Page 60 of A Ruse of Shadows
At the lodging house, every effort had been made to keep theplace clean and cheerful. But windows had to be open in summer, and the breeze brought in an unmistakable whiff of a tannery not too far away, and perhaps even of remnants of horses being boiled down for glue.
Charlotte, calling on the landlady, pretended to be Mimi Duffin’s long-lost friend and acted appropriately shocked and grieved when she was told that Mimi Duffin had passed away the year before.
Mrs. Earp, the landlady who apparently knew nothing about Mimi Duffin’s scandalous occupation, was obliging. But as Mimi Duffin had lived there for scant weeks before she died, Mrs. Earp could offer Charlotte nothing of note except her previous address.
Which led Charlotte back to Lambeth, near Lambeth Palace, the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. From the window ofthislandlady’s parlor, one could glimpse not only the gardens of Lambeth Palace but the Palace of Westminster across the river, a mere quarter mile away.
It was a superior place, not only to Mrs. Earp’s humble, if diligently maintained, abode in Bermondsey but also to the boardinghouse Charlotte had stayed at for a while, in a lesser part of Lambeth, before Mrs. Watson had taken her in.
However, Mrs. Osborne, the superior place’s very superior landlady, was not pleased to field inquiries about Mimi Duffin. “Yes, she lived here for three years. And true, she paid her rent on time, got on well with my other guests, and made no trouble. But I cannot help but feel grievously injured that while she lived under my roof, she conducted herself in an extremely regrettable manner. Miss Duffin, I’m sorry to say, was no lady at all.”
Mrs. Farr, too, did not escape her wrath.
“Well, Mrs. Beaumont, I don’t know why you’d want to know about her sister. I am not saying Mrs. Farr did anything as appalling as Miss Duffin, but she brooked no criticism of her dreadful sister, when she ought to have been horrified and outraged. I cannot help but think that she gave her tacit approval, and I cannot countenance that at all.”
Mrs. Osborne went on, but besides her indignation, Charlotte could glean little else.
She did manage to get in a question, as she was taking her leave, about Mimi Duffin’s final resting place.
“I wouldn’t have any idea about that,” huffed Mrs. Osborne. “Why would I?”
“Then do you mind very much if I inquired of some of your lodgers if they might know?” Charlotte put on her most beseeching look. “Perhaps from tomorrow on I’ll endeavor to forget her, but she was kind to me when we were little and I’ll find it hard to forgive myself if I leave England again without at least leaving a few flowers by her headstone. Please, Mrs. Osborne. She’s already dead. She can’t embarrass you or this very excellent establishment again. Please let me have that.”
?Worn down by Charlotte’s entreaties, Mrs. Osborne allowed Charlotte to speak to a lodger named Mrs. Lane. Mrs. Lane was perhaps a little younger than Charlotte, a widow who’d lost her husband before she turned twenty. She had worked as a pottery painter for the Doulton factory but was now an artistic designer for the company and sometimes did her sketching from home.
Unlike the cramped single room Charlotte had barely been able to afford when she’d been first cast out of Society and had to fend for herself on her own, Mrs. Lane’s room was large enough to be partitioned into several areas with screens. On her ceiling and walls she had installed hooks and loops through which wound swaths of gauzy fabric in mint green and sky blue. The crisscrossing undulating yardage of tulle and voile reminded Charlotte of waves in a warm shallow sea.
And if Miss Harcourt had been happy to see Charlotte, then Mrs. Lane was thrilled.
“You knew Miss Duffin as a child? Oh, how wonderful that must have been for you. I miss her. I really do. She made everything lively and fun—and goodness knows that for women like us, who mustlabor for our own support and worry about rainy days to come, the days aren’t always lively or fun.
“She was also a marvelous friend,” Mrs. Lane gushed on. “When she came to tea in my room, she always brought things I loved but wouldn’t have bought for myself. Oh, let me show you!”
She jumped up and brought back a novelty biscuit tin that looked like a penguin. “Is it not adorable?”
“It is extremely adorable,” Charlotte concurred.
“I would have been more than satisfied with a friend who gave me gifts, but Mimi listened, too. I cannot tell you how dull my life is, Mrs. Beaumont. I work, and on Sundays I go to church—there is little else. And yet if I should fall ill, I could quickly deplete my savings and lose this monotonous stability that is the envy of so many others.”
She caressed the penguin tin’s printed-on beak. Tin and woman seemed to share an identical expression, that of melancholy leavened by a hint of hope.
“In front of most people, I only dare admit how fortunate I am to be able to support myself. But Mimi understood both how penned in I felt and how afraid I was of losing what little I’d achieved. And the strange thing was, after I griped to her about everything that was wrong with my life, I always ended up feeling much better. I’d notice how pretty my room was or how I only needed to save a few more pennies to afford a seaside holiday.”
She set down the tin, went to the mantelpiece, and came back with a small framed photograph. “This was us, in Brighton. Mimi and I went together last summer. We ate ice cream, walked on the pier, and she told me that before she died, she meant to visit every continent on Earth.”
The two young women, caught by the camera, looked solemn. But there was a spark in their eyes, and an energy to their posture.
Charlotte gave the photograph back to Mrs. Lane, who trailed a fingertip across the top edge of the frame. “When she talked about traveling around the world, not only did I believe that she would do it, I believed that I, too, might go with her, if only for a small portion.
“Maybe Mrs. Osborne was right; maybe Mimi did corrupt the world with her postcards. But in what little time I knew her, she made my life far more beautiful than it would have been otherwise.”
Her eyes gleamed with tears. She turned to the side and wiped them away. “I’m sorry. You wanted to know about Mimi, and I’ve only talked about myself.”
“I couldn’t have asked for a better account of her life,” said Charlotte truthfully. “To hear her remembered like this, and loved like this.”
Mrs. Lane took out a handkerchief and dabbed some more at the corners of her eyes. Then she picked up the penguin tin, opened it, and showed Charlotte three paste hairpins inside.
Taking a butterfly-shaped hairpin in her hand, she turned it slowly. “These were also gifts from her—and I happened to be wearing this one the day I learned that she was about to be expelled from our lodging house. I didn’t know anything about those postcards before then. Afterwards, I visited her once at her new place.
