the professional judgement of Dr James Curlew, his unfortunate daughter had, at the very most, five years left before it was all over. Not her life, you understand; her prospects for marriage. The same physical features that made him such a distinguished-looking man – tall, rangy build, aquiline nose, long face, strong jaw – were a calamitous inheritance for a girl. If she acted quickly, now while she was in her teens, there was still hope.
‘Oh, but I don’t wish to marry, Father,’ she told him. ‘The world has enough married folk in it. What it hasn’t got enough of is missionaries.’
‘In that case,’ he joked, ‘it’s damn naughty of the savages in Africa to keep eating them, isn’t it?’
‘You mustn’t call them savages, Father,’ Emmeline chided him solemnly. ‘Such disparagements are precisely why slavery is still with us.’
Dr Curlew clenched his jaw – the same jaw he’d passed on to his blameless daughter – and did his best not to argue. Rancour between him and Emmeline would have grieved his wife, had she lived to see it.
‘I don’t know why you say “still with us”,’ he couldn’t help remarking. ‘We don’t have slavery in England.’
‘We must regard the whole world as our home, Father,’ said Emmeline, wiping her fingers on the breakfast napkin. Pale sunlight was shining through the parlour window onto her face and upper body, a cool glow aided by the white tablecloth and the snowy landscape outside. The jingling of horses’ harnesses as the nearby shops received their deliveries mingled with the tinkling of Emmeline’s spoon in her teacup. ‘This is the 1850s,’ she reminded her father, as if the modern age had arrived while he’d been occupied elsewhere. ‘Every place on Earth is connected by the web of our Empire. I have correspondents as far-flung as Kabool and New York.’
‘Oh?’ This was promising. Without taking his eyes off his daughter, he rang the bell for the housemaid, as the room wasn’t as warm as it should be. ‘Might some of these correspondents be of the male sex?’
‘Oh, the majority of them, Father,’ grinned Emmeline. ‘Males are in far more desperate need of salvation than females, I’ve found.’
She was quite winsome when she smiled. Her lips still had something of the childish rosebud about them, and there were dimples in her cheeks. Her eyes were bright, her face unlined, her hair glossy. Five years, at most, she would retain these qualities, then the sap would begin to drain out of her, and she would be left only with the aquiline nose and the Curlew jaw. Moreover, arithmetic would be against her; she would strike any potential suitors as unfeasibly old. Dear little Emmeline could prattle all she liked about modern Society and how unrecognisably different it was from when he was a young man, but some attitudes were eternal.
The maidservant padded into the room and, without needing to be told, perceived at once what the trouble was. She got on her knees in front of the hearth and started coaxing the flames. Worth her weight in gold, that girl.
Once Emmeline had declared that she was writing to many mysterious gentlemen all over the world, her father was naturally curious to know if this were true, and, if so, who these mysterious gentlemen might be. Emmeline was clearly not going to tell him, so he had a word with Gertie who, in addition to her other duties, also had the task of walking to the pillarbox to post Miss Curlew’s letters.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the servant. ‘Never less than one a day. Sometimes five or six.’
‘Always to the same person?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Replies?’
‘Sometimes, sir.’
‘From … from what part of the world, usually?’
‘America, sir.’
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