HER MOTHER TOLD THE DUKE SHE COULDN’T READ—THEN HE FOUND HER SECRET ROOM OF LAW BOOKS

Chapter 22

Olivia refused James Fairmont in September, and the refusal turned out to cost nothing, which surprised everyone including Olivia.

Charlotte had expected consequences. In the world as their mother had described it, a young woman with prospects who declined a wealthy baronet was spending capital she did not have. There would be talk. There would be a cooling. Doors would close.

The doors did not close, and the reason was so simple that Charlotte was embarrassed she had not seen it coming.

Olivia was pleasant.

She had spent twenty-one years becoming extremely good at being liked, and it turned out that this was not a shallow accomplishment at all — it was a form of social infrastructure. When she declined Fairmont politely, and said something kind about his mother, and asked after his sister’s confinement, and was seen at three subsequent gatherings laughing at other people’s jokes, the room decided that whatever had happened, Olivia Whitmore was not a woman with a grievance. She was a woman with standards. London found that considerably more interesting than a woman with a husband.

“I have accidentally become respectable,” Olivia reported, sitting on the end of Charlotte’s bed in October.

“You have become mysterious.”

“Which is better?”

“Considerably,” Charlotte said. “Mystery sells. Respectability merely sits.”

Olivia laughed.

They had come, over the year, into something neither of them had a name for. Not friendship exactly — there was too much history for that, and the history did not disappear. Olivia still sometimes said a thing that assumed a version of Charlotte that had never existed. Charlotte still sometimes answered a question as though Olivia were her mother. These moments landed, and passed, and were not discussed.

But they had begun, without announcing it, to check each other’s arithmetic.

When Charlotte came home too tired to eat, Olivia noticed and made her eat. When Olivia spent too long being polished in front of a mirror, Charlotte told her she was being boring, which was the only thing anyone had ever said to her that worked.

In November, Olivia began learning Italian.

It started as a folly, undertaken because she was bored. It became, within four months, an actual discipline, pursued in the mornings with a grammar open on the windowsill and a pencil behind her ear — which Charlotte found so startling the first time she saw it that she stopped in the doorway and stared.

“What?” Olivia said.

“Nothing.”

“That is Mother’s answer.”

Charlotte sat down. “I was going to say that you look like me.”

Olivia looked at her reflection in the window, where the pencil was clearly visible, and something crossed her face that Charlotte could not name.

“That is the nicest thing you have ever said to me,” she said.

“I said it to you once before. About the papers.”

“I know. I have been trying to deserve it since.”

Charlotte did not have an answer to that, so she reached over and took the pencil out of her sister’s hair and put it in her own, and Olivia squawked, and the sound brought Margaret to the doorway, and the three of them stood there for a moment — a mother and two daughters who had spent twenty years arranging themselves around each other like furniture in a small room — and then Margaret said, “Olivia, your Italian is atrocious,” and left, and Olivia laughed until she had to hold the windowsill.

In the spring, Olivia took over the correspondence for the fund.

It began accidentally. Charlotte was ill for a fortnight with a fever and could not read anything without her head aching, and the letters piled up, and Olivia — who had never in her life volunteered for anything that could not be seen from a drawing room — sat down at the desk and began answering them.

She had no idea what she was doing. She asked Charlotte forty questions. She sent three replies that were wrong and had to be recalled.

But she was good at it, in a way Charlotte was not. Charlotte answered letters the way she answered everything: completely, correctively, with three caveats and a request for further documents. Olivia answered them the way she answered a room — warmly, briefly, with a sentence that made the person on the other end feel that they had been heard and that they were not a fool for having written.

The fund needed both. Charlotte had not understood that until she watched her sister do it.

“That is the best reply we have ever sent anyone,” Charlotte said, reading over Olivia’s shoulder one afternoon.

“It is not a reply. It is a paragraph.”

“It is a good paragraph.”

Olivia turned around slowly, and looked at her sister with an expression of such open, unguarded pleasure that Charlotte had to look away.

“I have never been better at anything than you,” Olivia said. “You know that. I have been prettier and luckier and better liked, and none of it was ever anything I did — it was just the way the room fell. This is the first thing I have ever done that was mine.”

Charlotte thought about the drawing room, and the green silk, and the modesty practised in a looking glass, and the fact that Olivia had been carrying a weight that Charlotte had never once thought to look at, because Charlotte had been busy carrying her own.

“There is room,” Charlotte said, “for both of us in this.”

Olivia nodded, and did not say anything, and went back to the letters.

That evening, Margaret remarked at dinner, apropos of nothing, that the two Miss Whitmores had between them somehow become the most useful women in the family, and Edward said, “Somebody should write that down,” and Margaret said, “Do not be absurd,” and Olivia said, in Italian, something that made her laugh so hard she had to put down her glass.