A Lady in Pawn

Chapter 1 – A Perfect World

The light was the same.

A narrow strip through the heavy curtains, across the counterpane and on to the chest of drawers. That was how it had fallen in her bedroom every morning for the last nineteen years.

Clara opened her eyes and waited for the rest. It came.

The longcase clock in the passage. The fourth stair, which creaked when the maid came up with the hot water. Down in the street a cart, iron on cobbles.

Everything in its place.

The quiet of her home. All her life Clara had slept in it as if under a second blanket. Today the walls seemed thin to her.

Since last night there had been a draught.

Not from the window.

There was a knock. The maid came in, set the jug on the washstand and poured hot water into the basin. Yesterday’s silk still hung over the back of the chair.

“Shall I put the dress away, Miss?”

“Later.”

The maid glanced at the bed, glanced away again and drew the door quietly shut behind her.

Clara stared at the ceiling. Above the bed a fine crack ran through the plaster. She had known it for as long as she could remember.

As a child she had taken it for a river and given it names, one for each branch. The long one was called the Nile. The short one was called the Thames and simply stopped above the door.

Yesterday morning she had still had three worries. Which dress. When to call on her friend. Which tune to play at the piano.

A girl’s worries. Worries that, only yesterday, had had a whole day to themselves.

Then the evening.

Silk.

Powder.

Her mother’s hands.

They had been quick, almost flustered. Rouge on the cheeks, colour on the lips, a dab, and another. Clara had kept still. A doll before the auction, she had thought. Dolls kept still too.

Three times her mother reset the pin in her hair. The fourth time, Clara caught hold of her hand.

Her mother let her keep it. For a moment.

“It’s for your own good, Clara,” she had whispered. There had been something in her eyes that Clara could not read.

Then Mr Wallace entered the house, and she could.

Mr Wallace. Nearly forty.

He handed his hat to the footman without looking at him. Then he looked at Clara. Briefly. The way her father looked at a bill before he initialled it.

His sentences began with “Certainly” and ended with “Capital”.

In between there was nothing.

Her father introduced him to her like a new item in the inventory. Name, house, connections. A “financial safeguard”.

It was settled between the soup and the dessert, and Clara sat there, heard every word and kept none of them.

Over the soup the two men talked about the price of tea.

“Certainly,” said Mr Wallace. “It will rise. Unless it falls. Capital.”

Over the fish they talked about insuring cargo.

To her, Mr Wallace did not speak.

She nodded. She smiled when it was required. She ate the soup and the fish and afterwards could not have said what either had tasted of.

After the fish she laid her knife and fork side by side on the plate, exactly as she had been taught. No one needed to tell her.

Now, in the morning light, it lay before her like a sheet of paper on her father’s desk.

Not an engagement.

A contract.

She pulled the counterpane up to her chin. Beneath it her hands were trembling, only a little.

Clara Ashworth. For now. Soon Mrs Wallace. She could not finish the name, not even in her head.

Clara pushed the heavy counterpane aside and set her bare feet on the cold wooden floor. Grey ash lay in the grate. She hunched her shoulders. The room was not cold.

At the looking glass she brushed a chestnut curl from her face. A stranger looked back.

The lip colour had left marks. Faint, smudged at the corner of her mouth. Clara dipped the cloth in the basin and rubbed until there was nothing left to see, and then once more.

The face beneath was older than it had been the day before.

Sharper.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she folded the cloth, corner to corner, laid it precisely on the rim of the basin and dressed.

Downstairs the household had long since begun its day. On the landing Clara stopped. China clinked. Miriam’s bright voice. Her mother’s laugh.

Clara laid her hand on the banister and waited until her face looked the way it had yesterday morning.

It took a while.

Then she went down.

In the dining room with its tall windows her mother was already seated at the polished table, humming. She never hummed at breakfast.

“There she is. Did you sleep well, darling?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Mr Wallace was very pleased with the evening. He told your father so at the door.”

Her mother buttered a roll, laid it on her plate and did not bite into it. “Very pleased.”

Clara sat down. Yesterday she would have heard good spirits in that humming.

Today she heard relief. The daughter provided for. The daughter safe.

Her sister Miriam was half kneeling on her chair and had jam on her chin.

“The big swan in the park has only got one foot,” she announced. “He always stands on the one. I’ve seen it.”

“He tucks the other one up,” said her father from behind his newspaper. “They all do.”

“Mine doesn’t. Mine’s only got one.”

“Sit properly, Miriam.”

Miriam sat properly. Under the table she swung her legs.

Beneath the tablecloth Clara felt for her sister’s little hand. It was sticky. Clara held on to it, longer than she needed to.

Miriam let her and went on about the swan. He was as big as a dog. Bigger. As big as a calf.

Her father lowered the newspaper when he saw Clara, folded it and smiled at her. The same smile he had worn, when she was a child, to explain thunderstorms to her, and grazed knees.

The page that came uppermost as he folded it was the one with the arrivals in port.

He had fought for everything at this table himself. An old noble name, and nothing inherited besides.

He had married a commoner. Clara’s mother, who was now pushing the teapot towards him. For that his family had cut him out of his inheritance, and out of his place at their table as well.