“Mrs. Croome,” Mrs. Carter said. She was Mama’s oldest, dearest, and meanest friend. “You putting t’ings together the menu for Ruth’s upcoming wedding breakfast? Her second wedding should be nice, like a first.”
“Ruth and her barrister are still getting to know one another,” Mama said. “We shall have to see.”
Chuckles ensued, but I held my tongue and savored the sweet citrus scent of my chamomile tea.
I had to remain calm in front of the council to make it to my appointment, to get the proof I’ve needed for four years.
The clicking of bone china cups on brilliant white saucers was loud enough to cover the laughs, all the jokes made at my expense.
Things had to change.
“Ruth,” Mama said, sitting in her favorite high-backed chair near the fireplace. She sat directly across from me, a blurry vision of seafoam blue.
As always, Mama wore a freshly starched mobcap, a splash of creamy lace atop her silky dark tresses. Hints of gray wove about her chignon like a delicate basket. Reserved and powerful. A tigress in disguise.
“Your knitting is much improved, daughter, but don’t you think you need your lenses?”
Lenses. Spectacles. Horrible, heavy headache-inducing things that brought everyone’s scorn or pity-filled faces perfectly into focus.
Knit one, purl one.
“No. I don’t need them for knitting.”
I made a show of looping the scarlet yarn about my needle. I’d become an expert at knitting in the solitude of the country cottage where my parents had exiled me until the gossip had died down. Such awful gossip.
Ruth Croome, the whore, found in a brothel.
Ruth Croome, the liar, ran off with a man but was abandoned.
Ruth Croome, the jilted lover, lying about a man who never existed.
But the worst gossip—Ruth Croome Wilky, the fake widow.
All my pain, every bit of my life was a joke in our tight-knit community here in London.
“Ruth, I can ring Mrs. Fitterwall to get your spectacles. It would be no trouble.”
“No, Mama. They give me headaches for this close work.”
I felt my mother glaring at me, wishing I’d take the hint and obey.
Didn’t she know that there was a point when embarrassment lost its power?
My heart had died with Adam. I was a shell, nothing but nightmares and shame had been poured inside me for four years. It had burned up all my dreams, all the things a young woman should want. But it had birthed light onto the only thing that mattered, simple gratitude.
Food on my plate. A plate. Clothes for my baby and me.
Receiving my trunk, the one stolen from Adam and me four years ago, had resurrected something new. The dream of being a respectable lady, like Mama, lived again. Finding proof of my truth made me want to leave the house, something I’d rarely done these past two years in London.
Chatter continued amongst the four women, these friends—Mama, Mrs. Daly, Mrs. Johnson, and Mrs. Carter.
Mrs. Johnson, a new addition to the knitting circle, stayed quiet. She’d pick up the other ladies’ bad habits of poking at me soon enough.
The mantel clock gonged three times.
Each hollow brassy noise that echoed in my chest rattled in that empty spot near those lungs that had proven easy to fill with fear.
My nerves.
