Read Online A Most Extraordinary Pursuit by Juliana Gray - Free Book Online

there?”
    â€œWell, my father and my stepmother, to be precise. Olympia lent us his ship for an entire year, almost. My half brother was born off the coast of Argentina, in the middle of a hundred-year gale.” He laughed. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen my father so frightened. At one point, my stepmother ordered him off the ship in a lifeboat. Luckily he ignored her and carried on, with the help of a bottle of Scotland’s finest, procured for him from the ship’s stores by yours truly. One doesn’t much listen to women in the throes of childbirth, you see. Anyway, she had another the following year, so I suppose it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.”
    â€œYou shouldn’t speak of such things.”
    â€œWhat, childbirth?” He tilted his head to one side. “I never could make that out, actually. What’s improper and what’s not. Nothing more natural than having a baby, and yet we’re not allowed to speak about it. Why is that, do you think?”
    â€œBecause it’s—because—well, a woman’s delicate sensibility demands—”
    â€œOh, rot. If you had seen my stepmother laboring forth in the middle of a hurricane, you’d have no more regard than I do for this so-called female delicacy.” He knocked the ash from his pipe. “It’s because babies are the natural consequence of human concourse, I suppose.”
    I choked into my fist. “Sir!”
    â€œYes, exactly. And there’s nothing dirtier, is there, than a man and woman coming together in mutual— Now, don’t flounce off, Truelove. You’re a sensible, emancipated woman. If a chap can’t have a sensible, emancipated conversation with a sensible, emancipated woman, what’s the point of civilization?”
    â€œThis is not a sensible conversation, and I don’t have the slightest idea what you mean by emancipated.”
    He made a fluttering motion with his hands, as of wings. “Free. Independent. Able to think and act and decide for oneself.”
    â€œI hope you’re not accusing me of being a
suffragette
, Lord Silverton.”
    â€œWell, are you?”
    â€œOf course not!”
    His hands dropped to the rail. “But don’t you want the vote?”
    â€œCertainly not. Why should I? It’s a nasty business, politics, and we women are well clear of it, in my opinion.”
    â€œOh, nothing more beastly than politics, I quite agree. Pigs in the sty and all that. But it’s rather essential, you know, if one wants to get one’s way in life.”
    I looked down and smiled in the general direction of my hands, which were gloved in kidskin and folded, one above the other, on the rail before me. “I don’t mean to shock you, Lord Silverton, butwomen have been . . .
getting their way
, as you put it, for millennia, without recourse to voting for it.”
    â€œAre you quite sure of that, Truelove? I can think of a few instances—”
    â€œSuch as?”
    He pulled at the wisp of golden curl that escaped onto his forehead from beneath the shelter of his woolen cap. “The suttee, for example.”
    â€œYes, a horrifying practice, quite repugnant to our British sensibilities. But do the widows themselves object? Do their families? Very rarely. So it is not the legality of the matter that must change—the politics, if you will—but the moral constitution of the people themselves, of which women are guardians. Once the women decide they want something else, I can assure you, they will shortly have it.”
    â€œYou dazzle me, Truelove. I’m dashed if there isn’t a fatal hole in your logic somewhere, but for the moment you have me at an absolute loss. Drawn, quartered, flopping in the wind.” He chewed on his pipe. “Though—and I don’t mean to be cheeky—doesn’t that make you emancipated?”
    â€œSir, I gather your notion of