Beatrice’s fury buzzed in her temples, and she could feel the vibration of blood in her fingertips. Her work had been her only refuge and consolation during the dark year of mourning, and every fresh insight had been a moment of closeness to her father. The small volume would have been not just a solid first work from which to build a modest reputation as a writer but a direct connection from her father to her own future. Though she could see the undeniable benefit of the larger project to her father’s public memory, the publisher’s casual dismissal of her work as mere research, and his suggestion that she had removed letters from her father’s archive, made her despair. She buried her face in her hands and allowed herself a single hollow groan, for her lost father, and for the impossibility of her own wants.
Recovering her composure by pouring a last cup of tea from the teapot, Beatrice tried to think about her situation in a more objective way. It was a trick her father had taught her as a child when she was sad or angry. To analyze the problem in a larger, more empirical way would, he always said, improve her mood and her intellect at the same time. Though she now thought it possibly a very unsuitable response to a crying child, she often found herself rearranging her problems as if planning to present them in a small treatise.
She had never been concerned with money, its acquisition or its excesses, and yet now that she had very little, and her dreams of remuneration through publication were to be dashed, she could appreciate at last how money had always been comfortably accessible. Her father had been proud of what he considered their modest housekeeping, and their ability to keep well within his annual private income. Yet they had been comfortable enough that when he had a yearning for partridge, or a desire to lay in a few cases of obscure but highly fragrant claret, she had simply arranged the matter and then paid the bill with a swift signature and a smile. She had considered it a virtue to sit down every month and see to the prompt payment of accounts, but she could see now that it had been in fact a matter of pride—and that pride was a sin for which she was now perhaps to be punished.
The solicitor offered ten pounds—she removed a small black accounts book from the nearest of Agatha Kent’s charming Georgian bookcases and opened it to go over her finances one more time. In stark figures she could see that her small stock of accumulated money had mostly been spent in getting herself to Rye and in paying for her first two months of room and board. Her job, when it began, would pay Mrs. Turber with only a small amount left over—enough for sundry small daily needs, a modest donation to the Sunday church plate, and a few shillings put by for emergencies. She would no longer be able to afford books by subscription and she was not sure how she was to afford new clothing when the time came. If she was to write, she would also have to buy paper and ink, new pens, and stamps for the mailing of manuscripts—such things had seemed inconsequential in the past, but now she would be reduced to counting coins at the stationer’s and at the Post Office, like the old widows with their fumbling hands and threadbare gloves.
Gloves were of immediate concern. She had offered two pairs to Celeste and now only retained three cotton summer pairs and two pairs of silk evening gloves. She had not remembered that one of her remaining cotton pairs had a sizable ink stain on the cuff. She was not willing to go about in the sort of cheap gloves that shop assistants wore on Sundays, and yet to buy another pair of quality would take a week’s extra money. She smiled to herself as she put away the accounts book. She understood now why some people—housekeepers, governesses, Mrs. Turber—might appear conservative and limited in their outlook. She had secretly thought it some character flaw to be disdained but now saw with rueful clarity that it might be the acute need to avoid any exuberance resulting in the spoiling of gloves or the ruining of shoes. For the first time, as her tea grew cold in the cup and her porridge gelled in its bowl, she saw what it meant to be of limited income. It was a noble concept for the church sermon or the pages of an improving novel, but a chilling prospect on a sunny Sussex morning.
—
Celeste came down to breakfast in an atrocious pink silk dress donated by Mrs. Turber. It swamped her small frame and threw a blush into her cheek that looked like paint. Beatrice could not restrain a slight start of shock.
“I am wishing to ’ave a needle and some scissors,” said Celeste, fingering a large ruffle of linen cabbage roses at the waist. “If it is d’accord to make quelques changements?”
“I think you might need garden shears, not scissors,” said Beatrice. “Have some breakfast, and then Abigail and I will help you do some trimming.” She rang a small brass bell, and Abigail, who brought more hot water and some toast, gave an openmouthed stare at the dress and said that Mrs. Saunders should be summoned.
“Oh no, I must not agree,” said Celeste, a blush of her own adding to the glow from her bodice. “I must make my own repair and I am content.”
“Mrs. Saunders will be glad to help,” said Beatrice. “It makes us all happy to contribute.”
“I have already, how you say, accept too much pity?” said Celeste. She pressed her lips together and her fingers fumbled at the tiny gold crucifix around her neck. “This kind lady, she washed my lace and I cannot pay. I will not presume to demand her to make fashionable a dress.”
Beatrice perceived a desperate pride, and she felt ashamed that not ten minutes earlier she, Beatrice, had been poring over her accounts with all the pride of a miser. She had regretted a simple gift of gloves to a girl with nothing but the ruined clothes on her back. She had not thought what it must be to have no linen, no shoes, not so much as a bar of soap or a tin of tooth powder to one’s name and to have to accept the sort of charity which girls of their background were used to giving out.
“I am sorry,” she said. “We will manage together and make some small improvements.”
“I would like to fix it this morning,” said Celeste. “I am expected next door this afternoon.”
“Best chop it in half, miss,” said Abigail. “Happen we can make a walking skirt and a pair of window curtains from the lower half.”
Beatrice abandoned another morning’s writing, and Abigail her morning tasks, so that they might all three cut, gather, and sew the dress into something more fitting. Beatrice and Abigail labored at the long plain seams, while Celeste proved swift and dainty with the needle, stitching some of Beatrice’s gray grosgrain ribbon into neat loops down the bodice and in a flat band around the hem. By midday the pink silk was tamed into a slender, quiet afternoon dress, and Mrs. Turber, who came screeching about dinner not being made, was so mollified to see how well her dress looked on Celeste that she only huffed about it being far too fine to wear for an ordinary afternoon helping refugees. Celeste merely pressed her hand and told her, in her most charming broken English, how kind she was, and Mrs. Turber was forced to retreat before the language barrier.