Farriers' Lane - Anne Perry [70]
She smiled. “Oh good. Would you like a cup of cocoa before bedtime, Thomas?”
The following day Charlotte delegated Gracie to take care of matters at home and took an omnibus to Cater Street to visit Caroline. She arrived at a little after eleven o’clock and found her mother already gone out on an errand, and her grandmother sitting in the big, old withdrawing room by the fire, full of indignation.
“Well,” she said, glaring up at Charlotte, her back rigidly straight, her old hands clenched like claws across the top of her stick. “So you’ve come to visit me at last, have you? Realized your duty finally. A little late, girl!”
“Good morning, Grandmama,” Charlotte said calmly. “How are you?”
“I’m ill,” the old lady said witheringly. “Don’t ask stupid questions, Charlotte. How could I be anything but ill, with your mother behaving like a perfect fool? She was never a particularly clever woman, but now she seems to have taken complete leave of her wits! Your father’s death has unhinged her.” She sniffed angrily. “I suppose it was to be expected. Some women cannot handle widowhood. No stamina—no sense of what is fitting. Never did have much. My poor Edward always had to take charge!”
At another time Charlotte might have ignored the insult. It was part of her grandmother’s pattern of thought and she was accustomed to it, but at the moment she was feeling protective towards her mother.
“Oh fiddlesticks,” she said briskly, sitting down on the chair opposite. “Mama always had a perfectly good sense of what was appropriate.”
“Don’t you fiddlesticks me!” Grandmama snapped. “No woman with the faintest idea of propriety would marry her daughter to a policeman, even if she were as plain as a horse and daft as a chicken.” She waited for Charlotte to take offense, and when she did not, continued reluctantly. “And now she is making a fool of herself courting the friendship of persons on the stage. For heaven’s sake, that’s hardly any better! They may know how to speak the Queen’s English, but their morals are in the gutter. Not one of them is any better than they should be. And half of them are Jews—I know that for a fact.” She glared at Charlotte, daring her to argue.
“What has that got to do with it?” Charlotte asked, trying to look as if she were genuinely enquiring.
“What? What did you say?” The old lady was selectively deaf, and she was now choosing to make Charlotte repeat the remark in the hope it would cow her, or at worst leave time for her to think of a crushing answer.
“I asked you what that had to do with it,” Charlotte repeated with a smile.
“What has to do with what?” Grandmama demanded angrily. “What are you talking about, girl? Sometimes you are full of the most arrant nonsense. Comes from mixing with the lower classes who have no education, don’t know how to express themselves. I told you that would happen. I told your mother also—but does she ever listen to me? You are going to have to do something about her.”
“There is nothing I can do, Grandmama,” Charlotte said patiently. “I cannot make her listen to you if she does not wish to.”
“Now listen to me, you stupid girl. Really, sometimes you would try the patience of a saint.”
“I had not thought of you as a saint, Grandmama.”
“Don’t be impertinent!” The old lady flicked her stick sharply at Charlotte’s legs, but she was just too far away for it to do anything more than catch her skirts with a thwack.
“Is she expected home soon?” Charlotte asked.
The old lady’s faint eyebrows shot up almost to her gray hair.
“Do you imagine she tells me that?” Her voice was shrill with indignation. “She comes and goes all hours of the day—and night, for all I know! Dressed up like something out of a melodrama herself, stupid creature. In my day widows wore black—and knew their place. This is all totally indecent. Your father, poor man, hasn’t been dead five years yet, and here is Caroline careering around London like a giddy twenty-year-old trying to make a marriage in her coming-out year, before it is too late.”
“Did she say anything?”
“About what?