A position as a lady’s companion offered none of what she sought to gain in employment. A lady’s companion was a professional appendage. The spare legs to walk upstairs to fetch the needlework. The extra voice to read the paper aloud in the evening. The additional body in the house so rooms didn’t echo with emptiness.
In her specific case, however, it wasn’t this impersonal servility that concerned Charlotte, but her new employer’s lack of prior experience with other companions and her general high opinion of Charlotte’s mind. She was worried that Mrs. Watson would think it demeaned Charlotte to be asked to fetch needlework or read out loud from the paper. That she would, in the end, have too little to do.
And Mrs. Watson—she also worried about Mrs. Watson.
Charlotte was an acceptable conversationalist when the conversation revolved around weather, fashion, and the goings-on of the Season. But the deepest feelings of others were always a mystery to her. Not that she didn’t know what sentiments were and how to read them, but she herself didn’t seem to experience life in quite the same emotion-driven manner.
Her days were catalogued as facts and factual observations. She sometimes thought of herself as a combination of a phonographic cylinder and a motion picture camera—which inventors were still working on—that moved through life recording everything she saw and heard.
Sometimes she mentally annotated certain moments; most often she let them pass into memory without comments, as only sounds and moving images. It was in her adolescence that she discovered most people’s memories worked nothing like hers. For them the only indelible elements in the dossiers of a life were the emotions. They might not remember when, where, or with whom something happened—or be reliable in their recall—but by God that joy, that anguish, that stab of pure hatred, the emotions lost none of their power and potency.
She accepted it. She couldn’t understand it viscerally, but she accepted that she was the odd man out and that in this, as in most other respects, the norm did not remotely describe her experience.
How could someone like her comment on Mrs. Watson’s grief, if she were ever asked to? Therefore, she was more than a little relieved when Mrs. Watson made no mention of her late husband the next day.
Mrs. Watson also gave no list of regular duties Charlotte was to perform. “It’s new to me, too, such an arrangement,” she said apologetically. “I’m sure in time we will arrive at a state of affairs that suits both of us.”
Charlotte debated whether to mention her great willingness to fetch items—and decided to wait a day or two. Mrs. Watson did formally introduce her to the staff: Mr. Mears, the butler; Madame Gascoigne, the cook; Polly and Rosie Banning, a pair of sisters who shared housemaid and kitchen-maid duties; and Paul Lawson, Mrs. Watson’s groom and coachman.
Mr. Mears painted in his spare time. Madame Gascoigne was Belgian, not French—and not from the French-speaking part of Belgium. And while the Banning sisters might have grown up in the same household, they were not actually related by blood.
All of which was fine, except . . .
“I’m not sure whether it’s my place to bring it up, Mrs. Watson,” said Charlotte when she and her employer took a walk in Regent Park, “but I’m strongly persuaded that Mr. Lawson has spent some time in a penitentiary.”
“And so he has,” replied Mrs. Watson, not at all alarmed. “Into many lives a little irregularity must fall.”
Considering the amount of irregularities that had fallen into her own life of late, Charlotte could only nod. “How right you are, ma’am.”
Post-lunch Mrs. Watson took a nap, giving Charlotte plenty of time to write another letter to Livia. She also attempted to draft a letter to a different recipient, but gave up after half a dozen attempts.
Later that afternoon, Mrs. Watson had herself and Charlotte driven to the General Post Office. In the morning Mrs. Watson had already written to the papers, instructing them to stop printing her adverts, but she expected it would be a few days before inquiries stopped arriving.
Charlotte had nothing from Livia—her letters arrived in fits and starts, whenever she could get them to Mott and whenever Mott could post them. There was, however, something from Inspector Robert Treadles of the Metropolitan Police.
“Miss Holmes,” asked Mrs. Watson, as their carriage rolled away from the curb, “did I hear you call for letters for a certain Sherlock Holmes?”
There was only curiosity on Mrs. Watson’s face. Charlotte decided to tell the truth. “Yes, you did.”
Mrs. Watson leaned forward. “Would that happen to be the same Sherlock Holmes who wrote the letter to the coroner that has all of London Society in an uproar?”
“That’s the alias I used.”
“You are Sherlock Holmes?” Still no censure on Mrs. Watson’s part.
“I thought calling myself Charles Holmes would have been too obvious. Sherlock is similar enough to Charlotte without being its exact masculine equivalent.”
Mrs. Watson leaned back in her seat. “This makes perfect sense now. You wrote the letter to lift the siege around your sister.”