A Dangerous Education

The Fenwick lecture room seated ninety-two, and the four women sat where all of it could look at them.

That was by design. Front bench, left side, beneath the tall windows, with Mrs Corrigan planted at the end of the row like a post driven into the floor. Behind them the tiers climbed away and filled with men in gowns, and every one of those men could study the backs of four female heads for a full hour without troubling himself to turn round.

Nell had learned to sit very straight. It was the only defence the seating permitted.

“—which brings us,” said the Duke of Blackwood, “to the proposition that dear bread is a natural misfortune. Rain. Frost. A harvest that fails. An act of God, upon which no policy whatever can bear. Mr Alderton. You appear persuaded.”

“I am, Your Grace.”

“Then persuade me.”

Alderton stood. He was a large, pink, agreeable young man who had never in his life been required to defend anything.

“Well—the weather cannot be legislated, Your Grace.”

“No.”

“And therefore the price of corn cannot be legislated.”

“Ah.” Blackwood set down his chalk. “You have discovered a bridge between two statements and walked across it without inspecting it. Mr Cowper, is the bridge sound?”

Cowper had the sense to say nothing.

“It is not sound,” Blackwood said. “The weather governs how much wheat exists. It does not govern who may sell it, at what hour, under what duty, in what quantity, or across which border. There is a Corn Bill before the Commons this session which proposes to shut the ports below eighty shillings. Whatever else that is, gentlemen, it is not the weather.”

Somebody laughed at the back. Blackwood ignored it, which was, Nell had noticed over nineteen days, the only mercy he ever extended.

“So. Is the price of wheat a natural fact or a made one? Mr Alderton, sit down before you injure yourself. Mr Pelham.”

Pelham said something about scarcity finding its own level.

Nell raised her hand.

He did not call on her. He called on Wickstead, who repeated Pelham with different vowels, and then on a man behind her whose name she had never caught, and by the time he came back round she had held her arm up for the better part of three minutes and her shoulder had begun to ache and she was aware, in the specific way one is aware of a splinter, that ninety-two people were watching her arm.

“Lady Eleanor.”

She stood.

Nineteen days. She had come into this room nineteen times and said nothing at all, because every syllable she uttered would be entered somewhere in the great ledger the country was keeping on whether women could be taught, and she had not intended to make her first deposit until she was certain of it.

She was not certain. She said it anyway.

“The price of wheat is a political decision wearing the costume of a natural one.”

The room made a sound. Not a laugh yet, more a shifting, ninety men resettling themselves.

Blackwood’s expression did not change. “Go on.”

“Bread in this town stands at nine shillings the bushel. In Danzig it stands at twenty-nine shillings the quarter, which is to say a great deal less, and the reason the two figures have nothing to do with each other is not the weather in the Baltic. It is a statute.” Her voice came out steadier than she had feared. “The harvest sets what exists. Parliament sets what it costs. Those are separate questions and we have spent this hour treating them as one because it is more comfortable to be governed by God than by Lord Liverpool.”

“That is an accusation, not an argument.”

“Then take the argument. Your own—” She stopped.

She had been about to say your own monograph. She had read it twice and she was not going to admit that in front of ninety-two men.

“Take Ricardo,” she said instead. “Price is settled at the margin of cultivation. Very well. But the margin is not a natural boundary, it is wherever the law says it is profitable to plough, and when the ports close the law moves the margin onto worse land, and the corn grown on that worse land is dearer, and the man who owns the worse land grows rich upon a scarcity that Parliament has manufactured on his behalf. That is not misfortune. That is a transfer, and it has a direction, and the direction is upward.”

Fairchild laughed.

It was not a snort or a cough. He let it out fully, from three rows up, and two of the men beside him joined in, and the sound came down over her shoulders like a bucket of water.

Nell kept her chin level and her eyes on the front of the room, and she felt the ledger opening, and she thought: finish it, finish the sentence, if you sit down now you will never stand up again.

“Mr Fairchild.”

The room went out like a snuffed candle.

Blackwood had not raised his voice. He had taken off his spectacles, which she would learn later meant a great deal, and he was looking up into the tiers with the mild attention of a man examining a stain.

“Your Grace.”

“If Lady Eleanor’s argument is so amusing, I assume you can identify its flaw.”

Silence. It went on a long time. It went on long enough that Nell, who was the object of all this, began to find it unbearable on Fairchild’s behalf, which enraged her.

“…No, Your Grace.”

“Then permit her to finish it.”

Blackwood put his spectacles back on and turned to her, and his face held nothing at all. No apology. No encouragement. He might have been waiting for a coach.

“Lady Eleanor. You were describing a transfer.”

She had lost the thread. She stood there with her hand closed around the edge of the bench and the sentence gone out of her head entirely, and the silence stretched, and she understood that this was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

Then she found it.

“Upward,” she said. “Rent rises. Wages do not. And the second half of that is the part the Bill’s supporters have declined to write down, because a man may argue in public that scarcity is providence and he may argue in public that his rents are his own affair, but he cannot argue both in the same paragraph without somebody noticing.”

Blackwood looked at her for perhaps two seconds.

“Sit down,” he said. “Mr Pelham, take up the objection.”

She sat.

Pelham took up the objection. Blackwood dismantled it in ninety seconds and then, without warning, dismantled hers as well—found the soft place in it, the assumption she had made about the elasticity of the labouring diet, and pressed his thumb into it until it gave. He did it thoroughly. He did it without a shred of gentleness. Nell wrote it all down with her hand shaking and could not decide whether she had been honoured or destroyed.

He kept them nine minutes past the hour, which he always did, and dismissed them with the term essay.

“Three weeks. Twelve pages, and I would rather have eight good ones. The question is on the board. The set text—”

He wrote it, and Nell was already writing it before he finished, and then her pen stopped.

Whitmore, H.—On Land, Labour and the Common Right. Second edition, 1812.

The room laughed. Not unkindly this time. Somebody said modest, and Blackwood, cleaning the chalk off his fingers, said, “Mr Cowper, if you can produce a better book on the subject in the next three weeks I shall set that one instead,” and got a proper laugh, and Nell sat looking at the two lines she had written and felt something go very still and very cold and very interested behind her ribs.

He collected his papers. He paused.

“One further thing,” he said, to the room and not to anyone. “You may disagree with the text. I would be grateful if you did. But I want it done on evidence and not on temperament, and I will know the difference. A page of feeling costs me nothing and teaches you less.”

He went out through the side door.

Nell was still sitting when Mrs Corrigan touched her elbow and said that the women were required to leave the building within a quarter hour of the lecture’s end.

She did not go back to Kirkby House.

The women’s hours in the Bodmer Library ran from ten until noon, and it was twenty past three, and the porter looked at her for some time before he decided that the regulation covered borrowing rather than reading and that he did not wish to be the man who made a ruling on it.

She found it in the second alcove. Two copies. She took the one that had not been read, on the grounds that she wanted no other person’s pencil in her way.

On Land, Labour and the Common Right. Three hundred and eighty-six pages. She had read it in the spring, in her father’s library, with her feet on the fender, and she had liked it, and she had thought the man who wrote it must be sixty and probably dead.

She turned to chapter two.

He argued there that wages settle, over time, against the cost of subsistence—that the labourer’s wage is anchored, always, to the price of what the labourer eats.

She read it twice. She wrote in the margin: anchored how? by whose hand?

Then she turned to chapter seven, where he argued that agricultural improvement raises the landlord’s rent without depressing the labourer’s wage, since the improvement enlarges the whole.

She read that twice as well.

Then she went back to chapter two, and forward to chapter seven, and back again, and the porter came through at ten minutes to five and told her the library would close, and she said yes, and did not move.

Because they could not both be true.

If wages were anchored to subsistence, and subsistence rose with the price of corn, and rent rose with the price of corn, then chapter seven’s enlarged whole went entirely into one pair of hands, and the labourer stood exactly where he had stood before, holding a smaller loaf and a longer bill—and the second edition had been in print for a year and nobody, in a year, had said so.

Nell looked at the margin.

She had filled it. She had run down the outer edge and into the foot of the page and turned the book sideways to get the last of it in, and her middle finger was black to the first knuckle.

She turned to the flyleaf and started again there.

Chapter two, page 41. Chapter seven, page 208. He cannot have both.

Twelve pages, he had said. He would rather have eight good ones.

“No,” Nell said, out loud, in an empty library, to a man who was not there.