Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
“Was it a grave?” Charlotte asked.
Magnus flashed her a narrow look as he escorted her through the labyrinth of towering hedges, tangled trees, and untended rosebushes that made up the gardens of his ancestral home. “Do men often go about digging their wives’ graves in your experience?”
“I can’t recall what I’ve experienced,” she said. “Perhaps they do.”
His tone darkened with disapproval. “Perhaps you read too many sensation novels.”
“I can’t recall that either,” she admitted. “Though I am fairly certain I enjoy reading.”
The sun shone brightly above them, undimmed by its usual barrier of clouds or fog. There was a bit of a chill in the air nonetheless. Typical of a Yorkshire morning when the spring rain had finally stopped and the summer was fast approaching.
Magnus’s attention lingered on Charlotte’s unbound hair. Sunlight glinted in the fiery threads, making them flash against the deeper strands of brown.
He cleared his throat. “You think retracing your steps will spark your memory?”
“It might.” She gave him a quizzical glance. “Was it a grave?”
“No, it wasn’t a grave,” he growled.
“Then what—”
“It was a blasted hole. One of many I’ve dug on this benighted property since returning from the continent. Which is another reason you shouldn’t go traipsing about unescorted. You’ve already fallen from a wall. I won’t have you tumbling into a hole as well.”
Charlotte quickly inspected the debris-strewn ground around them. A frown crossed her face as she spied a freshly churned trench by a large rosebush ahead and another beneath a tree nearby.
Likely spots, Magnus had thought when he’d dug them.
Each near a visible marker. A sane man would have buried his treasure in an easily findable location, would he not?
Yet each attempt to unearth said treasure had uncovered nothing.
It was gradually occurring to Magnus that it might be because his late and very unlamented father had been anything but sane.
“Are you attempting to improve the garden?” Charlotte asked.
Magnus snorted. “Hardly.”
“Then what is it you’re doing?”
He glared at her. Good lord. Was she always so persistent? So reckless in pursuit of her own curiosity? Her own pleasure?
But of course she was.
She pranced along nine-foot stone walls, didn’t she? As well as juggling a string of lovers and keeping company with scarcely tame dogs, and heaven knew what else.
“I’m looking for something,” Magnus said shortly. “Something my father has hidden here.”
“What—”
“That’s all you need to know.” He guided her over a tree root.
“Why?” Her blue eyes sparkled with inquisitiveness. “Is it a secret?”
“Yes. My secret. Or rather, my father’s for the time being. It makes no matter.”
“It obviously matters to you.”
His jaw tightened. Too right. It was the only thing that mattered. Not the house. Not the village. And certainly not this outrageous girl who had inconveniently fallen into his lap.
The wall loomed ahead of them, towering up behind a stand of trees. Magnus could just make out the broken branch that had plunged to the ground a split second before Charlotte had.
All my fault.
The thought entered his head before he could prevent it.
She might have died. You could have killed her.
Magnus forced the damning words away. None of this was his fault.
Granted, he had pointed a pistol at her, but it hadn’t been loaded. And he hadn’t known she might fall, had he? He’d merely been protecting his property, the same way any trespasser-plagued landowner might have done.
“What matters to me at the moment,” he informed her, “is you getting your memory back. After that, the two us can—” He broke off.
Go our separate ways, he’d nearly said.
“The two of us can what?” she asked.
“Get on with our lives,” he replied. “Properly.”
She smiled briefly. “You make it sound as though the last several days have been improper.”
Magnus flinched. It was an apt description, though he couldn’t acknowledge it as such. “I’m not a nursemaid,” he said instead. “And you’re not a bedridden damsel.”
“I should hope I’m not.”
“Then we’re of the same mind. You’ll do whatever it takes to recover yourself and I’ll get back to—”
“Unearthing secrets,” she supplied.
He assisted her over another tree root. “My own business, I was going to say.”
Charlotte didn’t reply. Her gaze scanned the path ahead with evident disappointment. “I don’t remember this part of the garden at all.”
“You wouldn’t,” Magnus said. “I carried you through here.”
Swiftly carried her, all the while cursing his luck, his lineage, his temper for having threatened to shoot her.
“Yes, but I must have walked it before,” she said. “When I left the house to climb the wall perhaps? And why was I climbing a wall?”
“You were searching for your dog, I presume. Attempting to get a better vantage point.”
“He must have been hiding from me again.” Her footsteps slowed. “Poor thing. Have I had him very long?”
Magnus could only guess at the answer. And doubtless that guess would be wrong. He jerked his chin at the section of wall ahead of him. “There it is,” he said. “That’s where you fell.”
Charlotte stopped beside him to examine the ivy-covered stone. Her expression showed no trace of recognition. “And you found me here?”
“Promptly.”
Her fingers pressed his arm in gratitude. “Thank goodness for that.”
Magnus had the grace to redden. Curse Turner and his worthless advice. If Magnus had only disabused Charlotte of her false assumptions from the start, they wouldn’t be obliged to continue this embarrassing pantomime.
“Does nothing about this place stir your memory?” he asked with undisguised irritation.
“No. I confess, it doesn’t.” Her attention came to rest on a tangled clump of shrubbery. “What is that?” She moved closer, her hand sliding free of his arm. “Is that a book?”
Before Magnus could answer, Charlotte was hurrying off to investigate, heedless of the obstacles in her path. He strode after her with a muttered oath. “Take care,” he warned. “This garden hasn’t been tended in over a decade. There could be—”
“It is a book!” She raced to pick it up.
It was a red, cloth-bound volume Magnus had never seen before. Charlotte held it reverently in her hands.
“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne,” she read aloud. Her eyes found his. There was a flare of excitement in her gaze. “This is my book.”
Magnus’s pulse quickened. “Is it?”
“I think it is.”
“You don’t know it for a fact?”
“Not for certain. It’s only a feeling. And look!
” Again she ventured into the razor-sharp brambles.
“A basket!” she declared. “And here’s another book with it.
” Rising from the shrubbery, she held a broken wicker basket in one hand and an album with half-leather bindings in the other. “Why, it’s a sketchbook!”
Magnus took custody of the basket and the novel, freeing Charlotte’s hands to examine the sketches. He viewed them over her shoulder, his frown deepening with each turn of the page.
The first held a picture of a grand country house. An idyllic Palladian mansion of honey-colored stone, with verdant trees, lush lawns, and a liberal sprinkling of haphazardly placed forget-me-nots.
Her home, perhaps?
A real home. Not one that had been abandoned and neglected. Not one that had been cursed.
The next page revealed a portrait of a young woman. She resembled Charlotte after a fashion, though she was somewhat shorter and plumper, with pronounced freckles and a pair of delicate, round-lensed spectacles perched on her nose. She sat at a writing desk, a pen in her hand.
“Agatha,” Charlotte murmured.
Magnus gave her an alert look. “Is that her name?”
Charlotte nodded slowly. There was a vague flicker of memory in her eyes. “Y-Yes.” Her voice was uncertain. “I think she’s my sister.”
Magnus swallowed hard. “Do you—?”
“I don’t recall anything else. Not yet. But I do remember her face. And her name.”
A pit formed in Magnus’s stomach.
No, she hadn’t remembered everything. But it was a start. The first stone in the avalanche, Magnus suspected, with the rest sure to follow. Another moment and she would recall who she was. She’d recall who Magnus was, too.
Or, more to the point, who he wasn’t.
Something within him dreaded the turn of the next page.
It would be her intended, he was sure of it.
Either him or the fellow she was meant to have met today by the bridge.
A flashpoint to remind her of the sort of man she would really attach herself to.
Not an ill-tempered, unpolished brute. It would be a man who was handsome, decent, good.
But when Charlotte at last left off gazing at the image of her sister, when she finally turned to the next sketch, it wasn’t an elegant gentleman drawn upon the page, but an image of a fat tabby cat.
What had begun as a flicker of memory in Charlotte’s eyes leapt into a burning flame. Her features softened with unmistakable affection. “Mr. Aloysius.”
Magnus stared at her. “What?”
“Mr. Aloysius,” she said again. “He’s my cat.”
“Your cat?” Magnus’s prior apprehensions about her returning memory crumbled to dust. If that was the cat’s name, then who in blazes was the little beast hiding under the wardrobe?
And who was the man she was engaged to back in Somerset?
Good God. Perhaps her brains were well and truly scrambled after all. Or perhaps…
“Turner,” Magnus snarled.
Magnus returned Charlotte to the house on the pretext of her having exhausted herself.
It wasn’t entirely a ruse. She was visibly unsteady after her trek through the gardens, her face pale and her hands trembling as she clutched at the dubious treasures she’d found strewn among the brambles.
The basket, the sketchbook, and the novel.
Remnants of the person she’d been before she’d fallen from the wall and struck her head on the stones.
She offered no insight as to why her dog and her cat might share the same moniker. And she made no mention of her similarly named sweetheart. Magnus didn’t dare bring it up himself. Not when he had only Turner’s word for that sweetheart’s existence.
When Charlotte was safely settled back in his room, Magnus wasted no time in seeking out his useless worm of a valet. He found him in the kitchen indulging in a cup of tea.
“Not slacking, sir,” Turner said from his seat at the long, plank table. “Only fortifying myself for my next venture into town. Unless you’ve changed your mind about me going door to door—”
Magnus cut him off without preamble. “That letter you found in the garden yesterday. Where is it?”
“The letter, my lord?” Turner sat down his cup. “Why, I’ve got it, don’t I?” He patted the pocket of his coat. “Thought I’d show it to any folk I meet who think they might know the girl.”
Magnus extended an impatient hand. “Give it to me.”
Turner extracted the missive from his pocket. He handed it to Magnus with a puzzled frown.
Magnus unfolded the creased and soiled paper. His brow lowered as he read its contents.
Dearest Agatha, it began.
A letter to Charlotte’s sister, indeed.
Just as Turner had originally said, it contained aspersions about Magnus’s character.
Claims that he was an “evil gentleman” who had done “terrible things.” But Charlotte wasn’t making assertions.
It appeared she was merely repeating what she’d heard—and with a distinct air of doubt about the information.
Indeed, this wasn’t the writing of a crafty, arrogant, highbred young lady. It was the voice of a high-spirited, adventurous girl with a distinctly fanciful nature.
As to her sweetheart back in Somerset—
Please convey my regards to Mr. Aloysius (courtesy of a cuddle and a kiss). Tell him I shall be back with him soon. And do remember to give Artemis an extra bucket of mash when you ride her.”
Why the devil would Charlotte be asking her sister to give a “cuddle and a kiss” to Charlotte’s sweetheart? And in the same breath as she requested that same sister give a bucket of mash to a horse?
There could only be one answer.
Magnus felt an unaccountable wave of relief. “He’s not her sweetheart,” he said. “He’s her bloody cat.”
Or possibly her dog.
“Who’s her cat, sir?” Turner asked, bewildered.
And what about Charlotte’s secret rendezvous with yet another man at the bridge? Magnus poured over the pertinent lines.
I’m heading into the village this morning, and then to a very pretty bridge nearby where I mean to sketch and to read. An assignation, as you would say, with the person I like the best.
Who was it who Charlotte liked best? A person, she’d written, not a pet. But did it follow that it was a man? And if so, what were the odds that she’d share that scandalous fact so casually with her sister? Unless…
Magnus recalled the few times he’d overhead her voice echoing from his bedchamber in solo conversation.
He was surprised into a huff of amusement. “She’s talking about herself, by God.”
“I don’t follow,” Turner said.
Magnus shot him a look. “That much is abundantly plain.”
“Sir?”
“There’s no sweetheart, by the way.” Magnus lowered the letter. “And no secret lover awaiting her at a bridge.”
She was unattached, if Magnus had interpreted her words correctly. As for her character, it was reckless, whimsical, and infuriating, to be sure. It was also unimpeachable.
Which meant that he hadn’t been keeping a woman of questionable virtue in his house overnight. He’d been keeping a respectable young lady.
At least, she had been respectable when he’d found her.
But not anymore.
Now she was ruined.