Chapter Two
“Such a shame,” Aunt Georgiana said, watching Eleanor’s pen move across the page, “that accomplishments rarely help a woman in your position.”
Eleanor did not pause in her writing. She had learnt, over the years, that pausing invited elaboration, and Aunt Georgiana required very little encouragement to elaborate upon Eleanor’s circumstances—which were, depending upon the day and her aunt’s temper, either pitiable, regrettable, or a cautionary tale for young ladies who neglect their complexions.
“I find them useful enough,” Eleanor replied, keeping her voice mild. Mildness was armour. Mildness was invisibility. Mildness was the tone of a woman who had long since ceased to expect kindness, and was therefore no longer wounded by its absence.
“Useful, yes. But usefulness is not the same as advantage, is it?” Aunt Georgiana settled herself more deeply into the drawing room’s best chair—the one Eleanor was never invited to occupy—and adjusted her shawl with the air of a woman preparing to dispense wisdom.
“Your dear mother—may she rest in peace—was the most beautiful woman in three counties. And what did it avail her? A modest marriage, a fading reputation, and an early grave.”
And a daughter who learnt to be invisible, Eleanor thought. Which you would know, if you ever looked at me long enough to see.
“And you,” the aunt continued, “with all these languages and accomplishments, have fared little better. Here you remain—nine-and-twenty years old, translating correspondence for your aunt and uncle’s household like a glorified secretary.”
“I prefer to think of myself as an unglorified one,” Eleanor said. “The glorified sort charge fees.”
Aunt Georgiana blinked. Humour, in Eleanor’s experience, often produced this effect—a brief confusion, as though her aunt could not quite reconcile wit with spinsterhood.
“You have your mother’s face, you know,” she said at last, choosing to disregard the remark entirely. “Not quite so striking, perhaps, but the bones are there. If only you had made more effort when you were younger—”
“The Marchetti letter requires a reply by this afternoon.” Eleanor set down her pen and reached for the next document in the stack. “And Mrs Cheswick mentioned that Lord Cheswick expects the trade summaries before dinner. If you will excuse me.”
It was not, strictly speaking, a dismissal. One could not dismiss a visiting aunt from the drawing room of her sister’s household. But it was sufficiently close that Aunt Georgiana huffed, gathered her shawl, and swept from the room with the injured dignity of a woman denied her full audience.
Eleanor waited until the door closed before allowing herself a quiet breath.
Nine-and-twenty years old, translating correspondence like a glorified secretary.
The words ought not to have stung. They were not, after all, untrue.
Eleanor was nine-and-twenty. She translated correspondence.
And she did so in a household not her own, for relations who tolerated her presence as one tolerated a useful piece of furniture—valued for its function, and otherwise unnoticed.
Yet accuracy and painlessness were not the same thing. Eleanor had learnt that lesson early.
She returned to the Marchetti letter.
The work, at least, was absorbing. Mr Marchetti was an Italian merchant with interests in English wool, and his correspondence required a delicate hand.
His written English was enthusiastic but imprecise, filled with inventive grammar and the occasional phrase that translated, quite literally, into something alarming.
I am most eager to penetrate your markets, the present letter declared. My wool is of superior quality and unusual length, and I am confident it will satisfy all your needs.
Eleanor permitted herself a small smile. Mr Marchetti almost certainly intended nothing improper—Italian merchants were simply ardent in their descriptions—but the letter would require considerable refinement before it could be placed before Lord Cheswick.
She reached for a fresh sheet and began again, smoothing the merchant’s zeal into language that would not cause her aunt’s husband to choke on his brandy.
Dear Lord Cheswick, she wrote, I wish to express my interest in establishing a trade connection with your esteemed household…
The words came readily. They always had.
Languages had been Eleanor’s refuge since childhood—French first, learnt from a governess who stayed only two years before securing better employment; then Italian, acquired through persistence and a battered grammar; then German, gathered piecemeal from a neighbour’s music tutor who had indulged her endless questions.
Her father had called it a waste. What use are languages to a girl? he had demanded, upon noticing the accumulation of books in her room. You will marry, and your husband will attend to any correspondence of consequence.
But Eleanor had not married. Her father’s debts had grown. The governess had departed. And eventually, the sole thing standing between the Finch family and utter ruin had been Eleanor’s ability to translate documents her father himself could not read.
Useful, she had become. Indispensable, even.
And when her father died, and the debts consumed what little remained, it was that usefulness which secured her a place in the Cheswick household—not as guest, not as family, but as something between the two.
A dependent relation who earned her keep through labour that was never quite acknowledged as such.
Better than the alternative, she reminded herself. Better than the streets. Better than a governess’s post in some strange household, neither servant nor kin, overlooked by all.
At least here, she was overlooked by people she knew.
***
The Marchetti letter required an hour to render properly. Eleanor reviewed her work twice, then caught a minor error in the third paragraph—establishing where she meant expanding, a mistake few would notice, but one that would trouble her for days—and set the translation aside.
The trade summaries consumed another two hours.
They were more tedious than difficult: long columns of figures from French and German suppliers, demanding careful conversion into English measures and currency.
Eleanor’s head ached by the time she finished, but the work was clean and precise, and she allowed herself a moment of quiet satisfaction before proceeding.
There was always something more to be done. Such was the nature of usefulness—it was never complete, merely paused.
She was halfway through a letter from a Venetian glass merchant when the drawing room door opened and her cousin Honoria swept in, trailing perfume and purpose.
“There you are,” Honoria said, as though Eleanor had been concealed rather than seated in plain view for the past four hours. “Mama wishes you to dine with us this evening. We are to have company.”
Eleanor set down her pen. “What sort of company?”
“The interesting sort.” Honoria sank onto the settee with the effortless ease of a woman who had never been required to earn her place.
She was four-and-twenty, golden-haired, and possessed of a beauty that caused strangers to pause in the street.
Eleanor did not resent her for it. One could no more resent beauty than the weather.
“Sir Edward Holloway and his wife are visiting from Kent,” Honoria continued, “and Lady Tremaine is bringing her nephew—some sort of baronet, I believe. Mama thinks he may suit me, though baronets strike me as rather middling, do they not?”
“I have no particular opinion on baronets.”
“You have no opinion on anything.” Honoria did not speak unkindly—she was not, by nature, unkind—but the observation carried the weight of truth nonetheless. “That is your difficulty, Eleanor. You are so intent upon being useful that you have forgotten how to be interesting.”
I was interesting once, Eleanor thought. Interesting enough for Edmund Hale to pretend he admired me.
The memory returned unbidden: a summer afternoon, seven years earlier, when a charming visitor had discovered her in her father’s library and asked what she was reading.
“Italian poetry”, she had replied, and he had smiled—truly smiled, as though the answer delighted him—and asked her to translate a passage.
She had done so. He had asked questions. And for three luminous weeks, Eleanor had allowed herself to believe that someone saw her—not merely her usefulness, nor her mother’s faded beauty, nor her father’s debts, but her.
Then she had found him in the garden with her cousin Lydia. Pretty, prosperous Lydia, who spoke no Italian at all, but whose dowry was substantial and whose face possessed everything Eleanor’s did not.
“You did not truly imagine—?” Edmund had said, when she confronted him. His smile had not faltered. That had been the worst of it. He had not even attempted shame. “You are pleasant enough, Eleanor, but pleasant does not maintain a household.”
She had not cried. She had not railed. She had simply nodded once, returned to the library, and finished translating the poem he had asked about.
She had never trusted admiration since.
“Eleanor?” Honoria was studying her now, with something that might have been concern. “You look pale. Are you unwell?”
“Merely fatigued.” Eleanor summoned her practised smile—the one that revealed nothing. “Several hours of trade summaries will have that effect.”
“Then you must rest before dinner. Mama will not thank you for appearing haggard before the guests.”
Haggard. Another word for old. Another reminder that Eleanor was nine-and-twenty, unmarried, and useful in ways that did not signify.
“I shall do my best to refresh my appearance,” she said mildly.
Honoria nodded, content, and departed in another cloud of perfume.
Eleanor remained alone in the softening afternoon light and thought of her mother.
Arabella Finch had been, by all accounts, extraordinary.