Page 32 of The Unlovable Lady

“Phoebe has gone to the Danforths’. The basket-making.” A small sniff followed, with the grievance not quite gone out of it. “I cannot think why Lady Holt encourages it! A parish charity, with the gentry, when she might do a great many better things.”

“Lady Holt encourages a great many things.” The cold came back into the voice upon the name, smooth and even, as though the warmth had never been there at all. “Go and wash your face.”

Rosalind stepped back from the door without a sound, and by the time it opened she had her face composed and the silks settled in her arms.

Selina, Countess of Marbury, came out into the passage.

“Lady Rosalind.” The flawless smile came, though the eyes did not warm, and the faint weight sat upon the title exactly as it always did. “You have made yourself useful, I see. You always do. Put them on the small table, and then go in to Lady Holt. We must none of us trouble you with the carrying.”

“Lady Marbury,” Rosalind murmured, and made her curtsy, and set the silks down exactly as she was bid. The cold came off the Countess as cold comes off a window glass in winter.

* * *

The Danforths had given their back parlor over to the parish baskets, just as they had given it over to the greenery the week before. Rosalind came in out of the cold afternoon, and the warmth of the room folded about her at once.

It was a charitable undertaking, got up by Charlotte’s mother and two other ladies of the parish. There were baskets to be made up against Christmas for the poor of the district, each with bread and a little tea and a twist of sugar, and a few evergreens to make the whole look like something more than charity. A dozen of the young people had been set to the packing of them at the long table where the swags had been.

There was straw on the floor, loaves in their dozens on the sideboard, and a cheerful disorder of ribbon and brown paper over everything. It was the kind of work Rosalind’s hands understood before her mind had got round to it, and she had her gloves off and a basket pulled toward her almost before she had said her how-do-you-dos.

Phoebe was at the far end of the table, and so was Mr. Danforth.

Rosalind marked it quietly as she packed. The two of them stood down at the cold end by the window, with a small distance kept between them that was correct to the inch, and a warmth across it that the correctness did not hide. Phoebe had a loaf in her hands and was not, for once, glancing up the room. And whom was there to glance at? Cassandra was on Grosvenor Street, and her mother with her.

And Phoebe, with no mother at her elbow, was a Phoebe a degree brighter than the dimmed girl she had been at Marbury. The warmth was getting out around the edges of her, as it always did when no one was watching to see what it cost her.

“You need not fold it so small,” Mr. Danforth was saying of the brown paper. “It will not bite. Here, like so.” He folded the paper for her as he spoke. “You make everything smaller than it is, Miss Phoebe. I have observed it. The paper, and the loaf, and your own opinions.”

“I do not...” Phoebe began, and colored, and the old soft retreat started up her face. Rosalind, packing her basket, watched for the glance toward the door that always came upon the heel of it.

It did not come.

“I do make them smaller,” Phoebe said instead, and her chin came up a little, as though it had surprised itself. “You are quite right. I have been told my whole life that I ought. It is meant to be a virtue in a girl, is it not, the making of herself small? I have grown so good at it that I do it to the brown paper without thinking.”

She folded the next piece full and square, just as he had shown her, and set the loaf in it.

“There!” she said. “That one shall keep its proper size, and you may tell me whether the parish is the better for it.”

“The parish is greatly the better for it.” He said it warmly, with no weight to it and no angle, for that was how he said everything. “And so am I. I have been trying this sennight to have you finish a sentence, Miss Phoebe, and you have just finished one. I count that a finer Christmas than all the baskets together.”

Phoebe laughed.

It got the whole way out of her before she could catch it, a real laugh, warm and surprised. She did not look up the room to see who had heard it, and she did not make it smaller, and she did not take any of it back. She only stood at the cold end of the table with a loaf in a full-sized piece of paper and laughed, and was, for the length of it, exactly as warm as she truly was.

Rosalind looked back down at her basket, and her heart lifted.

Nobody wished to be observed in the middle of coming right at last, and she of all people knew it, for she had made being unobserved the only safety she had. Very well, then. She would do the useful thing, as she had done it all her life, only this time she would do it on purpose, and she would do it for them.

She drew the basket-straw and the brown paper deliberately down toward her own end of the table, and the ribbon with it, so that the supplies sat at the warm middle and the cold end by the window held only the two of them and their loaves. Then she caught Charlotte’s eye across the table.

Charlotte, who missed nothing, had already looked down the table at her brother and Miss Phoebe, and her glance had come back bright with what it had seen. Rosalind gave her, very small, the look that meant leave them be. Charlotte turned at once to her mother.

“Mama, are we quite certain we have sugar enough for the whole district?” she asked, and she made such a long and thorough business of the question that it occupied the whole warm middle of the table for several minutes together.

And when one of the parish ladies started down toward the window end to see how the packing went there, Rosalind rose with a finished basket in her arms and met her halfway.

“I wonder if I might ask your opinion,” she said, gravely. “Ought the evergreens to go in before the tea, or after? It seems to me the whole look of the basket depends upon it.”

The lady had a decided opinion on the matter and was very glad indeed to be asked for it, and she turned back with Rosalind to the sideboard to settle the thing properly. The cold end of the table by the window was left, for a while longer, to the two people who wanted it.