“Of anything, girl! How can I ask for news of something if I do not know what it is? If I already knew it, it would not be news to me, would it?”
It was a fallacious argument, but Charlotte had long ago discovered the futility of pointing that out to her.
“We called upon Mrs. Charrington and Miss Lagarde,” she said. “I found them both quite delightful.”
“Mrs. Charrington is eccentric.” Grandmama’s voice was tart, as if she had bitten into a green plum.
“That pleased me.” Charlotte was not going to be bested. “She was very civil, and after all that is the important thing.”
“And Miss Lagarde—was she civil too? She is far too shy for her own good. The girl seems incapable of flirting with any skill at all!” Grandmama snapped. “She’ll never find herself a husband by wandering around looking fey, however pretty her face. Men don’t marry just a face, you know!”
“Which is as well for most of us.” Charlotte was equally acerbic, looking at Grandmama’s slightly hooked nose and heavy-lidded eyes.
The old woman affected not to have understood her. She turned toward Caroline icily. “You had a caller while you were out.”
“Indeed?” Caroline was not particularly interested. It was quite usual for at least one person to visit during the afternoon, just as she and Charlotte had visited others; it was part of the ritual. “I expect they left a card and Maddock will bring it in presently.”
“Don’t you even wish to know who it was?” Grandmama sniffed, staring at Caroline’s back.
“Not especially.”
“It was that Frenchman with his foreign manners. I forget his name.” She chose not to remember because it was not English. “But he has the best tailor I have seen in thirty years.”
Caroline stiffened. There was absolute silence in the room, so thick one imagined one could hear carriage wheels two streets away.
“Indeed?” Caroline said again, her voice unnaturally casual. There was a catch in it as if she were bursting to say more and forcing herself to wait so her words would not fall over each other. “Did he say anything?”
“Of course he said something! Do you think he stood there like a fool?”
Caroline kept her back to them. She took one of the daffodils out of the bowl, shortened its stalk, and replaced it.
“Anything of interest?”
“Who ever says anything of interest these days?” Grandmama answered miserably. “There aren’t any heroes anymore. General Gordon has been murdered by those savages in Khartoum. Even Mr. Disraeli is dead—not that he was a hero, of course! Or a gentleman either, for that matter. But he was clever. Everyone with any breeding is gone.”
“Was Monsieur Alaric discourteous?” Charlotte asked in surprise. He had been so perfectly at ease in Paragon Walk, good manners innate in his nature, even if she had frequently seen humor disconcertingly close beneath.
“No,” Grandmama admitted grudgingly. “He was civil enough, but he is a foreigner. He cannot afford not to be civil. If he’d been born forty years earlier, I daresay he would have made something of himself in spite of that. There isn’t even a decent war now where a man could go and prove his worth. At least there was the Crimea in Edward’s time—not that he went!”
“The Crimea is in the Black Sea,” Charlotte pointed out. “I don’t see what it has to do with us.”
“You have no patriotism,” Grandmama accused. “No sense of Empire! That’s what is wrong with the young. You are not great!”
“Did Monsieur Alaric leave any message?” Caroline turned around at last. Her face was flushed, but her voice was perfectly steady now.
“Were you expecting one?” Grandmama squinted at her.
Caroline breathed in and out again before replying.
“Since I do not know why he called,” she said, walking over to the door, “I wondered if he left some word. I think I’ll go and ask Maddock.” And she slipped out, leaving Charlotte and the old lady alone.
Charlotte hesitated. Should she ask the questions that were teeming in her head? The old woman’s sight was poor; she had not seen Caroline’s body, the rigid muscles, the slow, controlled turn of her head. Still, her hearing was excellent when she chose to listen, and her mind was still as sharp and as worldly as it had ever been. But Charlotte realized that there was not anything Grandmama could tell her she had not already guessed for herself.
“I think I will go and see if Mama can spare the carriage to take me home,” she said after a moment or two. “Before dark.”
“As you please.” Grandmama sniffed. “I don’t really know what you came for just to go calling, I suppose.”
“To see Mama,” Charlotte answered.
“Twice in one week?”
Charlotte was not disposed to argue. “Goodbye, Grandmama. It has been very nice to see you looking in such good health.”
The old lady snorted. “Full of yourself,” she said dryly. “Never did know how to behave. Just as well you married beneath you. You’d never have done in Society.”
All the way home, rolling smoothly through the streets in her father’s carriage, Charlotte was too consumed by her thoughts to take proper pleasure in how much more comfortable the carriage was than the omnibus.
