‘What kind of little things, Miss Kent?’ asked Mary with interest.
‘Oh well… Perhaps you saw that Mr Henderson bore a likeness to the butler Fraser. And perhaps – while Miss Prentice saw only that family carriages arrived in the evenings – you were able to discern more. You were able to see, perhaps, that it was not families who descended from those carriages – but only gentlemen. Certainly you saw enough to make you so interested in the inhabitants of Knaresborough House that you were prepared to set aside propriety and introduce yourself to the young ladies in the park.’
‘You are right, of course. And you are right too in supposing that my interest was heightened by the similarity I saw in our situations. I was, you must understand, very unhappy at that time – my consent was given to Mr Lansdale and he was beginning to plan our elopement, but already I was blaming myself for agreeing – and yet, independent of him, my future was so very unpromising that I had not the courage to withdraw my consent.’
‘Of course, I quite understand.’
Mary looked curiously at her. ‘You seem to understand me very well, Miss Kent, and I daresay I am more transparent than I had hoped! But how do you come to understand Maria Carrisbrook? That is beyond my comprehension.’
‘Oh well, it was her accomplishments that I first wondered at,’ said Dido.
‘Her accomplishments?’
‘Yes. You see I watched her very carefully during our day at Brooke and I concluded that hers had been a very strange education indeed! Maria Carrisbrook plays and sings; she knows French; she knows how to charm and put people at their ease; she is able to enter into pleasant conversation upon any subject. In all these things she is remarkably accomplished. But there are odd deficiencies. Why, I wondered should she be so very anxious about a cold collation? And why did she not know what entertainments were usual at a summer garden party? Why had she never been instructed in these little matters – or observed how they were done by others?’
Mary was now watching her talk with unabashed wonder. Dido smiled and shook her head. ‘In short, Miss Bevan, I concluded that, although she had been taught how to captivate and delight a man, she had not been taught the business of being a wife.’ Colour rose in Dido’s cheeks. She looked down. ‘Marriage,’ she finished quietly, ‘was not the purpose of her education.’
‘No,’ said Mary. ‘It was not.’
Now the coach passengers were beginning to come out of the inn parlour and the guard with the broken tooth was reminding Mary that they would ‘be off in just two minutes, miss.’
‘And then, of course,’ Dido hurried on, ‘there was the way in which Sir Joshua behaved when I asked him about Mr Henderson. He became very uncomfortable indeed at the sound of the name. As he ought to be! For he knew his own guilt! He knew very well that the establishment the butler had had the audacity to form in Knaresborough House was…a disreputable one.’
‘So,’ said Mary, taking up her cloak, ‘you did not need me to point out the meaning of my letter in Dr Johnson’s essay?’
‘Ah yes! That is what confirmed everything! The use to which the good doctor puts those lines explains everything!’ They stood up. For now the other passengers had all taken their seats and the coachman was picking up his whip, the outriders mounting their horses. The bustle around them helped to overcome the awkwardness of finishing her story. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it is not lovers, nor apothecaries, to whom he claims the world and its laws are no friend. It is prostitutes.’
As she spoke the word, they both stopped and for a moment looked one another in the eye. Two very respectable young women in their plain morning gowns and simple bonnets, standing amid all the loud busyness of the coach’s departure. Dido held out her hand in farewell; Mary took it and held it fast a moment. ‘You will not expose her, will you?’ she said.
Dido shook her head.
Mary smiled gratefully and turned towards the coach. But, just as she was about to step into it, Dido took her arm. They might never meet again. She must ask the question. ‘Do you really believe,’ she said urgently, ‘that you and Maria Carrisbrook are so very alike?’
Mary pulled the travelling cloak about her; she looked up at the coach and seemed to see in it everything that lay before her: the journey; Yorkshire; her future of laborious duty and mortification. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘After all, Maria and I are not so very alike – we have made different choices.’
‘But if you had chosen differently? If you had married Mr Lansdale?’
Mary said nothing. She turned away and climbed up into the coach. Dido pressed forward to the window, hoping still for an answer. But now the door was being closed, the horn was blowing, the harness creaking as the horses strained against it. Mary’s pale face at the window only smiled; she raised her hand in farewell and Dido was forced to step back as the great vehicle lumbered into motion.
Chapter Thirty-Four
When the coach had rumbled and clattered out of Richmond, Dido walked slowly to her seat beside the lime-walk. And there she was soon engrossed so deep in contemplation of all that had happened in the last few weeks as to leave her insensible of time and of everything passing around her.
The true cause of Mrs Lansdale’s death must create a deep impression upon any thinking mind. For though no one was guilty of her murder, here were four people to be blamed with neglecting her and wishing her out of the way – four people who had each gone a little way towards that terrible extremity of selfishness which is murder. And, besides all this, was that other shameful crime which had been carrying on in the very heart of respectable society.
Here was more than enough to occupy her thoughts! But, as she sat there in the breezy sunshine, her mind was less occupied with such moralising than with the extraordinary behaviour of Miss Bevan – and with the belief which had prompted that behaviour: the belief that there was an affinity, a fellowship, even, subsisting between herself and the Misses Henderson. Her silence at the final moment of parting – what had it signified?
Did Mary Bevan truly believe that if she had married Mr Lansdale she would have been as guilty as those women…? And guilty of the same crime? Was this not principle run mad? Dido remembered how, when they had talked in Mrs Midgely’s parlour, she had been troubled by the extreme delicacy of Miss Bevan’s feelings. She had worried then that such refinement would not make the girl happy. And so it had proved…
But… But she found she could not dismiss the matter so easily. For phrases that Mary had spoken would recur. ‘I do not believe I could ever confide in a man again,’ and, ‘I would have nothing to give but a pretence of affection.’
…And there was truth in her words. If one could not confide in one’s partner in life – if there was no trust, no honesty, how could there be genuine attachment? What could there be but a pretence of affection?
And what was it but a pretence of affection which the young ladies had offered to the gentlemen who visited the establishment in Knaresborough House?
When her thoughts had reached such a point as this it was not to be wondered at that Dido’s cheeks should first become red and then turn pale, nor that she should hurriedly put her hand to her brow in an effort to still the raging of her brain.
But to the man who was now standing beside her, knowing nothing of the ideas passing in her head, her appearance was that of a woman upon the point of swooning.