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“Quite remarkable, yes,” Charlotte affirmed. “I can hardly believe it.” She tried to keep the ends of her smile upward. “Did she give you any indication of what sort of man you’re about to meet and fall in love with?”
“She said she saw a dark and brooding and handsome man, but the sort of man who will find kindness and humility as he gets to know me,” Louisa said brightly.
At this, Charlotte again yearned to snort—for weren’t these the wishes of nearly every woman on earth?
“She said within the year, absolutely,” Louisa said. “So I suppose my search begins anew, but with a fresh perspective. It’s essential to keep your eyes open to your current surroundings; essential to accept each day as it comes. This is what Florentia taught me. What you need may very well be blinking down at you—from this over-six-foot-frame. One had better keep one’s eyes open to see it. Him. I forget precisely what it was she said.”
Charlotte chuckled, grateful that the tension had switched towards silliness. Louisa stretched her fingers across the space between them and said, “I’m terribly sorry that you were so against this. I appreciate that you went along with me. I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to go alone.”
“Pish posh,” Charlotte returned. “You’re always brave enough to do things alone. You only wanted to try to fix my pessimistic nature.”
“Perhaps that’s true. It’s been one of the biggest challenges of my life,” Louisa affirmed. “Every single day, I imagine it becomes a bit brighter in that head of yours. I’m terribly afraid of failure.”
The carriage drew in front of Louisa and Margorie’s estate several minutes later. The rain spat down as they hustled towards the side door and rushed into the thin hallway. Charlotte chuckled as Louisa shook her head like a dog, casting splatters of water across the wall.
“What a strange day,” Charlotte said. She reached up and fluffed Louisa’s curls until she joined her giggles.
Together, the three girls marched up the creaking staircase and changed clothes, Margorie in the bedroom she’d returned to in the wake of her divorce and Louisa and Charlotte in hers. Louisa and Charlotte spoke in whispers.
“Do you suppose Margorie’s all right? I don’t believe she should have seen the mystic,” Louisa said.
“I’m sure she said something horrendous.”
“But it must have been correct,” Louisa affirmed. “She only lends a reflection of whatever brews in our future.”
Charlotte forced herself not to scoff. “I suppose so.”
“It’s just wretched to have a sister with such bad luck,” Louisa said. “I have my entire future before me. I will meet a man to love this year; I will find a path towards marriage, towards children. Everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Perhaps she should have seen a mystic before she met her husband. Perhaps then she could have avoided all this trauma …”
Charlotte arched her brow and forced herself to keep her lips closed. She turned and gestured for Louisa to help her latch up her corset and the buttons of her gown. She then spun around to do the same for Louisa. When they greeted Margorie in the hallway, she gestured for one of them to assist her with her own clothing.
“Thank you,” she said when they’d finished, her cheeks pink. “And I’m sorry for the embarrassment earlier. I wasn’t fully prepared for such a dire vision of my future. I suppose I should have been; I never suspected that my life would take any sort of mad shift towards otherness, beauty, happiness.”
Charlotte lifted her hands to Margorie’s cheeks. She’d known the girl every moment since her sixth birthday. At the time, Margorie had been brash and eleven, on the verge of taking over the world.
“If the woman gave you a vision of the world that doesn’t suit you, you have it in your power to change it,” Charlotte affirmed.
Louisa clucked her tongue, as though she wanted to protest this. Charlotte flashed her a dangerous look.
Downstairs, Louisa, Margorie, and Charlotte joined the girls’ parents for dinner. The storm raged outside, leaving them to comment that it had already been a wretched late-spring, early summer—the sort that made parties soggy and garden parties forgotten. Charlotte noted that the girls left out the idea of the mystic, which led her to believe that perhaps their parents hadn’t necessarily approved of the trek.
“You girls, age twenty-three,” Lady Major said, eyeing both Charlotte and Louisa. “I remember when you were just girls, playing with your dolls in the garden. At the time, I needed only to ensure you remained alive. Everything else was extra.”
“I suppose you did a stellar job of keeping us alive, Mother,” Louisa said teasingly.
“Charlotte. Tell me you’ve at least a few men after you,” Lady Major said, tilting her head.
Charlotte fumed. She hated such questions, feeling they belittled her place in the world.
“There’s always someone after Charlotte,” Louisa interjected.
“That was always true when you were younger.” Lady Major chewed a bit at her lower lip, then flashed her eyes towards her eldest. “Margorie, I don’t suppose you’d like to tell us what happened to you today? Your lip. Has it bled?”
Margorie placed a napkin across her mouth and bowed her head. “It was an accident as I placed myself in the carriage.”
Charlotte held the image in her head for a moment: Margorie slicing herself open due to devastation.
“Darling, you really must be more careful,” Lady Major affirmed.
