Free Elizabeth Mansfield by Poor Caroline Page A

once ... and in person. Excusing herself, she ran upstairs to dress.
    She brushed her hair until the curls were restrained into a smooth line sweeping back from her face. Then she selected from her wardrobe a neat, workaday walking gown of yellow-and-blue striped muslin, but after she’d buttoned the high collar, she wondered if it was, perhaps, too severe. To counteract that impression, she put on a pretty, small-brimmed bonnet, the crown of which was trimmed with gold satin ribbon that had been twisted into charming little rosettes. Then she studied the effect in her mirror. Satisfied that she looked properly governess-ish, she stole down the stairs and slipped quietly from the house.
    But the interview did not go well. It was so disappointing, in fact, that she wondered if Letty was not right about her—that she lived in a dreamworld. Certainly the reality of the experience was not at all what she’d dreamed. The lady of the house, a Mrs. Duckett, was a vulgar woman who asked foolish, irrelevant questions that Caro found embarrassing to answer, like, “Why ain’t ye married?” or, “Where on earth did ye purchase yer bonnet? My milliner can’t never seem to make the trimmin’s on my bonnets as pretty as that.” Caro, her cheeks burning, wished she’d worn something else.
    Mrs. Duckett had four children, all of whom ran in and out of the room while their mother was conducting the interview, interrupting her rudely, demanding attention, and ignoring her snarled orders to be quiet. They all appeared to be monstrously spoiled and ill-behaved. Caro found them so disruptive that she barely knew how she managed to answer the rude queries at all.
    Nevertheless, at the end of the interview, Mrs. Duckett surprised Caro by offering her the post. Then she enumerated the conditions of employment: for the meager sum of seventeen pounds per annum, Caro would be expected to be on duty every day (except for a three-hour period on Thursday afternoons when, if no emergency required her presence, she could go to visit her family), to give all four children their lessons, dine with them upstairs at the nursery table, see to all their needs (including their washing up and dressing), and to help serve dinners downstairs in the formal dining room when guests were present.
    Caro could scarcely believe her ears. “Seventeen pounds a year? ”she asked, stunned.
    Mrs. Duckett, her eyebrows raised as if offended by the vulgarity of being forced to discuss money matters, defended the salary by declaring, “After all, Miss Whitlow, ye’ll be livin’ here, in your very own room, and ye’ll have no expenses except yer clothes.”
    Caro, numb and disappointed, told Mrs. Duckett that she would have to think the matter over. But even through the fog of discouragement, she realized that she could not accept the post. If she took a position that required her to “live in,” she would have to send the boys away to school, but at a salary of a mere seventeen pounds per annum, she could never afford it. The situation seemed hopeless.
    She left the Duckett household so disheartened that she failed to notice that the weather had completely changed. The sky had darkened, and a steady rain had begun to fall. The pretty bonnet that had so entranced Mrs. Duckett wilted as she walked back toward Mortimer Street in an obvious daze, her steps slow and her thoughts muddled by a deep depression. Was a position like the one she’d just been offered all she could expect? Is that to be my future? she asked herself in despair as she stepped off the curb and started across the cobbles of Mortimer Street, ignoring the puddles that soaked her shoes.
    A short distance away, on the other side of the street, Kit, his head lowered under a large black umbrella, was walking away from his aunt’s residence, on his way back to his rooms at Fenton’s Hotel. He’d just made one of his useless calls to try to speak to Caro, and, not having bothered to drive his phaeton