“I’m not quite sure what I’ve just done.”
“Helped a good old soul die easy. An evil-tempered, thoroughly pigheaded, good old soul.” Mr. Carnaby raised his glass; Titus raised his own. “She’ll end easier for this. Whereas, as she indicated, your problems are just beginning.”
“Er—”
The lawyer gave him a wry look. “In that you’re about to be a very wealthy man.”
Titus wasn’t quite ready to think about that yet. It didn’t feel real. He’d come here with destitution hanging over him, and now he was to be rewarded, just for being the man on the doorstep at the right moment?
“I should thank Mr. Thorpe,” he said aloud.
“He has certainly done you a good turn,” Mr. Carnaby agreed. “For Miss Whitecross’s sake, but very much to your benefit. I hope you won’t hold it against him.”
“Why on earth would I do that?”
“Some might. You probably want to know how wealthy you have become.”
“No,” Titus said swiftly. “Not now. It’s her money until—well, until it’s not.”
Mr. Carnaby tipped his head. “How did you make her acquaintance?”
They talked, about Miss Whitecross’s hobby and the business of paints, and Mr. Carnaby’s work, and his four fine children, and anything else they could think of. They had another glass of sherry. Mr. Carnaby went upstairs once more, and then home to his family. Titus stayed, because he felt he had to.
A maid came to get him as the sky outside was darkening. He went up to see Miss Whitecross—he could not think of her otherwise—lying still with Mr. Thorpe and a plump,comfortable-looking woman, both wet-eyed, by her bedside, and the doctor standing. “Is she—”
Mr. Thorpe beckoned him over, and he saw she was breathing, very shallowly. He took her hand with care. “Miss Whitecross? It’s Pilcrow.” He didn’t know what else to say to this woman to whom he was married, so he simply sat with her, and wasn’t quite sure when her limp fingers became dead weight in his.
The doctor moved to pull up the sheet. The plump woman let out a sob, and Mr. Thorpe embraced her with a familiar, loving support that suggested she was Mrs. Thorpe. Titus waited awkwardly until they moved apart and then offered the butler his hand. “I’m very sorry. This is a sad day for you.”
“I will miss her, sir. In her service since I was seven years old. She attended our wedding, even bought Mrs. Thorpe’s dress as a gift. So fine it was. She was the envy of the street.”
“She’d say,A pretty penny I paid for that dress, and look at you now!”Mrs. Thorpe added with a wobbly smile. “It was her way. But she was so very kind to our Alma in her trouble— Oh, Tom.”
Mr. Thorpe’s mouth spasmed; then he hauled back his professional composure. “Thank you for making her end easier, sir. You put her mind at rest, and I’m grateful.”
“We all are,” Mrs. Thorpe agreed, wiping her eyes. “Now, will you be dining here? It is all at sixes and sevens, of course, but we can serve you something within the hour. And shall I have a room made ready for you tonight?”
“I will let the staff know,” Mr. Thorpe added. “You will want to meet them, I daresay, but perhaps tomorrow would be best.”
Titus blinked. “Sorry—dinner? Room? Here? Why would I—” His throat dried.
Mr. Thorpe gave him a look of something like compassion. “Yes, sir. It’s your house now.”
Chapter Three
The next couple of days were… peculiar. Titus closed his shop while he saw to the funeral arrangements, which was to say, put everything in the hands of Mrs. Thorpe. He obtained a black cravat and black gloves, though he felt like the worst kind of humbug in them, and brought over his best clothes and a few changes of linen from his home. His shop, rather. The Carey Street house was his home now, or would be once he had confirmation from Mr. Carnaby that the windfall would not be snatched from him. He wouldn’t let himself believe it until then. It felt like more good fortune than he was permitted to have.
He put notices of her death in the news sheets, and sat in the parlour waiting for the funeral. Reading seemed somehow too self-indulgent in a time of mourning, but he did draw, guiltily helping himself to Miss Whitecross’s pens and drawing paper, even more guiltily enjoying the opportunity. He had always liked drawing, though he was quite untaught, and concentrating on a sketch of a vase meant he didn’t have to think about anything else.
Miss Whitecross’s body was laid out in the dining room, surrounded by sweet-scented flowers, since it was late spring and getting warm. A handful of old people came to pay their respects; otherwise it was very quiet indeed.
Mr. Thorpe suggested Titus might like to invite a friend to sit with him, but Titus was acutely aware that he had nobody he could talk to about this. Almost everyone he knew was an impecunious artist, and he didn’t think he could say,I might have married a fortune and I’m not sure it was a good idea, and be understood. He had been on civil terms with a couple of past lovers who might have sympathised, but Henry had driven them away, and he’d let it happen. So he sat alone, to the point he composed a letter to his brother, just for the illusion of talking to someone.
The day of the funeral came. Titus stood self-consciously at the graveside, wishing his best blacks were better and blacker. Mr. Matthew Laxton stood opposite. He was a fleshy man in his forties, with wide shoulders, a dissipated look, and the start of a drinker’s nose. He wore an obtrusively mournful expression, but Titus couldn’t help glancing up when all eyes were meant to be lowered mid-prayer, and was sure he saw a smirk.
That would be because they had yet to announce the marriage. Mr. Carnaby had advised they wait to do so, on the grounds that all hell would break loose and Miss Whitecross should have a dignified burial first.
A scandal was horribly inevitable. Titus had known that Miss Whitecross could afford the best paints, but hadn’t considered her financial situation in much greater depth, it being none of his affair. He now learned that she’d possessed an astonishing amount in the Funds and Consols, quite a lot of land, and some manufactories in the Midlands. It all added up to a regular income of some eight thousand pounds ayear, a sum so ludicrous he had to sidle up to it from an angle.I will have a house, he told himself.I can afford servants and consult a lawyer. I will buy new clothes, tailored for me. It was rather like a man who had inherited a mountain picking up a single rock and saying,Look what I have!but it was the only way he found himself able to think of the change in his life quite yet.