“I would have liked to see a longer engagement, but I think perhaps you and the Baron are smart not to wait. People do like to talk.”
“Pardon?”
“The Vanderbilt back gardens were notorious already, dear. No need to add to their notoriety. Even in the excitement of an engagement.”
“Oh!”
She stared at her hands, not sure whether to laugh or cry from embarrassment. She should have nothing to be embarrassed about. Not only was she a widow—and she certainly wouldn’t be the first widow to take a lover—she had in fact been doing only what was necessary to secure the public awareness of the affection between herself and her apparent fiancé. Their kiss had been a sort of state secret. Only rather less secret than public.
“In his lap, Charlotte? Really? And to hear Lady Elliot tell it, his hand was halfway up your skirt and he was close to ripping your dress off with his teeth.”
“Mother!”
“I’m sure she exaggerated,” her mother said, her calm voice soothing Charlotte’s ruffled feathers as usual. “But I think soonest is probably best. So people won’t talk.”
About where the Makesmith Baron’s hand had been. Or his teeth. She didn’t explain to her mother that only one of those descriptions was at all exaggerated. He hadn’t been using his teeth at all just then. Not on her dress, anyway.
“People should find more interesting ways to occupy their time than inventing scandals.” Charlotte smoothed the dress out again and stood up, wandering over to her vanity and sitting down to fuss with her hair in the mirror. She allowed herself just a hint of smugness. “That little girl honestly thought she had a chance with Dexter, and her mother was foolish enough to encourage her. I imagine they were both having themselves a tantrum about being thwarted. Heaven only knows what the child thought she saw. And you know how these stories grow so quickly. They take on a life of their own.”
Her mother’s face appeared in the mirror over her shoulder, eyes narrowed. “Charlotte. You really did let him molest you in the garden, didn’t you? I would never have expected that kind of coarseness from you. I do like Baron Hardison, but I’m not at all sure he’s an appropriate match if he’s going to encourage this sort of behavior.”
Startled, Charlotte met the eyes that looked so much like her own and remembered that her father had married her mother for a reason. Lavinia Hardison put on a slightly vapid, vain façade, but she had never been stupid when it came to this sort of thing. She knew people far better than she let on, and Charlotte had a history of underestimating her mother to her cost.
“Dexter is the model of propriety, Mother.”
Not quite denying, not quite confirming any illicit behavior that might or might not have been encouraged by either of them.
Her mother sighed, a long-suffering sort of sigh that Charlotte hadn’t heard since before her marriage to Reginald.
“I must go. Please be careful, Charlotte. You know, I suspect I would be much less tolerant with you—or with him—if I weren’t so pleased to see you happy again after all this time.”
The embrace was swift, gardenia-scented, over before Charlotte could respond. Alone in her dressing room, she looked at her reflection again and tried to see what her mother saw. Happiness. But it was like a game of spot-the-difference with only one picture to look at. She couldn’t see what was there now, that hadn’t been before. She saw only herself, more or less the same as she had been for years. Charlotte thought mothers probably saw these sorts of things in their children, whether they were really there or not.
If she was happy, perhaps it was because she was finally about to attempt the work she had trained for, fulfill the purpose she had pledged herself to. For herself, and for Reginald’s memory.
* * *
THE HAND OF Silent Death had fallen into his customary postprandial snooze in the library the next time Charlotte and Dexter had a chance to speak privately.
“He’s worn himself out, poor thing,” Charlotte whispered archly, leading Dexter from the room and down the hallway to the conservatory. “Father’s quite exhausted from all his efforts to recruit you ever deeper into his network of intrigue.”
Dexter chuckled, the low tone resonating in the marble-paved corridor despite their efforts to be quiet. “Why the assiduous chaperoning all of a sudden? I must not have ruined you thoroughly enough at the Vanderbilts’, if your mother still believes there’s hope for what remains of your good reputation.”
“Oh, please don’t make fun,” Charlotte implored. “I know it’s tedious to string her along like this. I don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s necessary. One day she’ll understand.”
Charlotte thought her mother already suspected something was afoot, in fact. But she’d held her peace thus far, and the amount of gossip she’d spread about the happy couple had done more to solidify their cover than Charlotte and Dexter could ever have done themselves, had they all the time and dimly lit garden benches in the world.
She closed the conservatory door behind them and ventured farther into the room, until they were shrouded by foliage from any prying maternal eyes.
“You’re a grown woman and a widow. Doesn’t she realize I could simply visit you at your own home any time I liked?”
“She thinks she has spies in the ranks of my household staff. Here, come and sit. We can talk for a few minutes at least before it’s time for you to leave.” Charlotte sat on a wrought-iron bench, scooting to the end to leave ample room for Dexter. She enjoyed their talks, but had felt awkward and nervous with him since the night of their engagement. Now she was determined to remedy that by proving to herself that she could be alone with him and keep her head on straight.
“Your staff are loyal to you and not her, I take it?”
“To the Crown,” Charlotte corrected him. “Most of my staff are retired from government work. My late husband’s family had a longstanding arrangement with Whitehall, which I continue to honor, to provide work and homes for those agents in the Dominions who are unable to continue with field work, for whatever reason. The real wonder is that Mother never questions why so many of my domestics are sporting prosthetic limbs, or seem to do very little actual work. Most of the house is closed to visitors, of course. She’d be appalled to know it’s because the staff are living in it.”
“I suspect she knows more than you think,” Dexter mused.
Charlotte tilted her head, meeting his gaze curiously. She agreed with him in principle, but thought it was impressive that Dexter had figured out the ruse so quickly. “What makes you say that?”
“She’s not nearly as witless as she pretends to be. If she were, for one thing, your father wouldn’t pay as much attention to her as he does. I think they understand one another perfectly.”
“True. You’re very astute about people.”
“No.” He shook his head, laughing. “She just reminds me of my mother, is all.”
Charlotte couldn’t help grinning back at him. “Oh, if that’s all. You have my sympathies.”
“Perhaps one day you’ll be an equally devious mama.” He leaned closer and gave her a conspiratorial wink.
“Oh. I . . . oh.”
She sucked in a breath and tried to will her heart to stop its sudden mad thumping. Instead she caught a faint hint of Dexter’s characteristic spicy scent, and felt close to swooning as her mind whipped back to that evening at the Vanderbilts’. Her body tingled as if his hands were still roaming over it, as the idea of babies led swiftly and inevitably to thoughts of baby making.
Charlotte knew a moment of relief tinged with vague regret when it became clear that Dexter mistook the reason for her reaction.
“I’m sorry, Charlotte. Terribly sorry. It was thoughtless of me to suggest . . . had you and Reginald planned a family?”
He took one of her hands in his, throwing Charlotte’s senses into deeper confusion. She had to swallow twice before she could answer. “We had discussed it, of course. We’d thought we’d like t
o wait a few years. But after that, at least two. We were both only children, you know. Both of us thought it would be wonderful to have a sibling.”
“I’m fond of my brother and sister now, and I always imagine myself having three or four of my own one day, but I’m not sure I’d have agreed with you when we were all children. We fought like a pack of vicious little wolverines. I actually stabbed my brother in the back of the hand with a fork once, when he tried to beat me to the last pork chop.”
“You didn’t!”
“I did,” he swore. “He has a scar to this day. In my defense, I was only five at the time and he was a very large eight, so he was usually the one doing the injuring.”
Charlotte laughed despite herself. “I can’t picture you doing such a thing. You seem so level-headed now.”
“I was a horrible little boy,” Dexter confided. “When I wasn’t brawling, I was usually taking things apart to see how they worked, never mind that I had no idea how to reassemble them.”
“Yet. You learned at some point, obviously.”
“I learned a thing or two along the way. And stopped fighting. Or rather my brother did, when he stopped growing and I didn’t. He’s still a puny six-footer.”
She could picture it, Dexter grinning down with smug good humor at an older, shorter brother who declined to fight him; it was easy to imagine, even though she hadn’t met Dexter’s family yet. That would come soon, of course, but Charlotte was trying not to think about it just yet. It daunted her, the idea of deceiving that many people. Dexter had reassured her, with his customary geniality, that they would welcome her with open arms, and he himself would be the one to handle any unpleasantness on that front after their mission—and “marriage”—ended.
It wasn’t fair, Charlotte thought, that he should be handsome and personable and gallant. That she should yearn for his body even as she longed to talk to him about the mundane events of her day. In a way, that part was worse. She wanted to maintain a professional detachment, as she’d been trained to do. Dexter was a colleague, not a friend. In her experience, the two were mutually exclusive. It was best that way. Charlotte made herself recall a particularly grueling training session, a bivouac on some freezing mountainside in one of the northernmost Dominions. One of the other trainees had joked darkly about what they would do if the training exercise turned into a real survival test, if the snow continued to fall and they were unable to make their rendezvous to be transported back to the base camp.
“I vote we eat the young lady first,” the whipcord-thin agent-in-training had said, smirking in her direction. His name was Adams, but they all called him Weasel because he looked like one. “She looks tender.”
“And I’m chopped liver, am I?” the other female trainee, Beatrice, had countered. “Besides, ask McCormack there how far you’d get, trying to take down our Charlotte.”
McCormack, cocooned up to the tip of his long nose in his sleeping bag, had snorted loudly at that. “She’d have your guts for garters, Weasel lad. No joy there. Not for eating or anything else.”
Charlotte smiled fondly at the memory of her first mock combat skirmish with McCormack. He’d underestimated her. He’d learned never to do so again. Later that night he’d propositioned her outside the mess hall, and he’d learned never to do that again either. After that they got along quite well.
“Not for garters,” she corrected McCormack in her most ladylike voice. “For supper. And not the guts, I’d start with the organ meat. Probably the heart, as it’s the most nutritious. Even Weasel’s.”
She had meant every word of it.
She’d finished her field training well over a year ago. Weasel was a field agent now, last she’d heard. Beatrice and McCormack were both dead, along with another member of their squad, all killed in an exercise a few months after that chilly bivouac. An improperly placed piton had given way, three would-be agents whom Charlotte considered friends had plummeted to their icy deaths at the base of the cliff they’d been scaling, and Charlotte had learned why her father warned her not to view field training as a social occasion. Detachment in training was good practice for the job, he’d told her, because nobody ever knew in the morning who might be gone by evening.
It was a dangerous profession. Reginald’s death was hardly an exception. If anything it was closer to the rule, though she hadn’t known that when she’d married him. She’d been young enough to assume that he would live because he was hers, because she was not the sort of woman to whom terrible things like losing a husband happened.
Dexter, whose “training” consisted of a few extended briefings and a long weekend or two at a local armory, was meant to work primarily in the submerged station once in France, which should mean he was relatively safe. Otherwise, he would be even less likely than Reginald to make it back to New York in one piece.
He felt far too solid and alive next to her for Charlotte to believe for one minute he could die. His hands were warm on hers, his pulse steady and reassuringly strong where her fingertip rested lightly on his wrist.
“What are you thinking?” Dexter asked, his voice as soft and warm as the air in the conservatory.
That I’d like you to kiss me right now, and that I shouldn’t be thinking it.
Charlotte cleared her throat. “I was thinking it’s growing late.”
She pulled her fingers free and stood more abruptly than she meant to. She was flustered, out of sorts, her body’s lascivious impulses at war with both her heart and her head. Her heart said Dexter was dangerous because she was growing too fond of him, and it reminded her of Reginald. It wanted her to feel unfaithful, and reprimanded her when she didn’t. Her head said she needed to focus on the job, not on the doomed dilettante who was only along to fiddle with equipment and be her cover story.
Everything from her belly down to the crux of her legs, sadly, remained attuned to the big makesmith’s every move, like a compass to magnetic north. When he stood, she made herself take a step back. There was an awkward moment, her pulling away just as he offered his arm. Charlotte covered it poorly by pretending to cough into her gloved fist, then walking briskly toward the door as though she hadn’t noticed his gesture.
That night, back in the enormous house Reginald had left her, Charlotte sat at her dressing table contemplating a photograph of herself and Reginald at their wedding. He was seated, while Charlotte stood at his shoulder, resting one arm there. Just before the photographer told them to freeze, Reginald had lifted his hand to clasp hers. The moment was captured, as were the warmth in Reginald’s eyes and the hint of dimples by Charlotte’s mouth as she suppressed a laugh at something her new husband had just said.
She couldn’t remember anymore what it was he’d said to her, and the loss of that memory was like a physical pain to Charlotte. Like another little piece of herself slipping away. In her darker moods, she admitted to herself that she kept the photograph there to remind her what her husband had looked like, because if she was being absolutely honest with herself, his face was slipping from her memory. She hadn’t thought tonight was going to be one of those darker times, but apparently it was. She found herself deliberately trying to recall Reginald, his voice and face and touch, when she knew quite well it would do her no good.
Charlotte ran her fingers over the glass as she did every evening before bed. But this night, instead of pressing her fingers to her lips and then to the picture as usual, she pried the gilded frame open and slipped the photograph out to look at it more closely. It was warmer than glass, and softer to her touch, she found . . . but it was still just a face on paper. When she closed her eyes, she could see the photograph, but the man was gone.
This time she pressed her lips to the picture, dampening it with her breath and tears. The moisture made it tug against the glass when she put it back in the frame, but it didn’t matter anymore. She carried it to the bed, where she opened the bottom drawer of the nightstand that she’d always thought of as Reginald’s—even though they had never share
d this bed—and placed the photo carefully inside.
Closing the drawer hurt less than she’d expected.
* * *
KISSES AT WEDDINGS were public and fleeting. In Charlotte’s case, the kiss was also dulled by anticipatory champagne, applied in a liberal dose to numb her lips and calm the butterflies in her stomach prior to the event. Her lips weren’t so deadened that she couldn’t feel the heat of Dexter’s breath and the gentle press of his mouth to hers, but she attributed the mild tingling afterward to nerves and alcohol, and not at all to the kiss itself or the whisper of a smile on the groom’s striking face as he pulled away. For a moment they swayed toward each other, almost as though they might kiss again. The moment passed, but Dexter kept hold of Charlotte’s hand, his fingers entwining with hers as he led her down the aisle while their families beamed.
It was a small affair, with only a few dozen friends and relatives, conducted in the village church in the afternoon and followed by a reception and dinner at Darmont Hall. No dancing, no fuss, because she had been a widow, after all, although now she was technically Lady Hardison and a baroness.
The great bear of a smith looked even larger when they were alone in his steam carriage afterward. It was perhaps an hour’s drive to the hotel in the city where they would spend the night prior to embarking on the Alberta tomorrow morning. Their wedding had been timed with the Le Havre–bound ship’s departure in mind.
It was a very roomy carriage. It held Charlotte, and all the luggage that wouldn’t fit in the boot, and the huge Baron besides, with room left over. But it was very, very full of Baron by about ten silent minutes into the ride.
A gloomy, thoughtful Baron, Charlotte discovered, took up even more space. She had grown accustomed to his deep, gentle voice and the surprisingly witty banter that had sprung up between them. She had grown accustomed to his attention too, she realized, even though she was scarcely entitled to it. It was petty of her to miss it. Why should he dance attendance on her here, after all? There was nobody else to see them now.
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