dealt with many petitioners.
She weighed her purse – light enough, given the tight hold Mary had kept on the family accounts. ‘Alice, why don’t you go and commence negotiations with Mrs Shevarler,’ she suggested, with a nod towards the dressmaker’s.
‘Please tell me you are not going to exhaust any more of our funds this way,’ Alice said crossly. ‘Mary will be furious.’
‘Mary says that the honour of our family is about looking after those that depend on us,’ Emily pointed out. She was not at all sure that Mary would quite see things her way, but she got the words out smoothly enough. ‘And it will only be a little.’ The words rang hollow as she looked across the market square.
Leaving Poldry at the buggy, she set out, facing the impossible task of deciding who was in greatest need, and where her charity might benefit most. The more she looked, the more need there seemed to be: injured soldiers who had marched out whole and come back only in part; thin, grimy women who had no living and nobody left to support them – and their children, all too often. Emily slowed to a halt, feeling something harden inside her. She had so little to give: could she find even a penny for them all? And what would a penny buy them? She could feel a thought hovering over her, waiting for its moment: Surely they cannot all really be in need. Surely some are faking, are taking advantage of the kindness of others. And if some are, then why not most of them? Or all? Despite the evidence of her senses, how convenient it would be if she could adopt that thought: what a salve that would be for her conscience.
This must be how Mr Northway teaches himself to think.
All eyes, she was sure, were fixed upon her. The honour of her family was at stake. Closing her ears to Alice’s mutterings, she got her purse out and began distributing small coins almost at random, passing down the row of stalls trying to distinguish, via some hitherto unguessed-at sense, the truly desperate from the merely needy. The pennies fell from her fingers into the cupped hands, the bowls, the threadbare hats of her targets. She felt as if she was pouring them into a hole, into a bottomless darkness. Increasingly, she felt very much that Alice was right. She found herself with that thought in her head, as she was brought up short before another man with a band of cloth covering his eyes. She felt as though she was waking from a dream, only to find herself trapped in another one.
One more coin and then I go, but something was staying her hand, some odd intuition. The man before her had a palm out hopefully, but there was something amiss about his posture, a tension here that she could not account for.
‘Emily!’ Alice had finally reached the end of her fraying tether. ‘We’re here to be measured! You promised.’ And she was pushing forward, forcing Emily to step back. The blind beggar’s head shifted sideways, that sightless gaze fixing on Alice.
Everything happened so rapidly that she barely registered the events as they unfolded, only pieced them together in retrospect. As Alice remonstrated with her, the beggar lurched up, barged into her, then was off down a side street and away from the market. Alice let out a gasp of utter outrage, mouth open to deliver some acid comment, but then she let out a wail of dismay.
‘My purse!’
Emily had sometimes called her a thoughtless girl – and applied that label silently in her head far more often – but she herself did not stop to think at all. In an instant, her feet took her in pursuit of the thief, leaving her mind to catch up. She was still getting past the thought, He wasn’t really blind, when the fugitive turned another corner ahead of her. When she followed him round it, she had got as far as, Thank God I wore good shoes! Catching sight of him making another turn – his face a pale flash as he glanced over his shoulder – Emily pushed herself onwards determinedly. She was full of indignation that this man should come to her town and steal from her sister. The very fact of it was a slight against her family. What is Mr Northway doing that he cannot keep order on the streets?
And then she had him: the last turn