Farthing by Jo Walton Page B

dressing table, moving the prayer book. “Where is Miss Dorset?” I asked
    Jeffrey. “Does she need her room?”
    “She’s with her ladyship,” Jeffrey said. “She told me to tell you to make yourselves comfortable in here.”
    “That’s very kind of her,” I said, and Jeffrey bowed his way out.
    I managed to get several cups of the tea into Angela. She refused the brandy. She kept crying and almost howling, and clinging to me. There was something quite excessive about the way she behaved. She wanted to go to her husband’s body, which I didn’t think advisable. Daphne, thank goodness, didn’t let on that she had seen it. She drank some of the tea sitting ramrod straight on the edge of the bed.
    “Are you sure you won’t have some brandy?” I asked Angela as I poured her another cup of tea.
    “It’s very calming.”
    To be honest, I had an ulterior motive with the brandy. I was hoping she might pass out again and be someone else’s problem when she woke up. I still didn’t feel much in charity with her.
    “It’s not good for me in my condition,” Angela said, her hand on her stomach exactly like Lady Manningham earlier.
    Again I felt a wave of envy, and for the first time some actual sympathy, for the poor baby. Bad enough for the poor little thing to be fatherless, but to be fatherless and to have a mother as idiotic as Angela
    Thirkie seemed very unjust.
    “You’re making it up,” Daphne said, standing up and taking a step away. She looked as if someone had unexpectedly punched her in the stomach.
    I looked at her in surprise.
    “Why should I be?” Angela said, rubbing her stomach. “We’ve been trying for four years, after all. I’m going to have a baby in December, and the one thing that gives me comfort in this terrible situation is that
    James knew about it before he died.”
    She said this in almost the same way she’d recited the Browning earlier, as if it was something she’d memorized. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t exactly congratulate her on her pregnancy in the circumstances. I glanced at Daphne, who was staring at her sister and looking suddenly old.
    “Oh I know you’re not pleased,” Angela said, sipping her tea and looking at Daphne over the rim of the cup. She had been clinging to me earlier—now she entirely ignored me, as if Daphne were the only person in the room. “You always wanted James for yourself, and you’ve never had a baby. If you’d wanted a baby you should have married a man who could give you one, not a Page 23

    vicious nancy-boy like
    Mark.”
    I clapped both hands to my mouth to hold back absolutely all the things that I was thinking, about sisters, Bognor, Macedonians, Sir James, Mark, and even pregnancy. It probably wouldn’t have mattered. I
    think I was invisible to both of them. I looked from one of them to the other as they stared at each other.
    Angela looked triumphant and Daphne devastated, like a pair of goddesses done by some genius sculptor who wanted to show that Victory and Defeat have the same face.
    6
    The rooms didn’t yield much of interest. They were a standard bedroom and dressing room, clearly furnished for guests. The bedroom was carpeted in the center of the floor with polished wood around the edges. It had a fireplace, with a fire laid but not lit, and a window that looked out over the same landscape the men had walked through. “At the front of the house,” Royston said.
    “Not that it means anything,” Carmichael said. “I wonder where the bathroom is, and how many share it.”
    “You’ll have to ask Jeffrey that,” Royston said.
    The dressing room had carpet that was fitted but of lesser quality. It also lacked a fireplace, having instead a small gas fire. “Must get chilly in winter,” Royston said.
    If the rooms had ever been blue, they were so no longer, except in the imagination of the household. The main bedroom was papered with lavender roses, and the dressing room painted cream.
    Sir James and