A Study In Scarlet Women (19 page)

“I imagine the young man in the carriage must have bent over backward to help you.”

Charlotte smiled slightly. “He was very chivalrous and even brought out a map of London to help me orient myself. After I spoke with him, however, I became even more suspicious about his purpose here. So when I did knock on your door, instead of merely handing over the reticule, I asked to be brought to you. And a moment outside the drawing room was enough to let me know what Miss Hartford wanted.”

“I did think her accent was put on,” said Mrs. Watson. “She's a talented mimic, but she'd entered into it with too much enthusiasm and sounded as if a
Punch
caricature had come to life.”

“Perhaps it would be a good idea to retract the advert. I imagine you wouldn't wish for any more young women to show up at your door trying to claim you as a mother, whether they are sincere or intent on swindle.”

“You are right,” said Mrs. Watson. “The experiment has run its course.”

Something in her tone struck Charlotte. Mrs. Watson of this evening was different from the exuberant woman she had been earlier in the day: quieter, more solemn, and more . . . apprehensive.

She rose from her seat and walked to the mantel. There she stood with her back to the room, studying a row of framed photographs. Many featured a dark-haired young man with a steady, but mischievous, gaze.

He was in uniform in their wedding photograph—the army then. Dead six years, according to what Mrs. Watson had told Charlotte—and six years ago there had been a war with Afghanistan.

Distant colonial wars that one read about in the newspapers were like theatrical plays: vivid and dramatic. One could get caught up in the excitement of the battle, the unexpected turns of events, the high passions in the halls of Parliament. But in the end, they didn't seem quite real.

At least they had never felt real to Charlotte before this moment. Before she stared at Mrs. Watson's elegant back and saw thousands of dead men strewn across a harsh, brown landscape.

Mrs. Watson turned around. Charlotte half expected to see the very embodiment of grief and fragility. Instead she was reminded of the reason she had intuited that Mrs. Watson had been successful on the stage—she exuded a sturdy confidence, that of a woman who trusted herself because of a lifetime of good choices.

“Shortly before you arrived, I came to a decision,” said Mrs. Watson, her voice soft, her tone firm. “I knew it wouldn't be long before you called, bearing my reticule. And that would be an excellent opportunity to offer you the position of a lady's companion.”

This
development Charlotte had entirely failed to foresee. Her lips flapped a few times before she managed a reply. “Me? To you?”

“We do have a lack of respectability in common, don't you think?”

“It isn't your disregard of my scandalous recent past that astonishes me, ma'am. Most people tend to want nothing to do with me after I enumerate what I see about them.”

In fact, it had been a singularly effective means to persuade a gentleman to withdraw a proposal of marriage.

Mrs. Watson smiled wryly. “I can see why. It was extraordinarily uncomfortable to be laid so bare. But in my case . . . in my case it was also a tremendous relief.

“I stopped wearing mourning after the regulation period. I had a young girl under my care and I wanted her to see that life went on. That the loss of a man, even if he had been the love of her life, was
not the end of a woman's existence. That such a loss was something she could recover from, with both courage and grace. But now that my niece is away in Paris, now that I have no audience for whom to perform this role of the merry widow, I—”

She pulled out a handkerchief that had been tucked into her sleeve, straightened it, and then tucked it back in. “In any case, I thought, let me try it. Let me try having as a companion someone before whom it is useless to pretend that everything is all right. Let me try living without hiding my grief, because to her that grief would already be plain as day.”

For a minute, neither of them said anything.

Mrs. Watson retook her seat and looked at Charlotte. “Will you take the position, Miss Holmes?”

Would she?

Charlotte left her seat and walked to a window. It gave onto the same street where Miss Hartford's carriage had been parked, waiting for her return. The carriage was gone, but in its place, a man stood underneath a streetlamp, reading a newspaper.

At first she thought he was the man from the carriage. Instead, she recognized him as the one who had waited out the rain across the street from her earlier in the afternoon.

The one she'd suspected of following her.

She was not alarmed: Whoever had commissioned the man's service had not done so with the intention of harming her, but to keep an eye on her.

This did not make her happy—she did not care to be closely monitored. She wasn't angry at the person responsible for this surveillance—in his place she might have done the same. Nevertheless, she wished her secret guardian hadn't felt compelled to be so positioned as to be able to effect a rescue at any moment.

It implied that such a rescue was not only necessary, but imminent.

That she couldn't in good conscience—or cold logic—disagree with the assessment made it feel as if the air was slowly leaking from her lungs.

Of course she would have preferred to pull herself out of her difficulties by her own competence alone. That, however, was not the world in which she lived. If accepting the kindness of a stranger would stabilize her situation and give her another chance at ultimately improving not only her own lot but Livia's, too, then she must set aside her pride and do what was necessary.

She turned around. Mrs. Watson was still working on the same macaroon. She glanced up at Charlotte, her gaze kind but uncertain.

“You are absolutely sure you wish to have me as a companion, ma'am?” Charlotte asked.

Mrs. Watson set down the remainder of the macaroon. “Yes, I am.”

“Then I will accept the position. Gladly and with much gratitude.”

Dearest Livia,

I have a position.

And not just any position, but one that provides good wages, light duties, and excellent accommodation. In fact, I am sitting in my new room, which boasts of a four-poster, silk-draped bed, a painting of a lovely and abrupt seacoast that must surely belong to the Impressionist school of works, and a view of Regent Park outside my window—not that I can see much now, it being late in the evening.

My belongings have been conveyed from the boarding home where I had been staying. They fit perfectly into my new wardrobe. Nothing looks out of place—my brushes on the vanity, my typewriter on the desk, even my magnifying glass on the nightstand. It is as if this room has been waiting for me to arrive and make myself at home.

I am a lady's companion.

And now that you have gathered yourself from where you had fallen on the floor, allow me to repeat myself. I am a lady's companion. Not a Society lady, obviously. And most definitely not a matron or rich spinster of the grand bourgeoisie—they care more about respectability than even we do. But a lady of the demimonde, a former stage performer, comfortably off and most amiable.

Please do not worry that I might have been ensnared into some scheme. My new employer is both sensible and kind and I have found not only employment but acceptance. My only worry is that I shall manage to repel her, when I have every intention to the opposite.

For the moment I will not set down my new address. The last thing I want is for this letter to fall into the wrong hands and Mamma to show up at my benefactor's front door, in a fit of trembling outrage. You know she would, whatever Papa's orders to the contrary, if she heard that I, in my exile, had taken up with an actress.

I will post this letter first thing in the morning, and hope that by afternoon, when I go to the post office on St. Martin's Le Grand, I will already have a response from you. God bless the eleven-times-a-day delivery in this great city and may it bring your words to me at the very earliest hour.

Charlotte

Charlotte had, as usual, chosen to paint an optimistic picture for Livia.

To put it mildly, she was ill suited to acting as a lady's companion. It hadn't been merely greed that had made her decide on becoming a headmistress at a girls' school. It had also been the autonomy, the authority, and last, but not least of all, the relative isolation of power. A headmistress made all the decisions—
and
she was not expected to make friends. To be paid five hundred pounds a year to be aloofly in charge—well, it would have been earthly paradise.

A position as a lady's companion offered none of what she sought to gain in employment. A lady's companion was a professional appendage. The spare legs to walk upstairs to fetch the needlework. The extra voice to read the paper aloud in the evening. The additional body in the house so rooms didn't echo with emptiness.

In her specific case, however, it wasn't this impersonal servility that concerned Charlotte, but her new employer's lack of prior experience with other companions and her general high opinion of Charlotte's mind. She was worried that Mrs. Watson would think it demeaned Charlotte to be asked to fetch needlework or read out loud from the paper. That she would, in the end, have too little to do.

And Mrs. Watson—she also worried about Mrs. Watson.

Charlotte was an acceptable conversationalist when the conversation revolved around weather, fashion, and the goings-on of the Season. But the deepest feelings of others were always a mystery to her. Not that she didn't know what sentiments were and how to read them, but she herself didn't seem to experience life in quite the same emotion-driven manner.

Her days were catalogued as facts and factual observations. She sometimes thought of herself as a combination of a phonographic cylinder and a motion picture camera—which inventors were still working on—that moved through life recording everything she saw and heard.

Sometimes she mentally annotated certain moments; most often she let them pass into memory without comments, as only sounds and moving images. It was in her adolescence that she discovered most people's memories worked nothing like hers. For them the only indelible elements in the dossiers of a life were the emotions. They might not remember when, where, or with whom something happened—or be reliable in their recall—but by God that joy, that
anguish, that stab of pure hatred, the emotions lost none of their power and potency.

She accepted it. She couldn't understand it viscerally, but she accepted that she was the odd man out and that in this, as in most other respects, the norm did not remotely describe her experience.

How could someone like her comment on Mrs. Watson's grief, if she were ever asked to? Therefore, she was more than a little relieved when Mrs. Watson made no mention of her late husband the next day.

Mrs. Watson also gave no list of regular duties Charlotte was to perform. “It's new to me, too, such an arrangement,” she said apologetically. “I'm sure in time we will arrive at a state of affairs that suits both of us.”

Charlotte debated whether to mention her great willingness to fetch items—and decided to wait a day or two. Mrs. Watson did formally introduce her to the staff: Mr. Mears, the butler; Madame Gascoigne, the cook; Polly and Rosie Banning, a pair of sisters who shared housemaid and kitchen-maid duties; and Paul Lawson, Mrs. Watson's groom and coachman.

Mr. Mears painted in his spare time. Madame Gascoigne was Belgian, not French—and not from the French-speaking part of Belgium. And while the Banning sisters might have grown up in the same household, they were not actually related by blood.

All of which was fine, except . . .

“I'm not sure whether it's my place to bring it up, Mrs. Watson,” said Charlotte when she and her employer took a walk in Regent Park, “but I'm strongly persuaded that Mr. Lawson has spent some time in a penitentiary.”