recorded, I have a right to do what I please to you,’ and the law of a Christian land says she shall submit, to indecencies that would make a respectable devil blush for shame. Man, who is said to have been created in the image of God, is the lowest animal in the world, and the most cruel. It shatters my faith in the goodness of God, so much that it makes me tremble for my own reason.”

Here, he stopped, and his gaze bore into hers over the rim of the page.

She inclined her head. “Yes?”

“You read such things every day, I presume.” There was a disconcerting flicker in his eyes.

“I do, yes.”

“Since when?”

She had to think about it. “They came pouring in around five years ago, when my name had become established. We have been collecting and categorizing them for nearly two years now.”

“‘We’?”

“The suffragist chapters across Britain. I consolidate the tally every fortnight.”

“Ah.”

He was pacing round the room, his hands clasped behind his back.

“How many?” he then asked curtly. “Letters, I mean.”

“Presently, we have a count of fifteen thousand.”

His laugh was harsh. “And those are just the ones who write to you.”

“I expect there are many more who never speak,” she acknowledged.