Chapter 4
Four
For a few minutes, the relief of salvation had loosened Charlotte’s tongue.
Or had it been the brandy?
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken with such ease to any man. Ease? No—she’d been acutely aware of Mr Kernick as a man, rather than the tutor she glimpsed from afar once a week.
With him gone, she felt afraid and alone.
The cave no longer felt merely like a refuge; it felt like a mouth—stone lips closing behind him, swallowing his footsteps until she could not tell where the tunnel ended and her imagination began.
Salt hung in the air, sharp as tears. Each time the sea slammed against the rocks outside, the cavern shuddered, as if the earth itself were taking a breath and letting it go again in a long, angry sigh.
The lantern had thrown a brief, friendly circle of light when Mr Kernick had been beside her; now, without him, even the grey daylight filtering in from the entrance seemed mean and grudging.
Water ticked somewhere deeper in the rock—patient, persistent drops that mocked her impatience, her trembling, her need.
Need.
She pressed her hands to her arms, not certain whether she shook from cold or from the knowledge—terrible and exquisite—that they were, for the first time in three years, alone.
Another violent shiver seemed to erupt from her very core, when she’d almost forgotten the intense discomfort of her sodden clothing.
Suddenly the idea of interminable hours waiting for salvation, with heavy, wet wool against her skin, seemed intolerable. The weight alone was hard to bear.
And yet bear it, she must. Petticoats and chemise, round gown and pelisse, with Mr Kernick’ sodden cloak simply one more heavy, sodden layer that might freeze her to the bone.
But what alternative did she have?
He’d taken the lantern and although the grey skies illuminated where she sat huddled, shivering on a rock, the light was fading and she felt very alone.
And, inexplicably, like weeping.
Perhaps it was not inexplicable at all. A governess lived her life on the edges of rooms, the edges of conversations, the edges of other people’s happiness—useful, respectable, invisible.
Yet she had never been invisible to herself when Mr Kernick was near.
He had always been there, at a distance: a glimpse across lawns, a voice carried on air, a moment of eye contact that had lingered in her mind long after he’d gone.
She’d told herself it was foolish. That she was sensible. That she had learnt, very early, what became of women who let themselves want too much.
But the storm did not care for sense. Nor, it seemed, did her heart.
And then the tears came. A violent torrent of weeping. Something she’d not done since she’d been a girl. Not since she’d been sent off in the pony trap following the fever that had taken both her parents to earn her living at the tender age of eighteen.
“Miss Stanbridge, are you all right? I’ve found something!”
She leapt to her feet as she heard his voice, then tried to peer deeper into the tunnel, where the faintest glow could be seen.
And in that same moment, a little to the left, she saw another flagon, wedged between two rocks. Beckoning.
The smell of spirits—stale, smoky, unmistakable—had seeped into the stones long before they arrived, as if smugglers had bottled more than brandy in here: as if they’d stored danger itself.
Danger… And Temptation.
She’d taken a few sips from the flagon Mr Kernick had offered her earlier. But he’d seemed reluctant to give her more when she’d hiccupped and then hastily muffled the resulting giggle. And then he’d taken the flagon with him.
Seizing this newly discovered bounty, Charlotte uncorked it and took half a dozen lusty swigs.
For the cold, she told herself.
Then she took another few swigs.
For Dutch courage.
If she couldn’t give Mr Kernick sufficient encouragement when they were alone together, she never would.
Encouragement? When their lives were in danger?
Though wasn’t that as good a time as any?
She extended one leg and stared at her ankle, moving her gaze upwards as she tried to make sense of the thoughts, hopes, and fears jumbling about in her head.
No, she still couldn’t make sense of them as she heard him return, although she knew one thing: Mr Kernick made her body feel things that she couldn’t put into words.
She knew a second thing, too.
A kiss might very well be all that was needed.
A kiss, and the feel of his body pressed against hers.
“You’re very brave,” he told her as he lowered himself onto a rock opposite and held up something extraordinarily desirable to Charlotte.
A three-tiered man’s cape. And it was dry.
“I found several,” he said. “I think they’re stored her for situations like this. Now we can both get out of our wet clothes.”
The sentence resonated in the silence that followed before he added, clearing his throat, “Or we’ll catch our death from cold.”
His eyes flicked to hers, then away—as if the very idea of her unlacing so much as a ribbon beneath the same roof of stone was a temptation he refused to indulge.
But Charlotte had seen him, over the years, watching her in precisely the same way: quickly, as if ashamed, and then not at all—as if denial were a form of virtue.
He lay the garment over the rock by Charlotte. “I’ll leave the lantern here so you can see—”
“Where are you going, Mr Kernick?”
“You need your privacy, Miss Stanbridge.”
He said it like a man reciting scripture against sin. The devotion in his voice—his care—was its own kind of intimacy, and it made her ache in places she could not name in polite company.
“I need your help,” she said, presenting him with her back.
“Ladies often need help when—” She took a breath — “they are undressing.” Glancing over her shoulder, she ignored the incongruous sight of the raging sea beyond and smiled to see the visible response to her words.
Her head was swimming, but she felt the most extraordinary power growing within her.
So, she hadn’t imagined it. He was susceptible to her. Could it possibly be that he was simply as shy as she was?
“And,” she went on, “I have tiny buttons all the way from the back of my neck and with the fabric so wet and my fingers so cold, I can’t possibly undo them myself.” She sent him a look of entreaty. “You don’t mind?”
If the brandy lent her courage, it did not lend her confusion. She knew exactly what she was doing. She knew exactly whom she was inviting to do what, and why. The fact that his hands hovered a heartbeat before obeying told her he understood it too.
Yes, the brandy really was making her bold. Charlotte could no more have fluttered her eyelashes and injected a tone of suggestiveness into her voice as she had just now, than grow wings and fly, prior to this.
She glanced longingly at the concealed brandy flagon and wished she could have another swig before the effects wore off.
“I’ll take off my pelisse.” She tried to sound matter-of-fact, but nervousness more than cold made her voice tremble. “And then you can help me. It won’t take a minute, I promise.”
“We are not exactly in a hurry for anything other than the storm to pass.” His tone was dry.
“And I don’t think that will happen for some time.
Which is all the more reason for you to be rid of your–” He cleared his throat again, another note of embarrassment creeping into his tone as he changed tack, saying, “For you to put on something warm and dry.”
So, he thought it best to talk of her putting on clothes rather than taking them off.
The warmth from the back of Charlotte’s throat radiated throughout her body. She was barely aware of the heavy, damp petticoats dragging against her thighs as she shifted a little to allow him better access to the back of her neck.
When his fingers finally touched the first button at the nape of her neck, the contact was so light it might have been accidental—except that it wasn’t. It was gentle. It was deliberate. It was the kind of touch a man gave only when he’d imagined it before… and had fought that imagining like a sin.
Holding up her hair, which had fallen loose from its confines, Charlotte worked to remove the last of the pins, having discarded her sodden bonnet halfway down the cliff.
The warmth that had been so evident in the back of her throat from the brandy had taken up position somewhere lower.
It wasn’t a feeling to which she was entirely unaccustomed—though she was only conscious of it when Mr Kernick was in her vicinity.
It was one of the main reasons she’d told Mr Ravensby he’d have to wait for his answer. She just had to see the effect Mr Kernick had on her when next they met.
Granted, Mr Ravensby, as a wealthy widower, had reached a stage of life where he could indulge his fancies.
He wanted a young wife to grace his lovely home, and to tend to his wants and needs, she had heard it whispered.
With his children grown—a daughter recently married and a son at university — he would be an indulgent husband. Charlotte knew this.
She’d been keenly aware of his interest in the weeks leading up to his proposal and had had to pretend she didn’t know what Mrs Glendenning was referring to when her employer made not-so-subtle attempts to glean from Charlotte the state of her heart.
When this had fallen on deaf ears, Mrs Glendenning had been more forceful in reminding Charlotte how fortunate a lowly governess was to receive such an offer. At first, she’d pressed Charlotte to accept the following day.
Finally, she’d relented and agreed that, following Charlotte’s stay at Pencarrow Manor, the dinner which Mr and Mrs Glendenning were hosting ten days hence, would be an appropriate time to signal her acceptance.
“I beg your pardon!”
Charlotte, who’d closed her eyes in rapturous contentment as Mr Kernick’s fingers worked their way down her tiny buttons, opened her eyes in surprise at his apology, and turned.