Page 33 of The Unlovable Lady

It had cost her nothing. That was the strange new thing. All her life she had been useful in order to be kept, and today she had given it away to two people who would never know it.

It was while the parish lady was settling the evergreens that Lady Pelham came in.

She came in on the arm of Charlotte’s mother, straight-backed and silver-haired, patroness of every parish undertaking in the district, and her consequence rearranged the room without her so much as raising a hand. Rosalind, a finished basket still in her arms, moved by old instinct toward the wall.

She did not reach it.

“Lady Rosalind.” The old woman’s voice found her before her feet could. “Come here, child, and never mind the wall. I hoped I should come across you.”

Rosalind came, wondering what could have occasioned it. Why should Lady Pelham seek her out? The old lady considered her for a long, unhurried moment over the disorder of ribbon and straw.

“You have steady hands,” she remarked. “I have had occasion to know it. Steadier than mine were at your age, and mine were called remarkable.” She nodded once. “Well. I shall not keep you from your baskets. I only wished to ask after you.”

She inclined her head and moved on toward the loaves.

It was nothing, only two minutes in a warm parlor, and yet Rosalind packed four more baskets afterward and could not have said what was in any one of them. Lady Pelham had remembered her.

Near the end of the afternoon, the old lady stopped beside her again on the way to the door.

“You are going to the Stamfords’ on Friday, I hope?”

“Aunt and I mean to.”

“Good. Come and find me before the first set. I shall want to know whether Lady Marchwood has forgiven me for nearly fainting before her dinner.”

Rosalind smiled. “I shall.”

“See that you do.” Lady Pelham tapped one gloved finger against Rosalind’s basket. “And do not hide by the wall. I have had enough of finding you there.”

Then she was gone.

Down at the cold end of the table, Phoebe laughed again, low and warm, and Rosalind returned to her basket with Lady Pelham’s Friday invitation tucked somewhere unexpectedly dear.

* * *

Augusta took her tea by her own fire that evening. Rosalind had been turning the morning over since Grosvenor Street, and so she brought it to her aunt sideways.

“I heard the Countess this morning,” she said. “With Cassandra, before the call. The work-parlor door stood open.”

Augusta did not look up at once from her cup. “Heard her how?”

“Kindly,” Rosalind replied, and then shook her head. “No, that is the wrong word. She was frightened. About money, and about her girls, and about being a second wife who is never safe. She had Cassandra’s hands in hers, and she spoke to her as a mother speaks.”

“Go on.”

“And then she came out into the passage and called me useful and looked straight through me, exactly as she always does. Not a quarter of an hour apart. I cannot make them sit together.”

“No,” Augusta replied. “I do not suppose you can.”

She set her cup down with particular care.

“She is afraid,” Augusta said at last. “She has always been afraid. And a frightened woman, my dear, is a great deal more dangerous than a cruel one.”

“How can that be?”

“Because a cruel woman wishes only to wound, and a frightened one wishes to survive. There is nothing a frightened creature will not do if she believes the thing before her stands between herself and the cliff.” Augusta turned her ring once upon her finger. “You would do well to remember it, and not to soften toward her on the strength of one warm half-hour through a door.”

“The warmth was real. I am sure of it.”