Page 50 of A Conspiracy in Belgravia
Lady Ingram bolted from her seat. “You have no idea what we had.”
“But I know that you can never regain it, even if you do see him, even if he agrees to more meetings in the future, and even if you forsake your vows and become his lover. You are a different woman. He is a different man. The most you will achieve is a pale, corrupted echo of your youth, a mirage that will console you not at all.”
The woman who would never be Mrs. Finch stood as still as a pillar of salt, her fists clenched.
Miss Redmayne held out an envelope. “This is the fee you paid. There will be no charge for this consultation.”
Eleven
“My aunt tells me I was right in denying Lady Ingram any possibility of reaching Mr. Finch,” said Miss Redmayne softly. “But I’m not as sure of it myself.”
They were back at Mrs. Watson’s house. Mrs. Watson was in her room dressing for dinner, Charlotte scanning the small notices in the back of the paper, Miss Redmayne circumnavigating the afternoon parlor, tapping her fingertips against table corners, mirror frames, and the luxuriant fronds of a large, potted fern.
Charlotte looked at her. “No?”
Miss Redmayne sat down on the piano bench, her back to the instrument. “I can’t decide whether I was truly motivated by principle, or whether there wasn’t some vindictiveness on my part, an instinct to punish the one who has made a good friend miserable.” She looked at Charlotte. “Would you have given her Mr. Finch’s address?”
Charlotte thought about it. “Probably.”
“And therein lies the difference. You don’t wish her to suffer, but I do, at least in part, and I don’t like that part of me.”
Charlotte had no interest in seeing Lady Ingram suffer, but it was not out of any particular nobility of character: Whether LadyIngram was in torment and how much did not affect the situation, or anyone else involved.
“I wouldn’t have given her the address immediately,” Charlotte said. “I would have asked her to come back in seventy-two hours, if she still wanted it.”
“Do you think she would have had the wisdom to change her mind? To realize that it’s a useless pursuit?”
Charlotte shook her head. It required no powers of deduction to see that Lady Ingram was lost to the persuasion of reason—for now.
Miss Redmayne looked up at the painting that hung opposite the piano: blue sky, blue sea, white marble, and languid, doe-eyed women—a present-day artist’s unrelentingly romantic view of classical Greece. “I remember seeing her at the Eton and Harrow game the year she made her debut. She was so beautiful. Truly a vision. But even then we worried a little, my aunt and I, that he loved her more than she loved him.”
Her gaze returned to Charlotte. “Five quid says she barges into 18 Upper Baker Street in less than seventy-two hours and demands to know Mr. Finch’s address.”
Charlotte would wager her last penny on that, almost as sure a bet as sunrise and London fog.
She folded the paper neatly and came to her feet. “The time has come for me to speak to Mr. Finch in person.”
Charlotte stopped for a moment as she passed a house in which athé dansantwas reaching its apogee. Strains of violin and cello spilled out, the eternally ebullient melodies of Herr Strauss’s Vienna. Brightly clad figures passed before open windows, champagne cups in hand. Laughter and the hum of animated conversation served as percussion to the music, with an occasional masculine voice rising above the din to lob a word of friendly mockery across the gathering.
Charlotte didn’t go to many tea dances—they were not so fashionable these days—but the scene itself, this elaborate, stylized merrymaking, had figured prominently in her life for eight summers. And now she was a bystander, an outside observer of all that beauty and artificiality.
She understood the charges of profligacy and shallowness pelted at the Upper Ten Thousand, at those whose entire lives revolved around endless arrays of entertainment. But she also knew that for those on the inside, it was the only way they had been taught to live.
Few, in the end, ever truly defied the way they were taught to live.
She resumed walking. It was almost eight in the evening. Mrs. Woods served a plain supper at seven; her gentlemen ought to have dined by now. Chances were, Mr. Finch would be at home. The woman might still be with him, but that shouldn’t preclude him from receiving his sister.
Charlotte noticed herself slowing down as she drew closer to Mrs. Woods’s street. She wasn’t nervous about meeting Mr. Finch, but she also wasn’t looking forward to it. In her place, Livia would hesitate because of Mr. Finch’s irregular birth. Charlotte had never understood the brouhaha over parentage—it was to the credit and blame of no one what their progenitors had been up to before they were born. Her reluctance stemmed from the indissolubility of blood ties—once the bond was claimed it couldn’t be repudiated—and she was not keen on granting a permanent place in her life to a stranger.
She made the turn. Now she was halfway up the street. Three more houses and she would be knocking on Mrs. Woods’s door and announcing that Mr. Finch’s half sister had come to call. Two more houses. One more.
A young woman bounced up the steps from the service entrance of Mrs. Woods’s place. Charlotte remembered her—the most talkativemaid in the servants’ hall. Even though she didn’t expect to be recognized, now that she wasn’t wearing either a wig or a pair of spectacles, Charlotte turned her face and pretended to read the playbills stuck to a lamppost.
The door opened again and out came Mrs. Hindle’s voice. “Bridget, can you take this basket back to the tea shop?”
The maid went back. “Yes, mum.”
“Good. When Mr. Finch comes back, tell him you returned it for him. There ought to be a copper in it for you.”
