Chapter 2 #2
Every face in the room turned to her. Beatrice's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.
"No," Beatrice said. Simply, without elaboration.
Catherine felt the refusal like a physical check. "I am capable. I am not afraid. I have walked through worse—"
"You have not walked through anything approaching this," Beatrice said, her voice not unkind but entirely immovable. "Sit down, Catherine."
"Lady Beatrice, I volunteered in good faith—"
"And I am declining you in good faith." Beatrice held her gaze steadily.
"Your face is known. Your name is known.
Your father's crest is on your carriage and your features have appeared in three society publications this season alone.
You could undo in five minutes what it has taken us two years to build.
If you are recognized inside that mill, it does not merely end in your disgrace — it ends in the arrest of every woman in this room. "
The fire crackled in the grate. Outside, a cart rumbled slowly along the street, and for one suspended moment every woman in the room went very still, listening to it pass.
When the sound faded, Beatrice turned to Miss Collins. "Sarah. You are our woman for this."
Miss Collins nodded without ceremony.
Catherine sat with her hands folded in her lap and said nothing further.
She was not accustomed to the particular anger of being right about one's own capabilities and still being told no — not for lack of ability, but because of the very privilege she had spent the last months trying to put to some useful purpose.
It was a cage she had not fully understood was a cage until this precise moment.
As the meeting concluded and the women began gathering their cloaks and reticules, Mrs. Jenkins paused beside Catherine's chair.
She said nothing at first — simply looked at her with the measuring consideration of someone who had learned long ago to weigh people by their actions rather than their words.
"It was the right instinct," Mrs. Jenkins said at last, her voice low enough for Catherine's ears alone. "For what that is worth to you."
Catherine looked up at her. "It does not feel worth a great deal at present."
"No," Mrs. Jenkins agreed, with the ghost of something that was not quite a smile.
"It rarely does. But it is the instinct that keeps a person coming back.
" She moved toward the door, then paused once more.
"I have known women who talk of justice for twenty years without once putting themselves in its path.
You lasted three weeks before volunteering for something that frightened you.
" She adjusted her shawl. "Do not let Lady Beatrice discourage you entirely. "
She was gone before Catherine could respond.
Beatrice approached as the last of the others filed out, closing the drawing room door behind her. She studied Catherine with the particular attention of someone conducting a careful reassessment.
"You are angry with me," Beatrice said.
"I am," Catherine replied.
"Good." Beatrice settled into the chair opposite, folding her hands in her lap.
"Anger means you understand the stakes. I require you to understand them fully before you go any further with us.
" She paused. "Your position in society is not an obstacle to this work, Catherine — it is a tool.
There will come a time when a letter written on your father's stationery, or a word spoken in the right drawing room by an earl's daughter, will accomplish what Miss Collins and I cannot from where we stand.
That time is not yet. But it will come, and when it does, you must still be standing. "
Catherine absorbed this in silence. It was not comfort, precisely. But it was the truth, and she recognized it as such.
"Absolute secrecy," Beatrice continued. "You must tell no one — not your closest friend, not your lady's maid, not your family.
You arrive and depart without being seen.
If we encounter one another in public, you treat me with the cold courtesy appropriate to a woman of my reputation.
" She held Catherine's gaze. "I am persona non grata in every drawing room that matters.
I ask you to help maintain that appearance, because it protects us both. "
"I understand," Catherine said. The words sat uncomfortably, but she meant them.
Beatrice withdrew a slip of paper from the secretary desk. "Our next meeting is in a fortnight. A different address — we do not meet in the same place twice in succession."
Catherine took the paper, committed the address to memory, and tucked it into her reticule. She rose, gathering her plain dark cloak — chosen specifically to assist in blending into the evening's shadows — and turned toward the rear door through which she would depart.
"Lady Beatrice," she said, pausing. "The mill in Stepney. When Miss Collins returns with the ledgers — what happens next?"
"That," Beatrice said, with something approaching satisfaction, "is where an Earl's daughter and her father's stationery may yet prove useful."
Three streets away, her carriage waited in the darkness precisely where she had left it.
John, the family's most trusted coachman, assisted her inside without comment or curiosity — a discretion for which Catherine paid him well in both coin and genuine loyalty.
She settled against the cushions as the carriage rolled toward Belgravia, the city moving past the window in its familiar alternation of gaslight and shadow.
Her mind would not settle.
She kept returning to the moment Beatrice had said no — not to her courage, not to her willingness, but to her face, her name, the crest on her carriage door.
She had spent twenty-four years understanding her position as something that occasionally required management.
Tonight she had understood it, for the first time, as something that actively prevented her from being useful.
The distinction was not a comfortable one.
By the time the carriage turned into the wide, well-lit avenue where the Fairfax townhouse stood, she had resolved two things: that she would return to Lady Beatrice's circle regardless of what it cost her, and that she would find a way to be of genuine use that did not depend on hiding everything that she was.
◆◆◆
The Earl of Derby's dining room gleamed under the warm light of its crystal chandelier, mahogany table set with the family glasses and silver that had graced four generations of Fairfax suppers.
Despite the hour, her parents were still at table — a habit of companionable lingering over tea that Catherine had always found quietly admirable in them, even when it complicated her arrivals.
She entered as smoothly as possible, leaving her plain cloak with the footman in the hall and checking her reflection in the passage mirror before crossing the threshold. Nothing amiss.
"Catherine, darling." Her mother, Lady Eleanor Fairfax, looked up with the warm and entirely genuine smile that had been Catherine's fixed point since childhood.
The Countess of Derby was an elegant woman whose auburn hair had acquired only the lightest touch of silver, her blue eyes — so like her daughter's — bright with the particular intelligence of a woman who noticed a great deal more than she commented upon.
"You are just in time for the last of the tart. How is dear Anna?"
"Much improved, Mama." The lie came with the practiced ease that Catherine disliked in herself. "Her cough still troubles her in the evenings, but the worst has passed."
"I shall send Cook's honey cake tomorrow," her mother said with genuine warmth. "It never failed to set you right when you were small."
"She would appreciate that," Catherine replied, and accepted her tea with a hand that did not quite feel like her own.
Her father set down his wine glass and regarded her with the attentive curiosity that had always been both his most admirable quality and his most inconvenient one. "Have you heard the news that has set London buzzing these past three days?"
"I confess I have not, Papa. What has happened?"
"The Duke of Wexford has returned." He delivered the words with the deliberate pleasure of a man who knew their weight.
"Alexander Harrington — Lord Alexander, as was.
Appeared at Harrington House last week as if he had stepped out for the afternoon rather than been absent for eight years. Six of them presumed dead."
Catherine set her cup down carefully. "The man lost with HMS Valiant?"
"The very same. He is the eighth Duke now — his father passed just over two years ago.
" The Earl leaned back in his chair. "The whole affair is extraordinary.
No explanation of where he has been, what happened after the ship went down, how he survived.
Says nothing on the subject. The speculation is considerable. "
"I imagine it is," Catherine said. Despite herself, she found her attention genuinely caught — not by the social spectacle of it, but by the shape of the story underneath.
A man who had lived outside England for eight years, six of them in the African continent by most accounts, returning to a world that had long since divided his inheritance and moved on.
"What do people believe happened to him? "
"Various theories." Her father waved a hand. "Pirates. Illness. Living among the native populations. The man will not confirm or deny any of it."
"Poor fellow," her mother murmured. "Whatever he endured out there, it cannot have been pleasant. But Duchess Margaret must be beside herself with joy. I cannot imagine the agony she's endured these past years, convinced her son was alive when everyone else had given up hope."
"I am not certain I would characterize it as misfortune," Catherine said.
Both parents looked at her.