Page 58 of A Ruse of Shadows
“That was my first thought, too, but my mother wrote that she didn’t believe Mrs. Meadows would have known it. After all, my uncle Victor had no reason to ever tell her, if he’d indeed committed such an insidious act.”
“Oh, that poor woman.”
“I know,” said Miss Harcourt quietly. “She deserved better. She deserved so much better.”
Mrs. Watson didn’t say anything—it always saddened her when women had scant control over their lives. Gradually the silence turned heavier.
The sound came of a key being inserted into the street entrance.
“Oh, that must be Mrs. Beaumont,” cried Mrs. Watson in relief.
Miss Harcourt shot her a beseeching look. Mrs. Watson nodded—were this real life, she absolutely would have kept the worst news from Mrs. Beaumont.
But the older, rounder version of Miss Charlotte who walked in needed no such protection. “Why, Miss Harcourt,” she exclaimed. “What a wonderful surprise!”
Miss Harcourt leaped up. “I did want it to be a surprise for you, Mrs. Beaumont. Guess what? I found the photograph!”
Miss Charlotte hopped in place. “May I see it? May I?”
Miss Harcourt extracted an envelope from her handbag and tilted it. A photograph slid into her palm. She studied it for a moment. “Pictures can be such lifeless things, everybody all stiff and clench-jawed. But not this one—it captured the essence of my aunt Meadows. Not just her beauty but her strength of will.”
She chuckled, a sound at once amused and nostalgic. “Enough strength of will to keep my mother at bay. Believe me, no one else was ever able to resist her offers of friendship.”
Miss Charlotte, in her guise as Mrs. Beaumont, eagerly accepted the photograph. Mrs. Watson looked down into her tea. The romantic in her still hadn’t given up and was spinning ever battier possibilities. Perhaps Victor Meadows had been awful but Ephraim Meadows only pretended to be? Perhaps he and Mrs. Meadows had indeed eloped and found happiness together somewhere far away.
“How beautiful she had become,” murmured Miss Charlotte. “Would you like to see my friend and her sister, Miss Wicks?”
Mrs. Watson, still caught in her own reveries of a good life for Mrs. Meadows, almost didn’t recognize the name she and Miss Charlotte had decided for her twenty minutes ago. “Oh, yes, of course.”
The image had been taken in an ordinary parlor. Everything was tinted reddish-brown. It was hard to tell the colors of wallpaper and upholstery; they could have been blue and white or green and yellow. But the woman in the image seemed to be covered in black crepe,even though, according to Miss Harcourt, enough time had passed that she no longer needed to wear full mourning.
She was beautiful indeed, sitting at an angle to the camera, looking not at it but straight ahead. Her three-quarter profile could have served as that of Diana the huntress’s—her beauty was not delicate or seductive but cool and angular, meant to be captured in marble.
Mrs. Watson goggled. And then she goggled at the girl beside Mrs. Meadows. Unlike her sister’s carven stillness, Miriam looked as if she were on the verge of jumping up from the settee to twirl in the center of the parlor, a girl full of irrepressible verve and energy.
“I also found a photograph from her wedding, of the entire wedding party,” said Miss Harcourt.
She handed over another photograph and helpfully pointed out the unsmiling bridegroom, his fleshy, beady-eyed brother, and her own very handsome parents. Mrs. Meadows looked so impossibly young, and Miriam, held by a seven-year-old Miss Harcourt, a dumpling of a toddler.
Miss Charlotte looked again at the photograph of just the sisters, taken ten years later. “I do wonder,” she said wistfully, “what has become of them.”
Mrs. Watson stared down at her hands, for fear that the shock and grief on her face would otherwise be all too evident.
She recognized both sisters. Miriam was now dead, murdered in her prime, and Mrs. Meadows was no longer beautiful, her face ruined by life.
“I keep imagining running into my aunt Meadows somewhere,” said Miss Harcourt equally wistfully. “I wonder whether she’ll recognize me. I know I’ll recognize her.”
Oh, you would not, thought Mrs. Watson.You would not.
?Mrs. Watson displayed her usual quick recovery. She praised Mrs. Meadows’s beautyandthe late Mrs. Harcourt’s skill as a photographer. And then, in that discreet manner of ladies’ companions, she mentioned an upcoming appointment.
Miss Harcourt got the point and started to take her leave. Charlotte, as Mrs. Beaumont, bemoaned the fact that rendezvous with solicitors had been the bane of her existence of late. But what could she do when there was her aunt’s estate to be disposed of?
As the door closed behind Miss Harcourt, Mrs. Watson spun around, her hand clutched around her throat. “I havealwayswondered about that woman.”
For eight Seasons, Charlotte had been simply another eligible young lady on the London Marriage Mart, albeit one with a reputation for eccentricity.
Unbeknownst to most people, she had been waiting for the arrival of her twenty-fifth birthday. Her father, Sir Henry, had promised her that should she turn twenty-five and still prefer to become the headmistress of a girls’ school rather than a gentleman’s wife, he would sponsor the education and training necessary for her to embark on that path to independence.
