To Seduce a Stranger

by Susanna Craig

  But then he was there, stepping between her and the stranger. “Are you harmed, Charlotte?”

  Once more, Edward had come to her rescue at this ramshackle inn. But what was he doing here? Had he been searching for her? Her head told her it was the cruelest of coincidences. Her heart, however . . .

  “I’m fine.” Pushing up from the rough carpet, she came unsteadily to her feet. How had she ended up on the floor? Had she really fainted? How humiliating.

  She turned to the stranger. “I suppose you were sent by my stepson? Even though I begged him to call off his dogs.”

  “You are the Duchess of Langerton, then?” he asked.

  She nodded before recalling that she had meant never to answer to that title again.

  “Oh, thank God,” the man murmured, his lower lip beginning to tremble. “I’ve found you at last. No, I was not sent by the duke.” The suggestion seemed almost to offend him. “I tried more than once to enlist his help in finding you, but he could—or would—offer me no assistance.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “James Winstead,” he said, with an old-fashioned bow. “Earl of Belmont.”

  Charlotte swept one hand behind her, feeling for the bedpost, gripping it with all her might. “My . . . father?”

  “Have you proof?” Edward demanded of the man as he jerked around to face him.

  “Oh . . . well, yes. I have papers, and other things that will attest to the fact that I am who I claim to be. And my sister, Lady Penhurst, knows me.”

  Finding the bedpost insufficient support, Charlotte allowed herself to sag against the bed itself. “This cannot be.”

  Edward took a step closer, warmth and understanding in his eyes. “You’ve sustained quite a shock, I know. It is not every day one recovers a parent believed to be lost forever.”

  With those words she could guess that her parting instructions to Garrick had been followed. “Was I right about Tessie?”

  He took one of her icy hands in his warmer one and squeezed, as if words could not convey what he felt. “Yes. But all that can wait. For now, talk to your father, Charlotte.” Her fingers slipped from his grasp as he turned toward the door. “Pardon my interruption,” he said with a nod to each of them.

  “Please,” she whispered, “don’t go.”

  “I won’t be far away. If you need me, you have only to call.”

  When the door latched behind him, she returned her attention to her father, who was studying her with his head tilted to one side. “From the moment I laid eyes on you in Bath, I knew,” he said. “There’s something of your dear mother in your face and in your bearing.”

  Those words brought forth an unexpected surge of strength, fueled in large measure by anger, forcing her to her feet again. “My dear mother? The poor woman you got with child and then abandoned?”

  “I did not abandon her,” he insisted. Then, more softly, “Or at least, I did not mean to. We were living just outside Paris. I was called half a day’s journey away on business. Her time was not yet so near that I felt a risk in going. But I should’ve known better than to have trusted her brother. He’d been against us from the start. When I returned, delayed some days by bad weather, the nuns at the hospital showed me your mother’s cold form, told me the babe she carried had never even drawn breath . . .” He shook his head, as if trying to dispel a particularly tenacious memory. “They must have given you into her brother’s care, but how was I to have known? I had no will left—even to doubt. Grief struck me like a fever. Once I recovered my senses, I left France, headed east. Across Europe, through the Levant. All the way to China. Twenty years of wandering. An adventure, to be sure, though it never succeeded in making me forget what I had lost.”

  “You ran away.” She made no effort to keep the accusatory tone from her voice.

  The notion seemed to catch him by surprise. “I . . . I suppose you could say that. I think that deep down”—he sounded exhausted—“deep down, I hoped I would die, too. A bandito’s knife between the ribs, some exotic illness. But I enjoyed no such luck. The worst I ever suffered was a fall from my horse,” he said, nodding down at his left leg, which stuck out stiffly at an awkward angle. “Broken crossing through the Khyber Pass. Took months to heal. But left me with nothing worse than a limp.”

  Occasionally—when she was not grumbling about the thoughtlessness of people who ran off, expecting others to clean up the messes they left behind, without so much as a word of thanks—Aunt Penhurst had wondered aloud if her brother might not be dead. Then a letter would arrive from some faraway place where a reply was unlikely to reach him. Although those rare pieces of correspondence never inquired after his daughter, they did confirm his continued existence.

  Charlotte had never considered that he might know nothing of hers.

  Feeling the first stirrings of pity, she waved him toward the only chair in the room, into which he settled with a sigh of gratitude. The faint light coming through the window made it easier for her to take in his weather-beaten appearance, his hair flecked with silver. The places to which he had traveled over these last twenty-five years had not treated him kindly. Though she knew he could not be much older than fifty, no one who saw him now would believe it. His adventures, as he called them, combined with the shock of his recent discoveries, had left him rather the worse for wear.

  Absently, she reached for her mother’s book, her last connection to the woman who had brought her into the world before leaving it herself. “Yes, I was raised by my mother’s brother in Rouen. He was . . . never kind,” she whispered, tracing one finger across the book’s battered cover. “He never let me forget what had become of my mother. What becomes of the sort of woman who acts with her heart and not her head.”

  The sort of woman she had become, despite her best efforts to the contrary.

  “We were impulsive,” her father acknowledged, sounding chagrined. “Marrying though we had known each other such a little time. But—”

  The book nearly slipped from her hands to the floor. “Y-you were m-married?”

  “Oh, yes. I persuaded her to elope with me to Guernsey. By marrying in the Church of England, I hoped to ensure that our union would be recognized here. When we returned to Paris, we planned to wed again, according to the rites of her church. I wanted there to be no objection, on any score. But we could find no priest sympathetic to our plight.”

  “My uncle always claimed there was no marriage of any sort.”

  Her father’s face settled into harder lines. “From the first, her brother tried to convince her I had played her a wretched trick. She showed him her copy of our marriage lines, but he insisted they were forged. Afterward, I urged her to put them in a safe place, so that he would not try to destroy them. So that if anything happened to me, she would be able to prove she was my wife. I watched her—” His eyes fell on the book resting against Charlotte’s thigh. “Is that—? Did that book once belong to your mother?”

  With an uncertain nod, she held it out to him, and he took it reverently with both hands. “Ah, my darling,” he breathed, whispering to a ghost. Lifting the cover with his thumb, he traced over the flyleaf with the fingers of the other hand, as Charlotte herself had often done, though the intricate, inked design had been smudged beyond legibility long before she had been able to decipher it. “You see,” he said, displaying the page to her. “S.C.W.—Simone le Clerq Winstead. My wife.”

  “By itself, that proves very little.”

  “Yes, but . . .” He opened the book wider; she winced at the cracking sound. Into the narrow channel between the bound edge of the pages and the brittle leather spine, he slipped one finger, withdrew a carefully folded sheet of paper, and handed it to Charlotte. “This, I think, will attest to the truth of my story—the truth of yours, as well.”

  Carefully, she unfolded the yellowed parchment and saw, in formal script, the record of her parents’ marriage.

  Once more, she leaned heavily against the quilt-covered mattres
s, overwhelmed at the discovery. By joy, yes, because one scourge had been lifted. But also by sorrow. Sorrow at the loss of her mother. At the indignities Charlotte had suffered all her life because she was believed—wrongly, as it turned out—to be illegitimate.

  “I will not ask for your forgiveness, daughter,” he said, holding out the book. “I have done nothing to earn it—as yet. But I mean to try.”

  With a shaking hand she took the book from him, uncertain what else she might be willing to accept. Her father’s return might mean another chance to build a family, another chance to be loved. Or it might mean more heartache.

  Despite the difficulty posed by her trembling fingers, she managed to fold the parchment and slip it between the pages of the book. “May I ask why you returned?”

  “At some point, a man grows tired of adventure. I decided it was time to come home.”

  It was, she sensed, a partial explanation. But she did not blame him. Nor did she press him for more than he was able to give. What would Edward’s reply have been if she had asked him the same question?

  “When I arrived in England a fortnight ago,” her father continued, “I went first to my sister. It was she who informed me of the misunderstanding under which I had been laboring all these years. You were alive, she said, and recently married to the Duke of Langerton. By the time I arrived in Bath and tracked down his place of residence, however, he had died. I came to find you, to offer what comfort I could, but the servants told me you’d left, gone back to London. I followed you to this very inn, glimpsed you from a distance, and then . . . why, it was as if you simply vanished.”

  “I thought you were a spy, sent by my stepson. I fled into the country. To Gloucestershire.”

  “Alone?”

  She hesitated. “Not exactly.”

  “Ah.” He nodded his understanding. “The young man who barged in here to rescue you?”

  “Edward—that is, the Earl of Beckley. Yes. Also recently returned after many years abroad. When he saw me in distress that day, he offered his assistance. It is his way.”

  Wrinkles formed at the corners of his eyes as he narrowed his gaze, trying to read her expression by the fading light. “I . . . see. Well, I went on to London, hoping to discover where you might have gone. I heard nothing but the vilest gossip. Then this morning, as I was attempting to speak once more with the duke, I saw that young man and another on the doorstep of Blakemore House, also looking for you. The butler told him you were traveling west. You planned to meet here, I suppose?”

  Edward had gone to London? To Robert? “No.”

  The faintest frown notched his brow, then disappeared. But she knew disbelief when she saw it. “Aunt Penhurst has told you, I suppose, that I am . . . prone to invention. A liar.”

  “She would not dare to say as much to me, daughter.” Charlotte could not entirely contain her incredulous huff. “But if she had,” he continued, “I would have told her that your mother was also a teller of tales. Lovely tales, in verse that sang like the stars in the night sky. Those are her poems,” he explained, gesturing toward the book. “Did you know? I had them printed and bound—for her, I claimed, though really, I had more selfish reasons. I wanted to be able to hold her precious gift in my hands.”

  Turning the aged volume, she felt as if she were seeing it for the first time. And to think, just a moment ago, she had imagined the book of little real value to her, now that the banknotes had been removed. Slowly, she rose, took three small steps toward him, and laid the book in his lap. Before she could let go, he caught her hand along with it, and held her there, looking not at the book, but at her. “I am so sorry, my daughter. And also glad. So very glad. That does not make much sense, I suppose, but—”

  “I understand.” Without extracting her hand from his grasp, she knelt beside the chair. His free hand reached up, as if he would touch her cheek, though he did not. So she tipped her head toward his palm, closing the distance between them. “Tell me about her.”

  Over the next hour or more, he did just that, and through his words, she met her mother—no, not met. She had known her through her poems, first, without realizing it. Poems that had spoken of love and joy and beauty and all the other things Charlotte had discovered in them, and only in them, when she was a child.

  “I had traveled to Paris with friends, serious about nothing but wine and vingt-et-un,” he told her. “Then early one drizzly morning, I was staggering home and I stumbled right into your mama, who was just leaving mass, as it happened. She gave a nervous giggle, then tried to hide it.” While her father spoke, she let her head drift until it was resting on the edge of the chair. His hand passed over her hair. “Do you believe in love at first sight, Charlotte?”

  Her first impulse was denial. But at the question, her mind had conjured an image of Edward as she had first seen him, damp curls plastered to his forehead, gazing down at her with those blue eyes that drove away the rain and the cold. “I think, perhaps, that I do.”

  “Then you understand. When I saw her, I knew. I couldn’t just let her go. I tried to apologize, but she hurried after her family. So I went back to that church every morning until I saw her again. Father Biet must have thought he had made a convert. Once I found her, I was determined to win her.”

  She had to swallow twice before she could get a sound past the lump in her throat. “But you lost her instead.”

  “No, my child. No. I won her. For a time, I had her love. And so much more. I would only have truly lost if I had given up.” She felt him shift as if he would rise. “I should leave you to your rest. I hope this will not be our only opportunity to talk. I should like the chance to know my daughter.”

  Though she longed for him to stay and talk now, another part of her heart tugged her in the opposite direction, to the place where Edward waited. She pictured him at Ravenswood with his mother, shocked by the joy of their unexpected reunion. Yet somehow, he had torn himself from her side to follow Charlotte. Until this moment, she could not have understood the strength it had required. Until now, she had not fully understood what it meant that he had attempted to do it at all.

  “And I should like to know you better . . . Papa.” But she got to her feet as she spoke.

  He caught her hand. “Tell me, where were you bound?”

  Instinctively, she scrambled for a story to cover the scandalous truth. “I hadn’t quite decided—”

  “Charlotte,” he chided. “Do not prove your aunt right.”

  “Gloucestershire,” she whispered. “Ravenswood Manor.”

  “The name of the place is not familiar to me,” he said, lifting one shoulder. “Would I be safe in assuming it has some tie to the Earl of Beckley?”

  When an answer would not come, she merely nodded.

  He nodded, too, then rose and limped to the door. “The inn is full tonight. We are lucky to have beds. Some who arrived later were not so lucky. I believe at least one young man was obliged to make do with that hard bench in the public room.”

  There could be no doubt as to the guest to which her father referred.

  “Bound to be uncomfortable,” he added. “And lonely. Well, good night.”

  “Good night, Papa.”

  Before the door had fully latched, she was gathering the quilt and pillow from her bed. Before the door to her father’s room had closed, she was halfway down the stairs. When she glanced over her shoulder, his door opened a fraction wider as he looked out into the corridor.

  Surely it was a trick of the light, the single candle flickering in the sconce, but she could have sworn she saw him wink.

  Chapter 22

  As darkness fell, the public room emptied of its few remaining patrons: two local gentlemen who had been playing chess, a scattering of coachmen who reluctantly made their way to the stables for the night, and the guests whose limited coin had not secured them a private dining room. Before she retired, Fanny snuffed all the candles but one.

  “Be there ought else I can do for ye, sir?�
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  Wary that if he said yes, he might be presented with another slice of the worst beef-and-onion pie in the history of beef-and-onion pies, accompanied by another mug of ale unequal to the task of washing it down, Edward shook his head. “I’ll be fine, thank you.”

  At least the massive settle—around which he suspected the inn must have been built a hundred or so years ago—was wide enough to accommodate his shoulders. Time was, the exhaustion he felt would have been sufficient to ensure a good night’s sleep almost anywhere. But if he spent this night tossing and turning, he did not think the hard wooden bench would be even a little bit to blame.

  He lay with his head closest to the empty hearth, his feet pointed toward the wide entrance to the room, debating whether to use his greatcoat for pillow or blanket. When the stairwell just beyond the doorway beckoned to him, he closed his eyes. But when closed eyes invited his mind to wander to Charlotte, he opened them again.

  The image that seemed to be seared into his memory did not disappear, however.

  She stood in the doorway, her face a pale oval shining out of the gloom, her expression hidden in shadow. She looked as polished and proper as he had ever seen her, nary a speck of mud nor wayward lock of hair in sight. Easier, now, to imagine her a duchess.

  But she was not more beautiful, for all that. He had grown accustomed to the other Charlotte.

  His Charlotte.

  As before, his good sense tried to resist the claiming. But his heart had other ideas.

  For what seemed an eternity, neither of them moved. Perhaps she thought he was asleep. When at last she stepped closer, he could see she held a bundle in her arms. A flicker of fear passed through him. Was she fleeing in the night?

  With creeping steps, she came to the far end of the settle and laid down what he now realized was a pillow and blanket, then turned to go.

  “Charlotte, wait.”