The Cater Street Hangman - Anne Perry [2]
And Grandmama’s friends were even more interesting. Not that she liked them, not many of them; they were singularly disagreeable old ladies. But Mrs. Selby was over eighty, and she could remember the news of Trafalgar, and the death of Lord Nelson, black ribbons in the streets, people weeping, black borders on the newspapers; at least she said she could. She spoke frequently of Waterloo, and the Great Duke, the scandals of the Empress Josephine, the return of Napoleon from Elba, and the hundred days. Most of it she herself had overheard in drawing rooms much like this one, perhaps a little more austere, with less furniture, lighter, neoclassic; it was nevertheless fascinating to Charlotte, a reality sharper than this.
But today was 1881, a world away from such things, with Mr. Disraeli dead, gaslights in the streets, women admitted to degrees in London University! The queen was empress of India and the empire itself stretched to every corner of the earth. Wolfe and the Heights of Abraham, Clive and Hastings in India, Livingstone in Africa, and the Zulu War were all history. The prince consort had been dead of typhus twenty years; Gilbert and Sullivan wrote operas like H.M.S. Pinafore. What would the Emperor Napoleon have made of that?
Today Mrs. Winchester was here to see Mama—which was a bore—and Aunt Susannah was here to see them all, which was excellent. She was Papa’s younger sister; in fact she was only thirty-six, nineteen years younger than her brother and only ten years older than Sarah; she seemed more like a cousin. It was three months since they had seen her, three months too long. She had been away visiting in Yorkshire.
“You must tell me all about it, my dear.” Mrs. Winchester leaned forward fractionally, curiosity burning in her face. “Who exactly are the Willises? I’m sure you must have told me”—sublime assurance that everybody told her everything!—“but I do find these days that my memory is not nearly as good as I should like.” She waited expectantly, eyebrows raised. Susannah was a subject of permanent interest to her; her comings and goings, and above all any hint of a romance, or better still, of scandal. She possessed all the elements necessary. She had been married at twenty-one to a gentleman of good family, and the year after, in 1866, he had been killed in the Hyde Park Riots, leaving her comfortably provided for, in a well-run establishment of her own, still very young and enormously handsome. She had never married again, although no doubt there had been numerous offers. Opinion veered between the conclusion that she was still mourning her husband and, like the queen, could never recover from the grief, to the reverse conclusion that her marriage had been so acutely painful to her that she could not entertain the thought of a second such venture.
Charlotte believed that the truth lay between, that having satisfied the requirements of family in particular and society at large by marrying once, she now had no desire to commit herself again unless it were for genuine affection—which apparently had not yet occurred.
“Mrs. Willis is a cousin, on my mother’s side,” Susannah replied with a slight smile.
“Indeed, of course,” Mrs. Winchester leaned back. “And what does Mr. Willis do, pray? I’m sure I should be most interested to know.”
“He is a clergyman, in a small village,” Susannah answered dutifully, although her eye caught Charlotte’s momentarily in unspoken amusement.
“Oh.” Mrs. Winchester struggled to hide a certain disappointment. “How very nice. I suppose you were able to be of much