Paragon Walk by Anne Perry Page A

it isn’t anything bad. I always reckons this ’ot weather’s to blame for a lot. Ain’t natural.”
    “No,” Charlotte agreed hastily. “I like the autumn best myself.”
    “More like furrin’ weather, I should think,” Mrs. Smith went on. “Leastways from what one ’ears. I ’ad a brother what was a sailor. Terrible places ’e’s bin to. Well, you go and see to yours sister, dear. I’ll take care o’ Jemima till you comes back.”
    Charlotte gave her a dazzling smile. It had taken her a long time to learn any sort of ease with these people, who were so different from those she had known before her marriage. Of course, there had been working people before, but the only ones she had known personally had been servants, as familiar in the house as the furniture or the pictures, as much accommodated to the family’s ways, and as easy to regard or ignore. They had brought nothing of their own lives into the drawing room or upstairs. Their families were known of, naturally, as part of their references, but they were no more than names and reputations; there were no faces, and still less any ambitions or tragedies, and feelings.
    Now she had to accommodate herself to them, learn to cook, to clean, to shop wisely—above all to need and be needed. Neighbors were everything through the long days while Pitt was away; they were laughter, the sound of voices, help when she did not know how to manage things, when Jemima was cutting teeth and she had no idea what to do. There were no nursery maids to call, no nanny, only Mrs. Smith with her old woman’s remedies and years of practice. Her ordinariness, her passive resignation to hardship and obedience infuriated Charlotte, and yet her patience soothed her, that and her sureness of what to do in the daily small crises that Charlotte had never been taught to handle.
    To begin with, the whole street had thought Charlotte arrogant, aloof to the point of coldness, not realizing she was as shy of them as they of her. It had taken nearly two years for them to accept her. The annoying thing was that in their own way they were just as prim as Mama and her friends, just as full of genteel expressions to avoid a truth that offended and every whit as conscious of social differences in all the subtlest of shades. Charlotte had quite unintentionally outraged them with her opinions, spoken in total innocence.
    Mama’s withdrawing room seemed a long time ago: the afternoon teas, the polite visits, exchanging gossip, trying to learn something about eligible young men, other people’s social and financial affairs, always in the most circumlocutory manner, of course.
    Now she must try to recapture at least the semblance of grace again, sufficient not to embarrass Emily.
    She hurried home and changed into the gray muslin with white spots. Last year she had saved from the housekeeping for it, and the style was so plain as to have dated little. Of course that was why she had chosen it, that, and so as not to seem above herself to the rest of the street.
    The day was already hot by ten o’clock when she dismounted from the cab in Paragon Walk, thanked the cabbie and paid him, then crunched her way slowly up the gravel to Emily’s door. She was determined not to stare; someone would see her. There was always someone about, a housemaid bored with dusting, daydreaming out of a window, a footman or coachman on an errand, a gardener’s boy.
    The house was large, and after her own street it seemed positively palatial. Of course, it was built for a full staff of servants as well as the master and mistress, their children and whatever relatives might care to come up for the Season.
    She knocked on the door, and then suddenly felt terribly afraid that she would let Emily down, that their lives had become so separate since Cater Street that they would be strangers. Even that business at Callander Square was more than a year ago now. They had been close then, sharing danger, horror, even a sort of