“Only if you—”
“I hate to speak of it, I really do, but it was just so spiteful what she did to me! I suppose you have a perfectly lovely name, don’t you?”
“It’s—”
“Don’t tell me what it is. Please don’t! Or maybe . . . just say it very quietly.”
I leaned close so that I could whisper. “It’s Charlotte.”
“Charlotte? Oh! I could just about weep.” Indeed, she looked as if she might. “It’s such a lovely name. I hope you won’t mind that I never intend to use it. Doing so would just make me feel so much worse about my own.”
“What is it?”
“What is what?”
“What is your name?”
“It’s so dreadfully old-fashioned that I can only attribute it to my mother dying as I was born. She was quite a stylish woman, so it couldn’t have been her idea. I just know it wasn’t. And Mrs. Bickwith was the only other person in her room when she expired. I feel for that woman the closest thing I can to hate without it actually being a sin.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“You may be quite certain that I shall always think of you as Charlotte, though you’ll know now why I can never bring myself to say it. You will have to remain Miss Withersby so that I can remain Miss Templeton. That’s why I despise the woman, but why do you?”
“I wouldn’t say that I despise her, exactly, but she seems to think we ought to be rivals, competing for the same men. Of course, she doesn’t know I don’t have any intention of marrying, but—”
“How I wish I didn’t have to either. But it’s time I accepted my fate, which is not an easy thing to do, I assure you. It’s difficult to admit to myself that I shan’t be here much longer.”
“Are you going away, then?” Who would I talk to at these parties and dinners and concerts if she wasn’t in town?
“Quite soon I imagine. Least it will be soon once I marry, for I am not long for this world. I am going to die.”
“Pardon me? Perhaps I didn’t hear you correctly, but it sounded as if . . . did you . . . did you say die?”
“I cannot help it. I am the picture of my mother who was the picture of her mother who was the picture of . . . Well, I’m sure you understand. The point being that they all died in childbirth. It’s our hips, you see.”
“Your hips?”
She nodded quite decidedly. “Our hips. They may look round and full with all the petticoats I’m wearing, but I must tell you the shame of my existence: I might as well be a boy for all the good they’ll do me. They’re not meant for having children.”
But she was a vision of health and vigor. “You must be mistaken.”
She shook her head gravely. “I may be young, Miss Withersby, but I am not stupid. I’m simply not destined to be long-lived.”
“That’s . . . that’s dreadful knowledge to live with!”
“I can, perhaps, put off the inevitable for several more months—your example has given me great hope. Perhaps longer if I could manage to work myself into some sort of scandal. But scandals are tricky sorts of things. I’ve noticed that sometimes they seem to require marriage instead of prohibiting it.”
“I just . . . I don’t . . . I really don’t know what to say.”
“That’s truly the best thing about you, Miss Withersby. I can always count on you not to know what to say. And I can’t tell you how much it’s lifted my spirits since I’ve known you.”
“I’m glad.” I was beginning to suspect that most people thought quite the opposite.
“If I can find someone completely besotted with me to marry, someone who can truly mourn for me after I am gone, then it won’t be so bad, will it? If I’m not going to live long, then I really want to do it in style. Do you think that very dreadful of me?”
“I wish you didn’t have to marry at all.”
“My father insists upon it. He can’t bear to think that I would have no one to take care of me once he’s gone. And what else am I to do? I’m not like you. I have no talents and no passions, and I find it so difficult to interest myself in causes.” She sighed. “It is my burden, and I shall bear it.”
“But—”
She squeezed my hand as she looked into my eyes, and then she turned her head away as she put a smile on her face. “I rather think our new rector has taken a fancy to you.”
“He’s taken a fancy to my illustrated field guide.”
“Come!” She gave me a chiding look. “You must do a better job at pretending if you’re going to be convincing. And just think of being a mother to eight children. I must confess that, when I think of our visit to the rectory, I’m rather glad I won’t be given the chance to look after any for myself.”
“I hardly think—”
“Oh, look. He’s coming to speak to us, and he’s hardly spared me a glance in his approach. Really, I think it’s to you he’s coming to speak.” She patted my hand. “So I’ll leave you alone to enjoy the benefit of his exclusive attention.”
“Miss Templeton, don’t—!” But she’d already flitted away.
“Miss Withersby.” The rector bowed.
“Mr. Hopkins-Whyte.”
“I hope you don’t mind entertaining a question of botany, but I happened upon a curious plant during my rambles.”
The hitch in my stomach settled as I realized he was only interested in my knowledge of plants. I had Miss Templeton to thank for putting the thought of matrimony in my head.
Upon our return, my father asked, “And how did it go, Charlotte?” as if he were afraid of my answer.
“Splendidly, if you judge such things on the music. Appallingly, if you wish to judge on the true merits of the conversations before and after and in-between.”
My father looked to the Admiral.
He sighed as he put a hand to his neck and loosened his cravat. “There is not much scope for conversation when Charlotte seems to take great pains to say things nobody expects to hear.”
“I don’t understand the purpose for conversation if no one wants to hear anything unexpected. Isn’t that the reason for conversing?”
The Admiral took my father’s flask from beneath its glass dome. “These things are so scripted, my dear. That’s what everyone takes pleasure in—the idea that at a dinner or a dance or a tea, everything goes according to plan.”
“Then I wish they would share what the plan is.”
Mr. Trimble put down my favorite pen with a sigh. “If I may?”
My father and the Admiral both nodded.
Mr. Trimble drew out a chair and motioned me to it.
I sank into it, and immediately picked up a foot and pried it out of one of the flat-bottomed blue-kid shoes Miss Templeton had lent me.
“The plan, Miss Withersby, is to do exactly the thing people expect in exactly the way they expect you to do it.”
I wriggled my toes. It was heaven, being freed from that shoe! “I believe it’s safe to say that I have no idea what is expected of me. Perhaps that’s the problem.”
He pursed his lips as he stared into my eyes, seeming to search for something to say. “Perhaps we should discuss instead what people do not expect you to do.”
“You mean to say what I ought not do instead of those things that I should be doing? Yes . . . yes, that might be best.” I picked up my other foot and peeled the shoe from it.
“You are not expected, for instance, to show your ankles.” He yanked down my skirts, took the shoe from my hand, and set it quite firmly on the floor.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re not meant to have them.”
That seemed a silly sort of rule to me—everyone had ankles. People would not be able to walk if we did not. “My feet wouldn’t work if I didn’t.”
“Then perhaps the better way to phrase it is: I’m not meant to notice them.”
“Then don’t.”
“Believe me, I am trying my best not to.”
For some reason his tone made me feel as
if I ought to apologize.
He turned his back on me. “You are not expected to make allusions to wearing anything but gowns and bonnets and you are not expected to speak of botany as if you know anything at all beyond, perhaps, acknowledging a pretty flower when you come across one.”
“Here, I must protest! You cannot—”
He held up a finger. “And you are not expected to protest. Anything!”
“You mean I’m to say nothing if—”
“If it is an objection or a complaint, then no, you must not say it.”
“In short, I am to say nothing of my life before this autumn? Or what I truly think about anything?”
He turned round to face me, with a nod. “Exactly.”
“One might go so far as to think it would be better for me not to speak at all.”
“One might.”
“Which would lead me to ask what I am doing in society in the first place.”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell us?”
Who knew it would be such an unbearably bothersome business to pretend to find a husband? But I had to keep up the fiction that I was trying to do so. Otherwise, I would never be rid of Mr. Trimble. I smiled, but not overly so, as I folded my hands atop my lap. “I am trying to find myself a husband as I ought to have done long ago. It is only right and fitting that I should do so.”
Mr. Trimble was looking at me with a suspicious slant to his brow.
“You wouldn’t fault me for trying to maintain the natural order of things, would you?”
The Admiral gave me a stiff pat on the shoulder. “There now. Exactly so. That’s the way to do it. I knew you could make a good go of it.”
Mr. Trimble didn’t look convinced. I wondered anew where he had come by all that knowledge he loved to spout. His familiarity with fashion could be explained away by his sisters, but what of his command of dinner parties? A dissolute family couldn’t be credited with partaking in such amusements, could they? I rather thought not. And neither could a sheep farmer in the wilds of the colony.
I had tired of speaking of my failings, so I addressed myself to Mr. Trimble. It was time for his failings to be made plain. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from the Botanical Society about Father’s memoir yet?”
Though I had been hoping for prevarication and the look of anxiety that comes from a project forgotten, Mr. Trimble did not oblige me. “As a matter of fact, we have.”
I constrained myself from asking what their response had been. I could search for it after he and Father had gone to bed.
“But let us not be swayed from our lesson, Miss Withersby. You must learn not to directly say what you’re thinking.”
“To first determine what it is I want to say and then try to find the best way not to say it requires quite a bit of effort, Mr. Trimble. I find it dreadfully inefficient.”
“Inefficiency is just another word for politesse, Miss Withersby. Now then, pretend I am wearing . . .” He glanced about the room and then reached for a cushion and set it atop his head. “Pretend you have just been introduced to me and I am wearing this cushion on my head.”
“Are you quite mad?”
“Tut, tut. That will never do. I’ve just said you must not say those things you first think.”
“Even I would never do such a thing.”
“You’re an intelligent woman, Miss Withersby. I’m sure you can come up with a more clever retort than that.”
“And now I must be clever too? You ask too much.”
The Admiral and Father were looking on with much concern.
“To survive in Overwich’s dining rooms and ballrooms, you must sharpen your wits. Elsewise, you are bound to become fodder for the town’s gossips.”
“Perhaps. But what is it to me if you decide to walk around with a cushion on your head?”
“I am defying all expectations of polite society, Miss Withersby, and I cannot be tolerated. You must not comment directly, but you must put me in my place at once or you will suffer all season from my impertinence.”
“I would think your stupidity in doing so provides its own sort of reward.” Then, as if a gift from above, Mrs. Bickwith’s words from the first party I’d attended came back to me. “I don’t believe I have ever met anyone so secure in their expectations that they can afford to flout convention, Mr. Trimble.”
The Admiral sniffed.
Mr. Trimble clapped. “Very good, Miss Withersby! You might just do after all.”
When I had first heard those words, I had thought them a compliment, but now I realized that they had been an insult. Perhaps I did in fact despise Mrs. Bickwith.
“Are you quite well, Miss Withersby?”
“What?”
“Is something wrong?” He took the cushion from his head and returned it to the sofa.
“No. I think it safe to say I’ve learned this lesson. I shall endeavor to remember it.”
12
When I came downstairs the next morning and peeked into the parlor, I opened my mouth in astonishment. Gone were my piles. Gone were the scattered manuscripts and proofs. There weren’t even any specimens on my desk!
Mr. Trimble had looked up at my approach. Now he was standing. “May I help you?”
“What . . . what . . .”
“What?”
“What happened?” And how had we come by a red rug? And that blue chair over in the corner? I nodded toward it. “Is that new?”
“No, I simply uncovered it. It’s quite nice, really. A Robert Adam, if I am not mistaken.” He walked over to the cupboard and opened the door. “I also found this.” He offered me a tin of biscuits. “And this.” He showed me a lacquered box I recognized as my mother’s.
“I’d forgotten all about that!” I took it from him.
“And I found a desiccated mouse in that ceramic jug by the sofa. It must have fallen in and become trapped by the journals set atop it.
I couldn’t keep myself from shuddering.
“And now, as you’ve just observed, you have a chair that can be put to good use.”
“But where did everything go?”
“If by everything you mean the bills and receipts and drafts of papers and illustrations, they’ve been put into their rightful places.”
“Where?”
He looked at me as if he thought I’d made some joke. “In drawers and cabinets, where things like those are usually placed.”
“But . . . but . . . how will I ever find them?”
He bowed. “Just leave it to me. Let me know what you need and I’ll retrieve it for you.”
A swirl of panic overtook me as I glanced around that tidy room. I sat down on a chair. Hard.
Mr. Trimble winced.
“It’s all very well and good for you to put things where you can find them, but how am I to know that the bills are being paid and the correspondence is being conducted and—”
“How did you know all those things before?”
“I just . . . I just knew. I knew what had to be done.” I had kept up with all of those things in the way that one keeps up with a spinning top. At just the right second, before it topples, a little push is supplied. I had kept a sort of running tally in my head about it all, and now and then my mind would prompt me to tend to something. “And then I did it.”
“Now, it’s quite easy to tell what’s been done and what hasn’t been. So you don’t have to worry yourself about it anymore.”
How could I not worry when I couldn’t see what there was to worry about?
“Besides, as you never tire of telling me, it’s my responsibility now.”
“Yes, but, that doesn’t mean you can just upend everything and—”
“I’d hardly say that I upended anything. I simply put away all those things that had already been upended. By you.”
“That’s hardly fair!”
My father wandered in and over toward his study, but when he got there, he stood in the doorway for a long moment and then turned toward us
, blinking rapidly behind his spectacles. “I wonder . . . I thought . . . I could have sworn that I had been working right there just yesterday.” He was pointing at his desk.
“You were indeed.” Mr. Trimble entered the study and strode over to my father’s desk. He opened one of the drawers and took from it a sheaf of papers. “Here you are. Just as you left them.”
“I thought . . . I was really quite certain I had left them just there.” He gestured toward the window ledge with an open palm. Then he glanced at the room anew. “Has there . . . was there . . . Do you think a thief came in the night?”
“Not a thief. It was Mr. Trimble. He tidied up.”
“Tidied up?” My father looked at him, aghast. “Why?”
“I couldn’t find anything.”
“What was there to find? It was all right . . . here.” He said the words sadly as if mourning the loss of the papers and all of the specimens he was used to seeing.
“But I . . . I needed to know what was there. In order to assist you. And I thought I might as well put it all away so that I could find it when you needed it.”
“But Charlotte always knows where everything is.”
“Yes, but she isn’t assisting you anymore.”
“But I don’t . . . I fail to see how . . . How can I work?” His appeal to me was heartrending, but I steeled myself against it. He’d wanted Mr. Trimble instead of me, so now he had to learn to live with the consequences of his decision. “Couldn’t Charlotte have told you where things were?”
Here, I felt the need to intervene. “No, Father, I couldn’t. Because I’m meant to be finding a husband, remember? That’s what you said you wanted. So now you’ll have to try to fit your work to Mr. Trimble’s new housekeeping scheme.” Victory was close at hand. I could feel it.
Mr. Trimble scoffed. “It’s hardly a scheme. It’s an accepted way of doing business: putting things into the drawers they’re meant to be in in the first place.”
“Be careful, Father. Next he’ll probably be wanting to organize your stockings.”
“My stockings!” Father was looking at the man in horror.
“I plan to do nothing of the sort.”
Father was patting his desk as if to assure himself that it was still there. “You can’t . . . I don’t know . . .”
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