The Footnote

The Footnote

I. The Professor, the Student, and the Dead Woman

By the time the college porter found me sleeping in my office, the bust of one of my predecessors was wearing my scarf and my notes were scattered on the floor. It was November the way only an old university knows Winter—rain in the walls, rain in the lungs, rain lodged in the divots of the soul.

“I’ll bring you up some tea,” the porter said, because this was Olmsley University and Jenkins was a fixture who had known me for my entire tenure. “You look done in, Professor.”

“I’m perfectly fine,” I said, peeling page one of my paper—Vale’s Veil: Windows, Rooms, and the Architecture of Desire—off my face. Like most of my writing, it was on my favourite author, a personal heroine of mine, the lynchpin of my latest book on forgotten female writers.

My students call me a champion for the invisible nineteenth-century women—writers who could dazzle but were largely ignored. Everyone trots out their George Eliots and Elizabeth von Arnims; I went digging for the others. Vale inspired a movement, and for an academic like me it was less a discovery than a jackpot: a fresh seam to mine in the already strip-mined quarries of Victorian letters.

With my book going to press: Lifting the Veil – The Interior world of Women Inspired by the Works of E.A. Vale, in which I argued that Vale understood sexual politics like a surgeon understands bone. The book was the culmination of everything I’d written on the author I’ve adored ever since I first stumbled across her—an old, moth-eaten collection of stories tucked on a forgotten shelf in one of Olmsley’s famous book shops. Oxford may have its ‘dreaming spires,’ but Olmsley offers something stranger: bookshops so ancient they feel less discovered than dreamt. I gather the papers from the floor reverently, my final draft.

There’s an abrupt knock, and in strolls Theo Shaw—doctoral candidate, sharp as an ice pick.

“Not this again, Theo.” I groan, too tired to be bludgeoned with his favourite theory: that Vale was secretly a man hiding beneath a bonnet. Absurd. Women cloaked themselves in men’s names to be taken seriously; what man would volunteer to be ignored? I’ve always chalked up his insistence to some subconscious urge to bring me down—another cocky boy determined to topple a woman’s shrine. And yet, infuriatingly, he’s also my best mentee. Worse: between our rows over the years, I’ve always felt the live wire of attraction buzzing underneath.

Now he’s standing over me, eyes too bright, clutching a folder. He slaps it onto my desk, plastic sleeve glinting, paper inside. A small, cream-coloured detonator.

I blink, recognising the handwriting instantly. “Where did you get this?”

For a moment, hope clangs against dread. Could it be the Marsden letter? Vale wrote often to Walter Marsden—most scholars agreed he was probably her lover.

“I bought it at auction,” Theo says, eyes wary. “Found in an attic, among Marsden’s papers.”

We regarded the letter the way you regard a sleeping baby you’ve spent hours trying to rock into unconsciousness. The elegant, slanted hand I know so well.

“Someone could have forged it,” I said. “Those water stains look suspicious.”

He sighs, rubbing a hand through his thick auburn hair. “Read it.” Then he folded himself into my large, squashy armchair and waited.

I read. It wasn’t long, ending with:

…and so, dearest Hart, there is no ‘Eleanor.’ There is only me, putting aside my borrowed corset. The critics say Vale writes like a woman with a scalpel. I have enjoyed cutting them all to the quick. Please forgive the jest. I meant to prick a vanity and discovered I enjoyed the blood.

Your own,

Lord Evan Valentine

I stared at the signature. Lord Evan Valentine. The name rang through me like a cracked bell. Of course I knew it— everyone who’s lost years to footnotes and marginalia in crumbling Victorian journals knows it. A minor comet in the Brummell constellation: less wit, more scandal. A hanger-on who drifted from salon to salon, leaving broken hearts and creditors in his wake.

And the portraits—God, the portraits. I remembered them now, the gilt-framed reproductions I’d smirked at in the Ashmolean: Valentine posing as Apollo, as Ganymede, even once as Bacchus, white skin gleaming, the composition just shy of obscene. A man remembered less for his thoughts than for the sleek musculature of his buttocks, lovingly recreated in oils.

Theo watched me. He is ruddy-faced from years of playing rugby—looks more suited to the outdoors than the library. He has taken my seminars on gendered narration and the politics of pseudonyms and sat there with his pen still, as if the point of taking notes is to digest them. He has that same stillness now.

“This will ruin me,” I said, conversationally.

“I don’t want it to,” he said. “But if Vale was a man—”

“Then I’ve written hundreds of pages on the female gaze as performed by an aristocratic fraud with good cheekbones.”

I went to the window and pressed my forehead against the cool glass.

“You could argue authorship is performance,” Theo offered. “That Vale’s work still did what you said it did—”

“Oh good,” I said. “We’ll call it drag.”

I thought he’d be celebrating, instead he seems pensive. “We could… bury the letter.”

“As well bury ourselves,” I said. “It would solve certain problems.”

There is a species of humiliation particular to women who have built their defences out of cleverness. When the cleverness fails, you discover your armour was papier-mâché.

“I thought you should see it first,” he said, softening. “Before anyone else.”

II. The Ghost in the Room

I’d been feeling watched for months. I had blamed the portrait of the founder in Hall, who looked like a walnut in lace. Or the librarian, whose chin receded into a fleshy wattle, as if he’d been bred for permanent contrition. He'd once accused me of making off with a biography of Brummel without signing it out.

That night, I poured two inches of something green into two chipped teacups and ordered Theo to stop quoting Foucault, because I could not stomach French poetry after ten. We sat on my office floor and debated the ethics of keeping a dead man’s secret so a living woman could keep her job. The absinthe glowed like a malignant gem in the lamplight.

“He wore a woman like a coat.”

“Or,” Theo said, “he found a way to be read.”

Outside, the tree-lined quad pooled with rain. Inside, my brain too was sodden, flooded with grief.

There was a sound then—as if a dictionary had sighed—and a figure flickered in the mottled mirror. A face; shadowed and hollow: he looked exactly like a handsome nineteenth-century socialite who had not slept in 150 years.

“Good evening,” he said.

My jaw unhinged itself. Theo’s hand found my wrist.

The man tilted his head. “You can see me?”

“You, sir,” I said, accusingly, “are not a woman.”

The apparition winced.

“Lord Evan Valentine,” Theo said. “The whisper that’s left of him.”

“Forgive the intrusion,” Evan said. “But it grows tiresome to be treated as gossip when one has worked so hard to become literature.”

“You,” I said, “have ruined my book.”

The absurdly handsome ghost leans towards me, a chill presence.

“I know you,” he murmurs, “I’ve watched you argue for me, fight for me, love me when I was only ink and rumour. Made me believe I’m alive again.”

With him in front of me it’s impossible not to unload: I let loose my anger about closed doors I’ve had to batter open, the men who entered without asking. I told him about the students who cried in my office when they read The Opera Cloak and found their own rage there, intact. I told him about my reputation, hand-stitched from nights when I’d forged my confidence through imagining a woman long dead, fighting for recognition.

Lord Valentine’s pale face grew more translucent. “It is not nothing,” he said finally, “to be read for the right reasons. Does a name mean so much?”

“So that’s your defence,” I said. “Ends justified with a pretty bow.”

“My defence,” he said, “is that the shelves were not made for me either. I was a society decoration—useful as a table setting, insufficient for ideas. No-one heard me when I spoke as myself, so I adopted a veil to create mystery. Eleonor was a person I was not allowed to be.”

Theo snorted. “You’re saying you did drag.”

“If you like,” Evan said, and smiled at me. God, that level of charm is deadly. “Though I am not sure ‘drag’ was the word at the time.”

“The word,” I said, “is fraud.”

“Is it fraud,” he asked, “if the truth is there between the lines?”

I was going to unleash a flurry of argument when the room tilted—Evan blurred, then sharpened, then stepped forward exactly as Theo reached for the green bottle and, in the way of moonlit secrets and darker jokes, they blurred.

Theo turned, his face contorted. His pupils widened to the size of poor decisions. When he spoke again, he did it in a voice that had learned its vowel sounds in 1860.

“Ah,” he said. “That’s better.”

“No,” I spluttered, scrambling to my feet. “No, it is absolutely not.”

Theo/Evan looked at his borrowed hands with fascination. “To feel again… how indecently luxurious.” He examined a small mole on the base of his/Theo’s thumb. “Even skin has a grammar to it.”

“Get out of him,” I said to Evan, or to Theo, or to the bottle.

“Just a minute,” Theo/Evan said. “There is something I wish to explain. And I am so seldom afforded an audience with my most devoted reader.”

“You’re dead to me,” I said, hiccupping. He winced, yet moved closer, and I couldn’t help being drawn in, my favourite lines haunting me still. I loved you best in silence, dear,

For then your thoughts were mine…Men praise the chains they lock us in,

And call the weight divine/ But I have found a lighter fate—

A pen, at least, is mine…

“Why did you do it?” I asked. “Women had to borrow men’s names just to claw their way into print. You—already privileged—slipped into literary petticoats for sport.”

He winced. “When your standing in society is so low, even pretending to be a woman of high society feels like an elevation. I was a useless bauble. I decided to take my revenge on those who talked over me at the soirees. Then I became addicted to the vantage point.”

“Vantage point?” I laughed, bitterly. “The view you enjoyed was women clambering up the cliff face you were born on top of.”

Theo/Evan looked at my shelves ruefully. “I liked the way the sentences felt,” he said, slowly. “People recognised themselves in a mirror they had not authorised.” He touched the plastic sleeve that held his confession. “Power is a game of costumes.”

I said nothing. Occasionally silence is a form of scholarship.

“Your crusade, this hunger to champion women whose names fell through the floorboards… Women who might have cured diseases died of them instead. Women who might have written masterpieces died in labour. The rest had their brilliance annexed by some man.” He was far too close, and yet I was unable to move. I had often wondered what kissing Theo would be like and with this dark intelligence behind his eyes? I was helpless to it. “…You have polished these historic gems and brought them to the light… and in doing so you have burned bright with the brilliance they were denied.”

“Whatever, Casanova. Why don’t we see if the legend lives up to the kiss?”

III. The Triangle

It would be useful if what happened next could be categorised—possession, argument, defence. Instead it was all three, and a fourth thing that felt like confession.

At some point our knees touched; then we were on the rug; the absinthe ensuring gravity was optional. The window rattled, Cathy’s ghost demanding entry, as if Ellis Bell himself had scripted the scene. Theo/Evan looked at me with two men’s eyes, and what rose in me was not choice but combustion: passion warped by anger, devotion twisted by betrayal, all of it spilling over into touch.

After, Theo/Evan lay back and stared at my ceiling. “I’m sorry,” he said, which, like most apologies, was for himself.

“For what exactly?” I asked.

“For all of it,” he said, and his voice stuttered. Theo sat up, blinking, and then covered his face with both hands. “Christ,” he said between his palms. “That was…not in the handbook.”

“We don’t have a handbook,” I said. “We have three reputations and a letter.”

He peered at me through his fingers. “I feel used.”

“Tell me about it,” I murmured, pulling my cardigan from off the lamp where it had somehow ended up.

Evan had receded, Theo’s crisp questioning look softened, his lips raw from our kisses. “What would you like me to do?”

The question and the thumping headache that accompanied it made me sway towards him.

IV. Ethics, with Citations

We walked to the river because the old university requires meaningful decisions be made within sight of swans.

“We publish a paper together,” I said. “An argument about how pseudonyms alter reception. About how reading is a collaboration between the text and the room we read it in. We float the possibility of male authorship as a thought experiment. We ask what would break if the name changed.”

“You want to soft-launch the apocalypse.”

“I want to see who betrays whom,” I said. “Including me.”

Theo considered. “And later?”

“If later is kind,” I said, “we publish the letter with context. We write a new book. About the work that saved women, and about the man who used a woman’s identity to poke at sly truths.”

“And your career?” he asked, not unkindly.

“My career has survived worse.”

He laughed, sharp and affectionate.

From the water, a swan regarded us balefully for our failure to bring bread. Evan’s voice drifted into my brain like a fog, “The advantage of hiding in plain sight, is that your audience insists they’ve seen you clearly. My words are only a costume stitched in ink. Wear it long enough and even you forget the shape underneath.”

I tossed the flat stone I’d been worrying in my hand. It skipped ten times, then vanished. “The question is,” I said, “whether your words deserve to sink?”

V. The Subversion

I wrote an incendiary book unravelling all my research and re-examining it. Theo got credit for finding the letter and got a job as my assistant lecturer on the back of it. We did not revisit the physical side of our relationship. Now we were in accord, the sexual spark had sputtered out. To my surprise, we found that in this season of endless reappraisal—when every past misstep is picked clean—they left a bit of meat on my bones. Though some said I should have known, the reviewer from TLS wrote the book was “a fearless and illuminating study that reclaims a hidden lineage of women writers while exposing the paradoxes of Valentine himself. The author’s reading of Valentine’s bisexuality as both catalyst and curse is as fresh as it is unforgettable.”

Half the faculty called the book “provocative,” the other half sent emails that read like weather reports: clouds on the horizon of my reputation. The students were better; they wrote to me about how the work mattered even if the name didn’t. The internet did what the internet does—took sides, drew blood, got bored, moved on.

…

I'd been dipping into the absinthe too much and it was taking its toll. Still, it was time to retire the green fairy or lose what faculties I had left. The last time I saw Valentine’s ghost, before it disappeared into the wispy warmth of the mirror’s reflection, he smiled and said, “I believe I can go now.”

“Where to?” I asked.

“To the footnotes,” he said.

“Are you sorry?” I asked.

“For everything,” he said. “And thank you.”

“For what?” I said.

“For reading me when I was who I was not,” he said, “and finding something true anyway.”

He blurred. The room steadied.

I submitted a revised preface to Lifting the Veil – The Interior world of E.A. Vale. It begins:

It was never ‘her’ voice, and that should matter more than it does. Yet the echo inspired women who thought they had none. So, we reconcile ourselves to the lie—not because it is right, but because it worked. Sometimes history leaves us no choice but to take our courage from liars. It was a fraud, and I wish it weren’t. But so many great female writers believed in her. And in the end, belief has its own weight.

Sometimes, very late, when the building has settled into its polite creaks and the rain goes on rehearsing the same argument with the gutters, I think: the university doesn’t care who it keeps, only that it keeps you. I’m half-gargoyle already. Give me another few decades and I’ll be rattling the windows along with Valentine.

When the porter makes his rounds, he knocks twice on my door. “Almost finished, Professor?”

“I thought I was,” I say, “But we’re all works in progress.”