What if the investigation into Mr. Sackville’s death unearthed nothing? What if the truth remained obscured and Livia was forever branded an unprosecuted murderer because of a drunken spat?
Fear swelled, crushing her organs to make room for more of itself. It squeezed the air out of her lungs. It coiled, pythonlike, around her stomach. It forced its way up her windpipe, pushing, expanding, blocking every last sliver of open passage.
She had always been certain that she’d be able to take care of Livia in addition to herself. She never thought she would wreck both their lives simultaneously.
She had not made up out of whole cloth the more numerous opportunities open to women these days. Nor had she conjured from thin air those societies that existed to connect women in need of employment with employers in need of positions filled.
But a good portion of those organizations, for all their good and noble intentions, were thinly funded. Two of those she visited had already closed permanently, with another still nominally in operation, but taking applications only by post. The ones that appeared to be in more robust shape all required letters of character written by ladies of good standing—those Charlotte would never have, but those didn’t concern her so much: She was passable at imitating handwriting and did not consider it a moral failing for a woman in her situation to forge her own recommendations.
Of a far greater worry was that to receive help from those societies, she had to first pay a subscription fee, which her already thin wallet could ill afford—not if she wanted to eat and have a roof over her head, too. And then, were she determined enough to pay the fee, she could expect to wait weeks, possibly months, before a suitable position turned up.
She didn’t have that kind of time.
It wasn’t so dire yet. Not at the moment. But just as Livia looked down the years and saw nothing but misery and loneliness at the end of the road, Charlotte could not get rid of this stone-hard dread of coming to the last of her pennies.
Her room and board was nine shilling six a week. After paying for the first two weeks, she had five pounds three and ten left, including what Livia had given her. That amount had been further reduced after the purchase of the daily necessities—not to mention she had to provide for her own lunches.
The money would not last forever. It would not even last very long. And then what? If she couldn’t look after herself, how would she begin to help Livia?
“Are you all right, miss?”
An almost comically resplendent creature stood before Charlotte, in a polonaise of lustrous Prussian blue silk, worn over an elaborately ruffled white underskirt. Her hat was narrow brimmed and high crowned, laden with sprays of ornamental grass against which nestled a . . . a stuffed blue-breasted parrotfinch, if Charlotte wasn’t entirely wrong about her ornithology.
She realized that she’d been standing with her back against a forty-foot-high column, her hand over her chest. She dropped that hand. “Yes, I’m fine. Thank you, ma’am. It’s the weather, a bit hot today.”
“It has been rather warm lately,” said the woman. Her voice was of a startling loveliness, rich as cream, with a barely perceptible hint of huskiness. “Should I ask someone to fetch you a glass of water, miss? Or find you a place to sit down for a minute, in peace and quiet, away from nosy old ladies such as myself?”
The woman chuckled at her own joke. Until she did so, Charlotte had thought her in her mid-to-late thirties. But her mirth revealed webs of crow’s feet around her eyes and deep channels to either side of her lips: She was a woman at least fifty years of age.
Her money was new: No one who’d been raised to follow the unspoken standards of Society, not even a woman with Charlotte’s “magpie tastes,” as Livia called them, would sport so elaborate and fanciful a confection for an outing to the post office.
She wore no wedding band. But that, Charlotte decided, was not because she had never been married. The parrotfinch on the hat was perched on a little nest made of black crape. The same material formed a most discreet border around the blue reticule the woman held in her hand.
Women only wore black crape if they had lost their husbands. And the woman here, despite her extravagantly exuberant day dress, wished to honor her late spouse in a subtle manner, nearly invisible expressions of grief and remembrance woven into her daily attire.
Charlotte shook her head at herself, at her ingrained tendency to observe those she came across to the very last detail. She enjoyed it and she was good at it. But what use was it?
What use was a woman with a mind and a temperament that would be odd and borderline worrisome even in a man?
She forced a smile. “Thank you, ma’am, but I really am quite all right. Nothing is the matter with me at all.”