Emily was dressed as beautifully as ever. Black suited her fair coloring and she had an inner glow as though she were only waiting for the memorial service to be over in order to go on somewhere exciting. One felt as if she would shed the black any moment and burst into color.
“I think we should pay our respects to the widow,” Vespasia said with determination. She turned and smiled at Thelonius. “Do you think, my dear, that you would be generous enough to introduce us?”
He hesitated, knowing perfectly well what she intended, even though he was not sure what she expected to achieve.
She preempted his decision with a charming smile of gratitude and set out across the flagged yard towards Mina Winthrop.
Thelonius offered Charlotte his arm, and they followed after.
Mina acknowledged their introduction and accepted their sympathies graciously. All the while Bart Mitchell stood at her elbow, silent but for the civilities of courtesy.
Closer to her, Charlotte’s first impressions were reinforced. She was very fragile, and even through the veil of her widow’s weeds it was possible to see a pallor to her skin.
“How kind of you to come,” she said formally. “We all appreciate it. Oakley had so many friends.” She smiled tentatively. “A great many I confess I never knew. It is most touching.”
“I am sure you will learn of much feeling for him that you were not aware of before,” Vespasia said with an ambiguity that perhaps she had not intended.
“Oh indeed,” Charlotte added quickly. “Sometimes people only express their true regard at such times. It raises a great many emotions we may not fully have realized.”
“Were you acquainted with Captain Winthrop?” Bart Mitchell asked, looking at her narrowly.
“No,” Vespasia answered for her. “My niece came in order to be of support to me.”
Bart drew in his breath, presumably to ask her the depth of her own acquaintance, then met her eyes and changed his mind. What was a reasonable inquiry of Charlotte, of Vespasia would have been an impertinence.
Charlotte was grateful for the rescue, and even more so for the implication of relationship. She found herself smiling, although it was quite inappropriate.
“We are having a small breakfast,” Mina said warmly. “Perhaps you would care to join us, Lady Cumming- Gould?”
“I should be delighted,” Vespasia accepted instantly. “Perhaps we shall have the opportunity to become a little better acquainted.”
It was an invitation for which many debutantes and society hopefuls would have sold their pearls. Mina might not have understood its rarity, but she perceived something of its value instinctively.
“Thank you. I shall look forward to that.”
Vespasia had achieved what she sought, and etiquette required she withdraw and allow time for others to pay their respects. They excused themselves and were barely a couple of yards away when they came face to face with Lady Winthrop. She murmured something about their graciousness in coming, and Thelonius replied that they would see her at the breakfast.
“Indeed?” she said with some surprise. Then she forced a chilly smile. “How nice of Wilhelmina to invite you. I am delighted you are able to come.” But the look she shot her daughter-in-law held no approval at all.
Bart Mitchell moved a step closer to his sister, and his eyes, looking back to Evelyn Winthrop, were guarded and full of warning.
“How interesting,” Vespasia said when they were alone in Thelonius’s carriage on their way, not to Oakley Winthrop’s house, but to his parents’ house in Chelsea. “How often grief divides a family instead of uniting it. I wonder why, in this instance?”
“Very often a great deal of grief is anger, my dear,” Thelonius observed, sitting opposite them, his back to the driver, his fingers locked over the top of his cane. “One feels loneliness, resentment for the pain of it, guilt for all the things one did not do or say, and fear of the enormity of death. There is nothing to be done, no appeal against it. That anger can turn against those to whom one should be the closest. People occasionally feel isolated in their loss, as if no one else grieves as they do, indeed as if they do not grieve enough.”
Vespasia smiled at him, her eyes gentle and bright. “Of course you are right. But I cannot help it crossing my mind that perhaps Lady Winthrop knows or suspects something that we do not.”
Thelonius’s smile was full of amusement. He braced himself very slightly against the movement as the carriage turned a corner and straightened again.
“She may indeed know something, but I doubt even she could suspect anything that you have not imagined,” he agreed.
Vespasia had the grace to blush, very faintly indeed, but her eyes did not waver.
“Indeed,” she said dryly. “What do you know of the Winthrops’ marriage? I confess, I had not ever heard of them. Who are the Mitchells?”
Charlotte looked from one to the other of them.
“Very ordinary, I believe,” he replied. “Evelyn Winthrop regarded the marriage as less than satisfactory. Wilhelmina had nothing to offer but herself and a small dowry. As for Bartholomew Mitchell, he went out to Africa in the Zulu war of ’79, I believe, and has spent most of the eleven years since then either in Southern Africa or north in Mashonaland or thereabouts. Soldier, of course, to begin with. Something of an adventurer, I suppose.” A shadow of amusement crossed his face. “But none the worse for that. Certainly he did not add to his sister’s value in marriage.”
“Then Captain Winthrop was in love?” Vespasia said with warmth and a flicker of surprise.
He looked at her very steadily. “I wish I could say so, but I think it was more a matter of realism. He was not
