With This Curse: A Novel of Victorian Romantic Suspense

by DeWees, Amanda

  “No more should you,” she said, an iron edge coming into her voice. I remembered that tone, and suddenly I was seventeen years old again, burning with helpless humiliation as she dressed me down before the other girls and lambasted me for faults both real and imagined. “It’s clear that your good fortune has deserted you, or else you’d not have the gall to show your face here.”

  I tried not to let my smile falter. “I hope that the circumstances of our parting will not count against me,” I said, forcing the words out even though they turned my stomach.

  “Circumstances!” she spat out, all pretense of politeness gone. “You dare speak to me of circumstances! Don’t think I’ve forgotten you, miss, with your insolent tongue and headstrong ways. It was only my soft heart that made me tolerate you for as long as I did!”

  Soft heart? Hard business head, more like. Don’t let her anger you. Be composed. “I trust that in the years since our parting I have learned to comport myself in a more—”

  A shrill laugh cut my words short. “Pretty manners don’t fool me, Miss Crofton. I shan’t be taken in by you again. You should have been thanking me on your knees every day for a situation with me, and instead you treated me with such insolence—and before a customer, yet!—that I had no choice but to dismiss you.”

  “I remember it differently,” I said shortly. My transgression had been pointing out to the customer that the peau de soie she had requested had been replaced with cheap cotton sateen. This had been Mrs. Hill’s method of maximizing profits: switch cheaper fabrics for those the customer had selected—and if the customer noticed the substitution, blame one of the seamstresses. By scolding us in front of the customer for our supposed deception, she often earned the client’s respect… and future custom. I took a deep breath and strove to prevent my anger from showing. “You said that I had cheated the customer, and I defended myself against that misapprehension”—lie, I longed to say—“as any wronged party would.”

  That brought her to her feet. “The only wronged party, miss high-and-mighty, was me! And you may be sure that I let all the other modistes in London know it. Oh, yes, you imagined you could simply knock on any door and be welcomed with open arms for your association with the great Miss Ingram, did you? Well, I’ll wager you’ve found your reception to be quite different!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, a premonitory chill creeping across my neck. “Have you been prejudicing the other dressmakers against me?”

  “Warning them, my girl, as was my duty!” The false curls trembled with self-righteous indignation. “I couldn’t let any of my sister modistes be taken in by you. ‘Don’t expect loyalty from that one!’ I told them. ‘She’ll steal from you, mark my words, and will lie to your very face if you tax her with it!’ Oh, they were most grateful for the warning, I can tell you. And I’ve been cautioning all of my customers as well. Word has no doubt spread as far as the Hebrides by now.” Her self-satisfied smile made my hands itch to shake her. “I saw your advertisement, Miss Crofton. My memory is not so poor that I had forgotten you. You may be certain that I wasted no time in notifying everyone that they should be on their guard against you!”

  “You poisoned everyone’s mind against me,” I exclaimed. It made sense now, the fact that every door had been closed to me. The absence of responses to my advertisement. “After all these years, to think you could be so spiteful!”

  “Insolence and ingratitude will always reap their due punishment,” she snapped, planting her hands on her hips. “You’d do well to learn that, girl—and learn some humility as well. And I fancy that’s just what’s in store for you! Now, leave my establishment at once, and don’t set foot on my doorstep again.”

  I rose from the divan. I had the advantage in height, and sudden uncertainty flashed into her eyes when I glared down at her. She must have expected retaliation, but at that moment I realized that I had none. She had won. It was as simple as that.

  I turned and walked out. A kind of hollowness had taken the place of the anger and dread. She had walled up every door for me, and there was nothing I could do to change that.

  For a time I walked aimlessly, trying to awaken my numbed brain. The blow Mrs. Hill had dealt me seemed to have stunned all thought. What now? I asked myself again and again, but no answer came.

  I walked until there was scarcely any feeling left in my feet. When the sun began to dip toward the horizon, I came to myself to find that I was in a shabby, congested area of the city that I remembered well from ten years ago. Without conscious intention, my feet had found the way back to the district in which lay the garment factory where I had once worked.

  The racket of the machines was audible from a block away. It made my head throb and set my teeth on edge, and as I unwillingly drew nearer to the source, it stirred the beginnings of nausea in my stomach. I paused for a moment by the door of an apothecary to gather my courage. You can do this, I told myself. You must. You have no choice. Memories clogged my brain: the way my legs had trembled when I stood after working the treadle for long hours. My eyes burning from straining them and my throat burning from breathing the lint in the air. The ache in my neck and shoulders from bending over my work for hour after hour, day after day. And always the anxiety lest some unexpected problem prevent me from reaching my quota and reduce even further the pittance I earned.

  Some men at the alehouse across the street called something to me, and I was thankful that I did not catch the words. Behind me, a bell jingled, and automatically I moved away from the doorway to permit whoever was exiting to pass. Then a woman’s voice said, “Clara? Is it you?”

  It took me a handful of moments to recognize my old friend, so changed was she. “Martha?” I exclaimed, my tone too astonished for courtesy, but she smiled. She had lost a front tooth, which gave her expression an air of gruesome whimsy.

  “It’s me, right enough,” she said. Her voice was loud, and I wondered if she had lost some of her hearing, as so many workers did over time at the factory. “I’d have known you anywhere. You don’t look a day older than when I last saw you.”

  I could not say the same, sadly. Martha looked as if she had aged more than twenty years for my ten. She was dangerously thin, with spots of rouge on her sunken cheeks, and her hair was tinted a garish red. A certain fixed brightness in her eyes made me wonder uneasily what she had been purchasing at the apothecary’s.

  “How wonderful to see you,” I said. It was a lie, for I hated to see her in this condition, but I would lie from one end of London to the other rather than hurt her feelings. “You’re still at the factory, then?”

  Her laugh was bitter. “No, they had no use for me after—well, have a look yourself.” She stripped the worn cotton glove from her right hand, and I smothered a cry as I saw that her thumb was gone.

  “What happened?” I exclaimed. “Did you injure it sewing?” From time to time an unlucky girl would run the needle into her finger, and I had heard of at least one case in which the wound became so infected that the entire finger had to be removed.

  “I was working one of the cutting machines,” she said offhandedly. “I couldn’t see so well as I used to sewing, so they moved me to cutting. It wasn’t but a moment that I looked away—but it was enough.” She pulled her glove back on, dropping her eyes.

  “They couldn’t find anything for you to do after that?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, they set me to sweeping up for a time, but it didn’t pay enough to keep body and soul together.”

  “Then how do you manage?” As soon as the words left my mouth I longed to call them back, for Martha merely smiled—a ghastly, humorless smile—and I felt my face burning with shame at my clumsy naiveté. “Here,” I told her, fumbling in my purse for the few coins I had with me. “Take this. Buy yourself a hot meal—or a warm cloak if there’s enough.”

  “I don’t want your money,” she said roughly.

  “Please take it. For old friendship’s sake, Martha.”

  For a moment I
thought she would refuse again. Then her hand—her left hand—closed around the coins, and she favored me with a grin. The gap left by her missing tooth gave it a grotesque quality. “Right you are,” she said cheerfully. “But it’s gin I’ll be buying with your charity—if it please your ladyship.”

  A mocking curtsey was her farewell. Struck dumb, I could only watch as she sauntered across the street toward the alehouse, where the men welcomed her so warmly that I gathered they were already acquainted. In a moment she had vanished inside the dim interior.

  I turned so quickly that I almost collided with someone behind me, and at a pace that was almost a run I made my way home, with Martha’s worn, rouged face and marred grin hovering before my eyes at every step.

  Chapter Four

  Atlas accepted my invitation to call on me the following afternoon. My landlady was kind enough to provide us with tea, bread and butter, and the use of the front parlor. After bringing in the tray she retreated to an armchair at the other side of the room with her knitting, close enough to keep us in view but distant enough that our conversation would have a certain degree of privacy.

  “I see we have a chaperone,” Atlas observed as I poured out the tea.

  “So much in our acquaintance is unconventional, and likely to become more so,” I said, handing him his cup and saucer, “that I hope you’ll indulge me by observing a few of the conventions.” It was still a bit difficult to look at him directly, so striking was his resemblance to Richard, but I was trying to accustom myself to him. In the clear sunlight shining into the parlor that afternoon, his handsomeness was all the more vivid; I had seen my landlady herself, a prim virgin of some sixty summers, widen her eyes and grow pink in the face when the tweeny first ushered him into the parlor.

  It was odd for me to think of Atlas—Atticus, rather—as handsome. True, the resemblance between him and Richard had always been there, but where Richard always seemed dazzling, his brother seemed dull; lacking Richard’s gifts of charm, athleticism, and confidence, Atticus had been in comparison slight from lack of exercise, pale from time spent indoors over his books, shy and stammering and anxious. It was that air of earnestness that had earned him his nickname. Richard said laughingly that his brother looked as worried as if he carried the weight of the world on his insufficient shoulders, and Atlas he became.

  It had not struck me as cruel at the time, but now I shifted uncomfortably in my chair at the recollection and hoped that Atticus had not heard about the jest.

  “You look ill at ease, Mrs. Graves,” he commented, as if reading my thoughts. “Is something troubling you?”

  Why, yes, in fact: being put to the extremity of marrying you. “I was just reflecting on how much you’ve changed since I left Gravesend,” I said.

  That brought a surprised lift of his eyebrows. The sunlight streaming through the window picked out red glints in his chestnut hair and brows, and the contrast with his startlingly pale blue eyes was arresting. “I can’t say I’m aware of it.”

  “If you’ll forgive me for mentioning it, it seems you no longer wear a brace.”

  “I was able to cast that aside by the time I turned sixteen.”

  “Oh. I hadn’t realized.” That would have been well before I was turned out of the house, as he and Richard had been my elders by some two years, and I was embarrassed that I had not even been aware of the change.

  “Well, our activities didn’t bring us much into each other’s sphere,” he said. “I’m not surprised you did not observe every detail of my toilette.” His expressive mouth curved in a smile, which astonished me.

  “You are able to find amusement in reflecting on the disadvantage to which your—your condition put you?” I could not keep myself from asking.

  That brought a full-blown smile, and for a second it was as if I were sitting across from Richard, who was so often smiling or laughing in my memory. The impression robbed me of breath. I dropped my gaze to my cup and saucer as I fought for control over my emotions, and he said, “I discovered some time ago that if I couldn’t laugh at myself, every burden that life handed me would be all the heavier.”

  This made my thoughts turn again to the uncomfortable memory of his nickname, so I said, “I hadn’t remembered you and Richard as being so similar, that’s all.”

  “I see. Well, it’s true that when we were children Richard and I were easily distinguished. I think I closed that gap as I grew older. Once the head groom began training me in bare-knuckle fighting, I put on a bit of muscle and became able to borrow my brother’s clothing.” Then he stopped abruptly. “Forgive me, this must be painful for you. I’ve been tactless.”

  “No, it’s I who brought up the subject of your brother. But I mustn’t waste any more of your time. I asked you here to discuss your offer.”

  He nodded and waited for me to go on. He seemed remarkably at ease; his broad shoulders—definitely broader than I recalled—were relaxed and did not disarrange the lines of his grey wool sack jacket. His fine-boned hands held cup and saucer without fidgeting or self-consciousness. This, in short, was an Atticus I did not seem to know after all.

  “If I’m to accept you,” I said, “there are some areas of concern that I’d like to discuss.”

  “Naturally,” he said politely, but interest had quickened in his eyes. To avoid that penetrating gaze I turned to the teapot and refilled my cup.

  “First among these is my lack of plausibility as a member of your class, or indeed a sufficiently elevated position to marry into the Telford line.”

  He shook his head. “My dear Cl—Mrs. Graves, as far as your bearing and speech are concerned, you’ll move freely among my circles without detection. As a matter of fact, if you’ll forgive me, I’m curious as to how you came to speak so little like a servant.”

  “My mother’s doing,” I said, my throat suddenly tightening as I remembered her intent, serious face as she tirelessly corrected my pronunciation and vocabulary. So much patient effort, and all for naught—or so I had thought up to now. “I believe she wanted me to retain as much gentility as she could pass on to me.”

  “A thoughtful and most maternal impulse.”

  “A burden and a curse,” I snapped before I could stop myself. The other servants had thought me pretentious and stuck-up, and they had made a point of treating me with exaggerated deference. “It made it much more difficult to get along with the other servants.”

  “Ah, I can see how it would. They must have thought you were mocking them by speaking like your… I suppose they would have said ‘your betters.’ But now it’s most convenient.”

  “Please tell me the truth,” I said. “Don’t spare my feelings. If there are small ways in which I reveal my origins, better to know them now and contrive some explanation.”

  “That’s a wise precaution, Mrs. Graves. It seems I’m to have a wife who is clever in more ways than with her needle.” He saw that the pleasantry sat ill with me, however, and without comment moved back to the topic at issue. “If there are any small differences that occur in your speech, we may explain that with your time in America. The peculiarities of speech there have no doubt influenced your own.”

  “And that’s another difficulty,” I said. “My past. We can scarcely acknowledge that I was a servant for your family, nor that I have been earning my keep as a seamstress with a traveling theatrical troupe.”

  “A widow who traveled a great deal with her American husband,” he said promptly, making me wonder how much thought he had already given the matter. “A railway magnate, shall we say? They seem to proliferate in America. Apparently one can scarcely take two steps down any major thoroughfare without colliding with a captain of industry. They are a bigger nuisance than pigeons, I hear.”

  I laughed before I could help myself, and his cup paused on its way to his lips.

  “Your whole demeanor changes when you laugh,” he said thoughtfully. “I should like to see you smile more often… by which I mean at all.”

  Disc
omfited, I stared down at my lap. “One certain way to prevent my doing so is to make me self-conscious about it.”

  “My apologies. That was not my intention.”

  “To return to the subject at hand,” I said, grasping after a less uncomfortable topic, “such a story may indeed allay suspicions when I betray my unfamiliarity with your social customs. But will there be anyone among your acquaintance who is familiar enough with American society to recognize that my story is false? That could be disastrous.”

  He set down his cup and looked at me quizzically. “Mrs. Graves, I understood that you summoned me here with the idea to accept my proposition, yet you’ve put forth nothing but objections. Which of us are you trying to convince that marrying me is out of the question?”

  The direct gaze of those piercing pale eyes was a challenge, and I summoned the fortitude to meet it, although I wished to avert my own eyes—to hide, were it possible.

  “I do accept the offer,” I said. “It is only that—”

  “I’m delighted to hear it.” The smile struck again, and I blinked; he seemed genuinely pleased, but why I could not fathom. “You have made me the happiest of men, my dear Clara. I may call you Clara?”

  “I suppose, if you must. But—”

  “Thank you, Clara.”

  “You are welcome. But—”

  “I hope you’ll call me Atticus.”

  “If you insist. But,” I repeated, “it would be foolish not to examine every area where my imposture may be exposed.”

  He considered this as he helped himself to more bread and butter. His appetite seemed to be improving now that he had his answer. I, on the other hand, felt some queasiness now that I had committed myself. “A very sensible attitude,” he declared. “I’m doubly fortunate in having won a wife as intelligent as she is lovely.”

  I gave him an even look. “Do you have many such pretty compliments memorized for this occasion, or shall I be spared further sallies? I’m well aware that I am not your first choice… or, indeed, any man’s.” Any man since Richard.