Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Charlotte stared at Magnus, temporarily speechless. Her heart was beating in her ears like a drum. She didn’t know what to think. What to say.
Magnus appeared similarly affected. His throat was mottled red. His muscles tense, and his jaw hard as granite. He was upset, to be sure. But not angry, she didn’t think. Not with her anyway.
“You should go,” he said roughly.
No three words could have acted to quiet Charlotte’s pulse more effectively.
If Magnus were really a danger to her—or to anyone—he wouldn’t be so eager to send her away, would he? And he hadn’t confessed to killing the Farr family, after all. He’d only admitted to feeling responsible for their deaths. The two things were very different to Charlotte’s mind.
“You should sit back down,” she told him. “And it’s not Miss Beresford. It was Charlotte before I upset you and Charlotte it must remain.”
He didn’t speak. Neither did he return to his chair.
“Really, Magnus,” she said with a trace of exasperation. “You must sit down again. It makes my neck ache to look up at you in this irritating way.”
His taut countenance was transformed by immediate concern. Another scowl swiftly followed. As if every lapse into tender feeling must be masked by an even greater display of ill temper.
He returned to his seat, making a great clatter about the business. “We’re not having this conversation.”
“So you said the last time I broached the subject.”
“So I meant.” The coldness of his tone gave every indication that he considered this his final word on the subject.
Beneath the table, Chance nudged Charlotte’s knee with his nose.
She tore off another piece of bread crust for him, wordlessly dropping it to the floor.
It was quieter now. And not only between her and Magnus.
There were no more sounds of hammering or splintering boards either. Turner must have given up his labors.
Charlotte didn’t care for it. Prolonged silence during a disagreement made everything worse.
Hearts hardened, poor opinions became fixed, and prejudices grew beyond all proportion.
The only solution was to talk to each other.
Charlotte was sure of it. She was accustomed to expressing her emotions with words, even if those words were only to herself.
Picking up the small knife, she methodically buttered another piece of bread. She spooned some jam atop it. “If you don’t tell me what happened,” she said, “all I have to go on is everyone else’s version of the story.”
Magnus ran a hand over the back of his neck in frustration. “Why do you want to know? What difference can my version possibly make to you?”
She handed him the bread she’d prepared. “Because you’re my friend.”
Magnus’s expression fractured. “Friends?” he echoed bitterly.
She nudged him again with the bread until he finally took it. “You needn’t say it in such a disparaging way.”
Sunlight filtered through the grease-streaked window. It cast Magnus’s scarred face in harsh relief. “You don’t know me, Charlotte.”
“I think I do.” She returned to her cup of tea. “You saved my life. And you treated me kindly.”
“I threatened to shoot you.”
“You’ve convinced Chance to like you. Dogs are discerning judges of character.”
Chance looked from Charlotte to Magnus. His tail quivered hopefully.
Magnus frowned at the little dog. “I’ve made him my prisoner. He has no choice but to like me.”
“I wasn’t your prisoner.,” Charlotte pointed out. “What’s my excuse?”
An inexplicable emotion flickered in Magnus’s gaze. It was gone as quickly as it came. “You were,” he said. “For a time.”
“It didn’t feel that way.”
“Because you didn’t know who you were.”
“But now I do.” She raised her cup to her lips, confident in her reasoning. “I still came back, didn’t I?”
“You did,” he grumbled as he bit into his bread. “I begin to question your intellect.”
She smiled briefly. “If you think you can discourage my questions with childish insults, you may think again. Recall, I have two older brothers.”
“I could scarcely forget the fact.”
“I may not remember everything about them, but I know that they teased my sister and me mercilessly. We’re well armored for it.”
Magnus didn’t reply. He was unusually focused on his bread and jam. Anything rather than engage with her on the subject of his past.
Charlotte sipped her tea until he finished eating. She could see from his face that he was no more disposed to confide in her than the first time she’d mentioned the scandal. It didn’t prevent her from trying once more. “Won’t you tell me?” she asked gently.
His brows lowered. “Charlotte…”
“You’ve already admitted to there being another version.
Your version. I simply wish to hear it.” She refilled his cup.
The tea wouldn’t be hot any longer, but that wasn’t important.
It was the gesture that mattered. It was another sign of her friendship.
Her willingness to listen. “That’s not too much to ask, surely, given all that we’ve been through together?
For you to tell me what really happened all those years ago? ”
Magnus frowned as he took the proffered cup from her. Never had she seen him looking so somber. So pensive.
At length, he exhaled. It was as weary a sigh as she’d ever heard. “There are two schools of thought on the matter,” he said.
Charlotte straightened in her seat. Her every attention fixed upon him. She didn’t speak. Not yet. She had the feeling that a single wrong word on the subject would silence Magnus forever.
“The villagers would tell you that I courted Miss Farr with a view to marrying her,” he continued.
“They would say that, when confronted by her family about my intentions, I unilaterally disavowed them.” He returned his teacup to the table without taking a drink.
“My version of the story is somewhat different.”
Charlotte’s stomach tightened with mingled anxiety and anticipation. The very air around them was thick with tension. She rather thought she could hear a pin drop.
“It doesn’t change anything,” he said. “I’m guilty all the same.”
She huffed at his abrupt demurral, unable to hold her tongue. “Yes, but guilty of what exactly?”
Magnus’s mouth twisted at one corner in a bitter parody of a smile. “Of kindness.”
Had anyone told Magnus a month ago that, in the very near future, he’d find himself sitting in the kitchen of Moorcross Manor, across from the loveliest young lady he’d ever beheld, discussing the darkest part of his life, he’d have thought them mad.
Yet, here he was.
And here Charlotte was. She didn’t seem inclined to go until she had her answers.
Loathe as Magnus was to give them to her, he supposed it could do no real harm. He wanted her to leave, didn’t he? And what better method to drive her away than to tell her the unpleasant truth about his past?
The trouble was…
He was no longer sure that he wanted her to leave.
Even if the whole of their acquaintance was built on a lie.
Had been built on a lie from the first. Yes, even then.
It was too easy to succumb to the lovely fiction of it all.
Seated with her, having tea and conversation, as if they truly were friends.
Or perhaps something more.
Which they very well might be once news of her having spent the night with him was trumpeted abroad.
Yet another reason to hesitate. If they were obliged to wed purely to redeem her tarnished honor, did he really want her thinking the worst of him?
It was bad enough that she might find herself shackled to a beastly excuse for an earl, with no grand house and no great fortune to his name.
No handsome face, either. The very least he could give her was an unblemished account of his past.
But what use were more lies to either of them?
“Kindness?” Charlotte repeated. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Magnus agreed. “But then, you didn’t know my father.”
She waited for him to go on, still unnervingly attentive. Magnus had the sense that her blue eyes could see to the very heart of him.
What heart there was left.
“He used to keep this place as finely as a palace,” Magnus said.
“A fleet of servants, imported wall hangings, hampers of food brought specially from London. It was partially in honor of my mother. She began restoring the estate when they married. She was known for her exquisite taste. After her death, my father was consumed with maintaining her legacy. Improving upon it as well. There was nothing too fine for the house or too costly for the gardens. He spared no expense.”
Charlotte cast a sidelong glance at the dilapidated kitchen around them. She didn’t have to ask what happened. The question was plain on her face.
Magnus speared his fingers through his hair.
“My father believed in tradition. He thought we Sterlings were a cut above everyone else. We can trace our lineage back centuries, he used to say. Who in Yorkshire can boast the same? There’s not a one who’s worthy to be entertained in our smallest parlor. ”
She winced. “Did you feel that way too?”
He shook his head. “No. I considered myself too modern for such distinctions of class. It was one thing in London, but here… I believed it better for us to live with our Yorkshire neighbors as equals.” He paused. “It was my fatal mistake.”
Her expression sharpened with alertness. “What do you mean?”
“One day, I was driving home from a visit to Upper Beadwell when I passed Miss Farr on the road. She was returning from the market, struggling with an armful of packages. Her father had a carriage, and plenty of servants to have accompanied her. But that day, she was alone. I don’t know why.
Perhaps it was a trap from the first and I too na?ve to have spotted it?
Regardless… I had my driver stop the carriage and I offered her a ride. ”
Charlotte’s countenance went a shade paler. Or possibly it only seemed that way to Magnus because he knew what came next.
“Squire Farr was a widower, and a very rich man by local standards. The chief landowner aside from my father. He had great aspirations for his two children, especially for his daughter. I never imagined they would be in my direction.” Magnus uttered a harsh laugh.
“Which just goes to show how skin-deep my belief in equality was. For all my modern thinking, it didn’t occur to me that Miss Farr might reach so high as to consider me a potential suitor. I was blinded by my own arrogance.”
Charlotte studied his face. Her own was unusually grave. “What happened?”
Magnus vaguely registered that his palms had dampened. Bloody stupid. The events had occurred eleven years ago. A different time. A different life. It had no bearing at all on who he was in the here and now.
Yet, it didn’t feel that way in the telling. His mere recitation of the facts resurrected the past for him as vividly as if it had happened yesterday.
“Nothing then,” he said. “I had my driver set her down at the Farr’s house, that was all.
But their servants saw it. So did her older brother, Jeremiah.
That Sunday, in church, Miss Farr joined us in our pew.
It was on some pretext or other. We didn’t object.
It had been fifteen years since my mother died.
I rather think my father was flattered by her attention. ”
Chance pawed at Magnus beneath the table. Charlotte pulled the little dog closer to her by his lead. She dropped him another scrap, her eyes never leaving Magnus’s. “She must have been a very pretty girl.”
“I didn’t see her that way. I didn’t see her at all.
More of my arrogance, I daresay. I was for university, then travel abroad.
Marriage was for later. I had no particular lady in mind.
” Magnus turned the handle of his teacup watching the tea swirl slowly within.
“Twice more I encountered her in need of help. Once at a village fete when she required assistance with her rowboat. And once more on the road when I again—stupidly—offered her a ride, this time in an open gig. Within a month, news had reached my father’s ears of a potential engagement. ”
“Had you proposed?” Charlotte asked.
Magnus’s brows snapped together in a scowl. “I bloody well hadn’t.”
“Then—”
“It never occurred to me that she was angling for a proposal. The very idea of it—a farmer’s daughter and the heir to an earldom.”
“It’s not unheard of.”
“For my father it was.” Magnus leaned back in his chair.
“My mother was the daughter of a viscount. I never knew her. She died when I was still in leading strings. But my father waxed rhapsodic about her at every opportunity. Her grace. Her poise. Her elegant manner. He wed her in London and then set her here like a jewel. Her death…”
“What about her death?”
“I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t the spark that ignited his madness.”
Charlotte’s mouth fell open. “But he wasn’t mad, surely?”
“Look about you, Charlotte. Would a sane man have let his home descend into this state? Granted, he kept it up as long as he could. Constantly striving to have the best. To be the best. To him, reputation was all. He expected me to uphold the same standards.”
“In other words—”
“In other words,” Magnus said, “he was outraged to learn of the gossip about Miss Farr and me. He demanded to know what I had promised her. I assured him that I’d made no promises, and that I would disabuse Miss Farr of the notion at the first opportunity.”
“But if she genuinely believed you had intentions—”
“Miss Farr was a great reader of novels.”
Charlotte’s gaze narrowed. “I’m a great reader of novels.”
“Romance novels?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “What has reading to do with it? You’re not claiming that—”
“Arabella Farr imagined herself a figure in a romance,” Magnus stated. “It was the very thinking that inspired all of the helpless-damsel traps she set for me. And I—oblivious, arrogant, and too preoccupied with my own affairs to properly guard myself—unwittingly fell straight into them.”
Charlotte fell silent again. A look of faint disapproval was nevertheless evident at the back of her eyes. “So, you informed her that you had no regard for her?”
“I did.”
“I find that rather cruel.”
“The truth often is,” Magnus said. “Though, I confess…I did attempt to state it without excessive brutality.”
“How did she take it?” Charlotte asked.
Picking up his cup, Magnus downed a swallow of cold, bitter tea. “Badly.”