‘Squishing tenants and cottages in your way?’ laughed Henrietta.
‘Well, I was only twelve,’ said Charlotte sheepishly. ‘Or thirteen. It made sense at the time.’
‘Many things do,’ Henrietta agreed sagely.
‘And it can’t even be my dowry that he wants. He gets nothing from me that wouldn’t come to him already.’
‘Except your grandmother’s personal fortune,’ Henrietta felt compelled to point out.
Charlotte wafted that aside without a qualm. ‘It’s nothing to what he’s already inherited. The entailed estate is far greater. And I just couldn’t see Robert gambling away his patrimony at cards or spending it all on – well, whatever gentlemen spend it on.’
‘In Miles’s case, cravats,’ said Henrietta cheerfully. ‘He must go through at least ten a morning. It drives his valet mad.’
They smiled at each other in perfect understanding, leaving Charlotte feeling as though she had just been admitted to membership in a private club she hadn’t even known existed, a secret society for happily settled women. She and Henrietta had always discussed all sorts of things – books and plays and the meaning of life and whether that yellow dress was really a good idea – but Henrietta did not, as a rule, share personal details of her husband’s habits.
It was a little disconcerting to realise that she didn’t have any personal details to share in return. At least, not yet. She didn’t know how many cravats Robert went through a morning, or whether he preferred to sleep with the window open or closed, or how many lumps of sugar he liked in his tea. But she did know that he was kind, and that he cared for her (even if the word ‘love’ hadn’t yet made an appearance), and that she heard trumpets whenever he smiled – and shouldn’t that be enough? The rest could be learnt by and by. Couldn’t it? That was what marriage was for. Charlotte glowed at the thought.
‘Will you still be joining the queen’s household?’ Henrietta asked.
‘It’s only for three months,’ said Charlotte, ‘and Grandmama firmly believes that every Lansdowne woman must spend her time in the royal household to advance the interests of the family.’
The two women exchanged a sceptical glance. The days when personal attendance on the royal family led to power and influence were long since past, but if the duchess had done it, by Gad, her granddaughter was going to do it, too.
‘You can stay with us if your grandmother doesn’t want to come to town. I promise to be a very easygoing sort of chaperone.’
‘That would be splendid.’
‘I assume your duke will be coming to town, too?’
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Charlotte. ‘We didn’t discuss any of that.’
In fact, they hadn’t discussed much of anything at all, other than – what had they discussed? Charlotte found she couldn’t remember any of it at all. There had been silly trivia about her childhood games on the roof, a short discussion about the geography of Girdings, speculation about the antics in the ballroom in their absence, but nothing that might have any bearing on their future.
Charlotte craned her neck to peer around the ballroom. It was taking Robert an awfully long time to find her. Of course, he did have to stop and say hello to people and do his duty as nominal host. A newly returned duke was a novelty not to be ignored by the ton; there would be many who would want to detain him in conversation after his long time abroad. But she did hope he would appear soon. Their promised next dance had already become the next and the next and there was still no sign of him.
Henrietta was also craning to see through the crowd. ‘Look!’
Charlotte looked, fizzing with anticipation.
‘There’s Penelope!’ Henrietta finished, gesturing and waving. ‘I haven’t seen her since supper.’
A little of Charlotte’s fizz went out of her. It wasn’t that she wasn’t glad to see Penelope, but the longer Robert tarried, the more like a dream their interlude on the roof became.
‘M’lady.’ It was one of the liveried footmen, bearing a silver tray. Instead of a glass, the tray bore a folded note. There was no seal on the note and no address. ‘For you, m’lady.’
Puzzled, Charlotte lifted the small piece of paper and opened it. In a bold, scrawling hand were written all of two words. Forgive me.
For what?
‘Who gave this to you?’ Charlotte asked, trying very hard not to sound as anxious as she felt. There was a very unpleasant buzzing in her ears, like a whole horde of mosquitoes.
The footman stood, straight-backed, staring directly in front of him, as he had been trained. Charlotte had always found it distinctly disconcerting conversing with someone forbidden to look you in the eye; it felt doubly so now. ‘The duke, my lady.’
‘Did he have any further message for me?’
‘He said to tell you that circumstances required him to depart Girdings, my lady, and he did not know when he was to return.’
‘I see,’ said Charlotte, although she didn’t see at all. Paper crackled between her fingers. ‘Thank you. That will be all.’
‘He’s left?’ demanded Henrietta. ‘Tonight?’
Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to look at Henrietta, but stared as straight ahead as the footman. ‘So it would appear.’
‘But why? What does the note say?’
Charlotte held it up in nerveless fingers. Forgive me.
For leaving?
There had to be a logical excuse. An emergency. What else would necessitate so precipitate a departure in the middle of one’s own party? A friend might have been taken ill. He might have received an urgent summons from his old regiment. Charlotte’s mind churned out a multitude of soothing plausibilities. She would have preferred if Robert had made some indication of when he might return, but at least he had contacted her before he left. That had to count for something. With so haphazard a departure, there wouldn’t have been time to write anything more. In fact, she should consider herself honoured that he had taken the time to write anything at all. It showed he had been thinking about her, that he cared about her, that he knew she would worry when he didn’t appear, that he wanted her forgiveness.
It all made her feel a great deal better. Charlotte rubbed her cold fingers against the velvet of her skirt, forcing the blood back into them.
Forgive me.
Of course, she would. It was all perfectly understandable – or would be, once he came back and explained the whole story.
‘I don’t understand,’ mourned Henrietta, brooding over the note.
‘Understand what?’ Penelope’s hair was mussed and her eyes were very bright. She looked, in fact, like someone who had just been soundly kissed.
Charlotte found herself seized with an anxious desire to find a mirror and make sure she didn’t look like that. Not that it was the same, of course. What she had with Robert was worlds away from Penelope’s casual encounters. It was happily ever after, she was sure of it. Even if Robert had mysteriously decamped. Again.
Charlotte fought away a vague sense of unease.
‘There’s nothing to understand,’ she said, making the best of it as best she could. ‘Robert was unexpectedly called away.’
Penelope narrowed her tea-coloured eyes. ‘Was he?’
‘Sometimes these things just can’t be helped,’ said Charlotte, as much for herself as Penelope.
‘Oh, yes, they can.’ Penelope folded her arms across her chest with the air of one girding herself for battle. ‘Would you like to know where your Sir Galahad has gone? He’s off with Sir Francis Medmenham, prospecting for greener pastures.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Pen—’
Penelope shook off Henrietta’s hand. ‘Well, it’s true! I heard it myself. I heard your precious duke tell Sir Francis Medmenham that you weren’t the sort he’d be interested in dallying with. And then they went off together.’
Charlotte’s throat felt very dry. ‘When was this?’
‘Upstairs, just about an hour ago. Sir Francis saw him near your r
oom and commented on your both leaving the ball at the same time.’
Charlotte’s lungs expanded with sheer relief. ‘That explains it, then. Robert was protecting my reputation.’
‘He was protecting his own—’
‘Pen!’
‘He wouldn’t want Sir Francis to know we were upstairs together,’ explained Charlotte hastily, before open warfare could break out between her friends. ‘It all makes perfect sense. What else was he to tell him under the circumstances?’
‘I can think of a few things,’ said Penelope.
‘Well, so can we all,’ broke in Henrietta, in a conciliatory tone that made Penelope’s eyes narrow dangerously, ‘but he’s only a man, after all. And he was trying to protect Charlotte.’
‘By leaving,’ said Penelope flatly. ‘By going off to carouse with Medmenham.’
Charlotte shook her head so emphatically that a hairpin fell out. ‘If he left with Medmenham, it was only to distract him. He doesn’t like Medmenham. He’s told me so.’
‘He’s told Medmenham the same about you.’ Penelope rolled her eyes in frustration. ‘He left you, Lottie. He ran off without saying goodbye.’
Charlotte stiffened at the sound of the old nursery nickname. ‘He sent me a note.’
‘Not much of one.’ Penelope grabbed both of her hands. Charlotte could feel the crush of her fingers through both their pairs of gloves. ‘I just don’t want to see you make a mistake out of – romantic blindness! You can have him if you like, but don’t have him thinking that he’s something he isn’t.’
‘He isn’t. I mean, I don’t.’ Yanking her hands free of Penelope’s, Charlotte seized on a simpler point. ‘What were you doing upstairs?’
‘The same thing you were,’ said Penelope with a bluntness that made the colour creep into Charlotte’s cheeks. She hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms before. It made her feel oddly unclean.
‘Upstairs?’ said Henrietta despairingly. To go off into alcoves was one thing, bedrooms quite another.
It gave Charlotte a slightly squirmy feeling in the pit of her stomach to realise how carelessly she had been dicing with her own reputation. If she and Robert had been discovered upstairs … No wonder Robert had blurted out whatever he had to Medmenham.
Penelope looked off across the room, over the long row of couples circling in unison as they performed the final figure of the dance. In profile, her expression was carefully blank.
‘The alcoves were all occupied, so we went upstairs instead.’
The violinist drew his bow across the strings one final time. Throughout the room, gentlemen bowed and ladies curtsied to signify the end of the dance. With her back to the dance floor, Penelope failed to notice.
‘I was with Freddy Staines,’ finished Penelope, in a tone deliberately designed to provoke. ‘In his room.’
The words echoed with unnatural loudness down the suddenly silent room.
Henrietta’s face went ashen.
Like an animal scenting fire, Penelope’s eyes darted from side to side. Beneath Penelope’s still, straight posture, Charlotte could sense the panic coming off her in waves, the frozen panic of a trapped animal that knows it has nowhere left to run.
‘You mean Fanny’s room?’ Charlotte said very loudly. ‘Fanny Stillworth?’
There was no such person as Fanny Stillworth, but it was the best she could think of under the circumstances.
As if realising their gaffe, the musicians struck up again, plunging into a rather frenetic quadrille, but almost no one was dancing. They were all too busy watching the dreadful drama unfolding at the far end of the gallery, where one of their own had just willfully flung herself outside the bounds of polite society. Halfway down the room, Penelope’s mother looked ready to imitate some of the less attractive sorts of Greek gods and devour her own young.
‘You heard what I said.’ Penelope’s face was a tragic mask, like the bust of Medea in the library, carved into lines of bitter satisfaction. She looked like a queen on the scaffold, staring down the peasantry. ‘Everyone heard what I said.’
Without another word, she turned on her heel and strode out of the gallery, her flaming head held high.
‘Pen—’ Casting an anguished glance over her shoulder at Charlotte, Henrietta hurried out after her.
Charlotte made to follow but she was yanked to a stop by a hand on her arm. Mrs Ponsonby’s pudgy fingers tightened around her sleeve with surprising force.
‘No!’ declared Mrs Ponsonby, in ringing tones that carried clear over the efforts of the sweating musicians and the dancing couples, her fingers digging painfully into Charlotte’s arm. ‘Do not go after her! We do not know her now.’
Mrs Ponsonby’s bosom swelled with self-righteous zeal and not a little bit of selfish satisfaction. She had had her eye on Lord Frederick for her own daughter, Lucy, and everyone knew it.
She was not the only mother who had disliked Penelope on those grounds. They all clustered in now, like savages for the kill, ready to grind their spears into whatever vulnerable flesh they could find.
The murderous haze in the air made Charlotte’s stomach turn in a way that had nothing to do with Mrs Ponsonby’s poor choice of perfume.
‘Perhaps you don’t,’ said Charlotte, shaking off Mrs Ponsonby’s clinging grasp, and followed after her friends.
‘You can’t touch pitch without being tarred!’ Mrs Ponsonby called shrilly, if inaccurately, after her.
Hastening after friends, Charlotte refused to give her the satisfaction of looking back.
Mrs Ponsonby was wrong. She might be naive, but she knew enough of the world to know that it took a great deal of pitch to blacken a duke’s daughter. Not like poor Penelope, who didn’t even have an ‘Honourable’ in front of her name to scrub her reputation clean.
Charlotte’s heart wrenched for her friend. It was so like Penelope to try to protect her and land herself in a stew because of it. So generous and yet so entirely wrongheaded. Because, among other things, she didn’t need protection from Robert. Whatever he might have said to Sir Francis, whatever his reasons for leaving, his intentions towards her were honourable.
She was sure of it.
Chapter Eleven
As the boat drew him across the River Styx, Robert knew he was truly in hell.
It had been four days since he had left Girdings, four days since he had stood on the roof with Charlotte, four days since he had struck his own Mephistophelean bargain in the hallway outside Charlotte’s chambers. It felt more like four years. The descent from the roof of Girdings to the subterranean caverns of West Wycombe had to be measured in more than miles. The distance between the Dovedale domains and those of Medmenham felt as vast as that between paradise and inferno. Once one began the descent, one didn’t go back.
At the time, it had seemed like a logical enough decision. An offer of immediate initiation into Medmenham’s Hellfire Club meant that he could find Wrothan that much faster. The faster he found Wrothan, the faster he could return to Girdings. Quick, clean, over.
Fast, however, didn’t seem to be in it. Whatever the way to hell was, it wasn’t speedy. They had been three days on the road from Girdings to West Wycombe. Once at Wycombe, notices needed to be sent out and preparations made. Robert fervently hoped those preparations included summoning Wrothan from whatever rat-hole he was currently occupying. It wasn’t until a day later that the whole party had donned their ceremonial vestments and processed, torchbearers to the fore, from the confines of Wycombe Abbey to the vast Gothic folly Medmenham’s cousin had built to mark the entrance to his subterranean caves, home of homegrown Eleusian mysteries and the devil only knew what else.
Upon entering the caves, the others had gone off to prepare, leaving Robert cooling his heels in an upper cavern. He had been instructed to contemplate his sins with the aid of a course of ‘religious readings.’ These turned out, upon inspection, to be nothing more than a folio of expensive French pornography, done up at the edges with gold
leaf and illuminated capitals in a mockery of medieval devotional literature.
As Lord Henry had promised, nothing but the best for their orgies.
Like the mock Book of Hours, the ceremonial garb he had been given to put on was also a survival from the club’s earlier incarnation as the Monks of Medmenham. It was a replica of a monk’s habit, cut out of rough brown wool, supplied with a belt of thin and flexible leather with curious metal tips. The belt was, in fact, a whip. Robert preferred not to think too closely about that, although he supposed it might come in handy if he had to fight his way out of the caves.
In addition to being draughty, the robe was extremely itchy. Robert knew that his sojourn in the cell was meant to fill him with prickles of anticipation, but instead he just felt prickly. By the time his guide arrived, to conduct him down to the nether regions for his initiation, Robert was strongly wondering whether it was all worth it. There surely had to be other ways to find Wrothan. Ways that did not involve absurd excursions into subterranean amateur theatricals.
The figure gestured to Robert to put up his hood. When Robert would have spoken, he drew a finger sharply across his lips – or the area where Robert presumed his lips must be – indicating silence.
Feeling as though he had stumbled unwittingly into one of Horace Walpole’s Gothic novels, Robert followed his guide down into the catacombs. The path sloped steeply downwards, winding this way and that like a drunkard trying to find his way home. Lanterns cased in red glass hung from the ceiling, casting jagged bursts of flame along the chalk walls and turning the ground beneath their feet an unpleasant reddish brown. Crudely carved horned gods leered at them from the walls as they passed.