Chapter 12 #2
Lord Wolfgang offered his arm and Charlotte curled her hand around the crook of it. Even his forearm was large and hard as oak, which she discovered when she rested her fingertips lightly on it. A strange thrill ran through her, strong enough to part her lips on a silent inhale.
“Lord Wolfgang, could it be that you are in dire need of nonsense in your life, while I could do with practice at being serious?”
“I am thirsting for nonsense.” He had said it like a jest, but there was an ache in his voice he couldn’t disguise. Come to think of it, there was something odd about his laughter as well. He offered it up readily enough but it sounded stiff, almost creaky.
“Shall we start with this, Lady Charlotte—how was your Season?”
“Nonsense indeed! I set off to conquer the ton, but I found it much too easy. Can there be pleasure in winning without a fight?”
“A great deal of pleasure, and I say that as a military man. Perhaps Wellington should have put you on the battlefield and me in the ballroom?”
“I do often think—” She broke off because she did often think, but only rarely did she offer her true thoughts up to others. Yet God, she was tempted to try.
“You do often think?” he prompted.
“If you must know, I adore the ballroom but often think I’m wasted in it. So many women are. My grandmother is one of En-gland’s foremost horticulturalists, yet people never give her credit for it.”
“I see. And it’s your ambition to change all that?”
“Yes, but I’m no horticulturalist.” She took a deep breath—the telling of truth seemed to require a great deal of air. “To be honest, my main interest is clothing.”
Charlotte steeled herself against his judgment, but Lord Wolfgang only nodded. “I see. Like your bayonet lace—thought and style together as one?”
She blinked up at him. “You don’t want to mock me? Or tell me either how frivolous an interest in clothing is, or how charming you find it when young ladies fuss with their ribbons?”
The curve of his mouth deepened. “I value my head, or at least my pillowcase. Besides, Lady Charlotte, I suspect even your ribbons are formidable.”
It was such a pleasing thing for him to say that Charlotte knew it would linger. Later, Charlotte wondered if that was when the idea for the silk mill was born.
Just ahead, the trail split to follow the river.
“Oh good heavens, have we arrived already?” The time had passed so quickly. “Julian should be fishing just upriver.”
Lord Wolfgang had planted his feet at the fork in the path. “I’ve discovered a new ambition of my own.”
“Oh? What is it?”
“I’d like to walk a little longer, alone with you.”
That evening, Lord Wolfgang had received pressing news from Stoke House and was called away.
Charlotte didn’t know what the news was, nor did she have the faintest idea that his brother was ill.
She wrote to him all summer long but learned of the Duke of Warrick’s death with the rest of the country, when the announcement was printed in the Times.
“Heavens!” Gran had said, peeking out at Charlotte from behind her own copy of the paper at the breakfast table. “Were you aware of this?”
“No.” There was a strange new hollow where Charlotte’s stomach was meant to be.
In all their letters that summer, Lord Wolfgang hadn’t said a word about what the Times described as his brother’s “long illness.” In fact, she’d been trying to ignore the fact that she hadn’t heard from Lord Wolfgang in more than a week, since the night he’d failed to appear at the Marlowe ball.
Little needles of alarm prickled over her skin.
“Please excuse me, Gran. I must—”
“Of course, darling. You must write to him at once.”
Charlotte had streaked upstairs to write Wolfgang a long letter, followed by another the following day. She wrote him on the day of the funeral, and then a few days later, to send a black silk cravat she’d stitched for him.
But Wolfgang didn’t write back.
As the days dragged on, the needles of alarm became cudgels.
Lord Wolfgang hadn’t lifted a hand against her, and yet she walked around as if her body was bruised and even caught herself holding her hand protectively against her belly, cradling injuries that weren’t there. Why should silence hurt so badly?
Charlotte was left in a trap. She wanted both to comfort Wolfgang and to write him hot, angry letters demanding to know where he’d gone. But he’d just lost his brother—what business did she have demanding anything from him?
So she had plastered on a smile and threw herself into the whirl of the Season, and when the hurt grew to towering heights she made sure to laugh even harder.
“Save some merriment for the rest of the young ladies,” Julian had said one morning late in the year when she was arriving home from a ball just as he was settling in for breakfast. The remark earned him a scathing look from the dowager and many muttered comments at the idiocy of men, but Charlotte barely noticed.
It had been three full months since she’d last heard from Wolfgang, and she’d decided to swallow what was left of her pride and write him one last letter:
Your Grace,
It’s strange to write you with your new title, when I am so used to writing my dear friend Lord Wolfgang.
It must be stranger still for you—I ache to think of your loss.
I write only to say that I’ve missed our correspondence.
Did I misunderstand? If you need nonsense now, if you need anything at all, please know how often I think of you.
Lady Charlotte
A week later a folded vellum square with her name in blotchy handwriting had arrived for her. Levy ran it to her on a silver salver, looking almost as relieved as Charlotte to receive word from Stoke House. But when she tore the letter open, she found only two short lines:
Lady Charlotte,
As you noted, my circumstances have changed. I have no need of your nonsense.
Warrick
Charlotte was proud her hand hadn’t shaken as she folded up the letter again and flashed an overbright smile at Levy. That’s that, she told herself. At least I know it’s over.
But her heart was too loyal—or stupid—and it didn’t understand. It keened until it shriveled up from sheer exhaustion, and it was never quite the same again.