‘What makes you think it will fade away?’ Robert asked, knowing he was flirting with danger. ‘What if it’s real?’
Charlotte blinked up at him, her voice slightly muffled by his waistcoat. ‘Do you mean that? Or are you just trying to get me inside so I don’t turn blue?’
Robert tucked a finger under her chin and tilted her face up towards his. ‘I like you in blue.’
He kissed her before she could point out that he hadn’t answered the question. He kissed her, knowing that it was a knave’s trick, designed to buy time. He kissed her to avoid having to acknowledge that the most frightening answer of all was the true one.
When their lips finally parted, neither showed any inclination to move. Instead, they stood in comfortable silence, Charlotte’s head tucked beneath his chin, looking out over the sleeping gardens with their rosebushes tied up in burlap, over the dry fountains with their frost-scarred bottoms laid bare to the elements, over the lake from which all the swans had fled – presumably to avoid being turned into a ducal dinner. In summer, the view must be dazzling. For a moment, he allowed himself to entertain an image of what it would be to stand so in summer, with the flowers blooming below and the fountains sending up their fine spray and the sun reflecting golden off the tips of Charlotte’s eyelashes.
Summer was a very long time away. In the meantime … Robert didn’t want to think of the meantime, of Staines and Medmenham, of promises still unfulfilled and dark deeds unpunished.
‘We should go in,’ he said, brushing a kiss across the top of Charlotte’s head to soften the sentiment.
‘I know,’ agreed Charlotte, and nestled deeper into his waistcoat.
‘We could make a house up on the roof,’ Robert suggested, only half jokingly. ‘And send down baskets for food.’
Reluctantly, Charlotte peeled herself from his side and shook out her skirts. ‘It would have to be a very long rope. And you would be very cold.’
‘Shall we?’ said Robert. There was, he noticed, a crease in her cheek from the seam of his coat. He lifted a hand to smooth it away.
Charlotte caught his hand and pressed the curled fingers to her lips. ‘Let’s.’
For all that it was warmer in the stairwell, he could feel a chill settle upon him as soon as they closed the door to the roof behind them. Charlotte’s hand nestled trustingly in his as they meandered very slowly down the long stair. He could feel the weight of it like a tug at his conscience. Would her hand rest so comfortably in his if she knew him for what he really was? If she discovered that he wasn’t at all what she believed him to be, not a Sir Galahad but – well, a man. A man with a cluttered, untidy past and a million minor transgressions to his discredit.
She had hit far too close to the bone at dinner that night, when she asked about his departure from Girdings. He could still hear the clink of coins in his satchel as he had stolen away from Girdings that night, slinking off like a common thief with the four hundred pounds he had needed to purchase his commission as an ensign in the army. His father would have called it ‘borrowing against his inheritance,’ which was probably why Robert preferred to think of it as it was. Stealing. He had spent years trying to sweat out the taint of it by working twice as hard as any other officer in the regiment, volunteering for the most exhausting treks, the most dangerous missions, the most tedious administrative duties. He had been promoted from subaltern to captain on his own merits – his own merits and the backing of Colonel Arbuthnot. It was a pretty sort of punishment that there was no way to make proper amends; the person to whom he would have to pay that initial money back would be himself.
What would Charlotte say if she knew? Would she care? He remembered her praise of that long-ago Lansdowne who had taken such shameless advantage of Sir Walter Raleigh and allowed himself to hope that she might see it in that light, as an expedient to a greater end, unimportant in itself. But even if she saw it through rose-coloured glasses, he knew otherwise. He knew what he was and what he had done.
But he didn’t let go.
It was too tempting to hold on to Charlotte’s hand and her vision of what he might be, as though believing hard enough might make it so. He kept the conversation light as they strolled down the narrow stairway, hand in hand, sharing silly stories about nothing in particular and pausing frequently in dark corners. Robert knew he would have to pay the piper sooner or later, but for now, the shadows kept inconvenient realities at bay.
‘I should fix my hair,’ said Charlotte, dawdling on the first-floor landing, no more eager than he to abandon the shadows. She indicated the way to her rooms with a tilt of her decidedly lopsided coiffure. ‘And try to make myself presentable.’
Robert followed her into a wide hallway dotted with majestic-looking doors, not as majestic as the state bedrooms on the ground floor, including the gloomy ducal chambers that he currently inhabited, but still far grander than anything to which he had ever aspired. Accustomed by long usage, Charlotte didn’t even seem to notice.
Her sitting room looked just as he would have imagined it, decorated in airy pastels, with papers scattered pell-mell on a writing table and books falling open on every available surface. He thought he recognised the battered binding of the book he had seen her reading in the gallery last week. Emmelina? No, Evelina. The memory brought a smile to his lips.
‘Shall I wait for you?’ he asked.
Charlotte clung to his hand as though she were going to agree, and then reluctantly released it. ‘It would probably be best if we went back separately. Just so that people don’t talk.’
She looked at him so expectantly that Robert wondered if he was supposed to argue with her and insist on not leaving her side, or whatever else it was that a proper knight errant would be expected to do. But what she said made sound sense. They had undoubtedly been missed by now. Tongues would have begun wagging, dowagers would be whispering behind their fans. Charlotte knew this world far better than he.
‘All right,’ Robert said, planting both hands on her shoulders and drawing her close for one last kiss. ‘I bow to your superior judgment.’
‘The ballroom?’ she said.
‘I get the next dance,’ said Robert. ‘Whatever it may be.’
This time, he had clearly said the right thing. Charlotte beamed at him. ‘It’s a promise.’
With a flurry of flounces, she flung her arms around his neck for one more last, absolutely the last, very last kiss. It turned into an almost the very last kiss, instead.
‘The ballroom,’ Charlotte repeated breathlessly, once the absolutely last kiss had been kissed.
Detaching Robert’s hands from around her waist, she swirled through the door of her sitting room, giving the impression of flying rather than walking. Flying did have its hazards. Robert caught a last glimpse of frothing petticoat and heard a muffled ‘Ouch!’ as she stumbled over a book, and then the door swung shut behind her and he was left staring at a plaster panel.
Not just staring at it, beaming fatuously at it like the most mawkish sort of lovesick schoolboy. Robert hastily rearranged his face into more acceptable ducal lines.
Shaking his head at himself, he forced himself to move away from the door, step by determined step. Served him right to always be mocking Tommy and then to be hit by the fatal arrow himself. That it was fatal, he had very little doubt. Maybe Charlotte was right, maybe it was all an enchantment. If it was, it felt like a very durable one, solid as the stone of Girdings. Just so long as he could keep the past at bay.
Like the pictures in an all-illustrated paper, he could see their future all laid out, with captions. ‘Duke and Duchess of Dovedale Visit the Tenantry,’ ‘Duke and Duchess of Dovedale Relax in the Library,’ ‘Duke and Duchess Take Little Dovedales Unicorn Hunting.’ Funny, how the prospect of being duke became a great deal less daunting when Charlotte was in the picture as duchess.
He was too busy mentally moving Charlotte into the ducal chambers to hear the sound of footsteps in the hallway behind him. And he was f
ar too engaged in imagining what might come after to notice the long shadow fall across the floor in front of him.
He didn’t notice anything at all until a red-ringed hand descended upon his shoulder.
Chapter Ten
Robert grabbed for a pistol that wasn’t there. One tended not to wear arms in one’s own home, but his home, until now, had been an army tent, and there, one did. How in the blazes could he have allowed himself to go off in the clouds like that? That was the sort of lapse that could get a man killed.
Reality came raging back with the force of a fist to the vitals. With a sickening wrench, Robert realised that he had come within an inch of forgetting everything that had brought him back to Girdings in the first place. Domestic bliss didn’t come into it.
‘Ah, Dovedale,’ drawled Sir Francis Medmenham. ‘Just the man I wanted to see.’
Robert couldn’t quite bring himself to echo the sentiment. Something about the arch tone of his voice grated on Robert even more than usual.
‘Medmenham,’ he managed to say, with every imitation of pleasure. ‘Enjoying the party?’
‘Not so much as you, I expect,’ said Sir Francis Medmenham, with an eyebrow arched in the direction of the bedroom doors. ‘A bit far afield from the ballroom, aren’t we?’
Robert managed to keep smiling, although he was not quite sure how. ‘You wanted to see me?’
Having found him, Sir Francis seemed in no hurry to state his business. ‘The little Lansdowne has also been conspicuously absent from the ballroom.’
Robert’s fists ached with the visceral need to seek out Medmenham’s face. He managed a shrug. ‘Crowded places, ballrooms. It’s hard to see everyone.’
Sir Francis’s smile was too knowing by half. ‘Indeed.’
Placing one hand on the other man’s elbow, Robert steered him firmly away from Charlotte’s door. ‘Were you looking for me, or for Lady Charlotte?’
Sir Francis made a show of polishing his ring against the side of one perfectly cut sleeve. ‘Under the circumstances, I had rather thought I might kill two birds with one stone.’
Men had been called out for less.
There was nothing Robert would have liked more than to suggest rapiers at dawn – or, even better, cannons at twenty paces – but he had no right to dice with Charlotte’s reputation. And he couldn’t afford to alienate Medmenham. It was, he assured himself, the former that concerned him more than the latter.
‘You don’t think that I and – good Gad, Medmenham!’ Robert affected a hearty laugh. ‘Charlotte? I’m certainly very fond of her, but … no.’
‘No?’
‘No,’ repeated Robert quite firmly. ‘She’s not the sort of girl one dallies with, is she?’
That much, at least, was quite true. Courted, yes; dallied, no.
‘And I imagine her grandmother would have something to say about any man who came calling. She’s a dear girl, but not worth slaying dragons for, eh, Medmenham?’
‘That,’ said Medmenham, ‘would depend on the size of her dowry. A dragon’s hoard might be worth a certain amount of effort.’
‘Not this dragon,’ said Robert repressively. ‘What exactly was it that you wanted to see me about?’
‘A suggestion I think will interest you. I have a little proposition to put to you …’
Charlotte danced her way down to the ballroom in the sort of perfect happiness that only occurs once in a lifetime.
This was the very apex of joy, the peak of happiness, the desired ending of every novel. Happily ever after had finally arrived and it was just as glorious as she had dreamt.
They would be married, of course. That went without saying. A spring wedding would be perfect, Charlotte thought, with all its promise of the world coming again into bloom. It had a rather nice symbolic resonance to it. On a more practical level, she was promised to Queen Charlotte – the real Queen Charlotte – to serve as one of her maids of honour from the middle of January to the end of April. Fortunately, her duties would be light and maids of honour were no longer so secluded as they had been in the past. Due to crowded conditions in the royal residences, the queen had decided several years ago that it was no longer necessary for maids of honour to reside with the royal family during their tenure. While the royal household was in London, Charlotte would live at Dovedale House.
The Duke of Dovedale would presumably reside at Dovedale House as well.
In between her duties to the queen, there would be plenty of time for walks in the park, afternoons in the library, evenings at the theatre, and – Charlotte went a happy pink – many long hours in convenient alcoves. Dovedale House was well furnished with those, although Charlotte had never had any need of them before. Lovely, deep alcoves, shaded with heavy velvet curtains.
Downstairs, champagne burbled from a specially constructed fountain in the hall, monitored by white-wigged footmen in the distinctive green and gold Dovedale livery. The ground floor was mobbed with the most elite of the fashionable world, all of whom had gone trotting out to Girdings at the duchess’s command. Charlotte threaded her way through the crowd towards the gallery, smiling and nodding, brimming with affection for the whole of mankind. Even Lord Vaughn and his haughty bride, of whom Charlotte had always been more than a little afraid, earned a beaming smile that left them both completely baffled.
For Charlotte, the enchantment, far from fading, appeared to have followed her down into the gallery. The entire assemblage glowed as though touched with fairy dust. Jewels glittered like pendant stars, silks ran rippling like rainbow streams, the very champagne in the glasses scintillated like condensed sunlight, conveying benefaction to whosesoever lips it touched. She had never seen so many beautiful people, so many brilliant costumes, so many graceful dancers. Even Turnip Fitzhugh had an exuberant charm about him that not even his appallingly high shirt points could mar.
In the midst of it all, Charlotte felt as though she were floating, borne on her own personal, gold-spangled cloud. Her feet barely touched the ground as she sparkled her way through the hall and down the long corridor into the gallery.
As one gnarled dowager shouted to another, ‘The little Lansdowne is in looks tonight, ain’t she?’
‘With that sort of dowry,’ bellowed the other, ‘who wouldn’t be?’ And they both cackled happily over their own wit.
Charlotte found Henrietta at the far end of the gallery, on the side farthest from the musicians, chatting with the new Viscountess Pinchingdale, formerly Miss Letty Alsworthy, who had come up from London with her husband for the festivities.
It took only one look at Charlotte’s face for Henrietta to hastily detach herself from Letty and scoot Charlotte off into the most remote corner she could find, wedged between a shoulder-high cupid carrying candles and old Lady Featherstonehaugh, who had dozed off in her chair, her mouth open to reveal a truly impressive array of false teeth. Their remove offered only the illusion of privacy, but the din of the music and hundreds of voices chattering provided a far more secure safeguard.
After so many years of friendship, there were times when mere words were redundant. Henrietta grasped both of Charlotte’s hands in hers. ‘I don’t even need to ask. But I will. Well?’
Charlotte beamed. ‘Life can be better than fiction. Better than Evelina even!’
Henrietta’s hazel eyes widened. ‘This is serious.’
‘Oh, Hen, it was splendid. We were up on the roof—’
‘The roof?’
‘It was my idea.’
Henrietta shuddered. ‘He really must love you. It’s frigid out.’
‘Neither of us wanted to come back inside. Even though our fingers were turning blue.’
Henrietta collapsed in a fit of choking. ‘So you’re frostbitten, but very much in love.’
Charlotte felt that that was an accurate summary. ‘Essentially.’
‘Oh, darling, you are mad,’ said Henrietta, and proceeded to give ample evidence of the same herself by laughing, crying, embracing,
and generally bouncing around in place.
Fortunately, most of the guests were too involved in their own affairs to wonder why the granddaughter of the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale and the daughter of the Marquess of Uppington were engaging in their own private jig in the corner of the Gallery of Girdings.
‘Where is your duke?’ asked Henrietta, once the requisite jumping and squealing had been accomplished.
This time, Charlotte didn’t contest the appellation. ‘He’s supposed to meet me in here,’ she said, standing on tiptoe to scan the crowd. Given that the gallery was crammed by hundreds of guests, most of them taller than she, it was not the most effective of gestures. Charlotte was nothing daunted. Love’s compass would guide Robert to her. Besides, being much taller, he could actually see over the crowd to find her. ‘I’ve promised him whatever dance he likes.’
‘Oh, just a dance, is it?’ teased Henrietta, making Charlotte blush. ‘Is it all settled between you, or do I need to make Miles demand his intentions? Miles does loom so well,’ she said fondly, sparing a glance in the direction of her own husband, who was less looming than leaning, propped against the wall like a human replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa as he engaged in a conversation with his old friend, Pinchingdale-Snipe.
‘I believe we can spare Miles,’ said Charlotte happily. ‘I can’t believe it was all this easy. I had always thought that the path of true love was supposed to be strewn with challenges and dangers. But Mr Shakespeare seems to have got it entirely backwards. When it’s right, it is easy.’
‘Some of the time,’ said Henrietta, whose courtship had been anything but easy. ‘Is he going to speak to your grandmother?’
‘I suppose so.’ Charlotte’s face broke into a smile. ‘He can’t very well speak to himself. Can’t you just imagine that conversation?’
Henrietta grinned. ‘When he applies to himself for your hand?’
‘I hope he grants it to himself!’ exclaimed Charlotte. ‘Oh, Hen, I’m half afraid that if I pinch myself, this will all go away. I’ll wake up in my own bed and Robert will still be in India and all of this will have just been a particularly splendid dream.’ Henrietta made a sympathetic face. ‘I dreamt about him before, you know. All those years that he was away. I used to imagine that he would come back from India riding on an elephant and sweep me up behind him and carry me away.’