‘Ah, Miss Lucas—making progress, I see!’ She snatched up the paper before Charlotte could intervene. ‘Did you draw that darling boy?’
She squinted. ‘Is it... a bear?’
Charlotte bit back a smile, sharing an amused glance with Tom. ‘Yes, he is doing very well.’
Mrs Wilberforce beamed. ‘Excellent. I wished to invite you to dinner this evening—my brother is visiting.’
Charlotte stared. ‘Dinner, ma’am? With guests?’
‘Of course. We do not stand on ceremony here. I find it intolerable that you should be forced to dine alone simply because you are the governess. It may not be the usual arrangement, but I have never seen the sense in such distinctions. I would much prefer you dine with us. Do not bealarmed—it is nothing grand, only family and a few friends from nearby.’
‘Then I shall be delighted,’ Charlotte replied, curtseying—though inwardly she sighed, dreading an evening of insipid conversation amongst strangers.
Mrs Wilberforce paused at the door. ‘Six o’clock. Do wear something cheerful—none of that dreary black.’
Once she had gone, Charlotte turned to Tom.
‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘what do you think? Shall I survive this dinner?’
Tom smirked. ‘Maybe. I quite like your black. It makes you look like a ghost.’
A brief smile touched Charlotte’s lips before fading again. She wore black for her father’s mourning, but Anne was not in mourning, so she must comply with Mrs Wilberforce’s request and choose another dreary colour instead.
Sarah had altered a few of her gowns so that they fitted her better. Charlotte selected a sober dark blue and, at the appointed hour, made her way downstairs towards the murmur of voices drifting from the drawing room.
It would be useful, she reasoned, to observe their social circle.
After all, she had not forgotten why she was truly here.
The Odd Fellows could be anywhere.
They might even be in attendance that very evening.
Chapter 11
That evening, guests assembled in the drawing room, awaiting dinner. The room was a cheerful, informal chaos of chatter and revelry. The ladies’ perfumes clashed with the gentlemen’s colognes, while a portrait of some grim ancestor glowered from above the mantel, as though personally offended by the merriment below.
Mrs Wilberforce introduced Charlotte to a couple of her friends, who received her with polite civility.
Lady Pearson, a middle-aged baroness with a high-arched brow and the fading traces of former beauty, possessed an air of quiet resignation—as though life had disappointed her in small but persistent ways. She spoke in so soft a whisper that one was compelled to lean in perilously close; Charlotte feared their foreheads might at any moment collide.
Her daughter was very much her likeness, though softened by youth—a delicate debutante with a dazzling, almost overly eager smile she seemed determined to bestow upon everyone. She spoke more distinctly than her mother and greeted Charlotte with particular warmth as she described her recent Season in London.
Mrs Fraser, another friend of Mrs Wilberforce, was a plump, sharp-witted lady in her forties whose keen eyes missed very little. Her silks rustled with importance, and she wore an expression of faintly aggrieved entitlement, as though the world rarely met her expectations.
Miss Fraser, a younger scion of her mother, was youth and artifice in perfect harmony. Pretty, with high cheekbones and soft doe-like eyes, she smiled brightly—but with an edge sharp enough to cut. She carried herself with the serene assurance of one entirely convinced the whole county revolved around her.
Charlotte found herself preferring Miss Pearson; her eager sweetness, though a trifle excessive, was far easier to bear than Miss Fraser’s calculated charm.
Mrs Wilberforce and her two friends formed a neat, composed tableau upon the sofa, while Miss Fraser and Miss Pearson, evidently bored, were relegated to a delicate loveseat by the window.
Mr Wilberforce entertained a few gentlemen—Lord Pearson, Mr Fraser, and two others whose names Charlotte did not catch. They all seemed absorbed in their conversation about politics; she caught only snippets. The words abolition, progress, and tremendous moral courage drifted through the air between their ums and ahs.
Charlotte, feeling herself a loose thread in the arrangement, withdrew to a quiet corner and took refuge in observation beside some elderly ladies. Perhaps she might detect an Odd Fellow among them, she told herself, as her gaze moved deliberately across Mr Wilberforce’s acquaintances.
Yet nothing about them suggested clandestine villainy. They were, at least in appearance, unassuming country gentlemen—broad of waistcoat and earnest of countenance. Rather than whispering of dark enterprises, they engaged in vigorous debateover the Corn Laws and the abolition of the slave trade, speaking with the zeal of men entirely persuaded of their own rectitude.
The two elderly ladies seated in armchairs beside her—Miss Hill and Miss Underwood—were spinsters who lived in the village and had been introduced to Charlotte as distant relations of Mr Wilberforce. They seemed well acquainted with one another and were speaking quite loudly about the price of turnips. Charlotte rightly suspected Miss Hill was hard of hearing, as she wore an ear trumpet about her neck and, whenever she could not catch what Miss Underwood was saying, would whip it out and cry, ‘Eh?’
