She looked around the table, meeting each and every gaze. “Gentlemen, this is a good time to join the exodus. For too long I have tolerated ill conduct in and out of this room. No more. If your loyalty is more to Mr. White and Mr. Kingford than to Cousins, leave now. I will not keep any here who do not know their places.”
A deathly silence.
Mr. Pollard blinked. Two men, Mr. Ferguson the chief accountant and Mr. Adams the lead cashier, pushed back their chairs and rose. Mr. Hadley, another lead engineer, almost lifted his behind off his chair, but then went no farther.
Alice leaned back in her chair. “You mustn’t hesitate, gentlemen. You must let your convictions guide you. Were you to stay, I would take it to mean that you have understood that mine is the only tenure here guaranteed by law.”
“Mrs. Treadles, this is no way to speak to the men,” protested Mr. Pollard, this time with a hint of real fear in his voice. “You will suffer a catastrophic loss of talent.”
Her stomach twisted with the exact same fear, but she could not back down now. She would not. “Talent is replaceable, Mr. Pollard. A man might be invaluable to his loved ones, but on a battlefield the war continues even when the general falls. Someone else will take the responsibility. Someone else will do the work—often surprisingly well. And that new person would be more grateful, too, for having been given the opportunity.”
She looked around again. “Does anyone else wish to leave?”
No one said—or did—anything.
Alice turned to the men Mrs. Watson had brought. “Gentlemen, you may escort Messrs. White, Kingford, Ferguson, and Adams from the premises.”
“Not so unceremoniously!” moaned Mr. Pollard.
Alice stared at him. “These men will have their wages and their belongings sent to them. I note again, Mr. Pollard, that you showed no concern for my dignity when it was being trampled upon, but are now fretting over the dignity of the men who did the trampling most enthusiastically. Am I going to face such inequitable applications of your solicitude on a regular basis in the future?”
“I . . . why . . . that is . . . no, Mrs. Treadles, you will not.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pollard,” she said coldly.
The entire room watched as the four men made their way out. At the door, Mr. White turned and snarled at Alice, “Your husband will hang and you will never be able to show your face here again.”
Her fingers tightened around her fountain pen; her thumb slid over the engraving. “My husband will be exonerated and I will preside over this company, in person, until my dying day.”
The exiled men left. The room fell silent again. An eerie, blessed silence. She was exhausted, utterly exhausted. But she sat up straighter. “And now, gentlemen. We have work to do.”
Eleven
Olivia, why do you persist in contorting your hand in that most unattractive manner?” grumbled Lady Holmes. “Do stop.”
Livia, who was trying to work out the stiffness in her fingers, flattened her lips but complied. Or at least she made sure she appeared to by dropping her hands into her lap, so her mother, seated on the other side of the tea table, would not be able to see them beneath the tablecloth.
It was only tea time, but twilight was already fading. These were the darkest days of the year; the sun seemed to barely rise in the sky before fleeing again beneath the horizon. Livia often experienced melancholy and lethargy when she was too long deprived of sunlight. This year the doldrums hadn’t set in yet because she’d had a glorious fortnight in France with Charlotte. And since her return, she had been copying out her story with dogged resolve.
This morning she’d got up early and once again put in long hours at her desk, the reason she’d needed to bend her hand this direction and that to relieve the cramping in her fingers. But at the rate she was going, she’d be done with the task in a day or two, at most. What would she do then? What else did she have to occupy herself?
“My goodness but the world and everything in it is deteriorating at a rapid pace,” said Lady Holmes in disgust, tossing down the newspaper in her hand. “Read it for yourself, Olivia. A Scotland Yard police inspector has murdered two people who worked for his wife.”
Livia had hoped to hide from her mother for the entire duration of her father’s callous absence. But Lady Holmes, bored and restless, needed someone to listen to her at tea. Livia had thought long and hard about pretending to be unwell, but in the end she wasn’t cruel enough to deny her mother half an hour, even if they had never enjoyed being in proximity to each other.
Whereas it had been so wonderfully easy to be in Stephen Marbleton’s company. Charlotte made Livia feel that being herself was enough. Mr. Marbleton made being herself feel glorious.
A nameless distress shadowed her heart at the thought of him.
No, she’d already told herself not to remember him anymore. Their acquaintance had ended. He was probably in bright, warm Andalusia, drinking Spanish wine. Or else on the Côte d’Azur, walking on a long sandy beach with aquamarine waters lapping at his heels. And she . . . she was on a cold, wet island in the North Atlantic, with no prospect of sunshine in the near future.
She grabbed the newspaper—maybe the scandal in London would distract her—and nearly gasped aloud. The murderous policeman was none other than the despicable Inspector Treadles! Why, she couldn’t have come up with a more fitting downfall for him had she been standing behind the Almighty’s heavenly throne, whispering vengeful suggestions.
As she finished the article, however, she frowned. Charlotte wouldn’t be involved in this, would she?
“What?” cried Lady Holmes. “What in the world is this?”
There was news more startling than Inspector Treadles’s sensational disgrace?
Wide-eyed, slack-jawed, Lady Holmes turned to Livia. “There is a cheque of fifty pounds for me. From Charlotte.”
* * *
When Charlotte reached Mrs. Cousins’s house a little after tea time, Lord Ingram was already waiting in front, an umbrella in one hand, his face dramatically contoured and shadowed in the light of a nearby street lamp.
“How do you do, my lord?” she murmured as he helped her descend.
He extended the umbrella over her. It had a large canopy, enough for them to maintain several inches of distance, but sharing the space underneath still felt intimate, almost cocoon-like.
“I’m trying to remember when was the last time I spoke to so many people in a row,” he said wryly. “I’m profoundly grateful that Miss Longstead’s party was only a dance and not a ball.”
After she had left the Longsteads’, she, too, had called on some of the guests. But he had a far larger list. “Have you learned anything interesting?”