“But she’s still marrying an idiot,” Livia flopped back down on the bed. “Though I suppose it’s better to marry an idiot than someone who thinks you’re an idiot.”
Charlotte’s attention returned to her cake. Livia stared at the ceiling, swarmed by pessimistic thoughts. She was startled when Charlotte spoke again, as much by the fact that Charlotte wished to continue their conversation as by Charlotte’s actual question.
“You won’t marry an idiot, will you?” asked Charlotte.
“I certainly hope not,” Livia answered glumly. “Or at least with my eyes open if I do. What about you?”
“I don’t want to marry.”
“But how will you live? You know there won’t be enough money to keep us as spinsters.”
“I can earn money. If I were a boy, and there were no money in the family, wouldn’t I be expected to have a profession?”
“Yes, but you aren’t a boy. Mamma will have a fit at the idea of one of her daughters . . . working.”
“Mamma doesn’t need to agree.”
Livia sighed. “You’re deluding yourself if you think Papa will.”
She was unsentimental about Sir Henry, since Sir Henry had no use for her. But Charlotte was his pet—he was vastly amused by her combination of great intelligence, great oddity, and great silence. He regularly took her for walks, just the two of them. He bought contraband sweets for her. And he read her his favorite poems and was tickled that she could immediately recite them back to him.
“What makes you think he won’t?” asked Charlotte.
“The same reason I think he’d fly into a rage if he found Mamma having an affair. He might appear congenial, but he isn’t at all liberal in his thinking. Keep that in mind.”
Charlotte nodded, looking rather sadly at the empty plate before her.
It was the last time Livia saw Charlotte consume such a quantity of cake—or of any comestible, for that matter—in one sitting.
The next few years brought a slew of unforeseen changes on Charlotte’s part. For one, she began to take an active interest in her wardrobe—studying fashion plates, trying on different combinations of petticoats and stockings, accompanying Lady Holmes to browse selections of lace and feathers.
By extension, she paid far greater attention to her figure and stopped eating until she couldn’t swallow another bite. The day she asked for a second helping of carrots and then forewent pudding at the end of the meal, Livia drew her aside and asked whether she was ill. Charlotte shook her head.
Much to Lady Holmes’s relief, her youngest child also exerted a heroic effort in the direction of small talk. Instead of startling and discomfiting visitors with such comments as “I see you no longer write in your journal” or “I’m sorry the trip to Bath wasn’t as successful as you’d hoped it would be,” she learned to smile, nod, and chat about the weather.
This last was not accomplished without trial and error. In the beginning she had a tendency to correct old squires’ exclamations of “We haven’t had so much rain since I was a boy in short breeches” by quoting concrete records from the parish registers, which demonstrated that there had been far greater precipitation a mere five years ago. It was after a fair bit of practice and no shortage of awkwardness that she at last grasped the point of all that persiflage, which was merely to avoid the silence of people having nothing to say to one another.
The uncomfortable silence, in other words. But since there was no such thing as an uncomfortable silence for Charlotte, it was as difficult for her to understand as it was for a man with vertigo to master the Viennese polka.
Sometimes, as Livia stood beside her, perspiring on her behalf and making every attempt to convey the correct response via telepathy, it struck her how much Charlotte resembled a foreigner who found native customs baffling and, on occasion, patently ridiculous. One time, in the middle of reading a magazine article about the possibility of life on Mars, it occurred to Livia that Charlotte was more akin to an interplanetary alien: It wasn’t only the habits and conventions of the English she found perplexing, but that of all humanity.
But eventually Charlotte cleared that hurdle. She not only learned the stark difference between asking after an old lady’s cold versus her problem with incontinence, she became adept at navigating these formerly treacherous shoals, even though Livia could tell, at times, that she was herding a situation through an internal algorithm, trying to generate an appropriate response.