Page 72 of A Game of Scandal

He gave a start upon spying me, his face turning first white and then a blotchy red. He treated me to a furious glare before leaning in to the young man beside him and muttering something in his ear. Suddenly more than one pair of eyes was raised towards where we sat, and from the sneering expressions it was clear the attention was far from friendly. A murmur of discontent flowed outwards from Mr Trent, like ripples in a pool, and all of it was directed towards me.

“Unnatural,” I heard one of the young men declare to his neighbour in a voice loud enough to carry. “A girl like that could be putting herself to much better use.” He waggled his brows suggestively and stifled laughter drifted up.

Professor Carmichael ignored all this, but when he finally straightened and moved to the large chalkboard beside him, the room fell crisply silent.

The lecture itself was a blur. The other young woman in the gallery scribbled furious notes, her pencil flying across paper – a fact that was remarked upon by one of the men below, who called up to ask if she was making notes for her dressmaker. Others clearly considered this comment to be the height of wit, as loud guffaws followed, only to be stifled when Professor Carmichael turned to glare at them in annoyance. The girl herself seemed unfazed by this and carried on doggedly writing.

I had no problem following what Professor Carmichael was outlining – it was not a particularly challenging class on binomial expansion. Still, he raised one or two interesting points and I followed the lesson closely – which is more than could be said for Mr Trent and his friends who fidgeted their way through the hour, looking desperately bored and barely bothering to write anything down. The burning feeling inside me grew; the flame was fanned.

When we left, I was furious to find that my eyes had welled with tears, which I blinked angrily away.

Laetitia said nothing, but walked alongside me, her head high, seemingly unbothered by what had passed.

“Is that … usual?” I asked.

She didn’t need to ask what I was referring to. “As I told you,” she said, guiding me back along the gravel pathways, “there will always be those resistant to change.”

“I don’t understand it…” I heard the frustration in my own voice. “I don’t understand who it hurts. I don’t understand why an educated woman should be considered such a threat.”

Laetitia smiled. “But an educated woman is a threat, Felicity,” she said. “We threaten to disrupt the status quo. Educated women are less likely to marry. They are less likely to accept a social structure that has been in place for many centuries, and more likely to demand independence over our minds, our bodies, our futures. Education offers freedom.” She stepped closer as we made our way back on to the busy road. “Change like that doesn’t happen overnight. It happens degree by painful degree. If you choose to attend university, you will become a part of that change, but by no means the end result. Ah.” She looked up. “Here is Caroline to take you to Newnham. I must head home and work on my own lecture.” I turned to follow her gaze and spied Caroline approaching through the crowd.

Out of the corner of my eye, I thought for a moment that I had seen someone else I knew. I could have sworn that the man walking down the street was Horatio Peabody, the friendly American from the poker game, but he was gone before I could be certain. I shrugged. If it had been him, it was for the best he didn’t see me.

“Thank you for taking me,” I said to Laetitia with heartfelt sincerity. “It was important that I saw what things are really like.”

“I hope you’ll consider enrolling next year,” Laetitia said, and I knew it was the closest thing I would get to her approval, so I smiled.

“There you are!” Caroline greeted us cheerfully. “I was afraid I was running late, but I might have known Carmichael would run over. Shall we go and see the college?”

We said our goodbyes to Laetitia, and Caroline chattered as we walked the short distance up Newnham Walk, where we were confronted by a pair of ornate bronze gates set in a tall red-brick building of graceful curves and turrets. Dozens of bicycles rested against the walls.

“Welcome to Newnham,” Caroline said as we passed through the gates, and she called out a greeting to the porter in his lodge as we went by.

When we emerged on the other side of the gatehouse, I experienced another of those jolts – only this time there was nothing complicated about it at all. This time it was like stepping into the pure golden sunshine after a long winter.

Modern red-brick buildings were arranged tidily around a large and beautifully tended central garden. Wisteria clambered riotously over the walls, bees sailed by in drowsy bliss, flowers bloomed in the well-kept beds, and the doors and window frames were a bright, cheerful white. My shoes crunched over the gravel pathway as I took an involuntary step forward and let out a small sound of surprise.

It wasn’t only that the space was warm, welcoming and bright. It was the women.

There were women everywhere.

They walked arm in arm, deep in conversation. They sprawled on the lawn with their books in front of them. They stood, clustered around doors, waiting to attend a class. They pushed dark-framed bicycles past me towards the road.

Here, at last, was the feeling I had longed for, the one I had expected to find at Cambridge. Here was the joy of it.

“Oh!” I murmured. “It’s so beautiful.”

Caroline looked around with pleasure. “Yes, and we keep having to expand to make more room. We used to rent the land but we recently bought the site. Now we control it all.”

“It feels like heaven,” I said. I glanced at her. “Attending the lecture at King’s was … not what I expected.”

Caroline’s lips pressed together; the look she gave me was full of understanding. “We still have quite a way to go,” she agreed, guiding me towards one of the buildings. We paused on the threshold, looking out over the gardens. “But this is progress. Less than thirty years ago, Newnham didn’t even exist. It’s only twenty-five years since the first of these buildings was erected. Look how far we’ve come.” She gestured to the scene in front of us.

“I would love to be a part of this,” I said.

“You should apply,” Caroline said easily. “Or are you wedded to the idea of London?”

“I hadn’t got as far as thinking about that,” I admitted. Attending university at all had seemed like such a leap.