Eleanor waited until the door closed before allowing herself a quiet breath.
Nine-and-twenty years old, translating correspondence like a glorified secretary.
The words ought not to have stung. They were not, after all, untrue. Eleanor was nine-and-twenty. She translated correspondence. And she did so in a household not her own, for relations who tolerated her presence as one tolerated a useful piece of furniture—valued for its function, and otherwise unnoticed.
Yet accuracy and painlessness were not the same thing. Eleanor had learnt that lesson early.
She returned to the Marchetti letter.
The work, at least, was absorbing. Mr Marchetti was an Italian merchant with interests in English wool, and his correspondence required a delicate hand. His written English was enthusiastic but imprecise, filled with inventive grammar and the occasional phrase that translated, quite literally, into something alarming.
I am most eager to penetrate your markets,the present letter declared.My wool is of superior quality and unusual length, and I am confident it will satisfy all your needs.
Eleanor permitted herself a small smile. Mr Marchetti almost certainly intended nothing improper—Italian merchants were simply ardent in their descriptions—but the letter would require considerable refinement before it could be placed before Lord Cheswick.
She reached for a fresh sheet and began again, smoothing the merchant’s zeal into language that would not cause her aunt’s husband to choke on his brandy.
Dear Lord Cheswick,she wrote,I wish to express my interest in establishing a trade connection with your esteemed household…
The words came readily. They always had. Languages had been Eleanor’s refuge since childhood—French first, learnt from a governess who stayed only two years before securing better employment; then Italian, acquired through persistence and a battered grammar; then German, gathered piecemeal from a neighbour’s music tutor who had indulged her endless questions.
Her father had called it a waste.What use are languages to a girl?he had demanded, upon noticing the accumulation of books in her room.You will marry, and your husband will attend to any correspondence of consequence.
But Eleanor had not married. Her father’s debts had grown. The governess had departed. And eventually, the sole thing standing between the Finch family and utter ruin had been Eleanor’s ability to translate documents her father himself could not read.
Useful, she had become.Indispensable, even. And when her father died, and the debts consumed what little remained, it was that usefulness which secured her a place in the Cheswick household—not as guest, not as family, but as something between the two. A dependent relation who earned her keep through labour that was never quite acknowledged as such.
Better than the alternative,she reminded herself.Better than the streets. Better than a governess’s post in some strange household, neither servant nor kin, overlooked by all.
At least here, she was overlooked by people she knew.
***
The Marchetti letter required an hour to render properly. Eleanor reviewed her work twice, then caught a minor error in the third paragraph—establishingwhere she meantexpanding, a mistake few would notice, but one that would trouble her for days—and set the translation aside.
The trade summaries consumed another two hours. They were more tedious than difficult: long columns of figures from French and German suppliers, demanding careful conversion into English measures and currency. Eleanor’s head ached by the time she finished, but the work was clean and precise, and she allowed herself a moment of quiet satisfaction before proceeding.
There was always something more to be done. Such was the nature of usefulness—it was never complete, merely paused.
She was halfway through a letter from a Venetian glass merchant when the drawing room door opened and her cousin Honoria swept in, trailing perfume and purpose.
“There you are,” Honoria said, as though Eleanor had been concealed rather than seated in plain view for the past four hours. “Mama wishes you to dine with us this evening. We are to have company.”
Eleanor set down her pen. “What sort of company?”
“The interesting sort.” Honoria sank onto the settee with the effortless ease of a woman who had never been required to earn her place. She was four-and-twenty, golden-haired, and possessed of a beauty that caused strangers to pause in the street. Eleanor did not resent her for it. One could no more resent beauty than the weather.
“Sir Edward Holloway and his wife are visiting from Kent,” Honoria continued, “and Lady Tremaine is bringing her nephew—some sort of baronet, I believe. Mama thinks he may suit me, though baronets strike me as rather middling, do they not?”
“I have no particular opinion on baronets.”
“You have no opinion on anything.” Honoria did not speak unkindly—she was not, by nature, unkind—but the observation carried the weight of truth nonetheless. “That is your difficulty, Eleanor. You are so intent upon being useful that you have forgotten how to be interesting.”
I was interesting once,Eleanor thought.Interesting enough for Edmund Hale to pretend he admired me.
The memory returned unbidden: a summer afternoon, seven years earlier, when a charming visitor had discovered her in her father’s library and asked what she was reading.“Italian poetry”,she had replied, and he had smiled—truly smiled, as though the answer delighted him—and asked her to translate a passage.
She had done so. He had asked questions. And for three luminous weeks, Eleanor had allowed herself to believe that someone saw her—not merely her usefulness, nor her mother’s faded beauty, nor her father’s debts, but her.
