The Countess Conspiracy (44 page)

One hundred thousand pounds was not much of a burden to carry. But if a young lady wanted to remain unmarried—if she
needed
to stay with her sister until said sister was of age and could leave their guardian’s home—that same number became an impossibility.

Almost as impossible as four hundred and eighty—the number of days that Jane had to stay unmarried.

Four hundred and eighty days until her sister attained her majority. In four hundred and eighty days, her sister could leave their guardian, and Jane—Jane who was allowed to stay in the household on the condition that she marry the first eligible man who offered—would be able to dispense with all this pretending. She and Emily would finally be free.

Jane would smile, wear ells of lace, and call Napoleon Bonaparte himself her sister if it would keep Emily safe.

Instead, all she had to do for the next four hundred and eighty days was to look for a husband—to look assiduously, and not marry.

Four hundred and eighty days in which she dared not marry, and one hundred thousand pounds to the man who would marry her.

Those two numbers described the dimensions of her prison.

And so Jane smiled at Geraldine once again, grateful for her advice, grateful to be steered wrong once again. She smiled, and she even meant it.

Want to read the rest?
The Heiress Effect
is available now.

Other Books by Courtney

The Brothers Sinister Series

The Governess Affair

The Duchess War

A Kiss for Midwinter

The Heiress Effect

The Countess Conspiracy

The Mistress Rebellion
— 2014

Talk Sweetly to Me
— 2014
 

The Turner Series

Unveiled

Unlocked

Unclaimed

Unraveled
 

Not in any series

What Happened at Midnight

The Lady Always Wins
 

The Carhart Series

This Wicked Gift

Proof by Seduction

Trial by Desire

Author’s Note

T
HE VERY FIRST THING
I
KNEW
about this series, before I knew that it would be called the Brothers Sinister, before I knew a thing about Oliver and Robert—the very first thing I knew was that Violet Waterfield, a quiet widow, and her best friend, an outgoing rake, would have been involved in a scientific partnership where she did all the work and he got the credit. Since the very beginning of this series, I feel as if I’ve been issuing disclaimers about Sebastian’s work in my author’s notes—trying my best not to refer to it as
Sebastian’s
when I knew all along it belonged to Violet.

Now I can finally talk with a straight face about
Violet’s
work.

In our world, the study of genetics started in 1865, when Gregor Mendel did his now-famous experiments on pea plants. Of course, I imagine that those experiments still might have taken place in my world—I am not
changing
the history that came before the series, just adding to it. In this case, however, my additions would have changed the history that followed. Violet’s discovery of the incomplete dominance of snapdragons in 1862, coupled with a world in which those discoveries were made by someone who had close proximity to Charles Darwin, would have accelerated the pace of scientific change.

In our world, Mendel’s discoveries were forgotten for a few decades, and not immediately coupled to Darwin’s work. They were rediscovered at the very end of the nineteenth century. Mendel’s work was a keystone: one of those pieces of the scientific puzzle that, once uncovered, led to a cascade of discoveries. Once we knew traits were inherited, we wanted to know what the mechanism was
.
Shortly after Mendel’s work made its way back into the scientific canon, the chromosome theory was first promulgated.

There’s no reason that it couldn’t have happened much earlier. In the mid-1860s, scientists began to see what was at the heart of the nucleus. That was the point when aniline blue dye (a precursor to the methylene blue that is used today) was first used in biological contexts. But they didn’t know what they were looking at. The first accounts of the nucleus are filled with utter joy and complete confusion. (One account I read felt so incoherent I referred to it as the “double rainbow” of 1864.) They understood what they were looking at so little that in 1867, they were still referring to the mass observed at the center of the nucleus as “chromatin”—meaning “stuff that is colored.” The word “chromosome” wouldn’t come about for years and years, not until people started guessing that the number of chromosomes a cell had might be important.

It was my great good luck in writing this that I was able to come up with an alternate path for the discovery of the chromosome theory—one that led right through Violet’s name. I hadn’t planned that. I started reading papers on the genetics of violets simply because I wanted Sebastian to present some work of his own.

I found a wealth of research done in the early twentieth century, right after the chromosome theory was first promulgated, on the genetics and chromosomes of violets, almost all the papers written by one J. Clausen. I am deeply indebted to that work. His description of his methods was extremely helpful in pointing out what Violet would have to do to perform her work. (One of the main things I didn’t show Violet doing in this book was emasculating the flowers that were to be pollenated, to avoid self-pollination. I’m sure Sebastian’s manhood would have stood up to such a sight, but the analogy was too difficult to work with.)

But talk of J. Clausen and the work he detailed in his papers leads me somewhere else.

It is almost impossible to trace all the female contributions to science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainly because many of those contributions went unrecorded. But even when I wasn’t looking for them, I found them. In Clausen’s paper on the genetics of melanium violets, there is an exceedingly interesting aside.

Clausen thanks his wife with the following extremely casual remark: “[I]t had not been possible to get through without the kind and very accurate assistance yielded by my wife, Fru Anna Clausen. Artificial pollinations, back-crossings, fixations, baggings and harvesting were made almost exclusively by her, and she assisted me also in the enumeration of segregated types.” This is tossed out there casually—but that constitutes almost all the labor involved in the paper. In today’s world, that work would have been done by a graduate student, who would have received at least a coauthor credit, if not prime billing on the marquee.

Clausen was the only author on that paper.

I’m not going to criticize him. But the words are there for anyone to see.
My wife did almost all the work; I am taking the credit; and nobody in this time period thinks that this is unusual.

And now we come to the very beginning of this book—the dedication.

Rosalind Franklin was a brilliant X-ray crystallographer whose images of DNA were instrumental to the discovery of the structure of DNA, and along with it, an understanding of what genes are and how they’re passed on. But even though her work was central to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, her name wasn’t on the famous paper that announced that structure. The account that Watson published of his discovery (called
The Double Helix)
called Franklin a variety of unflattering names that I doubt would have been used to describe a man. Watson fessed up to the fact that he and Crick had used her data without her permission.

Franklin died of ovarian cancer before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson and Crick for their discovery, so we’ll never know if she would have been allowed to share in that honor. (But for a contrary point, google Lise Meitner: she helped discover nuclear fission and wasn’t awarded a Nobel even though she was alive.)

Franklin wasn’t the first woman to become a scientist—not by a long shot. She certainly wasn’t the first woman to have her work used by a man without credit.

But she
is
the one who is mentioned most often—not because she was the first woman to have her work used by men without credit, but because she was one of the first women to have her treatment was recognized as unjust.

I wanted to leave Violet at King’s College at the end, because that’s where Rosalind Franklin was when she did her seminal work. I’d like to think it would have made a difference—in some other world, for some other Rosalind Franklin.

So if you were wondering about the dedication in the beginning, I hope it makes sense now.

For Rosalind Franklin, whose name we know.

For Anna Clausen, whom I discovered while writing this book.

For every woman whose name has disappeared without recognition.

This book is for you.

Acknowledgments

T
HIS BOOK WOULD NOT
have been possible without comments, editing, and proofreading help from: Robin Harders, Keira Soleore, Kate Cousino, Rawles Lumumba, Brenna Aubrey, Leigh LaValle, Carey Baldwin, Martin O’Hearn, and Robin Schneider. I am, as always, indebted to Tessa Dare, Carey Baldwin, and Leigh LaValle for helping me stay sane, to the Peeners for everything else, to Melissa Jolly for manning the hatches when necessary, and to Rawles for taking care of all the things I didn’t want to do so that I could shut up and write.

Special thanks go to the dog, for making me get outside, Mr. Milan, for accompanying me when I did, and the cat, for no reason in particular.

Extra special thanks, of the perhaps less special than usual variety, go out to DNMNC, without whom I would never have written this book.

And again, as always—thanks to you for giving this story your valuable time.

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The Countess Conspiracy: © 2013 by Courtney Milan.

Cover design © Courtney Milan.

Cover photographs
Kirill_grekov
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Dreamstime.com

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