Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
“No wonder you won’t answer to your name,” Charlotte said to the little dog. “It’s not your name at all, is it?”
The dog’s feathery black paws were just visible from beneath the wardrobe. His small muzzle rested upon them—revealing the dampness of his nose and the curl of his snaggled lip.
Charlotte counted it as progress. He was coming to trust her, if only a tiny amount.
“What is your name, then?” she asked him. “I’ve scoured my head and I still can’t recall it.”
Her muddled head.
Yet not so muddled any longer that she couldn’t recall a tabby cat named Mr. Aloysius.
Or a sister.
“Agatha,” Charlotte murmured to herself as she paced to the bedroom window. “My older sister, if I’m not mistaken. And very dear to me.”
Drawing back the curtain, she peered through the murky glass. There was no longer any sign of Magnus below. He must have moved on to another part of the garden, digging up the earth as he looked for—
Whatever it was he was looking for.
Charlotte sighed. “Oh, why can’t I remember anything else?
” She let the curtain fall closed again.
“Why must it come back to me in these unsatisfying drips and drabs?” Returning to her bed, she directed a look at her dog.
“If only you could talk, my friend. I daresay you would be able to tell me all.”
The dog made a snuffling sound.
Charlotte sank down on the edge of the mattress. She was so entrenched in her own thoughts, she didn’t hear the approaching footsteps outside her door. The knock, when it came, startled her.
“Er…Yes?” she called out uncertainly.
“May I come in?” Magnus asked.
Charlotte frowned. Her husband had never knocked before. Nor why should he? This was his room too, after all. “Of course,” she said.
Magnus entered. He was no longer in his shirtsleeves. He had put on a black wool coat and tie. His posture was more rigid than usual, and his countenance sterner. Granted, Charlotte had never felt they’d really known or cared for each other before, but now…
He looked entirely like a stranger.
The little dog retreated farther under the wardrobe, concealing himself from Magnus’s view.
“You’re not in bed,” Magnus observed, shutting the door behind him.
“I was for a time,” Charlotte said. “I grew too restless.”
“Your head is better?”
“A little. It still aches, but…” She trailed off as he approached, forgetting what she’d been saying.
He’d told her yesterday that she could call him Lord Eversleigh, or Captain Sterling, or Magnus. The significance of the second option hadn’t occurred to her then. She’d had far too many other concerns on her mind. But now…
As Magnus came toward her, he looked every inch an officer. Straight-backed, decisive, deeply intimidating.
Is that how he’d earned his scar? In some battle or another?
He gestured stiffly to the window seat. “Will you sit with me?”
Charlotte bit her lip. Why not here on the bed? she nearly asked. And she might have done if her husband wasn’t behaving in such an oddly formal manner. It put her distinctly on her guard.
“If you like,” she said.
Rising, she crossed to the window. Magnus followed her at a distance.
He remained standing until she sat down.
Only then did he join her on the upholstered seat.
The modest window embrasure was dwarfed by his great size, making the space feel at once too small and far too close. It was a trifle difficult to breathe.
“Has something happened?” she asked.
Magnus didn’t prevaricate. “Yesterday morning, shortly after your fall, Turner found a letter of yours in the garden.”
“Of mine?” Her mouth tilted with bemusement. “Was it something I’d written to you?”
“Not to me. To your sister.”
Her smile faded.
“It had no envelope,” he said, “and no direction. Presumably, it was in the basket you’d been carrying, waiting to be posted. Turner read its contents and conveyed the particulars to me.”
“Turner read my letter?” Charlotte was appalled. “Why would he—”
“To ascertain the facts of the situation,” Magnus said.
“Inaccurate facts, as it turns out. Which is my fault. I should have insisted on reading the letter myself. But I confess, I was too cross to be bothered with it. Which is why I accepted Turner’s findings as gospel.
The first of my mistakes, as it happens. ”
“I don’t understand.”
Magnus’s jaw was tense, as though he was steeling himself. “I trust this will help.” Reaching into the inner pocket of his coat, he withdrew a folded letter.
Charlotte’s brows lifted as she took it from him. She looked from the letter to Magnus’s face.
“Read it, if you please,” he said.
Her stomach trembled. Goodness. It was sure to be something dreadful, wasn’t it?
More dreadful than the facts as she’d already ascertained them.
That she had a dog who was afraid of her, a husband who found her a nuisance, and that she had a propensity for foolish behavior like climbing up onto enormous garden walls.
“I don’t think I can bear to find out anything worse about myself,” she remarked in a feeble attempt at humor.
“It’s not your opinion of yourself that will be worsened by this,” Magnus said.
Charlotte’s attention lingered on him a moment longer before returning to the letter. She slowly unfolded it. Mustering her courage, she began to read.
Magnus watched Charlotte’s face as she pored over the words she’d written. He marked every notch of her brows, every tremor of her mouth, the way her dark lashes fluttered as her gaze moved down the page.
She wasn’t just pretty, he realized with an aching twinge of regret.
She was beautiful. And not only because of her eyes and her hair and the elegant turn of her countenance.
It was because of her soul. A soul that had shone out to him from her letter more clearly than it had from their brief interactions.
The girl who’d written those words was a creature of courage, of imagination, of limitless affection. Willing to dare all. To risk all.
And here he was with her in his father’s old bedchamber. The two of them seated in an antiquated window embrasure, half hidden by dust-laden draperies, amid a decade’s evidence of rot and neglect.
Magnus well recalled this room. This seat. On any other occasion, he would doubtless be plagued by unpleasant remembrances.
But not now.
In this taut moment, with her ruffled skirts bunched against his leg and her faded perfume whispering to his senses, he scarcely registered the dust and the damp.
Barely recollected the dark days before his disgrace.
Charlotte—irritating, ill-timed, inconvenience that she was—had temporarily blotted it all out.
By what cruel quirk of fate had she fallen into his power? And through what misguided attempt at chivalry had Magnus unwittingly made everything worse?
As if it could be any worse.
“I’m staying with the Champions?” Charlotte murmured to herself. “But I thought…”
He waited for her to complete her words. To turn to him with a look of accusation. To say, but I thought we were married.
She didn’t.
Her sentence remained unfinished, the furrow in her brow growing deeper with every line she read.
Magnus’s shoulders bunched with tension. It was all he could do not get up and stalk from the room. To leave her and this quagmire behind, and to flee, just as he’d done all those years ago.
But unlike the catastrophic scandal of his youth, this mess was one of his own making. He’d be damned if he ran.
No. This time he was going to face his failings like a man of nearly thirty, not as a stripling lad.
“Artemis,” she whispered to herself. “My mare.”
“So it seems.”
“And Mr. Aloysisus.”
“Your cat,” Magnus concluded.
Her eyes lifted to his. They held a new wariness. “And you.”
“And me,” he repeated grimly.
Charlotte’s face had gone pale. “Not my husband.”
Magnus looked steadily back at her. “Decidedly not your husband.”