Chapter 11
Mrs. Wick did not knock so much as the door opened and she was simply there, which told Henry everything he needed to know before she had said a word.
“Your Grace.” She had her shawl pulled tight, and her cap slightly off-center. “I am sorry to come at this hour. But one of the housemaids saw Lady Charlotte walking toward the stables. Three hours ago.”
Henry set down his pen. “Three hours.”
“Aye. She hasnae come back. It’s gone midnight, Your Grace.”
He had assumed—he had allowed himself to assume—that Charlotte had simply gone to her chambers after she left the library.
He told himself that she needed air and quiet and she would reappear at breakfast with her chin set and her composure entirely restored, which would be entirely in character.
He had not considered the stables. He had not considered three hours.
He was already on his feet and reaching for his coat. “Get the butler. And the footmen. Tell them to bring lanterns.” He paused at the door. “All of them.”
Mrs. Wick went.
Henry crossed the entrance hall at a pace that was not quite running and told himself there was no cause for alarm.
This was a small problem. Lady Charlotte had gone out in the dark and had not returned and that required locating her, which was a logistical problem, and he was particularly good at that.
The stables were dark. He took the lantern from the hook by the stable door and pushed inside, moving past the stalls until he found the small room off the far end where the stable boy slept. He rapped on the door.
No answer.
He rapped again, harder.
A shuffling sound. The door opened. The boy stood in the gap, blinking against the light, hair standing at an angle that suggested serious sleep had been interrupted.
“Lady Charlotte,” Henry said. “Has she been here tonight?”
The boy rubbed his face. “No, Yer Grace. Nobody’s been here. I’d have heard.”
Henry studied him. He looked entirely genuine, which meant Charlotte had never made it to the stables at all. She had been walking in this direction and had gone somewhere else instead.
The woods.
He felt the cold of it settle in his chest.
Redmont’s men. Her father’s inquiry. Three hours.
“Get your coat,” he said.
The boy blinked. “Yer Grace?”
“Your coat. Now.” Henry was already moving toward the tack room.
He had spotted the rifle on his first day—it was the sort of thing he noted automatically, an inventory item, a detail filed away.
He took it down from the wall, checked it, and came back out to find the butler and four footmen moving into the stable yard with lanterns, Mrs. Wick behind them.
He spoke quickly. “Lady Charlotte is missing in the grounds. She was last seen heading this way three hours ago. She has not arrived here. She is somewhere in the woods to the east.” He looked at the butler.
“Take the footmen in pairs. Cover the eastern path first, then the tree line south. If you find her, call out once.” He thought about it for half a second. “Once. No more.”
The butler nodded. If he had opinions about the hour or this hastily conceived plan, he kept them entirely to himself.
Henry took the east path himself, a footman at his heels with a lantern.
The woods were birch and oak, old growth, the kind that made noise in the dark—branches shifting, something small moving in the undergrowth to the left.
He kept the lantern low. Kept his pace steady.
He did not think about the things he could not control.
He thought about the path in front of him and the darkness beyond the light.
He nearly missed the shawl.
It was snagged on a shrub at knee height, a strip of pale wool caught on a thorn and left there. He crouched and took it in his hand.
He recognized it. The household shawl, deep cream wool, the one she had pulled from the chair by the fire before she left the library. She had been wearing it when she walked past him in the hallway. He had not registered it at the time. He registered it now.
She has been through here.
He straightened. His jaw was tight. The footman held the lantern up.
They had stopped beneath an oak. Wide trunk. Ancient. The kind of tree with branches that started low.
“Should I go back to the manor, Your Grace?” the footman said quietly. “Fetch more men?”
Henry considered it. He looked at the darkness between the trees. If there was anyone else in these woods—if her father’s men or Redmont’s had found her first and were still close—a second party crashing back through with lanterns and noise would give them every warning, they needed.
“No,” he said. “Stay here.”
He lifted the lantern in a shown the light it produced in a slow arc.
Something moved above him. In the oak. A small rustle, the kind a squirrel made at night when disturbed. He looked up. The lantern only reached the lower branches. Darkness rested above that. He lowered the light and moved on, stepping away from the trunk, scanning the path ahead.
He had gone perhaps four steps when he heard it. A branch, distinctly, snapping. Then a muffled sound.
Henry turned.
A shape was descending the tree. It came down with more confidence than grace, reaching for one branch and then another, skirts bunched in one hand, and then it dropped the last several feet and landed in the leaves below with a sound that was half thud and half dignified collapse.
Henry stood absolutely still.
Charlotte.
She straightened. Her hair had come entirely loose and was hanging in multiple directions at once. There was a long tear in the skirt of her frock from hip to knee. She had a smear of something dark across her chin. She looked, overall, like someone who had spent three hours in a tree.
Which was, it transpired, exactly what she had done.
He crossed to her in four steps. “Are you all right?”
She smoothed her skirt with enormous composure, given the circumstances. “Perfectly fine. I only climbed the tree to get some air.”
“In a tree.”
“And why not?”
He stared at her. He was aware—dimly, somewhere beneath the relief that was currently conducting itself like a runaway carriage through his chest—that he ought to say something coherent.
Nothing came. He stared at her hair, which had achieved a truly remarkable degree of disorder, and at the torn frock, and at the complete absence of any expression on her face that suggested she found this situation unusual in any way.
“What,” Henry said, “do you think you are doing? Coming out here in the dark with no care whatsoever for your safety—” He stopped. Breathed. “You had the entire household frightened half to death.”
“I was perfectly safe.”
“You were in a tree.”
“In an exceptionally sturdy tree.”
“Charlotte—" His voice came out harder than he intended. “Redmont’s men were on the post roads not far behind us. Your father’s inquiry is running through half the offices in England. If anyone had found you out here alone at midnight—”
“But no one did.” She held his gaze. “I am standing here. I am entirely intact. Except for the frock, which was already not in its best form.”
“That is not the—”
“And I would not have had any need to come out here at all,” she said, with considerable feeling, “if it were not for your utterly preposterous—”
She stopped.
Henry followed her line of sight to a footman, who was standing six feet away with the lantern, staring at a point somewhere above everyone’s head resolutely.
Charlotte cleared her throat.
Henry stared at the footman. “Cover your ears.”
The footman covered his ears with both hands. Charlotte looked briefly as though she might laugh.
Henry raised the rifle and fired once into the air. The sound cracked wide across the woods, scattering something from the branches above. Somewhere in the dark, he heard an answering shout—one of the other pairs, changing course toward them.
“Come,” he said, and turned back toward the manor path.
* * *
Mrs. Wick was in the front hall when they arrived, her shawl still clutched in both hands, and the relief on her face was the kind that sits in the body rather than the face alone. She took one look at Charlotte and let out a long breath.
“Oh, my dear. Are you quite all right? Your frock is torn.”
Charlotte produced a sheepish smile. “I got turned about in the woods. I am sorry to have caused such a fuss.”
“No fuss,” Mrs. Wick said firmly, which was not true at all, but was kind. She was already steering Charlotte toward the staircase. “Come. I’ll order a bath.”
“That is truly not necessary—"
“It absolutely is,” said Mrs. Wick.
They went up the stairs. Charlotte, somewhere near the landing, glanced back over her shoulder. Her eyes found Henry for one moment in the hallway below. Then she looked away again. Whatever was in her face, she took it with her before he could read it.
Henry stood in the entrance hall.
She would rather climb a tree in the Scottish dark at midnight than say yes to my proposal.
He set the rifle against the wall with more care than it required.
He was not angry at Charlotte. He understood, better than he would admit, what had driven her out of that library and into the trees. He understood it because he had sat in Nathan’s study afterward and tried hard not to understand it and had failed entirely.
He was angry at the circumstances. At the neat and impossible shape of everything—the deed of guardianship, the post roads, the fact that the only solution available was the one she could not yet accept.
At Nathan, slightly, for writing that clause.
At himself, considerably, for delivering a proposal with the warmth of a timber contract.
He picked up the lantern from the hall table.
He blew it out.
He went back to the study, and he sat down, but he did not pick up his pen for a long time.
He heard them before he saw them. A sharp crack of wood on wood rang out, and then Ian’s voice, high and indignant, followed.
“You moved!”
And Charlotte’s reply, entirely composed: “That is the point, generally.”
Henry stopped at the garden gate.