Chapter 33
“The carriage is ready, Your Grace,” Edith said.
Charlotte stood at the window, looking down at the gardens. The bed where she and Ian had planted marigolds sat neat and orderly, the flowers nodding in the breeze as if nothing at all had changed.
“I shall be down momentarily,” she said, without turning.
Edith withdrew. The door clicked shut.
Charlotte drew a long breath.
Compose yourself. You have survived worse than a garden view.
Her throat felt tight. Her eyes stung. She blinked hard until the room stopped blurring.
She made her way down to Henry’s study. The door was unlocked, as it always was when he traveled. She stepped inside. The room smelled of ink and leather, exactly as it always did.
She set the letter in the center of his desk, squared to the blotter.
He is in Matlock. He will not return for two days. No scene. No argument. No last conversation where I have to watch his face while I say something I can barely stand to think.
She had waited on purpose. She wanted no theatrics. Not that there would have been any, not with Henry. He would have simply nodded, thanked her for her honesty, and let her go. That was almost worse than shouting.
She looked around the study once and stared at the chair he always sat in. She glanced through the window that faced the drive. She ran the tip of her finger along the small dish where he kept his seals.
She turned and walked out, closing the door behind her.
In the front hall, Mr. Gedge held the door open, his face carefully blank.
Charlotte took a step toward it.
“Your Grace.”
She turned. Mrs. Ellison was crossing the hall, a small basket in her hands. She curtsied.
“Victuals for the road, Your Grace,” she said, holding it out.
Charlotte took the basket. Her fingers brushed the woven handle. “Thank you, Mrs. Ellison.”
Charlotte had not told any of the Sappherton servants what she had intended to do, but her actions and the preparations she’d made must have spoken for her. She managed to smile at the housekeeper, and it felt thin on her face.
Mr. Gedge bowed as she passed him. She stepped through the door and into the daylight. The carriage stood waiting, the horses shifting their weight.
A footman handed her up. Edith climbed in after her and settled onto the opposite seat.
Charlotte sat very still as the wheels began to turn beneath her.
Surrey. An aunt I have exchanged perhaps a dozen letters with throughout my entire life. A house I have never seen. A life I have no notion of how to build.
She watched Sappherton House shrink behind the window until the drive curved, and the trees closed over it.
What else could she do? Henry did not know what he wanted, and he did not understand why he had begun that conversation.
And I love him. I love him so much it has become unbearable to sit in the same room and wait for him to decide whether he wants me there at all.
The carriage rolled on, and her pain grew.
* * *
“Welcome home, Your Grace,” Mr. Gedge said, opening the door wide.
Henry stepped inside and pulled off his gloves. “Gedge. Is there correspondence?”
“Several pieces, Your Grace. Waiting in your study.”
“Very good.” Henry started toward the stairs, already thinking of Charlotte, of what he might say to her, of how he might begin to undo whatever damage that conversation in the library had done. He stopped and turned back. “Where is the Duchess?”
Mr. Gedge shifted his weight. His gaze dropped to the floor. “She is not at home, Your Grace.”
Henry frowned. Gedge never looked at the floor. Gedge usually looked people directly in the eye, even Dukes, even when delivering unwelcome news about missing silver or drunken footmen.
“Where has she gone?” Henry asked. “Did she mention when she would return?”
“She left two days ago, Your Grace,” Gedge said. “For Surrey. She is not coming back.”
The floor seemed to tilt.
Not coming back. She has decided. She has made the decision for both of us, exactly as I feared she might, and I was not even here to stop it.
“There is a letter, Your Grace,” Gedge added. “In the stu—”
Henry did not wait for him to finish. He crossed the hall in long strides and shoved open the study door.
The letter sat on his desk, squared to the blotter, precisely where she would have known he would look first.
He broke the seal.
Henry,
By the time you read this, I shall be at my aunt’s house in Surrey. I did not wish to make a scene of my departure, and I thought it kinder to both of us if I simply went.
I am grateful for everything you have done. You gave me safety when I had none. You gave me a home, however briefly, and you gave me Ian, who I shall love for the rest of my life regardless of distance. I do not regret a single day of our arrangement.
I understand that circumstances have changed, and that the reasons for our marriage no longer hold the weight they once did. I did not wish to wait for you to find the words to tell me so. I have saved you the trouble.
I wish you every happiness, Henry. I mean that.
Charlotte
Henry read it twice. Then a third time, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something less final.
She thinks I wanted her gone. She thinks that conversation in the library was me searching for a way to end this. I was searching for a way to ask her to stay. I simply did not know how to say it.
He wanted to tell himself it was for the best. He tried the words in his head.
This is what should happen. The arrangement has run its course. She deserves a life she has chosen for herself.
None of it settled. The ache in his chest only sharpened, spreading until it felt like something physical, something that might crack a rib if he breathed too deeply.
He set the letter down and walked out of the study.
The drawing room held her books, three of them stacked on the side table, a ribbon marking a page she would never finish here.
The garden beyond the window showed the marigolds she and Ian had planted, still blooming in their crooked row, entirely unaware that the people who planted them were both gone.
He walked the length of the house. Every room held some trace of her. A shawl left over the back of a chair. A vase of flowers she had insisted brightened the hall. The warmth she had brought into every space she touched, gone now, leaving the walls exactly as they had been before she arrived.
Quiet. Empty.
He stood in the center of the hall, and for the first time in months, Sappherton House felt precisely as it had before her, before Ian, before any of it.
He had never told her. Not once. He had let her walk out of the study with a letter meant to spare them both, when all he had wanted, for weeks now, was to ask her to stay. He loved her. He had loved her since a coaching yard in the rain, and he had said nothing.
And now she was gone.