‘No,’ he said at last, his eyes constant on hers in the mirror. ‘In fact, I find my habits very hard to change.’
Charlotte kept her voice hard. ‘I hope you are not going to make a habit of this. Of visiting here, I mean.’
Robert thumbed idly through the letters and invitations piled in the silver tray, lowering his head so that she couldn’t see his face, even in reflection. ‘Is that what you really want?’
It was very disconcerting speaking to the mirrored top of someone’s head. She could see the pale gilt where the Indian sun had streaked his hair and the darker hair beginning to grow out beneath it under the influence of a colder climate.
Charlotte spoke more loudly than she had intended. ‘I hadn’t realised that what I want is of any consequence.’
She didn’t need to see his face to see his shoulders stiffen as her words hit home.
‘Charlotte, I didn’t mean—’
He turned so abruptly that she automatically took a step backwards, even though there were several feet between them. He turned so abruptly that he forgot about the letter in his hand that hadn’t quite made it all the way into his sleeve.
She could see her name – or at least the half of it that wasn’t hidden beneath the lace-edged cuff of his shirt – on the top fold. It was a heavy cream paper, subscribed in a bold, masculine hand, sealed with a blob of midnight blue wax. Charlotte didn’t need to break the seal to know who had written it.
Amazed at her own boldness, she tapped Robert smartly on the arm before the note could disappear entirely into his sleeve. ‘I’ll take that.’
Robert made no move to hand it to her. ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’
Was there nothing about him that was true? So that was why he had come back – not because he couldn’t stay away from her, or for an illusory snuffbox, but to intercept any correspondence from Medmenham. His mission this morning having failed, he had decided to try a surer way.
Tipping her head back, Charlotte regarded him accusingly. ‘There never was any snuffbox, was there?’
Before Robert could even open his mouth to respond, a surprisingly heavy tread announced the reappearance of Henrietta’s butler. Having heard Stwyth move as softly as a cat when he felt like it, Charlotte was sure the interruption was quite deliberate.
Stone-faced, Stwyth extended a small, octagonal object covered with panels of painted porcelain. ‘Your snuffbox, sir.’
‘Thank you – Stwyth, is it?’ Robert raised an altogether too smug eyebrow in Charlotte’s general direction. ‘You were saying?’
‘Enjoy your snuff,’ said Charlotte tartly. She hoped he choked on it.
Tucking the snuffbox neatly away in his waistcoat pocket, he retrieved his hat and gloves from Stwyth. Hat in hand, he smiled ruefully down at Charlotte. ‘I don’t believe I will. It isn’t really to my taste.’
‘Then why take it?’
‘Call it penance. Good evening, Charlotte.’
Clapping his hat on his head, Robert turned on his heel. But he paused before he reached the door. Stwyth, who had scurried to open it, hastily pushed it closed again against the arctic air.
Tripping over his own words, he said, ‘I can’t promise our paths won’t cross. But I won’t come here again if you don’t want me to. You see, what you want is of some consequence after all. At least to me. Good night.’
It took Stwyth a moment to open the door. He studied Robert quite suspiciously before he would consent to do so, as though suspecting him of intending another abortive exit that would require more false openings and closings. But this time, Robert had clearly said all he intended to say. He all but collided with the door panel in his haste to leave. And Charlotte, perversely, having wished him gone, found herself wanting him to stay.
It wasn’t until Stwyth had triumphantly and with great finality shut the great door behind him that Charlotte realised that Robert had successfully made off with Medmenham’s note.
Chapter Eighteen
Medmenham’s letter crinkled reassuringly in Robert’s waistcoat pocket as he trudged down the stairs of Loring House.
‘Did the old snuffbox dodge work?’ A dark shape detached itself from the corner of the house, falling in step beside him. They were already late for an appointment at an exclusive gentlemen’s club on St James Street.
‘Beautifully. I owe you one.’ Robert made the mistake of looking back. Through one of the long windows, he could still see Charlotte, in silhouette, standing where he had left her.
Grabbing his arm, his companion tugged him to one side, narrowly saving him from collision with a decidedly unfriendly lamppost.
‘By my count, you owe me about two hundred. Including that one. But what are a few favours between friends?’ said Tommy airily. ‘Did you get Medmenham’s note?’
Robert patted his waistcoat pocket. ‘Safely tucked away.’
‘And the lady?’
Robert kicked at a bit of loose paving, sending pebbles scattering down the street. ‘Still thinks I’m lower than dirt.’
Tommy was unsympathetic. ‘You did rather do that to yourself, you know.’
‘For good reasons!’
Tommy stuck his hands in his pockets and tilted his head back to stare at the sky. ‘You just keep telling that to yourself.’
‘They seemed like good reasons at the time,’ Robert mumbled. Even to his own ears, he didn’t sound anywhere near convincing.
How had he managed to make such a monumental muddle of things? Fresh from the Hellfire Caves, the stench of brimstone still scouring his nostrils, it had all seemed so simple. In a fine glow of self-abnegation, he resolved to take the noble and lonely path, sacrificing his own happiness to keep his princess safe in her tower. For ‘noble,’ substitute … ‘misguided,’ Robert decided, ignoring the various riper adjectives Tommy had suggested, among the milder of which were ‘pig-headed,’ ‘addlepated,’ and ‘just plain stupid.’
‘Seems my friend,’ said Tommy wisely, ‘is a very dangerous creature. Like a tiger, only with even more spots. Great big spotty spots.’
Robert reminded himself that there was nothing to be gained by throttling his closest friend, even if he was asking for it. ‘There’s no need to belabour the point.’
‘Or the spots? All right, all right. I’ll leave you to make yourself miserable in your own way.’
‘What happened to pots and kettles?’ demanded Robert, stung beyond endurance. ‘How many times have you proposed to Penelope Deveraux in the past week?’
Some of the mirth faded from his friend’s face. Tommy managed to shrug without taking his hands out of his pockets. ‘Ten at last count. I try to get in at least one proposal before lunch and another after supper. But she won’t have me. She says she won’t drag me down with her.’
‘Then why do you keep trying?’
‘Why in the hell did you leave that damned snuffbox?’
Robert wasn’t sure he would call it quite the same thing, but Tommy had made his point.
‘Fair enough,’ he said brusquely. ‘We’re both besotted fools.’
‘The difference,’ said Tommy, delicately scratching the side of his nose, ‘is that you still have a chance.’
He might have had a chance once, but he had trodden it beneath his horse’s hooves on that hasty midnight ride from Girdings, trampling it away in the slush and the mud. However good his intentions might have been, there was no going back, no wiping the slate clean, any more than one could turn slush back into snow.
Irritation made him sharp. ‘Because “I never want to speak to you again” so often means “I love you.” No, Tommy. It’s just not on.’
‘There is a very simple solution,’ Tommy pointed out. ‘Tell her the truth.’
‘Before or after our next drunken orgy?’ asked Robert sarcastically.
‘Just because you go doesn’t mean you participate.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Robert, ducking out of the way of a very rapidly moving sedan chair. ‘I’ll just
tell her I was surrounded by drugged smoke but I didn’t inhale.’
‘Well, when you put it that way …’
Robert rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, knowing that he was being deliberately difficult and wondering if maybe, just maybe, Tommy might have a fragment of a point. His grand and noble gesture had been a colossal failure. What would Charlotte say if he plunked himself down in her parlour and said – what in the hell would he say? ‘Everything I told you the other day was a lie’? ‘Sorry to break your heart, but I was only trying to protect you’?
He had meant to protect her. Protect her and keep her safe for the sort of man she ought to marry. Someone whose education had come out of more than the odd book scrounged from other people’s libraries. Someone who didn’t wake in the night with sheets soaked with the sweat of memories of horses writhing and men screaming and flies lighting on the open eyes of the dead and dying and black powder smoke drifting over it all as though driven by the devil’s own bellows. Someone who would protect her and cherish her and never be anything other than she expected him to be.
After a month moving through Charlotte’s world, he began to wonder if he hadn’t been the naive one. In the hardscrabble of his youth, he had always imagined his peers – the ones whose fathers hadn’t burnt through their inheritances, who hadn’t been disowned by their families, who didn’t eke out a life lurching from town to town a week ahead of their creditors – leading lives of awe-inspiring gentility, with tutors to tend their minds and servants their bodies. Their food would be taken off china plates, from platters proffered by silent servants, not slopped into tin. Conversation would be conducted at a level scarcely louder than the genteel click of silver against porcelain. No shouting, no banging, no waving drumsticks to emphasize a point, no loud demonstrations of bodily functions. That was the sort of man Charlotte ought to marry, polished to a fine sheen of civilisation.
Such creatures didn’t seem to exist. Over the past month he had met bruising sportsmen who smelt of the stable even in evening clothes, professional toadies who simpered even in their sleep, and dedicated roués whose encyclopedic knowledge of sin would put a St Giles slumlord to shame. These men, these polished, powdered, pampered men, with their Etonian inflections and towering confections of neckwear, might have cleaner linen than the louts he had known growing up, but underneath they were as coarse, as self-serving, and a good deal less honest.
Who was he protecting by staying away? Charlotte? Or himself?
At the far end of the street, Robert could see the twin Tudor towers of the palace of St James, location of that uncomfortable scene in the Queen’s Drawing Room. Even if Charlotte forgave him for that, what if he hurt her again? He had seen his father do it again and again, trampling over the feelings of those nearest to him, not out of malice, but just by being what he was. There was no assurance that he would be able to make her happy, in this world that was so much more hers than his.
Seeing her in the Palace wearing her diamonds and feathers with the unselfconsciousness of long custom, he had felt for the first time the true depth of the chasm that separated them. He hadn’t risen to a ducal coronet; it had tumbled down to him. He had seen feathers before, on chickens. Diamonds didn’t come into it. When his childhood companions spoke of court, they meant the sort ruled by magistrates, not monarchs. Right now, he was nearly as much a novelty as a unicorn, the rightful heir returned home, cloaked in exotic grandeur from his time in India. But it was all an illusion. In time, she would come to be ashamed of him, and regret the impulse that had made her paint him in brighter colours than he deserved.
Which would be worse? he wondered. Never having her at all, or having to witness the slow death of love by disillusionment?
There was a cheerful prospect.
Robert scowled at the shadows on the pavement. Tommy, wisely, stayed quiet. There were some moods on which a man’s closest friends knew better than to intrude.
Talk to her, Tommy had said. What if he did? What if he told her the whole of it, warts and all? Robert felt the familiar twist in his stomach at the memory of that interlude in the underground chamber. Well, maybe not quite the whole of it. But close. Enough to allow her to decide for herself. Back at Girdings, he might have worried that childhood infatuation would unfairly prejudice her opinion of him – but he had certainly put paid to that, hadn’t he? He grimaced at the recollection of Charlotte challenging the existence of his snuffbox. She wasn’t anyone’s fool. Not even his.
As they strode down St James Street, he heard his own voice asking, roughly, ‘What if she doesn’t believe me?’
‘Then you’ve lost nothing.’ Tommy paused to consider. ‘Except possibly a snuffbox or two. But you’re a duke now. You can afford those.’
Robert shook his head. ‘And what if she does? What then?’
‘Then,’ said Tommy, speaking very slowly, as though to a not-very-bright child, ‘you live happily ever after.’
‘What if there isn’t such a thing as happily ever after?’
‘Then I can’t really help you, can I?’ said Tommy.
Robert paused in front of a wide-fronted stone house, one of the famous gentlemen’s clubs scattered along the street. Had he been the sort of duke he was meant to be, he might have been a member. Instead, he came as guest. He wasn’t even sure it was the right bloody building. They didn’t exactly signpost these things for nonmembers.
Hoping to hell he was in the right place, Robert began climbing the shallow stone steps.
‘Nothing can be done until the day after tomorrow, anyway,’ said Robert, as much to himself as Tommy. ‘We have to catch Wrothan first.’
‘Even better,’ said Tommy cheerfully. ‘Think of it this way. You’ll be coming to her a hero, having bagged a vicious traitor and a French spy.’
‘Mmmph,’ said Robert as noncommittally as he could, struggling to mask the unwarranted surge of hope that Tommy’s casual suggestion brought with it.
It was a possibility, at least, the prospect of scouring away all the embarrassments of his past with one pure blaze of heroism. Once redeemed … well, he would deal with that when he got there. First, there was a spy to catch. And he hadn’t the least idea of how to go about it.
‘Our contact said he would meet us here at seven.’ Robert raised a hand to rap at the door and hastily withdrew it as the door opened of its own accord. Knocking, apparently, was yet another faux pas.
‘Who is this contact of yours?’ whispered Tommy as they handed their hats and gloves to a waiting manservant.
‘War Office,’ Robert whispered back, before raising his voice to give their names to the waiting manservant. It was hard to tell whether or not they were expected; the man’s expression remained as impassive as wax. If he poked the man’s cheek, the impression of his finger would probably remain.
‘Hmm,’ said Tommy, looking around as though expecting the head of the War Office to burst through the door.
It had been a struggle to admit that he required reinforcements. But if the colonel had drummed anything into him over the years, it was that fighting a battle one couldn’t win wasn’t gallant; it was irresponsible.
So he had swallowed his pride and found his way to a ramshackle building on Crown Street, where his years of loyal service to the crown had meant nothing, but his ducal title got him through the door. He was passed along to someone not so junior as to offend Robert’s rank, but not so senior as to interfere with real work. In the end, he had been given a name, a contact, someone who (the slightly bored bureaucrat said, glancing at his watch) might help him. To Robert’s surprise, it was a name he knew.
The man with their hats melted away, replaced by another black-coated functionary, who guided Robert and Tommy through a series of rooms papered in deep greens and rich reds, redolent of tobacco and freshly ironed newspapers. Up two flights of stairs, at the very back of the house, they were admitted to a square room with only one window. The walls were papered in the same hunter green as the
rooms downstairs, hung with paintings of slightly lumpy horses. The heavy drapes had been drawn across the one window, muffling the room from the outside world. After bowing them in, their guide closed the thick oak door securely behind them, leaving them to the man who waited for them, sprawled in a squat leather chair before the fire.
‘Dovedale!’ Robert’s contact bounded out of his chair in a very un-agent-like way. ‘Bloody good of you to come. Sit down, sit down.’
Waving them into chairs, he promptly set about splashing brandy into three glasses. A table had been discreetly furnished with an array of decanters and a platter of refreshments.
‘Ginger biscuit?’ offered their host, brandishing a biscuit. ‘As you can see, we have everything we need. You don’t need to worry about being disturbed. No one will come unless we call.’
Robert gingerly accepted a biscuit. ‘Thank you for agreeing to help us.’
‘I couldn’t be more delighted. London has been damnably dull since the Black Tulip was put out of commission.’
‘The Black Who?’ asked Tommy, punching the leather of his chair into a more comfortable shape.
‘By Gad, how long did you say you’d been away?’ Their host paused with the biscuit in midair to gape at them.
‘Twelve years for me,’ said Robert drily.
‘Well, that explains it, then.’ Their host flung himself back in his chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him. Taking a big bite of his ginger biscuit, he followed it with a long swig of brandy, swilling the two together with obvious satisfaction. Thus refreshed, he said, rather indistinctly, ‘There’s been a vogue this past decade for flower names for spies, English and French. You must have just missed it when you left, Dovedale. We’ve had the Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian, the Pink Carnation. They’ve countered with the Black Tulip – nasty one, that – and a rather halfhearted series of Daisies, none of that stuck.’