Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [68]
“Worse than that,” Emily put in. “You’d have to ride on the omnibus, crammed in with other people, fat, out of breath and smelling of onions. You’d have to do most of your own cooking, and count your money to judge whether you could buy a thing or not, and the answer would usually be not.” She was thinking of Charlotte’s early years, before Pitt’s last promotion. Some of them had been hard. But they had shared so much that Emily now looked back on that time with a kind of envy. She seemed to have shared more with Jack before he had won his seat in Parliament, when there was still so much to work for, and victory was uncertain, and a long way away. He had needed her so much more then.
“It wouldn’t be so bad as that,” Tallulah argued. “Papa would make me an allowance.”
“Even if you married a parish priest, instead of his choice for you?” Emily said skeptically. “Are you sure?”
Tallulah stared at her, her eyes wide and dark brown, nearly black.
“No,” she said quietly. “No, he’d be furious. He’d never forgive me. He’d like me to marry a duke, although an earl or a marquis might do. I don’t think his ambition has any ceiling, to be honest. If I thought about it harder, it would frighten me. Nothing ever stops him, he just finds a way around it. People have tried to stand up to him, but they never win.”
Distant laughter sounded somewhere behind them, and a girl giggling. It really was getting very hot.
“Have you?” Emily asked.
Tallulah shook her head. “I’ve never needed to.”
“Would you, to marry Jago?”
Tallulah turned away. “I don’t know. Perhaps not. But as I said, it doesn’t matter. Jago wouldn’t have me.”
“Perhaps that’s just as well,” Emily said deliberately. “That you don’t have to make up your mind what you really want: to be rich and have pretty gowns, parties, trips to the theater, and marry whoever your father tells you … or marry a man you really love and admire, and trust, and help him in his life’s work—in comparative poverty. I don’t suppose you’d ever actually be hungry, and you’d always have a roof over your head—but it might leak.”
Tallulah swung around on the seat to stare at her in a flash of temper.
“I don’t suppose your roof leaks, Mrs. Radley!” she snapped. “Even if Jack Radley’s would, I’ll lay any odds the late Lord Ashworth’s doesn’t!”
It was a reference to Emily’s first husband and his very considerable wealth. Emily might have resented the gibe, but she knew she had provoked a retaliation, and she accepted it as fair.
“No it doesn’t,” she agreed. “But whether I even took a decision or not is beside the point. The thing is for you to recognize the reality of what your choices are. No one has everything. No relationship does. Look at Jago carefully. Look at whoever else there is, and decide what you want … then fight for it.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“That part of it is.”
“No, it isn’t.” Tallulah sat forward and leaned over, putting her hands up over her cheeks. It was a gesture of deep and troubled thought.
An elderly couple walked by, heads close together in earnest conversation, the woman’s parasol trailing, the man’s hat at a rakish angle. She said something and they both laughed.
“If this wretched business with Finlay doesn’t get solved soon,” Tallulah went on suddenly, her voice low and filled with anger and fear, “and the police don’t stop asking everyone questions about us, then it won’t matter anyway. We’ll all be ruined, and nobody will speak to any of us unless they have to. I’ve known it to happen. A story comes out. It is whispered around, and suddenly no one sees you. You are invisible. You can walk down the street and everyone is looking the other way. You talk to people and they don’t hear you.” Her voice was rising with the fear inside her. “Restaurants where you dine frequently find they are full whenever you call. Dressmakers