Chapter 12
Charlotte and the dowager spent the next week in a flutter of packing and planning.
Their first order of business was to send couriers after Julian and Anna, although they had very little hope of a reply.
Next, they went to Rundell, Bridge & Rundell to sell their jewels, which Gran claimed not to mind, though Charlotte noticed that she kissed her emerald drops and whispered, “Be well, my darlings,” before she handed them over to Mr. Rundell.
The dowager wrote their trustees to see how much money she could wheedle from them, while Charlotte wrote Julian’s man of business, Mr. Bernard Curlew, to ask him for a loan to cover her mother’s debt.
She first asked to borrow against her dowry, which Mr. Curlew declined.
Then she asked for a loan against her share of the silk mill, to which he also said no.
Finally, she wrote to beg for any sort of loan, to which she received an agonized response, because while Mr. Curlew flatly refused to dip into the Ramsay coffers, it worried him greatly to offend his employer’s beloved younger sister.
“I must stop harassing that man,” Charlotte muttered to her gran after she received his last letter.
Yet Charlotte wasn’t sure what else to do, especially after she’d gone to tea with her mother and gotten the name of her creditor.
He was a thin-faced and repellent Prussian named Count Carl Frederick von Hohenstaufen, and he didn’t seem a patient man, nor was he satisfied with the six thousand pounds Charlotte and Gran sent to him.
He was particularly scornful of Charlotte’s promise of future payments, perhaps because Charlotte herself wasn’t sure where those payments would come from.
I hear you have until the end of the summer to marry, he wrote. In the hopes your husband is both rich and obliging, I will also give your mother until the end of the summer to pay the remainder of her debt.
It was a reprieve of sorts, and yet it left another or else dangling over Charlotte’s head.
Still, even with all the work to do, it wasn’t long before the dowager’s town house was packed up and shuttered, holland covers laid over the furniture for the summer, the ladies bundled into their coach to jingle and creak down the long road from London to Clare, the family’s main estate.
After a few hours on the road, when they crossed into Kent, Charlotte found herself sneaking frequent glances out the window.
It wasn’t the sloping, sun-dappled countryside that caught her attention.
“Must we bring him along?” she said to the dowager.
The dowager startled awake.
“Bring whom, my darling?” The dowager blinked hard, as if she hadn’t been sound asleep. She liked to pretend she wasn’t powerless against the rhythmic sway of the carriage and hadn’t spent most of the trip snoring.
“Him!” Charlotte lifted her chin toward the window, where a massive figure on an even larger horse was silhouetted against the sun.
God, Warrick rode well, and it was shocking that Charlotte even noticed, given that her sister-in-law ran the country’s most successful riding stable and jawed constantly about horses.
Charlotte was accustomed to riders whizzing by her head, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from gaping at the sight of the Duke of Warrick and his charger, thundering along in a slow, rolling canter.
Was it just her imagination, or did the earth tremble with every stride?
The dowager peered out the window and her eyes filled with awe. “God bless Britannia!”
“Gran, really.”
The dowager drew herself up until she was sitting tall and haughty as a queen. “I believe His Grace is on Imperium, which is the horse he rode at Waterloo. Forgive me if the sight leaves me feeling patriotic.”
“Is that what we’re calling it? Thank heavens Warrick sold his commission. If he ever wore regimentals, I’d have to draw you a cold bath.”
The dowager ignored her. “As for your question, I must tell you I’m hugely grateful Warrick agreed to spend the summer with us.”
“We don’t need—”
“We most certainly do. This summer will be a trial, for both of us, and it never hurts to have a duke in one’s pocket.”
Charlotte bit back a reply.
The first time she’d met Warrick had been on a summer day three years ago, during her mother’s ghastly annual visit to Clare.
The dowager had been napping upstairs, Julian had tromped off down to the river—ostensibly to fish but more likely to clench his jaw and gaze nobly out at the horizon, or whatever he did when he was pouting—and the only one who’d been lurking was Lady Margot.
Charlotte had tiptoed down the corridor toward the dowager’s sitting room, trying to win a few hours of peace, because Lady Margot never deigned to enter one of the dowager’s private rooms. Not when she so clearly considered it enemy territory.
“Charlotte?” a voice had called from somewhere near, deceptively soft, because Lady Margot didn’t yell and yet still somehow always managed to make herself heard.
In fact, she didn’t have to open her mouth or change her expression by so much as a millimeter and Charlotte knew exactly what her mother was thinking.
Charlotte picked up her skirts and ran.
She was in full retreat and felt no shame about it. Then again, she had never understood men and their obsession with valor, which was simply stupidity dressed up in gentlemen’s clothing. Better by far to live to fight another day.
Or in her case, to face dinner.
Charlotte reached the sitting room and closed the door behind her, slumping back against it in sheer relief.
Everyone seemed to believe they suffered through Lady Margot’s annual visit on her account.
Yet each year, Charlotte felt like a stretch of contested land fought over by two mighty armies—her mother on one side, Gran and Julian on the other, their cannons booming back and forth.
Three more days, she’d thought darkly and flopped down on the settee, kicking off her slippers and staring up at the plaster palm leaves above.
She was crushing her hair, which her mother would notice, and wrinkling her gown, which was sure to draw a remark, but at least she was on her own and not working so hard, laughing her head off when nothing was amusing, or trying for a quip that would distract the others from the slow grind of their war.
Why do you bother? asked a small, exhausted part of herself.
Charlotte had never been able to answer, nor could she find a way out. How did one teach a heart not to care?
When the door clicked open ten minutes later, Charlotte was halfway asleep. Go away, Julian! she thought groggily, and stretched her head back over the arm of the settee to tell him so.
Another man, an enormous one, filled her upside-down view.
He had a head of messy, gleaming hair and eyes—were they black?
Good Lord, could anything that dark be blue?
Charlotte wasn’t sure, and anyway she was distracted by the man’s upside-down jawline, which looked as if it had been hewn with an axe, and then by his browbone, which jutted proudly from his forehead in a way that would have alarmed her because it seemed to promise opinions held too firmly, except that it was balanced by a rather staggered grin.
A brain built for ideas and a mouth made for laughter.
She grinned back at him even as she took in his truly dreadful clothes, made of what she saw at once was good fabric but sloppy and much too big, as if his tailor had cast a doubtful eye at the width of the man’s shoulders and given up, stitching the jacket together on a best guess and a prayer.
Charlotte suddenly itched to measure him up herself, and yet as he leaned back against the doorjamb and crossed badly polished boot over badly polished boot, she had to admit that carelessness suited him.
He was the sort of man who ought to have clothes he could shrug out of quickly.
“Who are you, sir?” she’d asked.
“Lord Wolfgang Latham,” he’d answered. Because he wasn’t the high and mighty Duke of Warrick, not then.
Charlotte offered to take him down to the river to find Julian, which they both knew was an excuse to stretch their conversation.
It was also a tricky bit of maneuvering because it meant negotiating the hallway without getting caught by her mother, but soon they found themselves safely outside on the path beside Gran’s hedge garden.
Alone, together.
“I read about you in the papers.” Charlotte slanted her eyes up at him, falling into flirting to break the strange tension between them. “They said you smothered yourself in glory at Waterloo.”
He looked at her steadily. “It didn’t feel much like glory.”
“Oh. No, of course it wouldn’t.” Charlotte felt her cheeks heat. “I apologize, my lord.”
“What for?”
She stared down at her hand, grazing over the feathery tops of Gran’s lavender. “Because what I truly wanted to ask you was what it was like, being away at war. But I can never manage to say anything straight when I can rather say it sideways.”
That had made his mouth quirk. “Can’t you?”
No, not really. Plain speaking wasn’t one of her talents, especially not on a week when her family was gathered together and every word felt like a cartridge waiting to explode. Yet with him, she had the strange urge to try.
“I suppose if we started with something simpler?”
“All right. Then solve a mystery for me—what is that?” He gestured to the froth of lace at her hem.
Charlotte looked down at her skirt in surprise. “It’s Brussels lace, my lord. Surely you know it? I’m starting a fashion for it, because so many of the lace-makers had to leave the lowlands during the war and establish themselves here.”
“Admirable. I’m familiar with Brussels lace, of course, but I’ve never seen a pattern of…” He peered closer. “Are the petals on those flowers made of bayonets?”
That brought her head up. Even Gran hadn’t noticed.
“Well, I wouldn’t want to wear ordinary Brussels lace.”
“No.” His mouth curved, and she felt absurdly pleased. “Of course not.”