She Fed the Workhouse Children in Secret for Three Winters, Then an Earl Chose Her Over Every Lad...
Chapter 8
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"Tuesday," he said."Yes."She gathered her papers, her cloak, and her basket, and walked home through the dark. And she felt something she had not felt in a long time, which was the specific sensation of the future being larger than the past, of there being more road ahead than behind, of the weight she had been carrying shifting the way weight shifts when a second pair of hands takes hold of it.She did not let herself think too far ahead. She was a woman who had learned to do her planning three months at a time, and three months was as far as she allowed herself to look. But that night, she sat by her small fire, and she thought about the Earl of Dunross, who paid for an apothecary anonymously, and had ridden past a workhouse gate in the dark, and said nothing about the coal except that he had been paying for it. She thought about the way he listened. She thought about a sister who had died too young in a cold place, and the particular guilt of a man who had come home too late, and how that guilt had made him into someone who noticed a woman with a basket in a dark lane and thought to ask whether she was hurt.She thought about Pip. She would not allow herself to think about anything else yet, but Pip she could think about without danger, because Pip was the reason she had started, and Pip was the reason she would go on. And in thinking about Pip, she found unexpectedly, and for the first time in a long while, that the going on did not feel quite so much like going on alone.The Tuesday call happened, and the one after, and the one after that.What the town of Ashford made of it was everyone's business except Cecilia's, and she declined to make it hers. Lady Forthwell had opinions. Mrs. Ouldgate of the Parish Ladies' Society had longer ones, delivered at a charitable tea in March with the careful loudness of a woman who means to be overheard. The printer's widow, Mrs. Ouldgate said with a particular sympathetic tone that was sharper than a criticism, was a capable woman, of course, but capability was not what a man of Dunross's station required in a wife, and she hoped the Earl was being careful about raising expectations he could not honorably fulfill, because a widow of limited means in Cecilia's position could not afford a long association that ended in nothing.Cecilia, who was standing near the tea table with a cup she had not yet drunk, heard every word. She set down the cup. She was very good at not flinching.What she could not account for, and had not expected, was the Earl's great-aunt.Lady Constance Averill was eighty-one years old, had survived four monarchs, and had the manner of a woman who had decided somewhere around age sixty that the world owed her nothing and she owed the world the truth. She arrived at the charitable tea in a sedan chair because she did not trust herself on stairs in cold weather, but she was not going to miss a tea where she had heard something interesting might happen.She made her way to Cecilia with the directness of a woman who has no time for the circumference of a room."You are the one keeping those children alive," Lady Constance said without preamble and without lowering her voice.The room went quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet when someone has said something no one expected to be said aloud."I help where I am able," Cecilia said."Don't be modest with me. I am too old for modesty. Three winters you have been at it, and the workhouse records show it, because I had my nephew's man look at them when I heard the rumor." She looked Cecilia up and down with eyes that missed nothing. "What do you need that you haven't got?"