Epilogue
One Year Later
“Sit down, and do not perch on the edge of the chair as if you expected to be asked to leave it, because you will not be. Sit properly. Take up the seat. It is yours for as long as this conversation lasts, and the conversation will last exactly as long as you wish it to.”
The young woman on the other side of the desk was perhaps twenty, in a grey gown chosen to make her unremarkable, her hands folded too tightly in her lap and her chin held at the careful angle of a person braced for judgement.
Selina had been her, a year and a lifetime ago, in a grey gown of her own, perched on the edge of a chair at Harcourt House, waiting to be inspected like a length of cloth.
The room they sat in was the interview parlour of the Wexford Foundation, which had opened its doors that morning in a good house in a respectable street.
Its offices occupied the lower floor; above stairs were clean, simply furnished rooms where a woman might lodge safely while a suitable situation was found.
Selina sat behind the desk not as an inspector but as the thing she had once needed: someone on the far side of the table who was not waiting for her to fail.
“I am told,” the young woman said, “that I am to be examined. As to my character, and my accomplishments, and my suitability. I have a list of my accomplishments. I have written them out. I can play, and I have French, and I sew a very neat hem, and I do not complain. I am told to say that I do not complain. That mistresses value it above the French.”
“Keep the list,” Selina said. “We shall want it when we begin considering situations, because there your accomplishments matter. But they are not the first thing I want to know about you.”
The young woman looked uncertain.
“You will be asked questions here,” Selina continued. “We must understand what work you can do and what sort of household may suit you. But we are not deciding whether you deserve our help. That has already been decided by your having come through the door.”
The girl’s fingers shifted against one another.
“At the placement assemblies and the agencies,” Selina said, “the employer chooses, and you hope to be chosen. Here the choice runs both ways. We shall make inquiries into any household before we recommend it to you, just as the household will make inquiries into you. And you may refuse a situation.”
“Refuse it?”
“Yes.”
“Even if it is respectable?”
“A house may be perfectly respectable and entirely wrong for you.”
The young woman considered this as though Selina had proposed overturning a law of nature.
“I do not think anyone has ever asked me to decide anything,” she said at last. “I was told my situation, when I had one. I did not choose it. It chose me, and then it dismissed me, and I was told that too.”
“Then this will be a novel afternoon for us both, because I intend to ask you a good many questions to which I do not already know the answers, and then wait for them.”
Selina leant back slightly.
“We shall find you another situation, or arrange further instruction if that would improve the choices available to you. While we look, you may lodge upstairs. Your room has a lock, and the key will be yours. You will not be obliged to take the first unsuitable position offered merely because you cannot afford another week without one.”
The girl stared at her.
“That,” Selina said, “is the part I should like you to remember.”
She reached for the bell.
“Now. Shall we have tea? Important decisions generally improve with tea, and we appear to have several to make.”
“They said you were a duchess,” the young woman said in a rush.
Her hand rose halfway towards her mouth before she stopped herself.
“The lady at the agency. She said, if you are fortunate, the Duchess of Wexford will see you herself, and I did not believe her. A duchess does not see a person like me. A duchess is seen, from a distance, in a carriage.”
Selina waited.
“And you are one,” the girl finished. “And you are pouring me tea and asking what I want. Forgive me. I do not understand why a duchess should trouble herself with a girl in a grey gown.”
Selina glanced down at the sleeve of her own gown.
She had worn grey that morning as well.
“Because a duchess in a grey gown once sat where you are sitting and knows precisely what it costs to have no good choices.”
The young woman looked at her.
“That is the whole mystery,” Selina said. “There is very little of it once explained. I was fortunate. Someone happened to give me a position when I badly needed one, and the position proved safe. Chance should not have so much to do with it.”
“But why this?” The girl glanced towards the room, and beyond it the house. “Why all of this?”
“Because one position was enough to alter the course of my life. It seemed reasonable to see whether the opportunity might be made less accidental for someone else.”
“Then this is a charity?”
“No.”
Selina’s answer came gently, but at once.
“Charity may be useful, and I have no quarrel with it. But that is not what is happening between you and me. You do not owe this house gratitude for having needed it. You will pay for your keep when you are able, according to your means, and nothing while you are not. If one day you find yourself able and willing to help another woman who has fewer choices than she deserves, I shall be glad of it. If you never do, you will owe me no account of why.”
Something in the girl’s face altered.
The tea arrived.
Selina poured without ceremony and pushed the nearer cup across the desk.
For the next half-hour they talked.
Not of accomplishments at first. Selina asked what the previous situation had been, and why it had ended.
She asked whether the girl preferred children or older people; town or country; a busy household or a quiet one.
Only afterwards did they retrieve the folded list and discover that the French was better than its owner had suggested, the pianoforte considerably worse, and the neat hem apparently beyond dispute.
By then, the girl was sitting against the back of the chair. Her hands no longer gripped one another.
Selina noticed both things and said nothing about either.
“Now,” she said at last, setting the list beside her notes, “what would you like us to call you while you are here?”
The question produced another moment’s surprise.
The young woman gave her name.
Selina wrote it down.
“And if you could choose the sort of life you earned for yourself, not merely the first position somebody offered, what would you choose?”
“I do not know.”
“That is an acceptable answer.”
“Is it?”
“Entirely. You have been allowed the question for approximately ten seconds. I think we may give you longer.”
The girl smiled. It was small and uncertain, but it was the first one.
When the interview ended, Selina rang for the resident matron, who came to show the new arrival the rooms upstairs and explain the arrangements of the house. The young woman rose, collected her list and hesitated at the door.
“Thank you, Your Grace.”
“You are welcome.”
Selina did not tell her she owed no thanks. Gratitude freely offered was not the same thing as gratitude demanded.
The door closed.
For a moment Selina remained at the desk.
Nearly a year had passed since Lady Marwood’s ball.
The Foundation had occupied much of it: leases and builders, interviews and references, arguments over staffing, legal arrangements, coal, linen and a quantity of correspondence Nathaniel had initially underestimated and thereafter refused to admit he had underestimated.
This morning the arguments had become a house with its doors open.
Selina rose and went into the hall.
The place was full without being chaotic, though only barely. Georgiana was directing two footmen carrying a box of donated books upstairs and had developed, over the preceding months, a startling ability to make men twice her age obey instructions delivered without the least apology.
Lady Marwood had arrived half an hour after the doors opened and was now in conversation with two ladies who had expressed interest in supporting the Foundation. She claimed no credit for the enterprise and accepted a great deal of it with equanimity.
Lady Helena stood near the clerk’s table examining the subscription ledger. She had already found one error in the arithmetic and was plainly hunting a second.
Selina watched them for a moment.
They were an unlikely collection of allies. A year ago, she would not have believed herself capable of assembling them, much less of belonging among them.
There were other women moving through the rooms too: women Selina had helped privately while the Foundation was still being built, some now established in suitable positions and returned for the opening.
One had brought flowers. Another had volunteered to spend the morning helping new arrivals find their way through the unfamiliar house.
They needed no speeches explaining what the Foundation might accomplish.
Their presence did that well enough.
Nathaniel was standing near the foot of the stairs.
He had come, as he came now to the things that mattered to her, without announcement. He had apparently been detained by Georgiana and her books and was holding one volume she had thrust into his hands.
He saw Selina.
His expression changed in the familiar way it still did when he found her unexpectedly in a room.
She crossed towards him.
“You have become formidable, Duchess.”
“I was always formidable. You were merely distracted by my grey gown.”
“I remember the gown.”
“I am surprised. You appeared far more interested in my employment history.”
“I was trying to discover whether you would terrify my sister.”
“And?”
“I underestimated you considerably.”
He laughed.
It was still not a common sound, though it was no longer rare enough to surprise her.
Selina looked down at her own gown. She had chosen grey deliberately that morning, though she had told no one why. It was finer than the one she had worn to Harcourt House and cut for a woman who expected to be noticed rather than overlooked.
Nathaniel followed her glance.
“Grey again.”
“Yes.”
He did not ask.
That was one of the things he had learnt.
Almost a year had passed since the ballroom, the terrace and the first time in eight years that Selina had said aloud a word she had believed safer left unnamed.
The year since had been less dramatic and considerably more difficult to describe: breakfasts, accounts, visits to Wexford Park, Georgiana’s careful return to society, and hundreds of ordinary mornings upon which Nathaniel had done precisely what he had promised.
He had still been there.
The certainty had accumulated quietly.
The Foundation had grown in much the same fashion; not out of a single grand gesture, but out of papers signed, rooms inspected, references checked, money argued over and doors made ready to open.
Now they had.
“What did you think of your first applicant?” Nathaniel asked.
Selina glanced towards the stairs up which the young woman had disappeared.
“She has better French than she thinks and worse pianoforte.”
“A grave condition.”
“Possibly incurable.”
“And what does she want?”
“She does not know yet.”
Nathaniel nodded.
“Good.”
Selina looked at him.
“You approve of ignorance?”
“I approve of her being allowed enough time to find out.”
For a moment Selina said nothing. Then she smiled.
In the hall behind them, something fell with a crash.
Both turned.
A box had tipped at the foot of the stairs and deposited several books across the floor.
“I told you that one was too heavy,” Georgiana said to the footman.
“I beg your pardon, my lady.”
“No harm done. Leave the large ones. We shall carry them separately.”
She bent to pick up the nearest volume.
Nathaniel made a movement towards her and stopped himself.
Selina noticed.
“So,” she said quietly, “you can be taught.”
“Apparently.”
“It has taken some time.”
“I was a difficult pupil.”
“You remain one.”
Georgiana looked up from the floor.
“If the pair of you have finished standing there admiring your own wisdom, there are books.”
Nathaniel looked at Selina.
“Duty calls.”
“Not duty.”
“No?”
Selina handed him the volume he was still holding.
“Ordinary life.”
He considered that.
“Worse. It never ends.”
“Precisely.”
They went to help.
Around them the Foundation’s first morning continued: doors opening and shutting, footsteps on the stairs, names being entered into the ledger, tea being carried into interview rooms, women arriving uncertain and being shown where to put their things.
There was no grand transformation in any of it. A house could not repair every injustice waiting beyond its door. It could not make every employer honourable or every frightened woman fortunate.
It could give her a locked room while she decided what came next.
It could ask before choosing for her.
It could give her time.
For Selina, that was enough to begin with.
Nathaniel bent to retrieve the last book from beneath the hall table and handed it to Georgiana.
Selina took another. Between them they cleared the floor while Lady Helena complained that books had no business being delivered on the morning an establishment opened and Lady Marwood observed that an establishment without a minor disaster on its first morning could not be trusted.
Nobody listened to either of them.
The front door opened again.
Another young woman stood upon the threshold with a small travelling case in her hand.
Selina straightened.
The woman looked into the busy hall and hesitated.
Selina went to meet her.
The End
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