Chapter Thirteen
“I am sorry, dear. Truly.”
Mrs Holt stood behind her counter with her hands clasped before her and her face arranged in such transparent distress that Molly understood, before the explanation came, that the news was bad.
“A gentleman visited late yesterday afternoon,” Mrs Holt said.
The word gentleman carried a weight which suggested she was using it in its technical sense rather than its moral one.
“He gave no name, but I am almost certain I had seen him before. He admired the window, asked who had arranged it, and then mentioned, quite carelessly, that the young woman employed here was involved in a disagreement with a prominent family, and that any establishment connected with her might find itself the subject of… attention.”
“His word. He said it as one speaks of weather when one means storm.” Mrs Holt’s hands tightened together.
“I am a widow, Miss Granger. This shop is my livelihood. I cannot afford the wrong kind of notice from powerful people, and I have not the means to oppose whatever this man was suggesting might follow.”
Molly stood in the shop she had transformed, surrounded by the ribbon wall, the window display, the arrangement of gloves she had devised, and understood at once what had happened.
Prescott had turned to the people around her and begun applying pressure to the frail foundations of her new life: string, charm, work, and other people’s goodwill.
“You are letting me go,” Molly said.
“I am.” Mrs Holt’s voice trembled. “Because I am frightened, and ashamed to be so.” She pressed a small envelope across the counter. “Your wages through the end of the week. And a reference, for what it may be worth. Your work here has been the best thing to happen to this shop in years.”
Molly looked down at the envelope.
“You have a gift, Miss Granger,” Mrs Holt said, her voice thickening. “I hope you find someone with the courage to let you use it.”
Molly took the envelope. She thanked Mrs Holt with a steadiness she did not feel and a smile that lasted only as long as the conversation required. Then she gathered her few things: a spare apron, a ribbon offcut, the small, foolish proofs that she had belonged there for a little while.
She walked through the shop one last time without touching anything.
When she stepped out onto Milsom Street, the door closed behind her and the bell chimed, small and bright.
It sounded like an ending.
She had been in Bath long enough to begin believing in the life she had made there.
Not securely. Not sensibly. But fiercely.
She had thrown herself into the city with all the labour, charm, and obstinate hope she possessed, trusting that if she kept moving forward, something would rise to meet her.
Something had risen.
Now someone was dismantling it.
She still had Teddy’s wine shop. Three shillings a week for afternoons. Enough for bread and tea, perhaps, but not enough to stand on. Without Mrs Holt’s wages, the arithmetic of her existence narrowed alarmingly.
She did the calculation as she walked, because Molly Granger, for all her reputation for impulse, could manage arithmetic very well when arithmetic concerned survival.
Teddy paid three shillings. Her savings tin beneath the bed contained, at last count, eleven shillings and fourpence.
It was not ruin.
Not yet.
But it was no longer freedom either.
She walked to the Crescent and sat on a bench in the pale sunlight. Bath spread below her in stone and spire and river, beautiful and indifferent. For the first time since the travelling-bag, the twisted ankle, and the wild conviction that courage would be enough, the warmth in her dimmed.
She thought about going home.
The thought arrived quietly, dressed in the respectable language of practicality. She could write to her father. She could say she was sorry. She could say she understood now that debts were real, tenants were real, and estates could fail if she refused to do what was expected of her.
She could go back. She could marry Lord Vyne. She could save them all by becoming exactly what he intended her to become.
The thought made her stomach clench so hard she bent forward and pressed her hands against her knees.
Even in the sunshine, she could see him: the silver hair, the still hands, the flat patience of his gaze.
She could hear his voice saying settled with the calm of a man speaking of livestock.
She could feel again the cold certainty that had come over her in her bedroom, with the wedding dress waiting nearby, when she had understood that the man she was being given to would take everything vivid in her and put it out by degrees.
No.
She was not going home.
The arithmetic was impossible. The alternatives were almost nonexistent. The fear was real, and so was the despair. But none of it—none of it—was enough to send her back to that house, that church, that promise of obedience to a man who wanted silence where she existed.
Still, the spark had gone low.
The bright, unreasonable hope that had carried her through Bath guttered like a candle in a draught, and what remained was a girl on a bench in a city that was not quite hers, doing sums that did not come out, and trying to remember that courage, on such days, was not the absence of despair.
It was the decision to keep walking through it.
So she walked.
By afternoon, she was at Teddy’s wine shop, selling bottles with her usual theatrical charm, inventing histories, making customers laugh, and pretending so well that only Teddy’s careful glance suggested he knew anything had changed. He did not press her. For that, she was grateful.
She returned to Mrs Bramble’s at dusk. She ate dinner.
She consulted Wellington upon several minor matters and discussed with Mrs Bramble the bread, the weather, and an interesting woman she had met at the Pump Room.
Mrs Bramble listened, answered, and permitted the evening to keep its ordinary rhythm: the small, steady heartbeat of a household that held.
After dinner, Mrs Bramble asked Molly to sit with her in the parlour.
The fire was low. Mrs Bramble poured tea with her usual brisk efficiency, then set down the pot and turned to Molly with an expression that was neither brisk nor efficient.
“A letter came today,” she said. “For me. Not for you.”
She produced it from her apron pocket, already opened, already read, already creased from being folded and unfolded too many times.
Molly took it.
The handwriting was precise and impersonal, the hand of a clerk or a man of business. The letter itself was short.