Read Chapter 34: An Unexpected Panel

The email arrived at 8:47 on Tuesday morning, and by 8:52 Elodie had read it four times, certain she was misparsing the syntax.

“James,” she said, her voice strange in her own ears. She was standing in the corridor outside her office, still in her coat, her bag slipping off one shoulder. He was two doors down, emerging with a stack of library books and a paper cup of coffee. “The committee. They’ve sent a response to our joint conclusion.”

He was at her side in three strides, reading over her shoulder. His coffee sloshed but he didn’t notice. The email was formal, dense with committee boilerplate, but buried in the fourth paragraph was a sentence that made the air between them go still.

*Given the exceptional quality of the collaborative submission, and in light of the proposed structure of the Marguerite de Veyrac Centre for Late Medieval Women’s Writing, the Committee invites Dr. Marchand and Dr. Whitmore to attend an expanded panel this afternoon at 3 p.m. to discuss a potential co-directorship arrangement.*

James read it aloud, slowly, as if tasting each word. “Co-directorship arrangement.”

“They said *potential*,” Elodie said.

“They also said *expanded panel*.” James’s eyes met hers. “The faculty board was supposed to vote on Thursday. This is happening now.”

Elodie’s pulse was doing something arrhythmic. She had been prepared to fight. She had spent the night composing a rebuttal that would defend her tenure case at Lyon while leaving room for James at Oxford. She had half-drafted a letter withdrawing her name—then torn it up when she remembered their promise: no unilateral sacrifice, no noble, quiet martyrdom.

But this. This was not in any of her contingency plans.

“What do we tell them?” she asked.

James was quiet for a moment. Then he shook his head, and a laugh escaped him—low, disbelieving, warm. “We tell them we’ll be there. And then we panic together in the Bodleian until we figure out what we actually want.”

---

They spent the next four hours in their usual corner of the library’s Upper Reading Room, spread across a table with their notes, the diary, and a growing list of questions neither of them knew how to answer.

“If we split the salary,” Elodie said, circling a figure on the committee’s outline, “neither of us can afford that flat in Jericho I was looking at.”

“You were looking at flats?”

“For after the defense. When I thought I’d be staying.” She said it quietly, aware of how much hope was stitched into that small past-tense verb.

James reached across the table and touched her wrist—just the once, a brief pressure before he pulled back, aware of the librarian’s occasional patrols. “Tell me what you’re afraid of.”

Elodie exhaled. “That we’ll say yes out of excitement, and then discover that sharing a research centre is like sharing a bathroom. That we’ll wake up in six months and resent each other—my margin notes, your filing system, the way you hum when you transcribe.”

“I don’t hum.”

“You do. Very quietly. When you’ve cracked a difficult hand.”

James’s mouth twitched. “Fair. What is it you want them to hear this afternoon?”

She closed her eyes. The answer came easier than she expected. “That I believe in the work. That Marguerite deserves better than to be shelved between two warring factions of scholarship. That if we do this, it has to be genuinely co-direction—not husband-and-wife, not rivals forced into a marriage of convenience, but something we build.”

James turned her words over. “So tell them that. But maybe don’t mention the husband-and-wife bit. They’ll start ring-shopping before we’ve said yes.”

That startled a laugh out of her. She pressed her hand to her mouth, and for a moment they were just two people, in the oldest library in the UK, laughing about the absurdity of the hour.

---

The panel met in a wood-panelled room in the Old Schools, long since repurposed for administrative use but still carrying the weight of four hundred years of academic ceremony. Six faces looked back at them from around a polished table. Professor Ashford was there, his expression carefully unreadable. So was Dr. Ellery from the faculty board—a woman whose approval Elodie had courted since arrival. And two external assessors whose names Elodie only knew from citation indices.

The chair, a silver-haired man with the accent of an old Yorkshire family, opened the proceedings. “I trust you’ve both had time to consider our proposal.”

Elodie exchanged a glance with James. He gave her the smallest nod.

“We have,” Elodie said. “And we’re grateful for the committee’s openness. But before we can accept—if we’re to be considered—we need to clarify what co-direction would look like in practice. What authority, what autonomy, what commitment.”

The chair lifted an eyebrow. “A rather direct opening.”

“A rather radical proposal deserves a direct response,” James said. And then, surprising them both, he went on: “We have spent nine weeks arguing about this manuscript. We have produced two distinct, coherent readings of Marguerite’s work that have strengthened each other through opposition. That is not a flaw in our partnership. It is the point of it.”

Dr. Ellery leaned forward. “Partnership?”

“Collaboration,” James amended. But Elodie heard the nearly imperceptible pause and knew Dr. Ellery did too.

She cleared her throat. “Dr. Whitmore and I are proposing a model where neither voice dominates. We’re proposing that one of us serves as primary director for a set term, the other as co-director with equal standing in decisions about acquisitions, fellowships, and publications. Alternating leadership. Complementary methodologies. A centre that houses both a feminist reading of Marguerite and a historical-context reading of her—not as competing factions, but as two lenses on the same, extraordinarily complex woman.”

The silence stretched. Then the external assessor on the left—a woman with steel-grey hair and glasses that reflected the window light—spoke for the first time. “And what of your own institutional commitments? Dr. Whitmore, I understand you have a final interview at Cambridge tomorrow morning.”

James’s shoulders squared. “I do. And I intend to attend it.”

Elodie’s stomach dropped. That wasn’t the plan. They had agreed he would tell Cambridge the truth—but telling them the truth was supposed to mean explaining why he was *declining*. She turned to look at him, and he met her eyes with something unreadable.

“I wanted to see what the committee said today before I made any decisions,” James went on. “But my answer to Cambridge has always been the same. I will not be accepting a position that doesn’t allow for genuine co-direction with Dr. Marchand. If this centre moves forward, I will stay. If it doesn’t, I will need to consider what my options are—but I will not compromise Marguerite’s scholarship, or my partnership, for institutional prestige.”

The chair’s pen paused. “And you, Dr. Marchand. What of Lyon?”

Elodie’s mouth was dry. She had not told James about Lyon’s formal offer yet—not in words. She had only mentioned the possibility. “I am—considering all options that allow us to pursue this work together.”

The panel exchanged glances. Dr. Ellery made a note. The steel-haired assessor’s mouth curved, just slightly.

“And the diary?” she asked. “You’ve both referenced it in your correspondence, but we have yet to see its contents formally documented.”

Elodie reached into her bag and withdrew the photocopied pages she had prepared that morning—a selection of Marguerite’s most significant passages, translated and annotated in readiness for her own defense. She set them before the assessor.

“This is the evidence my reading rests on,” she said. “But more importantly, it’s the reason this centre exists. Marguerite chose scholarship over marriage. She chose the work over the acceptable life. We have both—separately—interpreted her choice differently, but we agree she deserves a future where her work is read, taught, and studied. That future is best built together.”

The assessor’s eyes moved down the pages. Her expression gave nothing away.

“The committee will confer,” the chair said, rising. “We will have an answer for you by the end of the week.”

“The end of the week?” James repeated. “Our defense deadline is Thursday.”

“Then perhaps,” the chair said, with a fractional smile, “you should hope for speed.”

---

They fled to the Eagle and Child, the pub James had chosen because of the Tolkien association and because it was dark enough that no one would notice them sitting too close. They claimed a corner booth. Elodie ordered a half-pint of bitter she didn’t really plan to drink. James got a whisky that sat untouched on its circular coaster.

“Well,” he said. “That was not what I expected.”

“You said you wouldn’t compromise any partnership. That was—that was bold, James.”

“It was true.” He shrugged, but the corners of his eyes were soft. “I meant every word. If they split us up, I don’t want Cambridge. I don’t want any version of this that doesn’t include you arguing with me about comma placement.”

Elodie laughed. She actually laughed, loud enough that the elderly man at the next table looked up. “We’ve spent the last week in agony over the wrong problems. I’ve been planning a life without you. You’ve been planning to sacrifice Cambridge. And all along the committee was—” she gestured vaguely, “—sitting in a wood-panelled room, drawing up spreadsheets about shared salaries.”

“Co-directors,” James said, tasting the word. “We’ll need a joint letterhead. A seating chart when we have joint author events. A policy for whose notes go in the archive.”

“We’ll need,” Elodie said, “to agree on how to share a library office without killing each other and what to do when one of us gets an idea at three in the morning and wants to call the other.”

James’s smile softened. He reached across the table and took her hand—the pub was dim enough, and he didn’t care who saw. “I think we can manage that.”

“James,” Elodie said, and then stopped. She looked down at their interlaced fingers. Beneath her joy, a small, cold thought surfaced. “You still have the interview tomorrow.”

He nodded. “I’ll go. I’ll tell them honestly: I’m withdrawing from consideration. There’s a better opportunity here. A different kind of opportunity.”

“And if the committee says no on Thursday?”

James’s brow furrowed. “Then—” He didn’t have an answer. Neither did she.

Elodie reached for her phone, thumb swiping to the email she had been pretending not to think about all afternoon. The one from Lyon, marked *Confidential*, confirming the visit next month to discuss a permanent chair.

“I haven’t told you everything,” she said. “Lyon wants me to come in person. Next month. They’ve offered a full professorship.”

James held very still. “What are you going to do?”

The question hung between them, heavy with everything—fellowship, career, the life they’d both imagined, and the one they were beginning to imagine together.

The pub door swung open, letting in a gust of cold air and two laughing students. Elodie watched them pass, and then she looked at James and told him the truth.

“I don’t know yet. But if the committee says no—I don’t think I can take Lyon if it means leaving you behind. And I don’t think I can ask you to choose me over Cambridge without knowing both of us are choosing something real.”

James leaned closer, his voice dropping half a register. “Then maybe we don’t wait for the committee. Maybe we decide what we want—and we tell them what it is.”

Elodie’s breath caught. “And what do we want?”

He didn’t answer in words. He just held her gaze, steady, unhurried—until the question no longer felt like a threat but like a promise gathering shape between them. Outside, the Oxford bells began to ring four o’clock, and Elodie realized she was smiling.