The Temptation of the Night Jasmine pc-5

by Лорен Уиллиг

  “We had a difference of opinion,” said Charlotte tightly, not meeting her grandmother’s eyes.

  “Opinion, is it?” The Duchess exhibited her opinion of opinions with a hearty snort. “A fine time for you to choose to develop opinions, after all these years! Opinions have no place in making a match. If we were to let measly little things like opinions interfere with betrothals, who would ever get married? Answer me that!”

  Charlotte looked away. “It was more than a little opinion,” she mumbled. The habit of obedience died hard.

  The Dowager paid no attention. She shook her cane to the heavens like a wizened Lady Macbeth calling on spirits. “Do you think dukes just fall from trees? All my plans, all my efforts — all that money, bribing idiot roués to dance with you so Dovedale would think you had countenance. Sheep! Men are sheep! And I’ve never seen one yet that hasn’t let himself be led to the shearing. But never before have I seen a shepherdess run away from the sheep!”

  The metaphor didn’t quite work, but Charlotte’s mind was on other things. “You paid people to dance with me?”

  “Enough to keep your friends in fans and powder for a very long time,” said the Dowager grimly, as if reexamining an imaginary ledger. “And that’s just the men! Medmenham alone cost me five thousand pounds, the gilded weasel. Not that he didn’t earn it,” she admitted grudgingly. “I always say you get what you pay for.”

  “Medmenham did what?” Charlotte gaped at her grandmother.

  The Dowager rapped her stick impatiently against the uncarpeted floor. “You heard me, gel! Or is your hearing going, as well as your wits? I got Medmenham to lend a hand bringing your duke to the parson’s noose.”

  Charlotte’s head was ringing. Very slowly and very clearly she enunciated, “You offered Sir Francis Medmenham Robert’s money to get Robert to the altar.”

  “It was for his own good,” said the Dowager self-righteously. “Until you had to go and botch it. He needed a Lansdowne of the true line. And you — ”

  Charlotte broke in before her grandmother could inform her what she needed. It was the first time she could remember ever interrupting her grandmother, but she was too rattled to marvel at it. “Did it ever occur to you,” demanded Charlotte, “that he might propose to me of his own accord?”

  The Dowager just looked at her.

  “Of course,” Charlotte said shakily, her whole body beginning to tremble. “Of course not. I should have known.”

  “You should be thanking me, is what you should be doing,” said the Dowager stridently. “Did you think I would let the daughter of a duke marry anyone less than one?”

  “What of love?” asked Charlotte incoherently.

  Her grandmother leapt on her words like a gardener squashing a slug. “Love has no place in a marital alliance, you ninny. Do you think I loved Dovedale? Most certainly not! That would have been common. Bourgeois, even. We had a perfectly satisfactory partnership. It was your fool of a father who had to ruin it all by running off and marrying — ”

  Charlotte went stiff with rage. “Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say anything about my parents. They were lovely. And they loved me.”

  “Lovely,” muttered the Duchess. “Love.” She made it sound like the rankest sort of refuse. “Your mother ruined plans that were twenty years in the making, all for love. If your father had married the Belliston girl, we would have had a full quarter of Parliament in our pocket. Dovedale would have been greater than Marlborough, greater than Devonshire.”

  “They were happy,” said Charlotte tightly, not trusting herself to say more. The rich black and gold walls of the Queen’s breakfast room seemed to press in on her, too rich, too lush, a visual symbol of the pomp and power for which her grandmother had been willing to barter her only child’s happiness.

  “Happy?” snorted the Duchess. “Happy? They’re dead! Dead! And without an heir. All they left me was you.” And precious little I had to work with, her voice seemed to say.

  Charlotte remembered that tiny graveyard in Surrey, a narrow plot behind the pleasant stone vicarage. She remembered the small, curved headstone with the raw Roman lettering that had marked her baby brother’s grave. The heir. And behind it, like an echo, the larger stone that shaded her mother’s final rest. It was her brother’s birth that had taken her mother’s life. But it hadn’t been for the production of the heir. If he had lived, they would have loved him for what he was, for being a child and theirs, just as they had loved her, whether she was capable of inheriting Girdings or not.

  “If you had married Dovedale as you ought,” her grandmother was saying, “it would have put it all right. My great-grandson would have been next Duke of Dovedale. All you had to do was tell him yes.”

  Charlotte’s face felt as though it had been made of very fine porcelain that was starting to crack around the edges. Looking her grandmother straight in the eyes, she said very quietly, “But that still wouldn’t bring my father back.”

  Caught mid-tirade, the Dowager sucked in sharply, like the hiss of a snake against the lacquer walls.

  Charlotte didn’t need to see the crumpled flesh beneath her grandmother’s eyes, the sag beneath her cheekbones, to know the shot had struck home.

  She might have followed up her advantage, flung at her grandmother any of the stored-up slights of the past twelve years, but it didn’t feel worth the argument. Nothing was. With Robert gone, any victory would be a Pyrrhic one.

  It was all too much in too short a time, her grandmother’s machinations, Robert’s departure, the scene in front of the King, everything. All she wanted was to go home. Not to Loring House or to the room she had occupied on and off since her first Season at Dovedale House, but truly home, far away from London and Robert and the humiliation of knowing that a rake had been bought to pretend to court her — and that it had worked.

  “I would like to return to Girdings,” Charlotte said woodenly.

  The Dowager turned abruptly towards the door, her stiff petticoats slithering across the polished floor. She held herself very straight, presenting Charlotte with a view of her elaborately arranged gray hair, pinched and powdered in the style of an earlier generation. There was no softness in her stance, no yielding. She was every inch a duchess and every inch alone.

  “Do what you like,” she said brusquely, her back to Charlotte. “You will, anyway.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Springtime at Girdings had always been one of Charlotte’s favorite seasons. Not spring proper, but that period just before, when one awoke to find that the wind had softened, that the ground was soft and moist and dark, and that the still-bare tree branches bore tiny bobbles of buds that hadn’t been there before.

  At least, it had always been that way before.

  It wasn’t that Charlotte didn’t try; she did. She took long walks through the winter-bare gardens and forced herself to take deep bracing breaths, telling herself all the while how utterly lovely it was. She read poetry aloud to herself, as though by declaiming the lines to the empty library she might catch her own attention. She plunged into her old books as though the fate of the kingdom depended on the reading of them, plowing methodically through favorites that had never failed to excite her imagination before.

  It was no use. She had lost the key to that old enchanted land. The words on the page were simply that, nothing but print, flat and bare. The tournaments she had once attended, where richly caparisoned knights clashed for her favor, were closed to her, unidimensional pictures on pages that tore when she turned them too roughly. The heroes who had courted her, the villains who had menaced her in the Vauxhalls and Ranelaghs of half a century before had deserted her, and when she tried to make them speak, their plaster lips parroted platitudes in her own voice. Charlotte found herself dropping books unread by her bed, pacing lines in the flowered carpet that had never been there before and, on one particularly miserable midnight, dragging all the furniture away from the walls in an impulsive attempt at redecoration that inspi
red her grandmother to declare that she had gone mad and took three footmen to set it all right again.

  It was, Charlotte realized, not nearly so satisfying as she had remembered carrying on a conversation all by herself.

  As February dripped away into March, with dismal rains and chilling frosts, Charlotte was forced to admit that discretion might not always be the better part of valor. Maybe valor was the better part of valor. She had thought she was being so sensible, rejecting Robert — but what if she hadn’t been sensible? What if she had just been scared?

  Half a dozen times Charlotte took up her pen to write to him, but she foundered before she even completed the address. “Somewhere in India” wasn’t terribly much to go on. Penelope, on the other hand, was; Penelope, who was already halfway across an ocean. The prospect filled Charlotte with new energy. Once, her grandmother might have balked at the notion of allowing her to visit a friend a world away, but there were benefits to being in disgrace. Her grandmother had washed her hands of her. Noisily. Multiple times. And her grandmother adored Penelope.

  At the very worst, in India, she might come face-to-face with Robert across a drawing room and encounter only indifference, proof that his affections were the ephemeral product of circumstance, like a mist that dissolved in the heat of the sun. At least she would have tried. At least she would know, rather than fidgeting and pining and wondering about might-have-beens.

  On a misty morning in the middle of March, Charlotte tucked her writing desk under her arm and tromped out into the garden to compose a letter to Penelope. Little bits of damp clung like crystal beads to the yew hedges. The air was rich with the scent of damp, loamy earth and fresh-baked jam tart.

  Charlotte crunched to a halt right before stepping into the jam tart. She had no idea what a jam tart was doing in the middle of the path. It wasn’t even the right season for jam tarts. And yet there it was, unmistakably a tart and equally unmistakably filled with jam.

  The tart had been placed smack in front of her favorite bench, right there on the ground. It couldn’t have been there long or the birds would have been at it. As it was, a squirrel was already staring down a sparrow, each daring the other to make a run for it.

  Who left a tart on the ground like that? That it had been deliberately left was quite clear. Across the top crust, someone had painted an arrow out of raspberry jam. The arrow pointed down the path, past an amused Venus, straight to another jam tart. With another arrow.

  It was unicorn bait.

  Charlotte felt a crazy hope beginning to swell in her chest that had nothing to do with the promise of spring or the scent of loam and everything to do with the bizarre incongruity of a tart in the middle of a garden path, the sort of tarts a teenage Robert used to tease Cook into baking. They would lay them out just so, in a line to the edge of the woods, since Charlotte was firmly convinced that no unicorn could resist the lure of raspberry jam and that if they just waited long enough, one day they would see a shimmering silver steed nuzzling his way down the row of pastries, muzzle streaked with jam.

  The only person who knew about the tarts was far away across the seas, on his way to India. Wasn’t he? The only cause she had to believe it was his own departing salvo.

  No. Charlotte shoved her mist-frizzed hair back behind her ears. The whole idea was too absurd.

  But who else would lay a trail of tarts to catch a unicorn? Charlotte’s fingers tingled with nervous excitement. To catch a unicorn — or a lady?

  Depositing her writing desk on her bench, Charlotte followed the tarts. A third tart led down past the dry fountain; a fourth had been pecked but was still recognizable as leading towards the lake; and a fifth brought her across the ornamental bridge. By the third tart, Charlotte’s stroll had turned to a trot; by the fourth, a run. By the time she reached the bridge, she was flying, her skirt lifted high over her ankles and her unkempt hair flapping like a banner behind her.

  From the bridge, she could see a shadowy figure by the summer house, half reflected in the water. It was the form of a man, a tall man, in riding clothes, tossing bits of tart to the bad-tempered swans on the lake.

  He looked like something out of a picture, out of a tapestry, out of her imagination. Goodness only knew, she had daydreamed him often enough, imagining his step in every squirrel scurrying across the gravel in the garden, every sparrow pecking at the windowpane.

  Charlotte skidded to a stop a few feet away from him, lifting a hand to her chest as she struggled for air. He looked, at close range, astonishingly corporeal. Damp had darkened his hair and there was a splotch of raspberry jam on his buckskin breeches where a tart had tumbled wrong side down in the process of being painted.

  “Good morning,” he said tentatively, swinging his hat from one hand, and Charlotte realized that he was as nervous as she was, that the whole panoply of pies was as much a shield as it was an apology.

  “You didn’t go to India,” she said wonderingly. “You came back.”

  Robert tried to look debonair, but he nearly squished the brim of his hat with the force of his grip. “I heard the unicorn hunting was good this season.”

  Charlotte wondered how many sleepless nights it had taken him to come up with that line. It sounded as though he had been rehearsing in front of his mirror. The thought made Charlotte’s lips twist in a smile so fond, it hurt. But there was still one little question to be dealt with.

  “And if there aren’t any unicorns?” she asked, her heart in her eyes.

  Robert didn’t pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about. “I’m willing to take it on faith if you are,” he said seriously. He held out one gloved hand to her. There was a smear of jam on the palm. “Are you?”

  They had stood in just this tableau only a month ago, in the Queen’s chambers. Then, he had been poised and perfect, clothed in a king’s ransom of lace and velvet with a real King beaming on to give his blessing. Now they were alone, save for the irritated swans who squawked and pecked their opinions from the shallows of the lake. No King, no Queen, no courtiers. There was jam on his hand and goose droppings on his boots and the unmistakable spring odor of wet grass, new soil, and incontinent goose as he looked to her for her decision.

  This time, it was a question, not a command. And Charlotte finally knew exactly what her answer would be.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” she exclaimed, nearly incoherent with glad laughter, and launched herself across the space between them.

  The swans were squawking and the squirrels were gibbering, and somehow a tart got squished against the back of her dress in the confusion, but her arms were around Robert’s neck and his around her waist and they were both laughing and talking and kissing all at once and making so little sense that even the swans despaired of them and raised their tail feathers in derision.

  “ — love you,” he was saying, somewhat incoherently between kisses. It wasn’t the polished poetry Charlotte used to dream of, but it was more than declaration enough for her.

  “You came back!” she exulted, which seemed a perfectly sensible response at the time, and squeezed her arms so tightly around his neck that it was a wonder he wasn’t strangled on the spot. “You came back, you came back, you came back!”

  Laughing, he tipped her back and kissed her thoroughly, until her head was spinning and the clouds wheeled overhead in a gray blur and the malcontented mumblings of the local animal life sounded like the cheering of a crowd of loyal subjects.

  There was a bench by the side of the summerhouse and by unspoken accord, they wandered over to it together, collapsing onto the marble more by luck than design, since all their attention was entirely on each other.

  “Why?” Robert asked, his eyes devouring her face as though she were his own personal jammy tart and he hadn’t eaten for a fortnight. “What made you change your mind?”

  Charlotte looked at Robert. Not at the golden cousin she had adored in her childhood or the knight in shining armor she had imagined riding down the lane to Girdings on a cold Ch
ristmas Eve. Without even realizing it, she had bidden both of them farewell long ago. The Robert she knew was equally charming, but it was a charm meant to keep people at bay rather than to draw them close; the long, mobile mouth that spoke gallantries so glibly closed tightly around personal confidences. This man was more browned than golden, marked body and soul by those eleven years of which Charlotte would never quite know the whole.

  There were pockets of his soul she knew she would never quite know in their entirety, places he had been, demons he had borne, that were as alien to her as the carefully constructed fantasy world she had built for herself was to him.

  But, for some reason, they understood each other. And she understood, without having to be told, just how much it had cost him to decide to come back.

  “You came back,” she said. “You could have stayed away, but you chose to come back.”

  Robert made a wry face, as though contemplating the folly of his prior actions. “As you so wisely pointed out, I had been running away long enough. It was time to come home.”

  “Home to Girdings?” It was silly to feel jealous of a house, particularly one she loved so well.

  “Home to you,” he said, framing her face in his hands. “That’s the only part that matters. We can stay at Girdings if you like, or set up house in London, or explore the Outer Hebrides. I don’t much care where so long as you are with me.”

  “Girdings didn’t feel like home anymore without you here,” Charlotte confessed. “Not for all the books in the library. If you hadn’t come back, I was going to go to India after you.”

  Robert appeared inordinately tickled by the idea. “Riding on an elephant?” he suggested.

  “Sailing in a boat under the pretense of visiting Penelope,” Charlotte corrected. “I did consider the elephant, but they seem rather large. And I’m not sure they can swim that far.”