A Study In Scarlet Women (10 page)

My Dear Lord Ingram,

As soon as I arrived in Scotland Yard this morning, I learned that the Devon Constabulary has requested assistance from the C.I.D. with regard to Mr. Sackville's case. I have volunteered my services.

I can only hope I shall not disappoint Sherlock Holmes.

Your servant,
Robert Treadles

“N
o letters for you, miss,” said the post office clerk to Charlotte.

Charlotte thanked him, yielded her place, and walked across the cavernous, impersonal interior of the post office. She was fine until she reached the third pillar from the door, and then her lungs collapsed.

She couldn't breathe. She couldn't move. Her nails dug into the palms of her hands as she broke out in a cold sweat. Imminent heart failure—she recognized all the symptoms. Dear God, what would happen to Livia? And what would the man she couldn't stop caring about think, when he learned that she'd met her end at the General Post Office on St. Martin's Le Grand, of all places?

Two minutes later, still very much on her feet and not lying in a heap on the floor, she began to realize that what ailed her wasn't the spear point of mortality, but the onset of panic.

She had never felt panic in her life. Livia sometimes did, when she imagined, in excruciating detail, ending up an indigent old maid unwanted by any and all relations, spending her days in a grimy boardinghouse, subsisting on only bread and boiled cabbage.

When Livia fell into one of her states of uncontrollable anxiety—or climbed into one, as Charlotte sometimes thought—Charlotte
would bring her a heaping plate of buttered toast and hot tea laced with brandy. She would rub Livia's back. And then she would read aloud passages from
Jane Eyre
, Livia's favorite book, a work Charlotte couldn't otherwise get through, finding it too dense with high emotion and melodrama.

But even though she did all these sisterly things, she never did feel any of Livia's fear and anguish. It had seemed utterly incomprehensible that a future decades distant, built of nothing but worst-case scenarios, should hold such sway over the here and now.

Until this moment.

Until the weight of all her choices descended upon her with the force and tonnage of a landslide.

What if the investigation into Mr. Sackville's death unearthed nothing? What if the truth remained obscured and Livia was forever branded an unprosecuted murderer because of a drunken spat?

Fear swelled, crushing her organs to make room for more of itself. It squeezed the air out of her lungs. It coiled, pythonlike, around her stomach. It forced its way up her windpipe, pushing, expanding, blocking every last sliver of open passage.

She had always been certain that she'd be able to take care of Livia in addition to herself. She never thought she would wreck both their lives simultaneously.

She had not made up out of whole cloth the more numerous opportunities open to women these days. Nor had she conjured from thin air those societies that existed to connect women in need of employment with employers in need of positions filled.

But a good portion of those organizations, for all their good and noble intentions, were thinly funded. Two of those she visited had already closed permanently, with another still nominally in operation, but taking applications only by post. The ones that appeared to be in more robust shape all required letters of character written
by ladies of good standing—those Charlotte would never have, but those didn't concern her so much: She was passable at imitating handwriting and did not consider it a moral failing for a woman in her situation to forge her own recommendations.

Of a far greater worry was that to receive help from those societies, she had to first pay a subscription fee, which her already thin wallet could ill afford—not if she wanted to eat and have a roof over her head, too. And then, were she determined enough to pay the fee, she could expect to wait weeks, possibly months, before a suitable position turned up.

She didn't have that kind of time.

It wasn't so dire yet. Not at the moment. But just as Livia looked down the years and saw nothing but misery and loneliness at the end of the road, Charlotte could not get rid of this stone-hard dread of coming to the last of her pennies.

Her room and board was nine shilling six a week. After paying for the first two weeks, she had five pounds three and ten left, including what Livia had given her. That amount had been further reduced after the purchase of the daily necessities—not to mention she had to provide for her own lunches.

The money would not last forever. It would not even last very long. And then what? If she couldn't look after herself, how would she begin to help Livia?

“Are you all right, miss?”

An almost comically resplendent creature stood before Charlotte, in a polonaise of lustrous Prussian blue silk, worn over an elaborately ruffled white underskirt. Her hat was narrow brimmed and high crowned, laden with sprays of ornamental grass against which nestled a . . . a stuffed blue-breasted parrotfinch, if Charlotte wasn't entirely wrong about her ornithology.

She realized that she'd been standing with her back against a
forty-foot-high column, her hand over her chest. She dropped that hand. “Yes, I'm fine. Thank you, ma'am. It's the weather, a bit hot today.”

“It
has
been rather warm lately,” said the woman. Her voice was of a startling loveliness, rich as cream, with a barely perceptible hint of huskiness. “Should I ask someone to fetch you a glass of water, miss? Or find you a place to sit down for a minute, in peace and quiet, away from nosy old ladies such as myself?”

The woman chuckled at her own joke. Until she did so, Charlotte had thought her in her mid-to-late thirties. But her mirth revealed webs of crow's feet around her eyes and deep channels to either side of her lips: She was a woman at least fifty years of age.

Her money was new: No one who'd been raised to follow the unspoken standards of Society, not even a woman with Charlotte's “magpie tastes,” as Livia called them, would sport so elaborate and fanciful a confection for an outing to the post office.

She wore no wedding band. But that, Charlotte decided, was not because she had never been married. The parrotfinch on the hat was perched on a little nest made of black crape. The same material formed a most discreet border around the blue reticule the woman held in her hand.

Women only wore black crape if they had lost their husbands. And the woman here, despite her extravagantly exuberant day dress, wished to honor her late spouse in a subtle manner, nearly invisible expressions of grief and remembrance woven into her daily attire.

Charlotte shook her head at herself, at her ingrained tendency to observe those she came across to the very last detail. She enjoyed it and she was good at it. But what use was it?

What use was a woman with a mind and a temperament that would be odd and borderline worrisome even in a man?

She forced a smile. “Thank you, ma'am, but I really am quite all right. Nothing is the matter with me at all.”

After the woman sashayed away to conduct her business with the post office—her progress followed by all the men and most of the women in a twenty-five-foot radius—Charlotte pulled herself together and left.

Perhaps it was nothing more than hunger. Feeling the pinch of imminent penury, she had saved two slices of buttered toast from breakfast. But she had wanted to see whether she would still be able to function as usual without eating them for lunch. It had been a long day of walking about London, and she had two and a half more miles to go before she reached her little room at Mrs. Wallace's. She grew increasingly sure that if she could only set a kettle to boil, and put the slices of toast in her stomach where they belonged, she wouldn't feel nearly so dispirited.

Not to mention that Miss Whitbread had kindly loaned her a half dozen magazines. Charlotte had already found two interesting travelogue pieces—one on the fjords of Norway and the other about the Canary Islands. A cup of tea, a bite to eat, even if it was from morning, and a chance to forget her troubles by vicariously living another woman's holiday—

“A penny, mum? A penny please?”

The plaintive cry of a child beggar yanked Charlotte back to the unhappy here and now. The girl was small and hollow cheeked. Her face and her outstretched hand were coated with grime, her frock such a hodgepodge of brown and grey patches that Charlotte couldn't tell what its original color had been.

But it was the woman holding on to the girl's shoulder who made Charlotte's chest constrict. She had seen beggars in London, but never one like this. The mother wore a black patch over one eye, her other eye the milky blue of the blind. Her face had the vacantness of a North Sea beach in the dead of winter; her arms, held close to the sides of her body, the stiffness of a marionette.

She did not look defeated. To look defeated was to suggest that one had recently strived for something. This woman was drained, whatever hope and energy she'd once possessed long ago permanently depleted.

The husk that she'd become was far more frightening than the sight of the down-on-their-luck-but-still-saucy beggars Charlotte was more accustomed to seeing, ones who accosted their passersby with a combination of pathos and bravado.

“A penny for me supper, mum?” The little girl, not yet entirely diminished by life, asked again.

Charlotte opened her reticule and pulled out not only a coin, but the two slices of toast, wrapped in brown paper. “Here's a sixpenny bit for you. You look after your mum. Make sure she has her supper, too.”

The little girl looked with incredulity at the coin that had been dropped into her palm. She raised her face to Charlotte, let go of her mother's hand, and wrapped her arms around her benefactor. And only then did she accept the toasts.

Charlotte walked on, feeling a little less in despair.

Her relief that she could still do something for someone evaporated before the display windows of Atwell & Dewsbury, Pharmaceutical Chemists. She had never walked so much in her entire life; her feet were in agony. She probably couldn't afford to buy plasters for her blisters, but at least she could inquire into their prices.

She patted the hidden pocket on her skirt. In her reticule she kept only minor change, but in her pocket she had a pound note.

Mrs. Wallace's place seemed safe enough and the lock on Charlotte's door was sturdy. But what if the place burned down while Charlotte was out seeking employment? She didn't want to lose all her money, along with all her other worldly possessions. The pound note in her pocket served as a crude form of insurance.

But it was not there. Through the broadcloth of her dress, she couldn't sense the small but very real presence of that precious piece of paper, folded into a square. Surely she was mistaken. She dug her fingers harder against the fabric. Nothing. All she felt was the bulk of her petticoat—and beneath that, the form of her limb.

The little beggar girl who had embraced her. Charlotte should have known—she should have known that instant something was wrong. The girl hadn't been anywhere near as emaciated as her face would suggest. And she hadn't smelled of the sourness of lack of washing.

No, Charlotte should have known
before
then. The girl hadn't left her mother's hold—it had been the other way around. The mother had signaled her to go for the easy prey. The eye patch hadn't covered some unsightly deformity: It had covered her good eye, the black cloth thin enough for her to make out something of her surroundings in good daylight.