Chapter 10 #2
She had not climbed a tree since she was fourteen.
Her body, apparently, had not forgotten.
She found the next branch and then the next, and then she was properly in it, the bark rough under her palms, the wood solid beneath her feet, and she went higher.
Higher than was probably sensible. The branches thinned and the leaves moved and then a breeze came through, cold and entirely indifferent to her distress.
Charlotte stopped. She sat on a branch thick enough to be trustworthy, braced her back against the trunk, and breathed.
In. Out.
The night was wide up here. The moorland opened beyond the trees, and the sky above it was enormous, and none of it knew anything about a library proposal or a deed of guardianship or a duke with impeccable posture and an irritating habit of being right about everything except what mattered most.
She closed her eyes.
Marriage of convenience.
The words sat in her chest like a stone.
She had read about such arrangements in novels and histories and the sort of social commentary that her father thought entirely unsuitable.
She had understood them in the abstract, the way one understands something that happens to other people in other circumstances.
She had never imagined it could happen to her. Because when she was small and the world was still in the right shape, her mother had told her otherwise.
She closed her eyes and let the memory wash over her.
Charlotte was eight, possibly nine, and she had burrowed herself under her mother’s arm with her knees pulled up, listening.
Her mother’s voice was low and soft as she read from a small, cloth-bound book, the kind with illustrations that blurred at the margins when looked upon too closely.
“The maiden did not know he was a prince,” her mother read. “She knew only that he was tired, and hurt, and that the creatures of the forest had turned him ragged at the edges. She brought him water from her well. She did not ask who he was. She asked only if he needed more.”
Charlotte felt the story settle around her like a quilt.
“And the prince,” her mother continued, “who had spoken to a hundred courtiers and a dozen kings and had never once felt that anyone truly saw him—looked at the maiden and knew. He knew the way you know when you have finally come home after a very long time away.”
Charlotte looked up at her mother’s face. “Mama,” she had said. “Is love real? Like that?”
Her mother set the book down and took Charlotte’s hand. “It is,” she replied. “It is entirely real. But you must believe in it first. Here.” She had pressed one finger to Charlotte’s sternum, gentle and certain. “You must carry the belief in your heart before it can find you. Promise me you will.”
Charlotte promised.
She had kept the promise through every drawing room and every carefully arranged dinner and every Season where she had watched other girls receive flowers and said nothing about her own opinions on the matter, because she had been waiting for the thing her mother described.
As memory faded, Charlotte was still in the tree. The bark was cold through her dress and the breeze had not stopped. She sat for a long moment without moving.
Then, because her mind was not the merciful sort, it began its inventory.
If you do not accept the Duke, where would you go?
She pressed her fingernail into the bark and thought about it honestly.
She had no money. What she had taken from Ashford estate could be measured in a handful of coins. She had no jewelry—she had left it, all of it, because jewelry was the first thing that could be used to identify her—even if she sold it off piece-by-piece.
She had no references. Who would write them?
She could not approach any house in England without risking discovery, and she could not use her name without risking worse.
She could say she had been a governess in the north, but without documentation, without a previous employer who could be written to, the first housekeeper she approached would turn her away inside of ten minutes.
And her father was not a man who gave up. She had known that when she left. He had signed the settlements, been publicly committed to the match, and his pride would not permit her to simply vanish without consequences. He would search, and he had the resources to do it thoroughly.
Redmont’s men were already on the roads.
There is no simple answer here, she thought. There is only the question of which bad answer you can live with.
She looked out over the moorland. The Duke’s offer lay in front of her the way it had in the library.
A home.
She had called them cold words, and they were—but they were also true.
Charlotte had been wanted for her name and her bloodline and the neat transaction her person represented, and Sappherton had at least never pretended that this would be a love match.
He was not promising her the story from the cloth-bound book.
He was not claiming to be the prince who looked at her and knew.
He was offering her a contract. The terms were honest and she was old enough now to understand that honesty was not a small thing.
She pressed the heel of her hand to her sternum; in the place her mother had once pressed her finger.
You must carry the belief in your heart before it can find you.
She still carried it. She had not put it down. But a belief in her heart and a marriage in name were two different things. Charlotte was twenty-three, not eight, and her mother was not here to tell her how to reconcile this situation while still holding onto hope of finding someone to love.
And then there was Ian.
Charlotte did not know what to do, only that she could not walk away from a child who had already learned that everyone did.