Chapter 18
The fire was banked low in the Grand Salon and the candles melted halfway down, leaving the room bathed in amber light as Charlotte waited for Darlington.
The servants had cleared the room, leaving only a tray of fruit and cheese behind, because courting went better with refreshments—so useful to pop a grape in one’s mouth during an awkward silence.
The guests were upstairs in bed already, even the largest guest with the stoniest face, who’d had to be yanked from the room.
“Come, Warrick! Manners aren’t nearly as strict in the country,” the dowager had said as she dragged the duke out of the room. “Besides, one doesn’t make a match by chaperoning too carefully.”
“How true!” Lady Skeffington rolled her eyes between Warrick and Lord Lysander. Such a bounty of eligible men for a mother with three daughters on the marriage market.
Charlotte warmed herself by the fire, alone in the room. Something sparked in her chest—could it be anticipation?—and she took a little breath and tried to cultivate it.
Marriage.
Perhaps it was the answer after all?
“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long,” said a voice from the hallway.
Charlotte turned to find Lord Darlington, dressed all in black again but dry this time, slouching against the door and studying her with slumberous eyes. He held a battered old work box in both hands, and it made Charlotte’s pulse beat faster than any jewelry case.
“You brought it.”
“Indeed. Help me bring the candles over.” Darlington put the box down carefully on a card table in the corner and hauled an enormous carved wooden candelabra over so they could see better. Charlotte grabbed two candlesticks and placed them beside the box, her stomach in a flutter.
Darlington twisted the bronze fastener open and folded up the stiff leather cover to reveal a series of drawers, the smallest at the top and large, flat ones Charlotte assumed were for tools at the bottom.
He slipped one of the larger drawers open and pulled out two loupes and two long pairs of tweezers, handing a set to Charlotte. “Ready?”
“Yes, yes, get on with it!”
One side of his mouth curved. It wasn’t a smile, not quite, and Charlotte got the sense that smiles were rare for him.
His face seemed so still and solemn, as if he truly were carved from marble, or perhaps alabaster, and moving took real effort.
“You’re sure you wouldn’t rather see a finished piece? ”
“Quite sure. As I told you when I wrote, I want to see the process. When I make my silk, it’s creating the patterns and the embroidery that I find most satisfying, better even than the end result.
Is it the same for you?” But he was staring at her, and she trailed off.
“Oh dear, what is it? Was I too enthusiastic with the bonbons after dinner? Do I have chocolate all over my face?”
“It’s your hair. It’s… staggering.”
Oh. Charlotte was conscious of a faint impatience.
People often complimented her hair and she understood why—for size alone it should win prizes.
She quite adored its unruly nature, and thank goodness, because if she and her hair ever went to war, Charlotte didn’t like her chances.
Still, she’d rather Darlington focused on what she said, rather than on how she looked.
He pushed a curl back from her forehead. “Do you ever thread diamonds through it?”
“As often as possible.” She brushed his hand away. “Speaking of diamonds, do you prefer mine cuts or rose cuts? And why is it I see emerald beads and cabochons, but never diamond beads and—oh!”
Charlotte lost track of her thoughts as he began to pull drawers out of his work box and line them up carefully on the table. One was full of tiny diamonds and one, which Charlotte dove for, had what she suspected were different colors of the same mineral.
“Is this”—the name of it hovered on her tongue—“beryl?”
“Well done. A drawer of my pinks. Beryl comes in many colors—green beryl is more commonly known as emerald and blue beryl as aquamarine, the same way rubies and sapphires are different shades of corundum.”
Charlotte fitted the loupe to her eye. “May I touch them?”
“Of course. It’s easiest to pick them up with the tweezers, or with these.”
He produced little wax sticks, a bit like small candles.
Charlotte picked through his drawers, exclaiming over the sapphires from Ceylon and Burmese rubies, one so darkly glamorous that it seemed fitting to hear it was a prized color known as pigeon’s blood.
When Darlington placed it in her palm, Charlotte noticed that his fingertips were pleasingly rough and stained gunmetal gray from his work.
A gentleman jeweler. A real artist—he made so much sense for her.
He shot her a conspiratorial look. “Shall I show you today’s biggest prize?”
“Absolutely.”
He passed her a large rectangular emerald to admire through the loupe. “It’s called a gota de aceite emerald, from the mines in the New World, and it’s one of the finest I’ve seen. Do you see how it looks liquid inside?”
“I do!”
He unrolled a small leather mat for each of them, and Charlotte tipped the beryls out onto hers and began to arrange them into a spectrum. When that wasn’t quite pleasing, she nudged them around to play with their shapes. “Do you have any stones in darker pink?”
Darlington pulled out another drawer and handed it to her. “Try these. Pink sapphires.”
They worked in silence next to each other, each absorbed in their own thoughts and the stones in front of them. Only when the candles began to sputter did either of them look up, astonished by how much time had passed.
“How lovely!” Charlotte reached a tentative finger over to Darlington’s leather to touch the diamond at the tip of a coil she could tell was going to be a green-and-white snake.
“A necklace,” he explained. “I need more emeralds, but—”
“Yes, I see it.”
He’d worked out only a small section of the snake, laying the stones out onto the leather, but already it felt alive, as if it might slither onto Charlotte’s neck and give a haughty flick of its tongue.
Charlotte arched her eyebrows for permission, pulling his sketchbook over when he nodded and losing herself in the snakes he’d sketched—detailed drawings of what she guessed to be pythons and boas, their patterns and head shapes and how they moved.
Her wonder grew as she flipped through watercolor studies and scribbles and diagrams for prongs and metalwork.
When she lifted her head up to meet his eyes, she felt rather breathless.
“It’s astonishing,” Charlotte said.
“It will be, if I can match the emeralds. Waiting for the right stones is often the hardest part. Now, show me your work?”
“You sound like a schoolmaster,” Charlotte said with a laugh, but she scooted her chair closer so he could take a proper look at her sketch, where the straight lines of beryl and sapphire she’d started with had curled in to form the long, elegant lines of a pink feather, the same one from the pattern she’d designed for the silk mill.
“This is…” He blinked twice. “This is good. Very good indeed!”
“You needn’t sound so surprised.” Men so often seemed to feel as if they sat behind an invisible gate, and were astonished to find how easily women could open it.
“It’s only—most people would choose white for a feather. Diamond or rock crystal.”
“Yes, but this feather’s from a silk pattern I designed, and it’s a specific bird. You notice that the shaft is a deeper pink than the rest of it? My grandmother corresponds with a naturalist in the Americas, and she sent her a—”
“I like the curve of the tip and the darker pink streaks. Do you imagine it as a brooch?”
“Yes, or a hair ornament. You see?” She pulled the sketchbook close and was preparing to draw, until one of the candles sputtered so badly that it went out. “Good Lord! It must be appallingly late.”
Darlington stretched before wandering over to the window, where the sky was beginning to gray. “I suppose we ought to retire.”
“I suppose so,” she agreed, though she wasn’t the least bit sleepy. Darlington’s sketchbook made her want to leap into his brain, rifle around in his thoughts, and let his ideas light her up like lightning bolts. He was a bit arrogant, but he was a viscount—arrogance rather went with the territory.
All in all, it was a promising start.