Chapter Six #4
It took only a passing glance from someone like Lady Ingram for Livia to be acutely conscious of her shortcomings.
Or it could be said that she was already acutely conscious of her shortcomings and that a whiff of disdain from any quarter, real or imagined, heated that general anxiety to a froth of self-scorn.
“What I meant was, do you believe she ever loved Lord Ingram?”
What an odd question from Charlotte, who had never commented on that marriage.
Had rarely brought up Lord Ingram in conversation, in fact, despite their long-standing friendship.
Sometimes Livia wondered about the two, but it was usually to speculate on whether Lord Ingram might be secretly in love with Charlotte: She was fully prepared to accept that Charlotte had never felt the slightest twinge of romance in her twenty-five years on earth.
“I don’t know that Lady Ingram ever loved her husband, but I do remember thinking that she seemed awfully pleased with the match. Not to an unseemly degree, mind you, but still. I envied her that happiness.”
“Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.”
“Oh, I’m not entirely sure about that. Her happiness lasted a good long while—at least it seemed so to me.”
Charlotte cocked her head to one side. “What if it was all a pretense?”
“It was, wasn’t it? She only married him for his inheritance.”
“No, I mean, what if that happiness was all a pretense? What if she’d never been happy to marry him, even in the beginning?”
“Why are you interested in Lady Ingram, all of a sudden?”
Charlotte glanced out of the window again. “I’m going to tell you something that I learned recently, but you can’t say anything to anyone else.”
“You know I have no bosom bows eager to receive gossip from me. But very well, I won’t tell anyone. What is it?”
“I have heard that before she made her debut, Lady Ingram had been in love with someone else. Someone unsuitable.”
Livia sucked in a breath—and was almost sad she didn’t have a group of lady friends before whom she could dangle this juicy tidbit. “How unsuitable?”
“As unsuitable as our brother would have been.”
“We don’t have a—” They did have a brother. Charlotte had found that out. But it was one of those things that Livia tried to forget: She knew the kind of man her father was, but before such tangible evidence, she still felt as if she’d been punched in the kidney. “Who told you that?”
“I’m not at liberty to reveal that right now. I understand that ladies Avery and Somersby still seek you out to ask for my news. If you see them again, will you please ask whether they know anything of Lady Ingram’s romantic past? Subtly, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you.” Charlotte came forward and squeezed Livia’s hand. “I must leave now. But don’t forget, I’ll look after you—and Bernadine.”
After she was gone, Livia stared at the door for a good long while.
She wanted to believe that Charlotte could fulfill that promise, but everything stood in the way.
Everything.
Charlotte had seen the burned letter the moment she walked into Livia’s room.
The problem with her parents treating their servants with scant respect or consideration was that the servants returned the favor by doing as little work as possible.
In better households, even during warmer months, when no fires were laid, the grates would be swept out daily. But not so in the Holmes residence.
And so the carbonized remains of Livia’s letter had stayed in place, the original curled mass having since crumbled from gravity, small ash-edged bits blown about the grate from the daily airing of the room.
What had she written about? Their parents? Bernadine? Charlotte failed to see any reason why concerns about either should give Livia such pause as to destroy the letter altogether. And Livia’s despondency had felt both newer and keener than her usual gloom.
So it was something that affected her personally, something that upon reflection she couldn’t, after all, bring herself to tell Charlotte.
Livia’s reaction had confirmed Charlotte’s hypothesis. That Livia should have met a man who piqued her interest—well, it was what she was in London to do. The problem lay in what she’d said.
I haven’t been introduced to any man.
Society was structured to prevent young ladies from meeting men who hadn’t been first approved by those around them.
It was not a watertight system, but by and large it did what it was supposed to do.
Charlotte, while she retained her respectability, had never conversed with a man who hadn’t been vouched for by a known third party.
And as far as she knew, neither had Livia.
So where had this man come from? And what did he want?
From her parents’ hired house, Charlotte made her way to the laboratory of London’s best chemical analyst and delivered Mrs. Morris’s biscuits.
That afternoon, she met another client at 18 Upper Baker Street.
The rest of the day she again devoted herself to the odious Vigenère cipher.
It was past one o’clock in the morning before she held in her hand the completed table of distances and could conclude with confidence that the keyword was five letters long, given that the vast majority of the distances between repeated sequences of letters had been multiples of five.
There was little satisfaction in the discovery. Her eyes felt gritty, her head light—as if she’d been drinking. But she had no intention of stopping, even though she needed to get up the next day for work.
The unsettling sensation in her stomach about Mr. Finch’s nondisappearance.
The pointed guilt she felt toward Lord Ingram.
The pressure to marry Lord Bancroft that had, all of a sudden, reached a crushing point.
Livia was not well. And Bernadine, Bernadine had regressed to an appalling degree.
Charlotte had but to say one word and everything would improve drastically.
One word.
She bent her head to her notebook and began the next step in the deciphering.