Gabriel.
Professor Tyrant to his students (and several members of the faculty when they thought no one could hear them).
Her husband.
Elodie’s face blazed. She thrust the suitcase at Motthers without looking, turned on a heel, and began striding back toward the velocipede.
“P-professor!” Motthers cried out, but Elodie ignored him. She had to get away…even while her mind ran headlong into the pit of memory.
—
She’d married Gabriel on a Monday afternoon in September, almost exactly one year ago. It had been an accident.
If only she’d not gone to the Minervaeum, London’s private club for academics, after attending the annual Thaumaturgic Cartography symposium. If only she’d not felt so queasy from the odors of pipe smoke, steamed pudding, and nitroglycerine swirling through the club’s Paracelsus Lounge that she’d decided to open a window. And if only doing so had not brought her close enough to where Gabriel sat with Professor Dubrovic that she’d overheard their conversation.
“Oh dear,” Professor Dubrovic was saying. “Four Balliol students living upstairs from your flat?” He shook his head sympathetically.
“They are constantly quoting poetry,” Gabriel answered, managing to grouch in such refined tones, one naturally assumed he was in the right, because he sounded like he must be. “And they debate Shakespeare’s authorship at the top of their lungs. Or perhaps it’s just that they want breakfast at all hours—in any case, if I hear another cry for Bacon, I will go quite mad. I need to find new accommodation before I’m driven to educate them.”
“The place across from me in Holywell Street is vacant,” Dubrovic said.
“I know, and it would be ideal. I inquired, but the landlady only wants a married couple.”
Dubrovic shrugged. “So get married.”
There followed a pause in the conversation, due to a chemistry professor across the room having detonated her pudding. While the other patrons variously cheered or complained, Dubrovic smirked over the rim of his whiskey glass at Gabriel. “No need to look so perturbed, old chap. Amor est mortuus. I’m just talking about a marriage of convenience.”
Gabriel frowned. “Oh? And where would I find a wife at such short notice?”
I’d marry you, Elodie thought with a wistful sigh. She’d adored him since the day they had met in Advanced Principles of Thaumaturgical Cartography, two eighteen-year-olds embarking upon a master’s degree far sooner than their peers. He’d gotten there via a first-class bachelor’s degree, she by exceptional entry, having spent most of her life in the fields of Europe and Canada with famous geographer parents. They could not have been more different. Regardless, Gabriel Tarrant had from the very start represented her ideal of manhood. He possessed compelling gravitas, exceptional intelligence (and perfectly aligned facial contours).
But he also scrupulously ignored her existence. Elodie could not blame him, however. She wasn’t beautiful, she lacked proper refinement, and then there was that time she accidentally dented his expensive, thaumaturgically-charged copper sieve when using it to swat a fly in the classroom…
Suddenly, a ringing silence made her look up from the window’s latch—whereupon she discovered that Gabriel had, at that moment, become very aware indeed of her existence and was staring at her in a way that made her feel like a map location with a pin stuck in it.
For one frantic second, Elodie mentally cataloged every wrinkle and ink stain on her dress. Then she dragged together whatever dignity she could find within herself and stared right back at him.
“What?” she said defensively.
“You’d marry me?” he asked, echoing the thought she’d apparently spoken aloud.
Oh, damn.
—
“The other professors don’t respect me,” she explained two days later, back in Oxford, as they walked to a church, the landlady having accepted Gabriel’s application. Elodie’s hair was unraveling from the intricate arrangement she’d spent hours concocting, her white dress was really far too matrimonial for the occasion, and somewhere along the way she’d lost her quiet dignity, perhaps in the same place as the handkerchief she’d bought for the traditional “something blue.” Every few yards she glanced at her husband-to-be, still not quite believing the situation she found herself in. He just stared ahead, giving the impression he was walking alone. Nevertheless, Elodie couldn’t stop talking.
“They think an unwed female professor is a terrible idea. That’s why I’m agreeing to marry you.” (Well, and the fact that she was an idiot, unable to keep her thoughts in her own head.)
“Uh-huh,” Gabriel answered, glowering at a nearby oak that was shedding its old leaves onto the footpath.
Actually, now that she mentioned it, Elodie felt quite heated on the subject. “Women have been allowed tertiary education for a hundred years now, thanks to Queen Charlotte’s sponsoring it, and yet Oxford’s geography staff thinks a woman with a doctorate is some kind of bizarrity. Never mind that there’s a female ornithology professor even younger than I am; never mind that I know what I’m doing. I have more field experience than most of them put together, but do they care?”
“How strange,” Gabriel said as he watched a squirrel scamper up the tree with a paperback novel in its mouth.
“Yes, exactly! Strange is just how I would describe it. Strange, and yet so very common. Misogynistic. The departmental secretary told me outright that I’d plague other professors with my ‘tempting availability.’ ”
“Hm.”
“My mother said that was probably just his way of asking me on a date.”
Gabriel almost tripped on the edge of a cobblestone. “What?” he said, looking at her finally, his forehead creased with a frown.
“I know! Can you believe it?”
“Did you believe it?” he asked in return.
She huffed a laugh. “No. The only dates Coffingham knows about are the ones he buys at the greengrocers in an effort to be cosmopolitan.”
Gabriel glared at the church farther along the street as they continued toward it. He clearly did not want conversation, but if Elodie had ever found an off switch within herself, she’d lost it again long ago.
“When I’m married to you, they’ll have to respect me.” (For no other reason than the fear that, if they didn’t, “Professor Tyrant” might come and look at them.)
“So,” Gabriel said, “if we do this, I get decent housing, and you gain the respect of your peers? And you think that’s a good deal?”
Elodie recognized that he was offering her a chance to withdraw, and she considered it—which is to say, immediately, completely refused it. Her proposal may have been accidental, but the opportunity to marry Gabriel Tarrant was, as her more modish students would say, a no-brainer.
In other words, she failed to apply her brain to it.
