stormed from the room in finest Lizzy fashion, leaving Alec bewildered and rather concerned. Was Frances ill? Had something serious happened, and no one told him? He stood beside his desk, wondering if he should go after her, and finally admitting that he did not wish to. He sat down, eyed the piles of correspondence on his desk. Was the perilous state of the country more important than his sisters’ conduct and future? Of course not. Not… precisely. But… that was an unfair comparison. He’d done nothing wrong, Alec thought resentfully. Frances had always managed the household without visible effort. She hadn’t appeared to want advice from him. It was unjust to accuse him of neglect. He would tell her so—at some appropriate point, when things settled down. As they would; of course they would. No question.
Alec reached for a letter from the pile with an incongruous sense of relief.
Four
Charlotte watched the candlelight waver on the pages of her book and listened to the silence. Propped up in bed with plenty of pillows, her bedchamber warmed by a bright fire, she should have been quite contented. No one would be criticizing the amount of coal she had used, or sneering at her choice of reading material. Tomorrow, no one would insult her in her own home, or look at her as if they wished she did not exist. But still, she found the emptiness oppressive. The narrow town house wasn’t large; she’d grown up in a sprawling place far bigger. Yet its four stories were meant to contain many more than one young woman and her maid. The rapid departure of the other servants had left too much space behind. It opened around her and kept her awake deep into the night, with too much time to consider her mistakes. How had she let her life come to this? Why had she not protested?
Her thoughts strayed back to her recent meeting with the solicitor Harold Wycliffe. That choice, at least, seemed wise. She’d been wary of Sir Alexander’s recommendation, but Wycliffe had proved to be a pleasant, middle-aged man, thoroughly sensible and competent, and so she had invited him to look over and organize all of Henry’s papers. His explanations were clear and sympathetic, if depressing. She would have a small income, enough to maintain the house and hire a few servants; enough, perhaps, to salvage some sort of life from the ruins of her fortune. But ruined it definitely was. Her legacy had been poured into the shelves and cases that crowded the first floor of the house like millstones around her neck. Henry had spent it so fast it was dizzying.
It also was maddening. And then to have to face vultures such as Mr. Ronald Herriton, a fat, blustering antiquities dealer, who had called insisting that Henry had meant for him to have his entire collection. He’d offered Charlotte what he called a “very good price,” a figure she knew could not approach what Henry had spent. And he had refused to believe that Charlotte was unable to sell him anything—this, when she would have liked nothing better than to be rid of every musty old bit. She and Lucy together had just barely gotten him out of the house.
Her only comfort in the chaos was Wycliffe’s parting remark. “There is nothing in the will, you know, that requires you to announce the creation of a museum.”
It had taken her a moment. “I must keep all his glass cases and bookshelves and pedestals as they are, but if no one is told…?”
Wycliffe had had a gleam in his brown eyes.
“No one will know to visit,” she added slowly.
He had departed with a smile, and Charlotte’s spirits had lifted for hours, until she realized that this did not answer the larger question of what her life was to be now. Henry had socialized only at his club. They’d never entertained; she had no friends in London. She could invite old chums from Hampshire, she supposed, but most were married and busy with their new families. And the thought of any of them entering this cold museum of a dwelling made her flush. She could so easily imagine their astonished glances, their hushed pity.
Could she not have fought harder against Henry’s scathing sarcasm, the servants’ sly mockery? Even better, could she not have refused to marry him at all? What was wrong with her?
A vivid memory from the months before her marriage arose. She had come upon her father in