Chapter 34
“Lemon cake,” Georgiana, Countess De Clare and Charlotte’s paternal aunt, announced, setting the slice on Charlotte’s plate. “It will not fix anything, but it will make the afternoon considerably less bleak. Eat it.”
Charlotte looked at the cake. It was a generous slice, the sort that assumed its recipient had an appetite. She did not, particularly, but she picked up her fork.
The conservatory was pleasant in the late afternoon. Light came through the glass in long, golden panels, and the garden beyond the windows was the kind of orderly English countryside that looked as though it had been arranged specifically to soothe the troubled. Charlotte found it irritating.
“You are not eating it,” Georgiana observed. “You are holding the fork and thinking at the cake.”
“I am about to eat it.”
“You have been about to eat it for three minutes.” Georgiana poured herself more tea with the serenity of a woman who had long since learned to outlast stubbornness. “It is cake, Charlotte. It does not require deliberation.”
Charlotte put a bite in her mouth. It was good. She did not say so.
Her aunt watched her lovingly. Georgiana had always been like that.
Charlotte had exchanged perhaps a dozen letters with her over the years, and still the woman had opened her house without a single question, installed Charlotte in the best guest room, and proceeded to feed her at regular intervals as though nutrition were the only thing standing between Charlotte and total ruin.
Perhaps it was.
“Another cup?” Georgiana lifted the pot.
“Please.”
The tea was poured. Charlotte stared at the wrought iron table and thought about nothing in particular, which was her current method of thinking about everything.
Then something orange and enormous launched itself from the garden steps, landed squarely on the table with a sound like a small cannon going off, and sent Charlotte’s teaspoon flying into the flower bed.
Georgiana burst out laughing.
The cat—Apollo, carroty as a harvest moon, with the authority of a creature who had never been seriously inconvenienced in his life—blinked at Charlotte from among the teacups.
Charlotte stared at him. Then she laughed too, just a little, because it was impossible not to. She set down her fork and lifted him off the table, settling him in her lap. He went with magnificent indifference, as if being picked up were a privilege she had earned.
“You,” Charlotte told him, “have absolutely appalling manners.”
“Oh, don’t scold him,” Georgiana said, still smiling.
“Someone must.” Charlotte stroked his ears. He began to purr, deep and mechanical, like a small engine that had found its proper setting. “He nearly upset the cream.”
“He always nearly upsets the cream,” Georgiana said. “It is one of his finest qualities.”
“It is not a quality. It is a deficiency.”
Georgiana raised her eyebrows with great good humor. “Are you saying I did not raise him well?”
“I am saying you have done your best,” Charlotte said. “But cats like Apollo have a mind of their own. They do as they please regardless of what anyone wishes.”
Georgiana smiled. Then the smile softened into something quieter. “So do you, Charlotte.”
Charlotte looked down at Apollo.
“I mean it as a compliment,” Georgiana said. “You always have had a mind of your own. You simply were not always allowed to use it.”
Charlotte said nothing. She kept her fingers moving through the cat’s fur.
“I am very glad you are here,” her aunt continued. “You may stay as long as you wish. I mean that without reservation.” She paused. “But I think you ought to know that someone may come looking for you. And it is better to be prepared than to be caught unawares.”
Charlotte’s chest tightened. “My father will have heard by now,” she said.
“I was not thinking of your father.”
Charlotte looked up. “Then who—”
“The Duke,” Georgiana said simply.
Charlotte made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a dismissal.
“He will not come. He is perfectly content without me.” She reached for her tea.
“I have been in this house four days, and there has been no letter, no rider, no word whatsoever. That tells me everything I need to know about how greatly my absence is felt.”
Georgiana said nothing.
She only lifted one eyebrow, very slightly, with the expression of a woman who had lived considerably longer than Charlotte and had formed a different opinion entirely.
Charlotte looked at her. “What?”
The eyebrow did not come down.
“Aunt Georgiana.”
“More cake?” Georgiana asked pleasantly and lifted the serving knife.
Apollo purred on in Charlotte’s lap, oblivious to everything, thoroughly content. Charlotte stared at her aunt’s perfectly composed face and felt, for the first time in four days, that she might not have the full picture.
“You have a visitor,” Georgiana said from the library doorway.
Charlotte’s heart lurched. She did not look up from her book immediately, because looking up immediately would give her away, and she had not yet arranged her face.
Henry.
She arranged her face. Then she said, steadily, “I have no wish to see anyone.”
“You would want to see this one,” Georgiana said. “Otherwise he is likely to come in regardless.”
Charlotte looked up.
“Your father,” Georgiana said.
Charlotte’s shoulders fell. She closed her eyes.
Of course. Of course it was her father. Henry was at Sappherton House, perfectly content, reading dispatches and not thinking about her at all, and here was her father, who never needed an invitation.
She lifted Apollo from her lap and set him gently on the sofa beside her. He gave her an injured look. She smoothed the cushion around him and rose.
Lord Ashford was standing at the drawing room window when she came in. He turned when he heard her step, and he gave her a smile that she could not quite read. It was either warm or mocking. With her father, those were sometimes the same thing.
“Charlotte,” he said.
“Papa.” She kept her back straight. “I did not know you were coming.”
“I was in the neighborhood.” He looked her over once, assessing what has been lost and what might still be recovered. “You look well enough, considering.”
“Considering what?”
He sat. She remained standing.
“I have heard,” he said, “that you left Sappherton House. Alone. Without the Duke.” He let a small pause do its work. “I think we both know what that means.”
“I took a short holiday to visit my aunt,” Charlotte said. “I am not certain what conclusions you have drawn from that, but—”
“The marriage has failed,” he said. “It was inevitable, frankly. You ran from one hasty arrangement into another, and now you are here, and he is there, and the whole thing has come to nothing.” He crossed one leg over the other.
“Come home, Charlotte. We can manage this quietly if we move quickly.”
I could tell him he is wrong.
She wanted to. The words were right there.
I am on a holiday. The marriage is perfectly intact.
But her father had a talent for hearing the thing beneath the words, and he would hear the crack in her certainty, and then she would be precisely where she did not want to be.
She clasped her hands. “I have no reason to return to Ashford,” she said. “I am the Duchess of Sappherton. That does not change simply because I am currently in Surrey.”
Her father laughed. Not unkindly. That almost made it worse. “You are the Duchess of Sappherton until the Duke applies for a divorce. Given that you have left his house, I doubt that will take long.”
The word landed.
Divorce.
Cold and final.
Would he?
She didn’t know. She had never considered it in those terms. Henry was dutiful. Henry abhorred scandal. Divorce was the kind of scandal that followed a family for generations. Surely, he would not. Surely.
She was not certain.
“I have it on good authority,” her father continued, “that Redmont is still willing to consider the matter. Given everything. He would be prepared to—”
“No,” Charlotte said.
Her father blinked.
“No.” She said it again, quieter, and more final than the first time. “I would rather live alone for the rest of my life than marry Lord Redmont. That is not a position I am willing to revisit.”
Her father’s expression shifted. “Sappherton has put these notions in your head.”
“No one put them there. They are my own.”
“Before that man, you were sensible,” he said. “You understood how the world worked. You understood what was expected of you.”
“I understood that my wishes were irrelevant,” Charlotte said. “Henry taught me that they are not.”
“Foolishness.” He stood up. “Pretty words from a man who has no intention of honoring the marriage he trapped you into.”
“He did not trap me.”
“Charlotte—”
“He gave me choices.” Her voice had gone flat and clear.
“Every one of them mine. He asked before he acted. He waited when I needed time. He—” She stopped.
She was saying more than she had intended to.
She pressed on anyway. “He showed me that I was entitled to decide what happened to my own life. And I will not unlearn that simply because it is inconvenient for you.”
Her father opened his mouth.
“If my happiness has ever mattered to you,” Charlotte said, “why did you never once ask what I wanted?”
The question sat between them.
Her father did not speak. He looked at her. Something moved behind his face—not anger. Not dismissal. Something older than both.
The silence stretched.
“I believed I was securing your future,” he said at last. His voice had lost its edge. “I thought I was protecting you.”
“I know that.” Charlotte’s chest ached. “I believe you meant well. I do.” She met his eyes. “But all I ever wanted was the chance to choose it myself.”
He said nothing for a long moment. He picked up his hat from the chair. He turned it once in his hands.
“If you love him,” he said, not looking at her, “do not let your pride keep you from fighting for the marriage.” He set his hat on his head. “That would be a waste.”
She stared at him.
He was already crossing toward the door.
“Father,” she said.
He paused.
She could not think of anything to say. He gave her one short nod, not warm exactly, but not cold either, and walked out.
The front door opened. Closed.
Charlotte stood very still.
Then her aunt was there, quiet in the doorway, and Charlotte did not bother holding herself together any longer.
“I love Henry,” she said. The words came out roughly.
“I love him and I do not know if he knows it and I do not know if it matters and I left because I thought he wanted me to go.” She pressed her fingers against her mouth.
“I want him to come. I keep waiting for a letter or a rider or—something.” Her throat tightened.
“He hasn’t come, Georgiana. He hasn’t even written. ”
Georgiana crossed the room and took Charlotte’s hands.
“I wish he would come,” Charlotte said. “I wish he would walk through that door and be insufferably calm about the whole thing and tell me I have been ridiculous.” She laughed, and it broke a little. “I would not even argue with him.”
Georgiana said nothing and only held her hands. Perhaps she thought Charlotte’s wish an impossible one.