The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,51

the door.

About five minutes later, Mr. Oliver’s door creaked open. The vicar poked his head out, his eyes wide and watery, his face wan with fear. He started when Penelope waved, and craned his neck around, as if he could see around corners to survey the whole of the rectory.

“It’s alright,” Penelope reassured him. “They’ve all gone down the pub.”

“Ah.” Mr. Oliver straightened, and sighed. “I was rather worried there, for a moment.”

“I thought I might help you sweep up the glass,” Penelope offered.

“Yes.” The vicar swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down convulsively. “Yes, that’s very kind of you.”

He retrieved a broom and a bin and together they knocked the glass shards from the leaves and swept it up from the ground as best they could. The rich scent of loam rose up around them; the vicar kept his garden well-tended.

Mr. Oliver cleared his throat. “I was surprised to see Mrs. Koskinen at the head of such a group,” he said, his eyes fixed on the work his hands were doing. “I never pictured her as a rabble-rouser. She’s such a soft and feminine little thing.”

Penelope was suddenly, awkwardly conscious of the heft of her body, and the trousers bagging at her knees and tucked into the tops of her boots. She ignored the prickle of embarrassment in her cheeks, tugged on her gloves, and worked on prying the larger glass pieces out of the window frame, tossing them in the bin with the rest of the debris. “Mrs. Koskinen lost her cousin Beth at Peterloo last year. Sabered by one of the Yeomanry.”

Mr. Oliver grimaced. “I see. Such a waste of a good soul.”

Penelope didn’t know whether he meant Mrs. Koskinen or her cousin. She couldn’t think of a way to ask that didn’t sound rude, so she bit her lip to keep quiet and plucked at more glass fragments.

They moved slowly around the house from window to window. “How is your guest faring?” Mr. Oliver asked. “I hope she is finding a little solace now that the first shock has passed?”

Penelope paused, looking down at the shard of glass in her gloved palm. “It’s only been three months. Nothing to set against thirty years.”

Mr. Oliver brushed a tangle of leaves and glass and soil into the bin. “Three months is three times longer than Achilles grieved for Patroclus.”

“Perhaps,” Penelope retorted, “but at the end of the month Achilles stormed back into battle with murder on his mind. Joanna is not quite at that pitch of mourning.”

Mr. Oliver chuckled, but Penelope couldn’t share his amusement. She kept turning his reference over in her mind: Did it mean he knew about Joanna and Isabella being as good as a married couple? He had to, didn’t he? Most of the countryside knew, after all, or at least suspected. Surely the vicar, with all his learning, couldn’t have missed so many clues and rumors? Achilles and Patroclus were famous for their friendship, but to anyone who knew how to read the signs it was definitely that kind of friendship. The kind that got men whipped or transported or even hanged. Romantic friendship. Passionate friendship. Very often naked and desperate to fuck each other friendship.

Perhaps he felt differently about men loving men, than about women loving women? The vicar’s long-ago words to her brother whispered in her memory: Men of that sort might find life in the city more to their taste.

Had Mr. Oliver really meant it like that? Penelope couldn’t be sure. The uncertainty tied her stomach in knots.

Because if he disapproved of Joanna and Isabella, of their decades-long devotion and fidelity, which broke no laws at all, how much more easily would he disapprove of Penelope’s more transitory, flagrantly carnal affairs? It wasn’t only her current lust for Mrs. Griffin, that secret that beat like a second heart beneath her breastbone. She’d been eager enough to act on her past desires.

And Penelope was a married woman. Yes, her marriage was unconsummated, an arrangement rather than a union, and no, she still couldn’t have married any of the women she had loved over the last ten years—but it still wasn’t good that her vows had been broken beyond repair before the wedding cake had even gone stale.

If Mr. Oliver knew, he’d want to send her away, too.

Sometimes Penelope felt she deserved every last drop of the world’s scorn. She knew what the rules were, but rather than openly flout them, she’d merely hidden her affairs behind locked doors and light