Chapter Six
“You are drinking the water wrong.”
The woman at the next table in the Pump Room looked up from her glass as though she had never, in all her life, been informed that she was performing a basic bodily function incorrectly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The water.” Molly slid, uninvited, into the empty chair opposite, because Molly Granger had never in her life waited for an invitation and saw no reason to begin now.
“You are sipping it. Like medicine. That is the difficulty. You must commit to it. One long draught, straight down, before the taste has time to take hold. It is like jumping into a cold river. Hesitation is the enemy.”
The woman stared at her.
She was tall and angular, dressed in a shade of green that suggested both excellent taste and a complete disregard for whether anyone else approved of it.
Her dark hair was pinned with severe precision beneath a bonnet that managed to look at once fashionable and faintly martial.
Her face communicated intelligence before warmth, and humour before either, and she was regarding Molly with an expression that moved, in the space of roughly five seconds, from astonishment to assessment to something remarkably like delight.
“And you are an authority on the waters of Bath, are you?”
“I arrived three days ago and had never been here before in my life, so no. I am the furthest thing from an authority. But I tried the water yesterday, and I sipped it, and it was dreadful. Then I tried it again this morning in one go, and it was still dreadful, but at least it was dreadful for a shorter period of time.”
“That is the most practical advice anyone has given me in this room in all the years I have been drinking this water.” The woman set down her glass, extended one gloved hand, and said, with the crisp authority of a person who made decisions about people in the first thirty seconds and rarely revised them afterwards, “Miss Dorothea Finch. I have lived in Bath my entire life. I know everyone, I like almost no one, and you are the first person who has sat down at my table without being invited since 1811.”
“Molly Granger. I know nobody, I like almost everyone, and I have never waited for an invitation to do anything, which is both my greatest strength and the source of most of my difficulties.”
“I can see that.” Dorothea’s mouth twitched, a small, controlled movement, the sort of almost-smile that suggested she rationed her amusement carefully and distributed it only where she felt it had been earned.
“Where have you come from, Molly Granger, and why are you sitting alone in the Pump Room at nine o’clock in the morning, looking as though the world has made an excellent joke and only you have had the sense to laugh? ”
“Somerset. And I am sitting here alone because I have no one to sit with. The Pump Room seemed the sort of place where one might find company, and I was right, because I found you.”
“You found me because I was sitting alone, which I do deliberately, because I find most people exhausting.”
“Do you find me exhausting?”
Dorothea considered this with the gravity of a judge. “I find you alarming. That is different. Exhausting people drain me. Alarming people interest me. You may stay.”
Molly stayed.
She stayed for an hour, during which she learned that Miss Dorothea Finch was thirty, unmarried by choice, possessed of a modest income from her late mother, and in possession of a social intelligence so comprehensive and so precisely filed that she could produce the marital history, financial standing, and moral character of any person in Bath within fifteen seconds.
“Mrs Addington at the far table married her second husband for his house in the Crescent and his cellar. The cellar has proved more reliable. The Waverly sisters by the window are looking for husbands and finding only each other’s company, which is probably for the best, given their taste in men.
Colonel Fraser near the door has gout, debts, and three illegitimate children in Clifton, though only two of them know of one another. ”
“You are terrifying,” Molly said, with genuine admiration.
“I am observant. There is a meaningful distinction, though most people find the result identical.” Dorothea drank her water in one decisive gulp, grimaced, and set down the glass.
“Now. You said you arrived three days ago from Somerset. You are here alone. You have no chaperone. And you are wearing a gown that was clearly packed in considerable haste. I am going to ask you a question, and I would appreciate honesty, because I can detect a lie at forty paces and find them tedious.”
“Ask.”
“Are you in trouble?”
Molly studied Dorothea Finch: this sharp, funny, solitary woman who had spent a very long time drinking bad water alone in a room full of people, and who had just, with characteristic directness, asked a question most would be too polite or too incurious to voice.
“Yes,” she said. “Quite a lot of trouble, actually.”
“Good.” Something in Dorothea’s face softened, just slightly, at the edges. “Trouble is interesting. Tell me everything.”
So, Molly told her everything.
She told her about Lord Vyne, and her father’s debts, and the wedding dress, and the window, and the rose bush, and the mail coach, and the sixpence, and Mrs Bramble, and the cat, and the earl who had been sent to retrieve her and was, inexplicably, still in town.
Dorothea listened without interrupting, a feat few managed in Molly’s presence, given that her manner of narration involved several detours, two digressions about the Turkish prison novel, and one extended reflection on the comparative intelligence of cats and goats.
When Molly finished, Dorothea was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, “This earl. Lord Harrowden. He is staying?”
“He says he is.”
“And he has not told your father where you are?”
“He says he has not.”
“And you believe him?”
Molly thought of Cillian Swifton standing in Mrs Bramble’s parlour the other day, quiet and watchful and entirely unreadable; of the way he had reached for her elbow when she stood, then stopped himself; of the way the stopping had seemed to cost him something, though she could not have said what.
“I believe him,” she said. “I have no reason to, except that when I told him about Lord Vyne, he listened. He actually listened. He did not tell me I was being dramatic, or that I ought to trust my father’s judgment, or that marriage is a woman’s duty.
He just sat there and heard me. And then he stayed. ”
“That is either very honourable or very suspicious.”
“It may be both. I have not decided.”
“Well.” Dorothea rose and adjusted her bonnet with the precision of a woman arming herself for battle. “You have a great many problems, Molly Granger, and I intend to help you with all of them, beginning with the fact that you are dressed for a country house and living in a city. Come with me.”
Molly went with her to a milliner’s shop on Milsom Street, where Dorothea introduced her to Mrs Holt, who was flustered and short-staffed because her assistant had been ill for a week and the shop window looked, in Dorothea’s words, “as though a windstorm had arranged it.”
“My friend Miss Granger has an excellent eye and is in need of temporary employment. You are in need of someone with an excellent eye. The arithmetic is simple.”
Mrs Holt turned to Molly, and Molly turned to the window display: a disaster of mismatched ribbons, crowded bonnets, and haphazardly angled hat forms. She felt something quicken in her chest, the particular excitement of seeing a problem she could solve.
“May I?” she asked, gesturing towards the window.
“Pray do,” Mrs Holt said, with the weary resignation of a woman who had attempted the display three times that morning and surrendered.
Molly stepped into the window space and began to work.
She had no training, no credentials, only an eye sharpened by years of walking into rooms and immediately seeing what was right and what was wrong. She saw the world in terms of how it might be made more beautiful, and had never, until this moment, been offered an outlet anyone took seriously.
She grouped the hats by colour, creating a progression that moved from deep burgundy through rose to the palest cream.
She angled the forms at varying heights so the eye travelled upward, drawing the gaze from the street towards the shop’s interior.
She unwound a length of ivory ribbon and draped it through the arrangement in a loose spiral that caught the pale light, then placed one hat—a striking emerald-green bonnet with a single pheasant feather—slightly apart from the rest, at the centre of the display, like a jewel in a setting.
She stepped back.
Mrs Holt came to look.
Dorothea came to look.
Two women passing on the street stopped to look.
“That,” Mrs Holt said slowly, “is the best that window has looked since I opened the shop.”
“I can do the ribbons as well, if you like. And the gloves. The gloves should be fanned, like a hand of cards, so the customer can see the range of colours without having to ask. It is more inviting.”
Mrs Holt turned to Dorothea.
Dorothea raised one eyebrow, which, in Dorothea’s vocabulary of facial expressions, constituted a full-throated endorsement.
“Come back tomorrow at eight,” Mrs Holt said. “I can pay you four shillings a week while my regular girl is away. It will not be much.”
“It will be more than you know,” Molly said.
And she meant it with a force that surprised her, because four shillings a week was scarcely enough to live upon and entirely enough to keep her alive. Alive was, at present, the only ambition she could afford.
She left the shop with Dorothea, and the two of them walked through the afternoon light, Molly talking and Dorothea listening, occasionally offering some dry observation that made Molly laugh so hard she had to stop walking.