Charlotte felt a hysterical urge to laugh well up in her throat. So she was to be the subject of a royally mandated wooing, was she? She wondered if court etiquette set certain time bounds to the activity. Was she meant to succumb after five minutes, or might one successfully resist for ten without exciting the king’s anger?
His face carefully bland, Robert swept another bow. ‘With pleasure, Your Majesty. Lady Charlotte?’
Rather than create another scene, Charlotte took the arm offered her. Robert’s muscles told a different story than his mouth; beneath her fingers, his body was quivering with tension. Anger? Perhaps that, too. He had a right to it, having just been refused in front of not only his friends, but his monarch.
On the other hand, thought Charlotte rebelliously, he might have been spared that had he had the simple sense to ask her first instead of demanding her hand the way one might ask for a horse.
‘Go, go,’ said the king benevolently. He reached for the queen’s hand, but she twitched her fingers away from him, moving restlessly to the far side of her chair. Shooting her mother a look of pure venom, Princess Sophia moved to stand by her father’s shoulder.
Charlotte let herself be drawn through the door, through the black-and-gold-lacquered walls of the queen’s breakfast room, into the closet beyond, a small and private room where they could speak without being overheard. Robert took care to shut the door, thwarting any potential eavesdroppers, before turning back to her.
In the tiny space, his presence was almost overwhelming. Charlotte fought the urge to just lean against him and let all her weariness drain away into him. It would be so lovely just to sit, together.
‘What is wrong?’ he asked gently, touching her cheek with his gloved fingers as though he were handling something rare and infinitely precious.
Charlotte forced herself to look away, holding herself stiffly aloof until she felt his hand drop.
‘Is it wooing you want?’ he asked, bracing a hand on the wall behind her, the strong lines of his face arranged in an expression of concern. It was heady stuff, having all that attention concentrated on her. His blue eyes searched her face. ‘If so, we can, er, woo.’
She was no longer a child to be placated with a bauble, no matter how desirable a bauble it was. And it was a desirable bauble, like a prism dangled in front of her, dancing with rainbow images of courtship. What would it be like to be really, truly courted by Robert?
Until he grew bored again, that was, and sought adventures elsewhere. There would be new quests to undertake, new prizes to be won. Like an old trophy, she would be hung up on the wall of Girdings, taken out from time to time to show off to guests.
Charlotte slid out from under his arm. ‘It’s not wooing I want,’ she said.
‘Then what do you want? I can’t know if you don’t tell me.’ He sounded reasonable enough. But although the pose was right, his body angled towards her, she couldn’t help but feel as though he weren’t listening at all. He was already planning the post-betrothal feast, the congratulations of his peers, the return in state to Girdings. Where she would be just another piece of the tapestry, the lady riding at his side, passed like a parcel from king to suitor.
‘Why did you ask for me?’ she demanded. ‘Why now? Why here?’
Robert blinked at her as though the question had never even occurred to him. ‘Why?’
‘Why?’ Charlotte repeated firmly, unwilling to be put off.
‘It seemed like the thing to do,’ he joked, in an unfortunate attempt to lighten the mood. ‘Hero rescues king, hero marries princess – isn’t that the way these stories usually go? Even if you were really the one to rescue the king rather than me,’ he added wryly. ‘But I thought you would enjoy the romantic gesture. It seemed like something out of one of your books.’
Biting her lip, Charlotte looked away, knowing herself guilty as charged. He was right; it was something she would once have found dreadfully romantic. But now, she couldn’t help but fear that underneath the gaudy fairy tale trappings loomed a gaping pit into which she was poised to tumble. What if all the grandeur and fanfare masked nothing more than an empty hole where honest affection ought to have been? Once the fairy tale was gone, what would be left?
‘It’s all very well for a book, but can’t you see that this is different?’ Charlotte said earnestly, scrabbling to put her misgivings into words. ‘Stories end. Marriage is for life. You can’t just leave when you decide you don’t like the book anymore.’
Understanding spread across his face, and with it relief. Reaching for her shoulders, he drew her to arm’s length, scrutinising her face. ‘Is that what this is all about? I already told you—’
Pushing at his chest with both hands, Charlotte broke his hold. ‘And I already told you. Did you listen to anything I said last night?’
Robert looked slightly shifty, which Charlotte took as a no. ‘I thought we had resolved all that.’
‘Asking the king for my hand in marriage does not count as a resolution!’
‘Isn’t that what you wanted? Don’t you want us to be married?’
So much that it hurt. Even now. Charlotte wondered if she were being a stiff-necked fool. A tempting little voice whispered that the means didn’t matter so long as the end was right. But she had never agreed with Machiavelli in that. The means shaped the end. If she accepted Robert under such circumstances, always wondering, doubting the depth of his affection, it would warp whatever future they had.
‘Not on these terms,’ she said distinctly.
Robert was clearly reaching the limit of his patience. ‘Not on these terms, or not ever? Be honest, Charlotte. No games. Is it the terms you don’t want, or is it me?’
When she didn’t answer, he prodded, ‘Let’s try this another way. Are there any terms you can name that I could fulfil to your satisfaction?’
Charlotte could only stare at him, in mute agony. What good were promises if she couldn’t trust herself to trust him to keep them? The only term that mattered was as impossible as a unicorn – that he love her enough to never leave. No one could promise that truly. Even her parents had abandoned her for death.
‘Right,’ he said sharply. ‘You don’t need to say more.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Charlotte said pleadingly. ‘You said it best when you said that enchantments can’t survive. You can’t make a fantasy real just by believing hard enough. I used to believe you could – but we never did find any unicorns together, did we?’
‘And I suppose that’s my fault for eating the filling out of all the tarts.’ Robert raked a hand through his hair, dragging a ragged breath in through his teeth. ‘Good God. Just listen to us. We’re fighting about unicorns, for the love of God. We’re both tired and overwrought. Tomorrow, once we’ve both got some rest—’
‘I’ll see it your way?’
A light flush mottled Robert’s cheekbones, sign that her bolt had hit home.
‘We can discuss this further,’ he finished pointedly. He looked at her challengingly. ‘Unless you don’t want to.’
They might as well have been waiting twenty paces apart from each other across a duelling green, each waiting for the other to fire first. Charlotte wasn’t quite sure how they had come to this, each poised to deliver to the other a mortal blow. It wasn’t what she wanted; it wasn’t what she wanted at all. She wanted to slide her arms around his neck and lift her face to his and let him kiss all her worries away and then prance happily home to Girdings in a carriage built for two. But the gulf between them was too wide to be compassed by a kiss.
Once on the duelling green, honour permitted no way out.
‘Maybe that would be wise,’ she heard herself saying.
Robert smiled a dangerous, tight-lipped smile. ‘No point in sullying the bloodlines, is there?’ he agreed, in a tone terrifying in its geniality. ‘You go back to Girdings, and I go back to India. Everyone is where he belongs.’
‘So you’re running away again,’ said Charlotte, in
a voice that shook. She hadn’t realised how much she had hoped that he would fight for her – even if fighting for her meant fighting with her – until he didn’t.
Robert twisted the handle of the door. Through the breakfast room lay the exit to the stairs, and the wider world beyond. Charlotte could see it, an endless series of shapes on a map, London giving way to England, to the ocean, to India.
‘Not running away, Lady Charlotte,’ he said, thrusting the door open as though what he really wanted was to kick it. ‘Sent away.’
Across the way, Charlotte could have sworn she saw the door to the Crimson Drawing Room hastily shut, as though eavesdroppers were hastily ducking back out of the way.
‘I didn’t send you away,’ called Charlotte softly from the doorway. ‘It was you who chose to interpret it that way.’
But he was already past hearing.
Bonelessly, Charlotte slid down into a velvet-backed chair in the breakfast room. She felt like the survivor of a tempest, gazing out helplessly at the wrack of her world, all her worldly goods beaten into splinters around her. She was too exhausted to cry. That would come later, no doubt. It was, she thought, really quite impressive to have managed to destroy everything so completely so quickly. It was a positive triumph of destruction.
He wasn’t supposed to have left.
Dropping her head into her hands, Charlotte found herself yearning, with a child’s fervour, for Girdings. She wanted the sturdy stone walls and the quiet companionship of her books, where characters always said what they were supposed to and endings were always happy. A hero might storm off, but he always came back again; misunderstandings might occur, but they were always solved by Chapter Twenty-nine. She had been happy with her books and her daydreams, happy and protected and safe.
‘Well?’
Charlotte lifted her head as an uneven thumping sound signalled the approach of her grandmother. Her drawn face and hollow eyes told their own story.
The dowager duchess’s lips opened and closed in the sort of mute rage that summoned storm clouds and sank ships. She took refuge in a bout of soundless laughter. ‘Handed to you on a platter,’ she gasped, ‘and still you manage to lose him! You have a rare talent. How did you do it? How do you make a proposal turn to dust?’
‘We had a difference of opinion,’ said Charlotte tightly, not meeting her grandmother’s eyes.
‘Opinion, is it?’ The duchess exhibited her opinion of opinions with a hearty snort. ‘A fine time for you to choose to develop opinions, after all these years! Opinions have no place in making a match. If we were to let measly little things like opinions interfere with betrothals, who would ever get married? Answer me that!’
Charlotte looked away. ‘It was more than a little opinion,’ she mumbled. The habit of obedience died hard.
The dowager paid no attention. She shook her cane to the heavens like a wizened Lady Macbeth calling on spirits. ‘Do you think dukes just fall from trees? All my plans, all my efforts – all that money, bribing idiot roués to dance with you so Dovedale would think you had countenance. Sheep! Men are sheep! And I’ve never seen one yet that hasn’t let himself be led to the shearing. But never before have I seen a shepherdess run away from the sheep!’
The metaphor didn’t quite work, but Charlotte’s mind was on other things. ‘You paid people to dance with me?’
‘Enough to keep your friends in fans and powder for a very long time,’ said the dowager grimly, as if reexamining an imaginary ledger. ‘And that’s just the men! Medmenham alone cost me five thousand pounds, the gilded weasel. Not that he didn’t earn it,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘I always say you get what you pay for.’
‘Medmenham did what?’ Charlotte gaped at her grandmother.
The dowager rapped her stick impatiently against the uncarpeted floor. ‘You heard me, gel! Or is your hearing going, as well as your wits? I got Medmenham to lend a hand bringing your duke to the parson’s noose.’
Charlotte’s head was ringing. Very slowly and very clearly she enunciated, ‘You offered Sir Francis Medmenham Robert’s money to get Robert to the altar.’
‘It was for his own good,’ said the dowager self-righteously. ‘Until you had to go and botch it. He needed a Lansdowne of the true line. And you—’
Charlotte broke in before her grandmother could inform her what she needed. It was the first time she could remember ever interrupting her grandmother, but she was too rattled to marvel at it. ‘Did it ever occur to you,’ demanded Charlotte, ‘that he might propose to me of his own accord?’
The dowager just looked at her.
‘Of course,’ Charlotte said shakily, her whole body beginning to tremble. ‘Of course not. I should have known.’
‘You should be thanking me, is what you should be doing,’ said the dowager stridently. ‘Did you think I would let the daughter of a duke marry anyone less than one?’
‘What of love?’ asked Charlotte incoherently.
Her grandmother leapt on her words like a gardener squashing a slug. ‘Love has no place in a marital alliance, you ninny. Do you think I loved Dovedale? Most certainly not! That would have been common. Bourgeois, even. We had a perfectly satisfactory partnership. It was your fool of a father who had to ruin it all by running off and marrying—’
Charlotte went stiff with rage. ‘Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say anything about my parents. They were lovely. And they loved me.’
‘Lovely,’ muttered the duchess. ‘Love.’ She made it sound like the rankest sort of refuse. ‘Your mother ruined plans that were twenty years in the making, all for love. If your father had married the Belliston girl, we would have had a full quarter of Parliament in our pocket. Dovedale would have been greater than Marlborough, greater than Devonshire.’
‘They were happy,’ said Charlotte tightly, not trusting herself to say more. The rich black and gold walls of the queen’s breakfast room seemed to press in on her, too rich, too lush, a visual symbol of the pomp and power for which her grandmother had been willing to barter her only child’s happiness.
‘Happy?’ snorted the duchess. ‘Happy? They’re dead! Dead! And without an heir. All they left me was you.’ And precious little I had to work with, her voice seemed to say.
Charlotte remembered that tiny graveyard in Surrey, a narrow plot behind the pleasant stone vicarage. She remembered the small, curved headstone with the raw Roman lettering that had marked her baby brother’s grave. The heir. And behind it, like an echo, the larger stone that shaded her mother’s final rest. It was her brother’s birth that had taken her mother’s life. But it hadn’t been for the production of the heir. If he had lived, they would have loved him for what he was, for being a child and theirs, just as they had loved her, whether she was capable of inheriting Girdings or not.
‘If you had married Dovedale as you ought,’ her grandmother was saying, ‘it would have put it all right. My great-grandson would have been next Duke of Dovedale. All you had to do was tell him yes.’
Charlotte’s face felt as though it had been made of very fine porcelain that was starting to crack around the edges. Looking her grandmother straight in the eyes, she said very quietly, ‘But that still wouldn’t bring my father back.’
Caught mid-tirade, the dowager sucked in sharply, like the hiss of a snake against the lacquer walls.
Charlotte didn’t need to see the crumpled flesh beneath her grandmother’s eyes, the sag beneath her cheekbones, to know the shot had struck home.
She might have followed up her advantage, flung at her grandmother any of the stored-up slights of the past twelve years, but it didn’t feel worth the argument. Nothing was. With Robert gone, any victory would be a Pyrrhic one.
It was all too much in too short a time, her grandmother’s machinations, Robert’s departure, the scene in front of the king, everything. All she wanted was to go home. Not to Loring House or to the room she had occupied on and off since her first Season at Dovedale House, but truly home, far away from London and
Robert and the humiliation of knowing that a rake had been bought to pretend to court her – and that it had worked.
‘I would like to return to Girdings,’ Charlotte said woodenly.
The dowager turned abruptly towards the door, her stiff petticoats slithering across the polished floor. She held herself very straight, presenting Charlotte with a view of her elaborately arranged grey hair, pinched and powdered in the style of an earlier generation. There was no softness in her stance, no yielding. She was every inch a duchess and every inch alone.
‘Do what you like,’ she said brusquely, her back to Charlotte. ‘You will, anyway.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Springtime at Girdings had always been one of Charlotte’s favourite seasons. Not spring proper, but that period just before, when one awoke to find that the wind had softened, that the ground was soft and moist and dark, and that the still-bare tree branches bore tiny bobbles of buds that hadn’t been there before.
At least, it had always been that way before.
It wasn’t that Charlotte didn’t try; she did. She took long walks through the winter-bare gardens and forced herself to take deep bracing breaths, telling herself all the while how utterly lovely it was. She read poetry aloud to herself, as though by declaiming the lines to the empty library she might catch her own attention. She plunged into her old books as though the fate of the kingdom depended on the reading of them, plowing methodically through favourites that had never failed to excite her imagination before.
It was no use. She had lost the key to that old enchanted land. The words on the page were simply that, nothing but print, flat and bare. The tournaments she had once attended, where richly caparisoned knights clashed for her favour, were closed to her, unidimensional pictures on pages that tore when she turned them too roughly. The heroes who had courted her, the villains who had menaced her in the Vauxhalls and Ranelaghs of half a century before had deserted her, and when she tried to make them speak, their plaster lips parroted platitudes in her own voice. Charlotte found herself dropping books unread by her bed, pacing lines in the flowered carpet that had never been there before and, on one particularly miserable midnight, dragging all the furniture away from the walls in an impulsive attempt at redecoration that inspired her grandmother to declare that she had gone mad and took three footmen to set it all right again.