Chapter 2
Charlotte Pembroke came home with mud on the hem of her habit, wind in her hair, and the distinct impression that no one in the world had ever been made wiser by remaining indoors.
The morning had been all silver and green: wet grass glittering under a pale sun, hedgerows breathing out the scent of hawthorn and rain, the lanes soft enough to take the imprint of every hoof.
She had ridden farther than she intended, though this was often the case when no aunt scolded and no gentleman appeared with the tiresome conviction that a lady required either direction or rescue.
Her gray mare, Artemis, had been in one of her proud moods, tossing her fine head at every puddle as though the whole county had been arranged solely to offend her delicacy.
Charlotte understood her perfectly.
By the time Pembroke House came into view, standing square and faded among its beeches, the morning had lost some of its brightness and a skein of cloud had gathered above the chimneys.
It was a house that had once been handsome, and still remembered the fact with considerable dignity. She slowed Artemis before the stables and slid down before the groom could reach her.
“Lady Charlotte, you should not have gone alone so far,” young Will said, taking the mare’s rein with the anxious expression of a boy who had been instructed to object and knew perfectly well he would not succeed.
“And yet,” Charlotte replied, patting Artemis’ neck, “I have returned in one piece, and so has she. We must both be congratulated.”
Artemis stamped, as if in support. Charlotte smiled despite herself and pressed her cheek briefly against the mare’s warm neck.
She gave instructions for Artemis’ care, checked the mare’s leg herself despite Will’s wounded insistence that he was capable of the task, and then crossed the yard toward the house.
The front door opened before she reached it. Her father was standing inside the hall. That was the first sign of trouble.
Lord Henry Pembroke was not a man who lurked near doorways. He preferred comfort, conversation, and the illusion that difficulties might be made more manageable if approached after breakfast. Yet there he was, wearing an expression of such careful mildness that Charlotte’s heart sank at once.
“I had begun to wonder whether you meant to ride to Scotland.”
“Not before luncheon. The roads would be inconvenient.”
His mouth lifted, but the smile did not last. His eyes moved over her habit and the damp curls escaping beneath her hat. “You went alone.”
“I often go alone.”
“Yes,” he said with a sigh that held more affection than command. “That is precisely the problem.”
Charlotte stepped into the hall and handed her crop to the footman.
“I took the north lane,” she said, removing her hat. “Then the meadow path beyond Ashford brook. There was no danger unless one counts Mrs. Benton’s geese, and I assure you they were the more alarmed party.”
“Charlotte.”
The single word stopped her more effectively than any lecture. She looked at him properly then. Her father was still handsome in the worn, kindly way of men who had once been admired and had never learned to make a weapon of it.
His hair had thinned at the temples, and there were lines at the corners of his eyes which deepened whenever he smiled.
Charlotte loved those lines. They belonged to every bedtime story, every indulgent reprimand, every hour he had sat with her when fever or grief or childish injustice had made the world unbearable.
But this morning the lines seemed sharper. His color was poor. His hand, resting on the chair, tightened slightly against the carved wood.
Something was wrong.
“What has happened?” she asked.
“Nothing has happened.”
She frowned. “Then what is about to happen?”
He blinked. “My dear girl, must you always gallop straight at a subject?”
“Only when I see it attempting to hide behind furniture.”
A true smile touched his face then. He reached out and brushed a loosened strand of copper hair from her shoulder. “You are very like her when you speak so.”
Charlotte went still. He did not need to say whom he meant. In Pembroke House, there was only one her who could enter a conversation uninvited and change the temperature of a room.
Her mother.
“You must be cold,” he told her. “Come in. Have some chocolate sent up.”
“I am not cold.”
“You are damp.”
“Only externally.”
“Charlotte.”
She relented, but not because he had won. There were arguments worth having and arguments that merely bruised two people who loved one another. She crossed to the long pier glass near the stairs and began unfastening her riding coat.
The mirror gave her back a figure she knew well and did not always understand: tall enough to be inconvenient in a ballroom, fine-boned, cheeks bright from the wind, amber-brown eyes too direct for the comfort of several matrons, and hair of that unmistakable copper shade which had made strangers pause, then look toward the portrait gallery with recognition.
The green ribbon she wore for riding had loosened, as it always did, and now hung half undone against her shoulder.
She pulled it free. The moment the ribbon came away, her hair tumbled in a heavy, rebellious mass down her back. She gathered it impatiently, though not before her father’s gaze softened again.
“You should let Mary pin it properly before breakfast.”
“Mary would require twenty pins, two lectures, and half my will to live.”
She folded the green ribbon over her fingers. It was old now, faded slightly along the edges, but she wore it whenever she rode. Her father had once told her that her mother had favored that same deep green because it made her hair look like flame in a forest.
Charlotte was thirteen at the time. Since then, she had never quite been able to put the color away.
A sound of hurried steps came from the passage to the breakfast room, then Meg appeared. She entered as she did most rooms: already speaking, already indignant, and entirely without concern for whether anyone was prepared to receive her.
“Charlotte, I have been waiting this half-hour to tell you that you are the most provoking creature in England, and I will not be interrupted by your father saying I ought to begin with good morning, because it is not a good morning when one’s cousin insists upon risking her neck before the household has finished its toast.”
Charlotte turned. “Good morning, Meg.”
“No. I reject it on principle.”
Margaret Pembroke, known to everyone who loved her as Meg and to everyone else as Miss Pembroke until she encouraged them otherwise, came fully into the hall with her bonnet ribbons untied and her cheeks flushed from walking too quickly.
She was not beautiful in the formal sense that made poets tiresome, but she was warm, lively, brown-eyed, and possessed of the sort of expression which suggested she had already detected the joke and was only waiting to see whether others would catch up.
She looked from Charlotte to Lord Henry and narrowed her eyes.
“Oh. What is this? You both look solemn. Has she fallen? Has she offended someone? Has the mare offended someone? I warned you, Charlotte, that horse has the manner of a dowager duchess and twice the pride.”
Charlotte chuckled. “Artemis behaved with perfect dignity.”
“Then I am certain you did not.”
Her father cleared his throat. “Meg, my dear, you arrive in force.”
“I arrive with news,” Meg corrected, removing her gloves. “And also with a blister, which I shall mention again when I am less concerned with the fate of the county.”
Charlotte draped her riding coat over her arm. “Has the county misplaced itself?”
“In a sense,” Meg replied. “It has acquired a duke.”
The hall seemed, for the smallest instant, to take in the words and hold them. Her father looked away. Charlotte noticed.
Meg, who noticed a great deal but often pretended not to, continued with great relish.
“The Duke of Ravensmoor returned yesterday. Mrs. Vale heard it from the Pemberton coachman, who heard it from a groom at the posting inn, who saw the carriage himself and swears the duke looked exactly as a duke ought to look after years in London: dark, severe, and as though he disapproved of the weather.”
Charlotte unwound the green ribbon from her fingers and began folding it more precisely. “How reassuring for the weather to be noticed.”
“Charlotte, you cannot be indifferent.”
“I assure you, I can.”
“No one is indifferent. Lady Weston has already remembered that all three of her daughters are unmarried. Mrs. Carrow has ordered new lace. Miss Bell has been seen walking twice past the milliner’s in a bonnet that can only be described as an opening attack.”
Charlotte laughed, though lightly. “And what is required of me in this emergency?”
“Curiosity, at minimum.”
“Then I shall disappoint you. I remember very little of His Grace except that he was older, solemn, and once possessed a black pony no one else was allowed to touch.”
“I remember that pony,” Meg said. “It bit George Rutley .”
“That improves my opinion of it.”
“Charlotte,” her father commented with a mildness that returned too quickly. “The Duke of Ravensmoor is an important man in the county.”
“Then the county may admire him. It has more leisure than I.”
Meg gave her a look. “You speak as though dukes return every day.”
“No, but men do. They leave, they return, they are praised for both, and women are expected to rearrange their bonnets in gratitude.”
Her father’s gaze moved, just for a moment, across the hall toward the open door of his study.
Charlotte followed it. On the writing table within lay the household accounts ledger.
It was large, dark-bound, worn at the corners, and placed too near the edge as though recently opened and hastily abandoned.
A paper protruded from between its pages.
His eyes went to it and away again. No one else would have marked the movement. It lasted less than a breath. But Charlotte spent her life reading her father in the spaces where he did not speak.