“I used to come up and down these stairs all the time when my father was in the Duke’s rooms,” Charlotte’s voice echoed cheerfully down the stairwell. Ahead of him the velvet train of her gown dragged against the steps, the gold threads in the hem an incongruous splash of luxury against the worn wood. “It was the easiest way to get in and out without Grandmama seeing me.”

The underside of her train caught on a break in the stair where the warped old wood had cracked. Bending, Robert freed the fabric for her, and was rewarded with a grateful smile from on high. Three steps above him, she still looked like a queen, even with her garland tipping down over one ear.

“I forgot those were your father’s rooms.”

“It was my father’s idea to have me right upstairs — so I wouldn’t feel so alone in a strange house. Our house in Surrey was much smaller, you see.”

She spoke without the slightest hint of bitterness. It would, thought Robert, be like Charlotte to have mastered the trick of remembering without rancor, picking out the good and discarding the bad. Bottle that and she could make a fortune.

“Do you ever miss it?” They were four flights up and still she kept climbing, her train swishing behind her like a mermaid’s tail.

Charlotte paused with her hand on the rail, an emerald bracelet glinting on her gloved wrist. “I miss the idea of it, but I don’t think I would want to go back.” She smiled jauntily down at him from the lofty heights of the top step. “I rather like where I am.”

Robert’s heart squeezed in a very inconvenient way. “I think that it would be very hard not to like wherever you are,” he said, and meant it.

What the implications of that were, he couldn’t quite bring himself to work out. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. With the air of a conjurer displaying a new trick, Charlotte threw open another door. “Then wait until you see this!”

The immediate results were not auspicious. Cold air barreled down the stairway and walloped Robert in the chest, cutting through layers of wool and linen.

“Where are we?” he asked as neutrally as he could. He had expected a conservatory, blooming with carefully preserved plants, or a library, blanketed in books. Instead, Charlotte appeared to have brought him to the North Pole.

“The roof,” said Charlotte, skipping over the threshold and taking a long, deep breath of frigid air. “Mmmm.”

“Mmmm” wasn’t quite the expression that came to Robert’s mind. The word that presented itself was just as short but far more profane, so he didn’t voice it. Instead, he moved with a great deal of cautiousness over the small bump at the base of the door onto the glacial surface of the roof.

“Welcome to my kingdom,” said Charlotte cheerfully, flinging her arms wide in welcome.

The tip of her nose was already beginning to turn pink, but otherwise she didn’t seem to notice the cold at all. Robert made an attempt to remember how many times he had refilled her glass at dinner.

“Come see!” His extremities might be beginning to turn blue, but her enthusiasm was infectious, even among the frost-scarred stone.

Up close, the pale gold stone was pitted by the elements, scarred by past storms and stained by soot from the chimneys. But there was an odd charm to the landscape, nonetheless. A terrace ran waist-high along the edge of the roof, high enough to provide an illusion of security. Along its length perched a fanciful collection of historical and mythological personages, hectoring, lecturing, and gesturing to hypothetical persons in the gardens below.

Charlotte greeted each as an old friend.“This,” she said, giving Aristotle a brisk pat on the arm, “is my first minister of state. And this” — she moved on to another robed gentleman whom Robert didn’t recognize, although he had no doubt that Charlotte could — “is my Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

“Chancellor.” Robert nodded in greeting. Being a very grand personage, the Chancellor forbore to respond.

“A bit high in the instep, isn’t he?” Robert said.

“Always,” agreed Charlotte, her eyes glinting a pale, clear green in the icy air. “He utterly refused to play tiddlywinks and he despises having poetry read aloud. But he’s very good at sums.”

Tucking Charlotte’s arm against his side — for warmth, of course — Robert strolled along to the corner of the roof, where two satyrs with furry torsos and cloven hooves leaned precariously over the edge, playing their panpipes for the delectation of those in the gardens below.

“And who are these rascals?”

“My court minstrels, of course,” said Charlotte.

“Of course,” agreed Robert.

Charlotte leaned familiarly against the satyr’s furry arm. “They’re arrant knaves, both of them, but they play beautifully.”

She announced it with such conviction that Robert could almost picture the stone arms flex and the panpipes begin to play.

“You’ve spent a good deal of time up here, haven’t you?” he said. He could picture a miniature Charlotte spinning stories for stone statues and offering them a spot of tea.

Charlotte acknowledged the point with a wry smile. “It was one of the few places where Grandmama couldn’t follow. It was the one place that was wholly my own. And it makes a lovely spot for reading in summer,” she added more prosaically. “I still come up here when the weather is fine.”

Robert slapped his hands against his arms to warm them, his breath making white puffs in the air. “I can see where it might be nice — when the weather is fine.”

Charlotte wrinkled her nose at him. “Such a fuss about a light breeze.” She waved a hand at the sky in a sweeping gesture. “Just look up there. You don’t see stars like that in summer. Can’t you just imagine the Wise Men traveling through the night by the light of those stars?”

Robert suspected it would have been a hell of a lot warmer in Bethlehem. The stars, however, were everything Charlotte had said they were. In the clear, cold air, they looked close enough to pluck from the sky, like silver apples in a mythological goddess’s garden. If one were bold enough or rash enough to take them. His classical education was spotty, but he seemed to remember that those mythical apples always came with a high price.

“But this,” said Charlotte, maneuvering him towards the center of the terrace, where the ornamental pediment surmounting the garden front came to a sharp point, “is the very best part.”

Robert looked around and saw nothing to justify that statement. There were no philosophers, no satyrs, no mythological figures to enliven the view, just stone.

Charlotte poked him in the shoulder. “Not there,” she said. “There.”

Following where she pointed, he looked out over the edge of the roof and found the whole expanse of the gardens arrayed below. Below them stretched patterned parterres and whimsical follies. The topiary capered and posed for their delight; statues raised their arms in graceful arabesque, fighting to be free of their pedestals. At the verge of the garden, the lake glittered with reflected starlight, like gems on a bed of velvet, and the elegant summerhouse watched benevolently over the whole, its white columns stately in the moonlight, like a wise old chaperone settling back while her charges played.

But there was still more. Beyond that, he could see out over the fields and the patches of forest, down the muddy road, clear through to Dovedale village in the valley below, where the windows of the cottages glowed orange with firelight as, in house after house, the denizens of the village conducted their own celebrations for the last day of Christmas. The whole scene lay before them like a Christmas crèche, an entire world in small, the edges sharp and clear and glittering with a dusting of ice. It was a fairy tale kingdom, offered up for the taking. Charlotte’s kingdom, to be precise, and she was offering it to him.

Charlotte tilted her head, eagerly monitoring his reaction. “Isn’t it lovely?”

Her carefully arranged curls had been dragged to one side by her crown and whipped to frizz by the wind. Her cheeks were red and chapped from cold, her lips were bitten, and her nose was starting to drip. Robert had never seen anything lovelier. The starlit lake and perfectly trimmed topiary couldn’t even begin to compete. “It’s perfect,” he said.

It was quite clear that he wasn’t referring to the scenery.

“I am r-rather fond of it,” Charlotte managed. Robert could feel more than see the slight movement as her gloved hand tightened around the ledge of the roof, unconsciously seeking support.

It was a very odd sensation to be so attuned to someone else’s actions that you could divine the movements of her body without sight. In the past, that sort of awareness had only come to him in the presence of enemies, breathing the same breath as the man on the other end of a sword or a pistol, in a contest for one’s life.

Knowing that he was plunging into enemy territory, Robert carefully adjusted her garland, setting it farther back on the crown of her head — that’s right, a nasty little voice in the back of his head whispered, get it out of the way. The voice sounded unpleasantly like Medmenham’s. Robert ignored it. “Your coronet is slipping,” he murmured.

Charlotte looked up at him from under her lashes, eager and uncertain all at once. “It’s made of mistletoe, you know,” she said hopefully, tipping her head back at an angle as old as mistletoe itself.

A tender smile pushed at the corner of Robert’s lips. “Is it? In that case . . .”

His hand traced a path from her garland to her cheek, smoothing her tousled hair out of the way. His conscience gave one last, agitated bleat and went still. It wouldn’t do to ignore tradition, after all. Not at Girdings. What harm was a kiss, after all?