Chapter 43
Charlotte’s chest clanged and clamored all through the dessert course, as if the bells of Canterbury Cathedral were ringing inside her, a paean of joy so loud and reverberating that it rattled her bones and shook her courage awake.
She locked eyes with Wolfgang, but the dowager signaled for the women to leave the men to their port, a formality Lady Alice had abandoned all summer but seemed to find crucial now, though perhaps she simply wanted to minimize time spent with the count or the margrave.
Charlotte was the last of the women to rise from the table, and she could feel Wolfgang’s gaze heating her back as they left the dining room for the Grand Salon.
Lawrence stopped her in the hall, coughing at her elbow to offer up a letter on a silver salver. “Your ladyship, the courier you were expecting arrived. I believe you asked me to notify you at once?”
“Thank you, Lawrence.”
Her hand shook slightly as she opened the letter and began to read:
My dear Lady Charlotte,
Felicitations on the success of the Aveton-Wells Mill, and for the sales figures you advanced to me.
Most impressive! With the addition of the Jacquard loom, I’m honored—and, frankly, relieved—to accept your proposal on your brother’s behalf.
Please find the sum of ￡9,000 in a bank draft enclosed herewith, as a loan against your shares of the mill. As always, I remain,
Your devoted servant,
Mr. Bernard Curlew
The bank draft, an enormous document much adorned with stamps, signatures, and seals, fell out into her hand.
A fortune, and it weighed nothing more than a feather.
“Mother, may I speak to you in private?” Charlotte said, leaning into the Grand Salon. She yearned to go to Wolfgang, but she needed to have an honest conversation with her mother first. One that was years overdue.
The dowager pushed her chair back. “I believe I’ll join—”
“Thank you, Gran, but no. I need to speak to Mother alone.”
“Yes, Lady Alice, we’ve no need of you.” Lady Margot stood, her skirts falling in stormy blue folds around her, and turned to her daughter. “Shall we take a turn in the portrait gallery, darling?”
A laugh almost slipped past Charlotte’s teeth.
Her father hung in the portrait gallery, and Lady Margot never failed to point out his bloodshot eyes and the ugly set of his mouth.
“Drunk even as he sat for his portrait,” she’d say whenever she visited the painting, which was surprisingly often when she came to Clare.
Lady Margot’s grievances seemed to gain strength and multiply in the portrait gallery.
“I prefer outside, on the terrace,” Charlotte said. “I could use some air.”
A sky full of it.
When she had flagstone under her feet, Charlotte turned to her mother and looked her in the eye. “I’ve found the money to pay your debt, Mother. There’s no need to sell me.”
“Sell you? Such dramatics.” Lady Margot’s mouth tightened. She hardened more and more all the time, until Charlotte sometimes wondered where her mother existed under the ever-thickening layer of scar.
“It doesn’t matter.” Charlotte pulled an envelope from her pocket and pushed it into her mother’s hand. “This is a bank draft for nine thousand pounds. You may present it to the count yourself, or if you prefer, I can—”
The smallest wrinkle appeared on Lady Margot’s forehead.
“Charlotte, you mistake the matter. The margrave is one of the wealthiest men in all Europe—you ought to be thanking me.”
“For wanting to ship me off to Prussia to pay your debt?”
“Is that what you think?” Lady Margot took her daughter by the elbows.
“We’ll ship off together. You’ve had five years to choose a husband, though why such an important choice was left to—” She broke off.
“You seem to believe that your life will be nothing but roses, but the future finds you whether you’re prepared or not. ”
“Prussians inoculate against unhappiness, do they?”
Lady Margot ignored that remark. “I’ve chosen carefully.
The margrave is rich and easily led, and you will move in the first political circles if you exert yourself but a little.
All I want for you is a good life. God forbid you ever know how it feels to be at the mercy of a man.
Your grandmother—whom you love so dearly!
—should have warned me about your father. And your brother should have—”
“Julian was fifteen when Father died. Still a child himself.”
Silence fell between them, a vast chasm of it.
“Mother, you must know…” Charlotte paused, because it wouldn’t do for her voice to crack. “You’re asking me to marry a man I don’t know, to leave England. To give up my silk mill and—”
She didn’t dare say the name Wolfgang.
“We’ll be secure, and rich, and together,” cried Lady Margot. “You choose them, over and over. Is it too much to ask that you choose me for once?”
Charlotte took a deep breath, because there was the crux of it. And yet somehow choosing Lady Margot always meant turning away from everything else.
“I never thought I should have to choose. Can I not love all of you?”
Lady Margot dropped Charlotte’s elbows. “It’s the duke, isn’t it? It’s that ridiculous declaration he made, as if fine words meant anything. Your father offered them to me once. Have I taught you so little? Do you not listen to a thing I say?”
“I do listen. More than you know!” Charlotte cried.
“But what if you built me up strong enough to weather loss, weather heartbreak if I need to? What if all the people I’ve chosen—you, Gran, Julian, Anna, the Marbys, and yes, Warrick, too—will catch me if I fall?
I’m so lucky to have every last one of you. ”
Lady Margot’s mouth twisted. “You’ve decided, then? You’ve decided against me. I never had a chance, did I?”
Charlotte had no reply.
There was another kind of heartbreak, one Lady Margot had never mentioned, that happened slowly between mother and daughter when there were too many things it became impossible to say.
“I’ll pay the count as soon as he finishes his port,” Charlotte said quietly.
“I never once asked you to pay my debt.”
“I know. I did it willingly, but I won’t do it a second time.”
She wouldn’t lie to her mother again, either. Lady Margot wasn’t going to change and Charlotte would love her anyway, and some would say that was a gift and others would call it a tragedy, but either way it was enough.
Mother and daughter took two more turns around the terrace in silence and the matter was done.