Page 10 of Unforeseen Affairs
His father studied him, searching for any sign of insubordination or dishonesty. Finding none, he nodded slowly.
“Good.”
He looked back to his correspondence.
“I’m not insane,” Colin said, his heart now as heavy as his head.
“Of course you’re not,” his father said dismissively. “You’re a Gearing.”
He looked once more at Colin, his face deathly serious.
Colin had nothing left to say.
Charlotte spent the ensuing week at her leisure.
Well, mostly so. Not entirely, for her cousin Bess had enlisted her assistance in the rather ridiculous pursuit of dressing and staging her dog, Walter, for a series of photographs that echoed the works of the great Renaissance masters.
Charlotte did not mind. She liked her elderly cousin, silly though she may be, and Charlotte had been thinking she really ought to spend more time with her.
Bess was supposedly her chaperone, after all.
“I can’t decide, Charlotte, dear, and the photographer is telling me we must settle on this today, before his arrival,” Cousin Bess fretted in a strained voice. “Not like Tuesday.”
On Tuesday, when the poor man had last visited, he’d drunk seven cups of tea while waiting for Bess to select the most appropriate dog-sized flat cap, of which there were at least a dozen. Charlotte had quite enjoyed the photographer’s bulgingeyes when Bess threw open a small trunk filled with tiny jackets and accoutrements fit only for an aging, ailing spaniel with rheumy eyes and a lolling tongue.
Charlotte could hardly wait until she was old enough to be peculiar in such an outwardly outlandish way. It seemed that people were far more willing to allow widows and spinsters such leeway. She supposed she might be so in a different way from Bess, though; she preferred cats to dogs, for a start.
But for now, as a young lady of means she was expected to maintain a certain appearance. Perhaps even more so than the average wealthy young woman, to compensate for the shocking circumstances of her birth. And Charlotte usually obliged, up to a point. But not for the nebulous collection of people that comprised “polite” society, with their boorish opinions and middling intelligence.
No, she did it for her stepmother.
“Shall we approach this in a more, er, regimented manner?” Mrs. Susanna Sedley suggested. “If I fetch some paper, we could make a list of the paintings you wish to recreate, and then work from there toward the requirements for each tableau?”
They were in the Oswine House conservatory. Next to them, the trunk of Walter the dog’s effects was thrown open, its contents strewn about or laid upon a collection of wicker furniture for better viewing. Thankfully it was still morning, which meant the room was merely stuffy and humid, and not yet unbearable. A chorus of cheerful chirping laced through the air, emanating from a cage of chaffinches.
“Oh, dear me, and I nearly forgot the potted palms—Simms ought to have moved them, for the photographer insisted upon this direction for the best light.” Bess shook her head.
Charlotte, seated off to the side on a stone bench, watched impassively. Walter lay on the cool tile at her feet, a nearly flat pancake of an animal, as if he’d been squashed by a carriage.Despite his ridiculous posture, Charlotte thought that she would no doubt do the same if she were covered in a scraggly coat like him. He made the most awful, ragged sound as he breathed, as if he’d spent the past hour chasing a rabbit through the gardens rather than feasting upon scraps from Cousin Bess’s breakfast tray.
“I could fetch some paper,” Charlotte offered to her stepmother. “And maybe water for Walter as well.”
“Very kind of you,” she replied with a gentle smile.
“Donotmove, Charlotte!” cut in Bess in a strident tone. “I shall see to it. I’ve got to fetch Simms at any rate—hemustmove these palmsthis instant!”
The elder lady bustled out of the conservatory, the tassels of her shawls trailing in her wake.
Cousin Bess was getting on in her years, though she still crackled with the same nervous energy as when Charlotte had first arrived at the Sedleys’ garish and tasteless London manse several years ago.
Charlotte had been naught but a terrified child then, her entire world dashed to pieces after her mother had finally given up the ghost and succumbed to consumption. There’d barely been time to grieve, for she’d had her livelihood to think of. It had always been just her and her mother, alone, a tiny family attached to the greater organism made up of the other actors and crew of the company. She’d supposed she would be absorbed into the bigger whole and earn her keep mending costumes or polishing brass in the theater, until perhaps the day might come when she too would tread the boards like her mother and make a living as an actress. And then, after following in her footsteps, she might grieve for her mother in the proper way.
But instead, the theater manager had brought in a tall, dignified-looking gentleman with graying hair and mustache, who introduced himself as Ajax Sedley.
Her father.
And her world had been turned upside down again.
“Has she been at this all week?” her stepmother asked, looking in disbelief over the canine wardrobe scattered before her.
