‘Allow me to be the first to felicitate you on your ascension.’ Once again exercising his ducal prerogative, Robert lifted Charlotte’s hand to his lips. ‘Congratulations, Queen Charlotte. Long may you reign.’
When he bowed in obeisance over her gloved hand, Charlotte felt like a queen. Her spine straightened, her shoulders moved back. She was Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, resplendent in silks and velvets, confounding foreign ambassadors and dazzling the eyes of her courtiers. And Robert? He was Sir Walter Raleigh, promising her new worlds and new kingdoms and strange little brown leaves called tobacco. Or maybe he was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the queen’s Master of the Horse and secret love, ready to whisk her off for a clandestine tryst behind an alcove within yards of the courtiers milling about.
Charlotte thrilled to the romance of it, feeling gloriously imperious and utterly unlike herself.
Facing down the long table, Robert lifted his glass high, commanding the attention of the unruly revellers at table. ‘To Her Majesty, our Queen of the Feast – Queen Charlotte.’
Crystal glittered in the candlelight as a chorus of slightly inebriated voices echoed, ‘Queen Charlotte!’
In front of her, all down the long table, mouths opened to hail her, hands raised to toast her, and the ruby red of a dozen rings gleamed like fireworks in the air. Charlotte beamed down on the lot of them, giddy with more than wine.
‘Do you have any pronouncements for your loyal subjects?’ called out Tommy Fluellen, from the lower end of the table, where he was seated next to the pudding-faced Miss Dempsey.
‘That I do!’ called back Charlotte, deploying her fan like a sceptre. ‘Go forth and enjoy yourself mightily.’
Tommy grinned at her down the table. ‘A good and wise queen if ever I saw one, eh, lads?’
The lads all agreed.
‘Shall we open the dancing, Your Majesty?’ suggested Robert, holding out an arm.
Charlotte considered the guests streaming towards the gallery. There would be the usual jostling for place as they formed up for the dance, the endless polite inanities exchanged with dozens of dull acquaintances. That was all very well for the workaday world, but tonight she was queen, daring and reckless, able to command Armadas with a single word. It was too soon to have to go back to mundanity, to being quiet Charlotte in the corner of the ballroom. ‘No,’ Charlotte said decidedly. ‘I have a better idea.’
‘Unicorn hunting?’ suggested Robert, seeming perfectly content to follow whichever way she should lead.
‘It’s the wrong season.’ She tugged at his hands, drawing him after her. ‘Come with me. I want to show you my very favourite place at Girdings.’
Chapter Nine
When his queen commanded, what was a loyal subject to do but obey?
Swept up in her enthusiasm, Robert found himself hurrying along as Charlotte grabbed his hand and pulled him in the wake of the departing guests. At the door of the dining hall Charlotte veered sharply to the left, down a narrow and barren corridor lit with tapers at long intervals. Despite the gloom, Charlotte moved with the assurance of familiarity, one hand still holding his as she urged him along, her skirts making a cheerful swishing noise as she danced ahead of him. Robert had to half run to keep up with her, his boots skidding on the marble tiles of the floor. For a small person, Charlotte could move very quickly when she wanted to. Robert grinned at the thought.
‘Where are you taking me?’
Charlotte glanced back over her shoulder, spinning a bit to make the scalloped edge of her skirts flounce. ‘You’ll see.’
‘Kidnapping, is it? What do you think you can get for me?’
‘Seven swans a-swimming?’ suggested Charlotte blithely.
‘Just so long as we don’t have to eat them.’
‘No, that wasn’t one of Grandmama’s better ideas, was it?’ said Charlotte, stopping short so unexpectedly that he nearly toppled right over her.
‘Does the oubliette open here?’ asked Robert, catching at the wall to keep himself from falling over her.
‘We’re going up rather than down,’ said Charlotte, not the least bit discommoded by being hemmed between Robert and the wall.
Given certain of his thoughts at the moment, Robert was afraid that he was going very far down indeed, straight to the realms of pitch and brimstone reserved for those entertaining carnal thoughts about young ladies in dark alcoves. Their present position was as dark and secluded as any rake could desire, far from interfering chaperones and indignant duchesses.
Charlotte tilted her head up at him at an angle that would have been perfect for kissing, had Robert been considering kisses, which he most certainly was not. That was the tale he was telling to his conscience, and he was sticking to it.
‘Don’t you know where we are?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ Robert said, and meant it in more ways than one.
He could see only the outlines of her smile in the general gloom, like a portrait done in charcoals, emphasising the Cupid’s bow curve of her lips.
‘You should,’ she scolded. ‘We are directly between your bedroom and dressing room.’
From anyone else that might be construed as an invitation. From Charlotte … it was nothing more than a geographical observation. It had to be. Didn’t it?
‘And these,’ continued Charlotte, blissfully unaware of the implications her last words had engendered, ‘are the back stairs.’
Groping along the wall, she located a knob and turned it. A door swung smoothly open on well-oiled hinges – there would be no unsightly creaking noises permitted to disturb the duke’s slumbers. Robert had to execute an inelegant hop to get out of the way before the wooden panel made straight for his nose, bowling him safely out of the way of his companion.
There was nothing like a blunt block of wood in the face to dispel lascivious thoughts.
Turning to face him, Charlotte beamed up at him in the way of an illusionist producing silk flowers out of a hat. ‘This is how the servants get down to your rooms.’
‘Right,’ said Robert. Well, that did rather put paid to any thoughts of assignations. Coal scuttles and water buckets weren’t exactly among the harbingers of romance.
Gathering her heavy velvet skirt in both hands, Charlotte started up the steps, the gold thread on her emerald slippers winking in the occasional glare of the candles placed at infrequent intervals along the stairway. ‘My rooms are just above.’
‘Are they?’ Robert’s eyebrows engaged in the sort of acrobatics that would have done credit to Drury Lane.
‘Right through here.’ With a sweeping gesture, Charlotte indicated a door that led off the next landing – and kept right on climbing. Robert wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.
‘I used to come up and down these stairs all the time when my father was in the duke’s rooms,’ Charlotte’s voice echoed cheerfully down the stairwell. Ahead of him the velvet train of her gown dragged against the steps, the gold threads in the hem an incongruous splash of luxury against the worn wood.
‘It was the easiest way to get in and out without Grandmama seeing me.’
The underside of her train caught on a break in the stair where the warped old wood had cracked. Bending, Robert freed the fabric for her, and was rewarded with a grateful smile from on high. Three steps above him, she still looked like a queen, even with her garland tipping down over one ear.
‘I forgot those were your father’s rooms.’
‘It was my father’s idea to have me right upstairs – so I wouldn’t feel so alone in a strange house. Our house in Surrey was much smaller, you see.’
She spoke without the slightest hint of bitterness. It would, thought Robert, be like Charlotte to have mastered the trick of remembering without rancour, picking out the good and discarding the bad. Bottle that and she could make a fortune.
‘Do you ever miss it?’ They were four flights up and still she kept climbing, her train swishing behind her like a me
rmaid’s tail.
Charlotte paused with her hand on the rail, an emerald bracelet glinting on her gloved wrist. ‘I miss the idea of it, but I don’t think I would want to go back.’ She smiled jauntily down at him from the lofty heights of the top step. ‘I rather like where I am.’
Robert’s heart squeezed in a very inconvenient way. ‘I think that it would be very hard not to like wherever you are,’ he said, and meant it.
What the implications of that were, he couldn’t quite bring himself to work out. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. With the air of a conjurer displaying a new trick, Charlotte threw open another door. ‘Then wait until you see this!’
The immediate results were not auspicious. Cold air barrelled down the stairway and walloped Robert in the chest, cutting through layers of wool and linen.
‘Where are we?’ he asked as neutrally as he could. He had expected a conservatory, blooming with carefully preserved plants, or a library, blanketed in books. Instead, Charlotte appeared to have brought him to the North Pole.
‘The roof,’ said Charlotte, skipping over the threshold and taking a long, deep breath of frigid air. ‘Mmmm.’
‘Mmmm’ wasn’t quite the expression that came to Robert’s mind. The word that presented itself was just as short but far more profane, so he didn’t voice it. Instead, he moved with a great deal of cautiousness over the small bump at the base of the door onto the glacial surface of the roof.
‘Welcome to my kingdom,’ said Charlotte cheerfully, flinging her arms wide in welcome.
The tip of her nose was already beginning to turn pink, but otherwise she didn’t seem to notice the cold at all. Robert made an attempt to remember how many times he had refilled her glass at dinner.
‘Come see!’ His extremities might be beginning to turn blue, but her enthusiasm was infectious, even among the frost-scarred stone.
Up close, the pale gold stone was pitted by the elements, scarred by past storms and stained by soot from the chimneys. But there was an odd charm to the landscape, nonetheless. A terrace ran waist-high along the edge of the roof, high enough to provide an illusion of security. Along its length perched a fanciful collection of historical and mythological personages, hectoring, lecturing, and gesturing to hypothetical persons in the gardens below.
Charlotte greeted each as an old friend. ‘This,’ she said, giving Aristotle a brisk pat on the arm, ‘is my first minister of state. And this’ – she moved on to another robed gentleman whom Robert didn’t recognise, although he had no doubt that Charlotte could – ‘is my Chancellor of the Exchequer.’
‘Chancellor.’ Robert nodded in greeting. Being a very grand personage, the Chancellor forbore to respond.
‘A bit high in the instep, isn’t he?’ Robert said.
‘Always,’ agreed Charlotte, her eyes glinting a pale, clear green in the icy air. ‘He utterly refuses to play tiddlywinks and he despises having poetry read aloud. But he’s very good at sums.’
Tucking Charlotte’s arm against his side – for warmth, of course – Robert strolled along to the corner of the roof, where two satyrs with furry torsos and cloven hooves leant precariously over the edge, playing their panpipes for the delectation of those in the gardens below.
‘And who are these rascals?’
‘My court minstrels, of course,’ said Charlotte.
‘Of course,’ agreed Robert.
Charlotte leant familiarly against the satyr’s furry arm. ‘They’re arrant knaves, both of them, but they play beautifully.’
She announced it with such conviction that Robert could almost picture the stone arms flex and the panpipes begin to play.
‘You’ve spent a good deal of time up here, haven’t you?’ he said. He could picture a miniature Charlotte spinning stories for stone statues and offering them a spot of tea.
Charlotte acknowledged the point with a wry smile. ‘It was one of the few places where Grandmama couldn’t follow. It was the one place that was wholly my own. And it makes a lovely spot for reading in summer,’ she added more prosaically. ‘I still come up here when the weather is fine.’
Robert slapped his hands against his arms to warm them, his breath making white puffs in the air. ‘I can see where it might be nice – when the weather is fine.’
Charlotte wrinkled her nose at him. ‘Such a fuss about a light breeze.’ She waved a hand at the sky in a sweeping gesture. ‘Just look up there. You don’t see stars like that in summer. Can’t you just imagine the Wise Men travelling through the night by the light of those stars?’
Robert suspected it would have been a hell of a lot warmer in Bethlehem. The stars, however, were everything Charlotte had said they were. In the clear, cold air, they looked close enough to pluck from the sky, like silver apples in a mythological goddess’s garden.
If one were bold enough or rash enough to take them. His classical education was spotty, but he seemed to remember that those mythical apples always came with a high price.
‘But this,’ said Charlotte, manoeuvring him towards the centre of the terrace, where the ornamental pediment surmounting the garden front came to a sharp point, ‘is the very best part.’
Robert looked around and saw nothing to justify that statement. There were no philosophers, no satyrs, no mythological figures to enliven the view, just stone.
Charlotte poked him in the shoulder. ‘Not there,’ she said. ‘There.’
Following where she pointed, he looked out over the edge of the roof and found the whole expanse of the gardens arrayed below. Below them stretched patterned parterres and whimsical follies. The topiary capered and posed for their delight; statues raised their arms in graceful arabesque, fighting to be free of their pedestals. At the verge of the garden, the lake glittered with reflected starlight, like gems on a bed of velvet, and the elegant summer house watched benevolently over the whole, its white columns stately in the moonlight, like a wise old chaperone settling back while her charges played.
But there was still more. Beyond that, he could see out over the fields and the patches of forest, down the muddy road, clear through to Dovedale village in the valley below, where the windows of the cottages glowed orange with firelight as, in house after house, the denizens of the village conducted their own celebrations for the last day of Christmas. The whole scene lay before them like a Christmas crèche, an entire world in small, the edges sharp and clear and glittering with a dusting of ice. It was a fairytale kingdom, offered up for the taking. Charlotte’s kingdom, to be precise, and she was offering it to him.
Charlotte tilted her head, eagerly monitoring his reaction. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’
Her carefully arranged curls had been dragged to one side by her crown and whipped to frizz by the wind. Her cheeks were red and chapped from cold, her lips were bitten, and her nose was starting to drip. Robert had never seen anything lovelier. The starlit lake and perfectly trimmed topiary couldn’t even begin to compete. ‘It’s perfect,’ he said.
It was quite clear that he wasn’t referring to the scenery.
‘I am rather fond of it,’ Charlotte managed. Robert could feel more than see the slight movement as her gloved hand tightened around the ledge of the roof, unconsciously seeking support.
It was a very odd sensation to be so attuned to someone else’s actions that you could divine the movements of her body without sight. In the past, that sort of awareness had only come to him in the presence of enemies, breathing the same breath as the man on the other end of a sword or a pistol, in a contest for one’s life.
Knowing that he was plunging into enemy territory, Robert carefully adjusted her garland, setting it farther back on the crown of her head – that’s right, a nasty little voice in the back of his head whispered, get it out of the way. The voice sounded unpleasantly like Medmenham’s. Robert ignored it. ‘Your coronet is slipping,’ he murmured.
Charlotte looked up at him from under her lashes, eager and uncertain all at once. ‘It’s made of mistletoe, you know,’ she sa
id hopefully, tipping her head back at an angle as old as mistletoe itself.
A tender smile pushed at the corners of Robert’s lips. ‘Is it? In that case …’
His hand traced a path from her garland to her cheek, smoothing her tousled hair out of the way. His conscience gave one last, agitated bleat and went still. It wouldn’t do to ignore tradition, after all. Not at Girdings. What harm was a kiss, after all?
Charlotte’s lashes fluttered down over her eyes. They were touched with gold at the tips, he noticed, inconsequentially, before his own eyes drifted closed and there was nothing but touch. The slide of her hair beneath his fingers, the soft exhalation of her breath in the cold air, the brush of her lips against his, more warming that any number of well-stoked fires. He had meant it to be only a mistletoe kiss, a ceremonial salutation in honour of the season, but perhaps it was the sheer quantity of the mistletoe in the crown that betrayed them, kiss upon kiss multiplying until there was nothing ceremonial about it at all.
Charlotte’s crown jangled forgotten to the stone-flagged floor as she wrapped her arms securely around his neck, kissing him back with kisses that tasted faintly of wine. Above them, the stars whirled in dizzying circles in the perfect night sky and the faint sound of music rose from below like the chime of celestial harps.
They might have stayed that way for hours, drugged by kisses, spellbound by starlight, if the wind hadn’t defeated them. Beneath the velvet of her dress, Robert could feel Charlotte shivering. He wrapped his arms more firmly around her, drawing her into the shelter of his body. While her dress might be made of a warm fabric, it left crucial areas uncovered. Robert warmed the exposed skin at her collarbone with a kiss and felt her shiver with something other than cold.
‘You’re freezing.’ For a wonder, he wasn’t. For the first time since returning to England, he felt warm. Too warm. That was the harm in a kiss. ‘We should get you back inside.’
Charlotte rested her head against his jacket, finding a comfortable hollow beneath his shoulder. ‘Must we?’ she said wistfully. ‘Magic never fares well in the real world. I’m afraid that once we go downstairs, the enchantment will all fade away.’