Highgate Rise - Anne Perry [41]
In the meantime she climbed aboard the omnibus, gave the conductor her fare, and squeezed between a remarkably stout woman with a wheeze like a bellows and a short man whose gloomy stare into the middle distance of his thoughts threatened to take him beyond his stop, unless he were traveling to the end of the line.
“Excuse me.” Charlotte sat down firmly, and they were both obliged to make way for her, the large woman with a creak of whalebone and rattle of taffeta, the man in silence.
She alighted presently and walked in mild, blustery wind the two hundred yards along the street to the house where she had been born and grown up, and where seven years ago she had met Pitt, and scandalized the neighbors by marrying him. Her mother, who had been trying unsuccessfully to find a husband for her ever since she had been seventeen, had accepted the match with more grace than Charlotte had imagined possible. Perhaps it was not unmixed with a certain relief? And although Caroline Ellison was every bit as traditional, as ambitious for her daughters, and as sensitive to the opinions of her peers as anyone else, she did love her children and ultimately realized that their happiness might lie in places she herself would never have considered even tolerable.
Now even she admitted to a considerable fondness for Thomas Pitt, even if she still preferred not to tell all her acquaintances what he did as an occupation. Her mother-in-law, on the other hand, had never ceased to find it a social disaster, nor lost an opportunity to say so.
Charlotte mounted the steps and rang the bell. She had barely time to step back before it opened and Maddock the butler ushered her in.
“Good afternoon, Miss Charlotte. How very pleasant to see you. Mrs. Ellison will be delighted. She is in the withdrawing room, and at the moment has no other callers. Shall I take your coat?”
“Good afternoon, Maddock. Yes, if you please. Is everyone well?”
“Quite well, thank you,” he replied automatically. It was not expected that one would reply that the cook had rheumatism in her knees, or that the housemaid had sniffles and the kitchen maid had twisted her ankle staggering in with the coke scuttle. Ladies were not concerned in such downstairs matters. He had never really grasped that Charlotte was no longer a “lady” in the sense in which she had been when she grew up in this house.
In the long-familiar withdrawing room Caroline was sitting idly poking at a piece of embroidery, her mind quite absent from it; and Grandmama was staring at her irritably, trying to think of a sufficiently stinging remark to make. When she was a girl embroidery was done with meticulous care, and if one were unfortunate enough to be a widow with no husband to please, that was an affliction to be borne with dignity and some grace, but one still did things with proper attention.
“If you continue in that manner you will stitch your fingers, and get blood on the linen,” she said just as the door opened and Charlotte was announced. “And then it will be good for nothing.”
“It is good for very little anyway,” Caroline replied. Then she became aware of the extra presence.
“Charlotte!” She dropped the whole lot, needle, linen, frame and threads, on the floor and rose to her feet with delight—and relief. “My dear, how nice to see you. You look very well. How are the children?”
“In excellent health, Mama.” Charlotte hugged her mother. “And you?” She turned to her grandmother. “Grandmama? How are you?” She knew the catalogue of complaint that would follow, but it would be less offensive if it were asked for than if it were not.
“I suffer,” the old lady replied, looking Charlotte up and down with sharp, black eyes. She snorted. She was a small, stout woman with a beaked nose, which in her youth had been considered aristocratic, at least by those most kindly disposed towards her. “I am lame—and deaf—which if you came to visit us more often you would