Chapter Text
From an early age, Miss Jemma Simmons had been taught to always assess a situation in a calm, scientific manner. Her father had been a successful businessman, granted a peerage for his services to the crown in developing airship technology, and he'd appointed a long string of tutors for his eldest daughter, all of them devout believers in the Steam Revolution. Now, standing in the middle of a crowded ballroom in a distinctly unflattering dress, Jemma shut her eyes and imagined the voice of her favorite tutor, clever Miss Lovelace. We always begin with a hypothesis, Miss Simmons. Very well, Jemma thought. Hypothesis: If she spent any more time in this room, then she would faint from a unique combination of boredom, heat, and the meant-to-be-cutting comments about that “odd Simmons girl.”
Jemma's eighth and last Season would be over in two months, one week, and five days and then at twenty-seven, much to her delight and her mother's horror, she would officially be on the shelf. It had been obvious from the moment she made her debut: the men of high society were more interested in demure English roses than thorny lady scientists and she was not at all interested in men who spent their time yearning for the days when they rode around the manor and shouted commands from the back of their horses. It had been quite a simple deduction in the end. Her family's—if she was being honest, her mother's-- social ambitions prevented her from marrying someone of a lower class who might appreciate her for the ideas she could bring to a partnership. Her own dignity prevented her from marrying some older noble who wanted her to provide children, or one of the young rakes who owed debts to her father. Finally, her own extensive reading had convinced her that love matches were a rarity for those who were actually sought after, practically nonexistent for those who weren't, and extremely unlikely to ever happen to her. Her father would leave her a comfortable inheritance in his will, enough to live modestly on her own. So therefore, she wouldn't marry.
Easy as two plus two, she'd told herself. She'd seen enough unhappy marriages in the past eight years to convince herself that she wasn't missing much, to get used to the idea of a life spent by herself. Not by herself, she corrected. She quite liked the idea of being an eccentric spinster aunt, the kind who bought extravagant presents for her nieces and nephews and said outrageous things in the middle of family dinners. The kind of woman who did what she wanted. Leaning against the wall of the ballroom, Jemma sighed in frustration. Outside the drawing rooms and country manors of society, she knew that women were running their own businesses, publishing novels, campaigning for social causes, reporting for newspapers—she'd even read about a woman running for Parliament. But inside, everything was invitations to tea and the new fashions for gloves and things men had decided were suitable for women.
Focus, Jemma. How can you test your hypothesis? Option one: Stay in the ballroom, attempting to make conversation with the other wallflowers, until she actually did faint from boredom. Option two: Dance with one of the elderly suitors that her mother kept presenting her with until she had to fake a faint to avoid their lecherous glances. Clearly, what she truly needed was a new hypothesis. Hypothesis: If she found a library, then she would be saved. She set off across the ballroom and finally spotted a set of heavy oak doors after dodging waltzing couples, butler mechanicals carrying trays through the crowd, and the floating gas lanterns that were the latest fashion. Hypothesis: If heavy oak doors are spotted, then a library is imminent.
Ten minutes later, she was curled up in a window seat with Mr. Darwin's most recent treatise and three trays of food. Butler mechanicals kept on trundling through the library with refreshments—it must have been some kind of glitch in the clockwork—and she was happily buttering her second crumpet when the doors swung open, a shadow fell across the carpet, and a distinctly Scottish voice declared that she was stealing his crumpets.
“I was certainly not. First of all, there was absolutely no indication that the crumpets had been claimed. Second of all, you would have had to be here to actually claim them. And third of all--” she sprang up from her seat to face the voice and her protests died away. Hypothesis: If she had never seen the color blue before, then she could have believed it only existed in his eyes.