Free Indiscretion by Jude Morgan

The old lady had entrenched herself in the position of being undeceivable; and like most dogmas, this one exacted absurdity as the price of assurance. Caroline had more than once seen her turn down a genuine bargain in a shop, through attributing all sorts of cunning subtleties to the innocent shopkeeper’s mind.
    As for the dances themselves, the assemblies and card-parties, she liked them very well. If her status as Mrs Catling’s dependant, whose first concern must always be her employer’s comfort, her mantle or her iced-water or her fire-screen, meant that she was always more looker-on than participant, she was not dissatisfied with this, for she had always taken pleasure in observing people. Indeed nothing could have suited such a habit of mind better than the position of a lady’s companion, who was often treated as some insensible object like a hat-stand or dumb-waiter, and in consequence often witnessed the instructive spectacle of how people behaved when they supposed no one was watching them. Which, she found, was seldom well.
    But Caroline was twenty years old, and could have been forgiven more sighs than she allowed herself, at the prospect of forever creeping along in the craggy shadow of Mrs Catling: of never standing up to dance with a man because she liked the look of him, or accepting a glass of wine without first looking to her employer for approval, or even going into a giggling huddle with other twenty year olds and making solemn appointments to meet at the milliner’s tomorrow and tell all.
    She tried not to repine: mostly she succeeded; but still there were nights when she threw open her bedroom window to gasp the fresh air that was never allowed to circulate in Mrs Catling’s house, and to hear the near murmur of the sea, which to her young mind, fretted by endless rubbers of whist, seemed the very sound of life going on tantalizingly without her.
    Mrs Catling’s ill-humours were not unbearably frequent, and when they did come the storm was soon ridden out. More unpredictable, and more troubling, were the tremendous fits of gloom to which she was subject.
    These were referable to no object or event: the widow did not fall to thinking on her husband or her lone state, and there was no question of chivvying her out of them — Caroline made the attempt once, and retreated scorched. It was rather as if some alteration came over her vision: the wry satire fell away, and the greedy relish, and instead there was only the world and her vast, bleak contempt for it. At such times Mrs Catling’s hard black eyes seemed to be looking out, not over the liveliness of Brighton, but over a lunar terrain, rocky, blasted, and hopeless.
    Caroline tried not to be infected by this, even though it had a peculiarly pervasive effect on the household: at such times even the carriage-horses seemed to hang their heads in depression. The best of all remedies was a letter from her father. These came irregularly, and were full of nonsense, chaos, self-glorification, thumping fibs, and fondness. She could almost physically warm herself at them.
    But it was a letter from another source that finally broke through the most forbidding of Mrs Catling’s moods, a spell of cold brooding that seemed set to turn into everlasting winter. Caroline, reading out her correspondence to her one morning when the brilliant sun streaming into the breakfast-parlour seemed to chill and fade as it touched the old lady’s bombazine skirts, had despaired of any communication raising anything but a scowl — and then she came to a letter that changed everything.
    ‘From Mr and Miss Downey, ma’am.’ Ah, the danglers. ‘Shall I read it?’
    ‘Oh, yes.’ All at once there was a light in Mrs Catling’s eyes — a very feline, if not kindly light; like a bored cat that hears a mouse in the wainscot. ‘Oh, yes, read it. Let us hear what they have to say’
    ‘“My dear aunt,”‘ Caroline began. ‘“It is in no spirit of trifling formality,