“I suppose. I’ve never done the figuring, but it’s not so far off. We are inexpensive, compared with the Royal Colonnade, and our selection is larger. Plus, of course, we have a particular appeal for those who know of the Venus catalog.”
“Selina,” he said, a rather queer sound to his voice. “Are theEldonsmembers?”
She blinked. “Why—I’m not certain. It’s entirely possible.”
“The Cleeves are members. The Dugglebys, as you say. The Hope-Wallaces?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What about Lady Jersey?”
Lady Jersey was one of the patronesses of Almack’s, nearly as terrifying as Aunt Judith. It had always amused Selina to see her name on the membership rolls. “Yes. In fact all of the Almack’s patronesses are members. I like to imagine that they talk of vegetable-shaped phalluses over tea.”
“Aboutwhat? No—never mind.” He toppled her unceremoniously from his lap and leapt to his feet. “Selina—why has the Venus catalog not been more widely talked about before now? Why had I never heard of it?”
She watched him stride toward the window, his mouth curling, half a grin. “No one would admit to it. Not in public. No one wanted to say that they were members, that they’d borrowed books on delicate topics.” Belvoir’s in general was openly popular—the Venus catalog, on the other hand, was discussed in whispers, beneath hands, in the corners of ballrooms and behind hedges at country estates.
He bounded back across the room to her. “That’s right. No one would admit to it. Ha!”
She shook her head against the spark of hope his enthusiasm engendered. “I’m not sure what you are suggesting.”
“Perhaps Iwilltake out an ad in the newspaper. We’ll make it known that Belvoir’s is yours and then—by God, Selina, we will brazen it out.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
His grin was in full effect now, shatteringly so. “Will it cause a scandal that you run a circulating library? Perhaps. But think— no one will want to accuse you about the Venus catalog because no one will want to admit that they themselves are part of it. Imagine how those patronesses would feel to see their names in the gossip rags alongside your—your vegetable phalluses, or whatever you said.”
“You suggest that I threaten to expose my membership rolls?” There was something sacrosanct about her library records: what the patrons had borrowed, the fees they had paid. It seemed rather a wrong thing to make that information public.
But Peter was still smiling at her, a pirate’s smile. “You don’t need to threaten. You only need to go about town like a cat with cream, nodding at everyone you meet and never once mentioning that you—the Duchess of Stanhope—hold their shocking secrets in your hand.”
She had never thought about it that way. She was accustomed to thinking about Belvoir’s as something to be ashamed of. A secret guarded so closely that she must never even be seen to enter the doors of the library. Not as something that made her a force to be reckoned with.
She tried to encourage her brain to action, to look for holes in his plan. “But—if even one person reveals the Venus catalog, it will still fall to me. What about Lord Alverthorpe? He might still want his retribution.”
“He might. But think of what we know about the man. His damned English pride. Will he want it revealed that his own wife and daughter are members?”
Selina bit her lip, trying to think. “It need not be Lord Alverthorpe. It could be anyone—any of the members who’ve checked out books from the Venus catalog.”
“Oh, indeed. And to whom will they reveal it? All the rest of the members will already know.”
“Everyone will know it was I. They’ll realize thatIcreated the catalog.”
He shrugged. “You made it, yes. But they partook of it. And if they try to take you down, well—you hold just as many cards as they do.”
“More,” she whispered.
He leaned back, eyeing her with delight. “Is that right?”
“I know—who’s taken a lover. Which Tory politician has a daughter with a fondness for radical politics. I would not reveal it, of course—”
“But they don’t know that you would not.” He gave a small, startled laugh. “By God, Selina, if you had a mind to blackmail, you could make a fortune.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. “I only wanted to run a library.”
Peter pressed a quick, smacking kiss to her mouth. “Don’t be modest. You only wanted to revolutionize female education. Makes blackmail look almost decorous.”
She felt his kiss linger, imprinted on her lips. “Do you really think this could work?”
