Page 71 of How to Fall for a Scoundrel
“Do you object to me tagging along as an interested party?”
Ellie bit back a smile as she caught Tess’s amused glance in her direction. “Of course not. You can come if you wish.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
The entrance to the Royal Society’s rooms in Somerset House were guarded by a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, who glared in friendly rivalry across the shared vestibule at a bust of Michelangelo, placed before the Royal Academy’s door. Harry laughed as he pointed out the perpetual standoff between the Arts and the Sciences.
Daisy and Tess had both returned to the office, so Ellie was once again alone with Harry. She’d already put on her spectacles to project a suitably serious, scholarly air, partly to appear more competent, but also to remind herself that she was there to work, and not merely flirt with Harry.
The gruff gentleman at the front desk frostily inquired if they were members, and she lied shamelessly to gain access.
“We are not, but my father, Lord Ellenborough, has tasked me with undertaking some research in your archives which he hopes will prove invaluable in cracking a case.”
She didn’t dare glance over at Harry, sure that his expression would make her blush guiltily.
The man’s coldness evaporated. “It’s for the Lord Chief Justice? Oh, well, in that case, of course. May I ask exactly what it is you’d like to see?”
Ellie pushed her spectacles higher on her nose, as if their admittance had never been in doubt, and inspected her notebook. “I believe the paper we’re looking for would have been published in your yearly journal,Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.”
“Do you know the name of the member who presented the article?”
“I’m afraid not, but it would have been in either 1791 or ’92.”
The man nodded, his long side-whiskers twitching. “Ah. This way.”
Harry shot her a congratulatory glance as they followed the man into a huge two-level library, its floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with innumerable leather-bound tomes. A few desks with chairs for private study were dotted about, and Ellie received several raised eyebrows from their inhabitants at her feminine presence in such a male sanctum.
She raised her nose a little higher in the air. The only reason there were currently no female members of the Royal Society had absolutely nothing to do with the inferior ability of the female brain—as one obnoxious dinner companion had once suggested to her—but more to do with the fact that women were denied the same education as their male counterparts.
She considered mentioning it to Harry, but since idle talk seemed to be frowned upon in the library, she held her tongue.
The clerk led them to a section of shelving and pulled out two enormous leather-bound volumes, numbered 81 and 82, with the dates 1791 and 1792 detailedin gold on the spines. He placed them carefully on a nearby table.
“All the papers published by the society are in here. Do you know the subject, if not the author?”
“I think it’s an article on the human eye or iris. Under the biological sciences.”
The old man shrugged. “The articles aren’t indexed, I’m afraid. You’ll just have to look through each one and see if it’s the one you’re after.”
Ellie sent him a grateful smile and sat in one of the hard wooden chairs. “Thank you.”
The man left them, and Ellie pushed one of the enormous books across the desk toward Harry, who took a seat opposite.
He grimaced at the thickness of the books. “That is alotof papers.”
“It’s for your own good,” Ellie teased. “Get reading.”
She opened her book, and spent the next half hour scanning through the most mind-boggling array of articles, with titles such as “Experiments on the analysis of the heavy inflammable air,” and “An account of some extraordinary effects of lightning.”
She glanced up at Harry. “Have you ever wondered about ‘The rate of traveling, as performed by camels, and its applications, as a scale, to the purposes of geography’?”
“Can’t say that I have,” he whispered back, his eyes flashing with amusement. “Haveyoulain awake at night pondering the ‘Astronomical observations on the Planets Venus and Mars, made with a view to determine the heliocentric longitude of their nodes’?”
“Regularly,” Ellie murmured, trying to suppress a giggle. How was it that even the dullest task became fun in Harry’s company?
They each returned to their books.
Finally, just when she thought she’d go cross-eyed with boredom, she found an article entitled “Observations on the natural variation of pigmentation in the human iris, including an unusual case of heteroglaucos,” by Dr. William C. Emberton, F.R.S.