Chapter 21
Mrs Constantine waited until the tired little maid had left her chamber before she opened the curtains the girl had carefully pulled closed a short while ago.
She was wrapped in her sober dressing gown and sensible nightcap: just another middle-aged woman who had trouble sleeping.
She set her candlestick down on the ledge and stood looking out for a moment.
The sliver of moon was hidden by clouds and the street below was fairly dark; no grand town houses set about with dozens of expensive lanterns here, no link-boys lighting the Quality home from glittering parties, since Bloomsbury was emphatically not a fashionable part of town, even if it had been once, long ago.
Newfangled gas lamps were just starting to appear to make the London streets brighter and safer, but not here, not yet.
The British Museum was close by, and once it had been Montagu House, one of the finest mansions in the old city, but it wasn’t a private residence any more, and it was unlit as any hovel at this hour.
She took a second to imagine the pale Greek and Egyptian statues, stuffed giraffes and South Sea curiosities, standing sightless and wordless in the shadows, and the thought made her shudder unaccountably.
You wouldn’t want to be alone in there… If you turned away from them then turned quickly back, could you be perfectly sure they hadn’t moved a little closer to you in the meantime?
She wasn’t a superstitious or a fanciful woman, she couldn’t afford to be, yet somehow tonight felt different.
But the night’s obscurity meant that the candle in the bedchamber window would show at some distance, which was why it had been chosen as a discreet signal many years past. She couldn’t see anyone in the street below, apart from a rickety carriage rumbling slowly by, and perhaps there was nobody there just now, but sooner or later some ragged urchin, some weary woman of the town or tipsy late-night wanderer would see the light, and pass the message.
In two nights, at the same hour, he would come.
He’d been here earlier, standing in the street to see them in their finery going off to Lord Milton’s house, but no one else had noticed him, of course.
They never did, unless he happened to be playing music for pennies, and then it was the catchy tunes they recalled, not him; he was just a shabby old man, a nobody.
Leontina had been in two minds as she sat with Allegra earlier on their way home, answering her more or less at hazard during the latter part of the journey as she wondered what she should do: summon him, or not?
It was undeniable that a meeting now would be dangerous for both of them, and it was also unnecessary, in the sense that she had made her bed long ago and now must lie in it.
There was nothing she or he or anyone else could do that would change matters at this late date.
But she felt a sudden fierce longing for company.
Just occasionally, she tired of being strong for everyone else.
Who was strong for her? Not her husband, who was a kind, gentle and loving man but fatally weak, not her daughters, who were young and heedless, even the married ones.
Only one person: her father. The man who was supposed to have been dead these forty years, but who would soon come to see her in secret and hear her pour out her worries in the language they shared, even if he could do nothing to soothe them.