Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 19
“I am a spinster, lest you forget.”
“Faugh! Now that you no longer insist on wearing those awful spectacles you no longer look like a bluestocking.”
“Before you give voice to further insult, I shall remind you that I have every intention of replacing them.”
“I wish you would not, for your eyes are your best feature and I do hate to see you hide their brilliance behind such thick glass.”
Grey was hardly a brilliant color—not really a color at all and not worth consideration—so Emma dismissed Milli’s flattery, such as it was, and began sketching.
“I wonder that we have had no letter from Victoria,” said her sister.
The edge of Emma’s pen stalled momentarily as memories of Victoria’s brother invaded her mind afresh—that wolfish grin of his was never really far from her thoughts. “Why should you wonder about them at all? It is not as if they are close acquaintances, and we hardly move in the same circles.” And thank goodness for that. “I should think poor Miss Baggot wonders when she will have a letter from you.”
“Hang Eunice!” With a rude sound, Milli flung herself onto the divan. “The maggot girl will have a letter when I have had one from Victoria.”
“I somehow doubt that.”
After grumbling about the injustice of having a tedious older sister, Milli left the room to amuse herself elsewhere.
At one o’clock Emma heard her uncle leave his library. She set her sketchbook aside, stood up, and crept to the parlor door, gnawing her thumbnail. The library door was open and there was no sign of her uncle. Pursing her lips, she marched resolutely to the library and paused at the entrance. The Times lay discarded on a chair, and within its pages she knew she’d find the murder inquest. She knew her uncle preferred she not delve into the vile details, that she preserve her inviolate woman’s ignorance, but she had every right to know what monsters lurked in the darkness; moreover, so far as she knew, most of the victims were fellow inviolate ignorants like herself. To remain naïve was to disarm a woman. But her uncle would only deem her curiosity distasteful, unhealthy, and unseemly in a lady. Best to keep him ignorant of her extracurricular reading; she had much rather not upset his delusions of feminine ignorance if she could help it.
It was with determination, therefore, that she snatched the newspaper up and absconded with it to the parlor. Unfortunately, it seemed she was not long to have the parlor to herself.
“What are you reading?” Milli said around a mouthful of the sugary treat she had filched from the kitchen.
“Shh!” She shot her sister a warning glare.
Milli merely shrugged her shoulders and licked her fingers, unconcerned by her sister’s secretive perusal of the newspaper. Emma hurriedly skimmed her eyes down the columns of the broadsheet, barely glancing at the mundane articles and advertisements while she searched out what she was looking for.
On Sunday a pearl brooch was lost in Vauxhall Gardens…
She read on impatiently, uncaring of whether or not Lady Beresford ever found her poxy brooch.
Governess wanted.—A young person in possession of elegant accomplishments who has lived in that capacity and can be well recommended to take charge of two or three children…well principled and strictly religious…etcetera, etcetera.
Here Emma paused to ruminate, for she had, for some time now, been meditating on the prospect of finding herself a situation of employment. If not to work in a convent then a post as a governess would do well enough.
As to being well principled and strictly religious, she certainly endeavored to be. And her “elegant accomplishments” were not limited to Latin, French, and German, all of which she spoke moderately well; she also had a firm grasp of numbers, could read music, play the harp with some talent, and could sketch tolerably enough. So she doubted not that she could find herself a respectable position with a genteel sort of family, if she so wished.
Milli, she was sure, would one day marry well, but she herself had no prospects, and the thought of becoming a bauble on a man’s arm (not that she was pretty enough for such employment) was out of the question, and being a burden to her parents was anathema to her. There was far less honor in the ignoble dependency of spinsterhood than in seeking to join the proletariat. Something Milli would never understand.
She discreetly scribbled down the High Street address before turning the page; she would reply to the advertisement this very evening. She read on.
“Ah ha!” Emma exclaimed, startling Milli from the Lady’s Magazine. With a flush of contrition, she peeked at the door, lest her uncle or any of his household should notice her unfeminine interest in the macabre. The report read as follows:
The Wood Street Murders.—The Coroner’s Inquest.
Mr. Clutterbuck, the coroner for South-East Middlesex, resumed at eight o’clock this morning the inquiry into the circumstances attending the deaths of Miss Fanny Smith, aged twenty, and her younger sister, Miss Camilla Smith, aged eighteen, whose bodies were found mutilated in Wood Street early on the morning of Sunday last.
Constable Munt, also in attendance, deposed that at three o’clock on Sunday morning, while patrolling Milk Street, he received information as to the discovery of the two deceased. There he noted that the bodies had sustained severe injuries to the chest cavity, the nature of which will, respectfully, not be expounded on in deference to the constitutions of this newspaper’s most esteemed readers and the family of the two deceased. The constable’s report was corroborated by two witnesses, employed at a neighboring slaughter-house, that had summoned him thither. Those witnesses went on to say that they saw no evidence of a weapon of any description laying nearby, nor of their having noticed any persons of interest thereabouts. Dr. Wheatstone was at once sent for and the bodies removed to the mortuary.
This incident is now the third in