“Did you — did he ask about me?” Charlotte was craning her neck wildly, knowing that she was behaving appallingly, but not caring in the least.

“Why don’t you ask him yourself? The last time I saw him, he was” — squinting, Lady Uppington peered about the crowd, gave a little nod of satisfaction, and leveled her fan like a cavalry captain signaling a charge — “right through there.”

It was hard to see in the mad crush, with so many wide skirts and plum-colored coats shifting like the pattern in a kaleidescope, but with the fortuitousness of the sun breaking through a crowd, the pattern shifted, the heavens parted, and there was Robert. Or, rather, Robert’s back, but Charlotte was quite sure she could recognize him at any angle. He looked ridiculously handsome in the plum-colored coat and knee breeches that were required of men at court, with dark blond hair neatly brushed and gleaming with hidden glints of gold.

“Charlotte?”

Charlotte jerked abruptly back to life as Lady Uppington nudged her in the ribs with her fan.

“Yes?”

Lady Uppington gave her a maternal shove on the shoulders. “Go.”

Charlotte went.

Heedless of her hoops and train, Charlotte hurried across the room, skirts swishing. Pride had no place in true love. And it was true love, true with a capital T, truest of the true, truer than the truest . . . well, that was the general idea. Charlotte all but flew over a protruding train, dodging sword hilts with love-borne ease. He had come for her! He must have gone to Girdings and heard she’d come to Court and . . .

The man he was speaking to tapped him on the arm and indicated Charlotte, whose precipitous progress was eliciting more than one amused smile behind a fan. Charlotte caught the word “cousin,” and then the man faded discreetly away, leaving Robert to his familial responsibilities.

As Robert turned, his sword turned with him like a compass’s needle — pointing away from her. Charlotte decided to ignore that bit. After all, not everything in life could be accounted an omen. Only the happy things.

“Robert!” Without pausing for breath, she held out both hands, skidding to a stop before him, flushed and happy. “I’m so happy you’ve come!”

Robert bowed, managing his sword with credible prowess. “Charlotte.”

Was it her imagination, or did he seem slightly less thrilled to see her than she was to see him? No matter; men were silly about things like public displays of affection. It was his first time at Court, after all, so maybe he was nervous about committing a breach of etiquette. Not that he would ever admit it. As Henrietta was fond of saying, men were about as likely to admit they were nervous as they were to stop and ask for directions, which was why one found so many hopelessly lost courtiers wandering around the tangled byways of the Palace after a levee, tripping over their own swords and desperate for a chamber pot.

Realizing that she was babbling in her own mind, Charlotte promptly bottled it all up and turned all her enthusiasm on its proper source.

“Did Grandmama tell you I would be here?” she asked breathlessly, beaming all over her face. “I left a message for you at Girdings, but I wasn’t sure if you would see it, especially if your business kept you away longer than you expected.”

“I haven’t been back to Girdings,” he said shortly. “Not since — ”

He broke off abruptly, looking as though he had just accidentally sat on the business end of his own sword.

“Since Twelfth Night?” Charlotte filled in for him, smiling at the memories that evoked. “Are you staying at Dovedale House?”

“No,” he said curtly, looking over his shoulder as he said it. “I thought it best to take bachelor quarters. So that I can pursue, er, my own pursuits.”

“I . . . see,” Charlotte said, even though she didn’t see at all, and Robert knew it. He always knew.

Robert laughed raggedly, as though the sound had been torn out of his very guts. “No, you don’t see, do you, Charlotte?”

“Then tell me,” she said simply.

For the first time, she noticed that there were deep circles beneath his blue eyes, and that the hair that had been brushed so neatly into place framed a face stripped of all its usual vitality. There was a sallow tinge beneath his tan, and lines along the sides of his lips that hadn’t been there two weeks before. Charlotte wracked her brain for where she had seen that look before. It had been, she realized, on second sons, just come down from Oxford or Cambridge, who had found themselves playing too deep in the pleasures of the capital.

Charlotte took a deep breath, her eyes never leaving his face. “Robert, if you’re in some sort of trouble, don’t keep it to yourself. Let me help you.”

“Help me,” he said flatly.

“Yes.” She could feel her high-piled hair weighing her back as she tipped back her head to see him better. “That’s what people who care about each other do. As I care for you,” she finished, a little awkwardly.

Against the granite of Robert’s expression, the sentiment sounded mawkish and flimsy, like rhymes worked by a fifth-rate poet. It had sounded much better in her head.

“I’m sure whatever it is, we can work through it together,” she tried again.

Without saying a word, Robert took her arm and led her through the crush, towards a relatively untenanted window embrasure. It couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be called private, but it was as private as could be found in the crowded room. Charlotte’s broad skirts provided a flimsy barrier against the rest of the room.

Robert rested an elbow against the window embrasure, the lace on his wrists spilling in an expensive stream along the painted sill. In the unforgiving afternoon light, his face looked unutterably tired. “Charlotte, what happened at Girdings . . .”

Charlotte tilted her head eagerly up at him, already hearing the words she wanted to hear. Come live with me and be my love. She had been waiting for this moment for weeks. Her heart hammered unevenly against her corset. “Yes?”

Robert pressed his eyes shut. “It was a mistake.”

“A what?” Charlotte’s mind refused to process the word. Unless, of course, he meant that it was a mistake to have left so hastily, with which she absolutely agreed. They should, she thought dizzily, have never left the roof. They could have stayed up there and lowered down a rope for food, built a little bird’s nest among the statues, watched the garden start to bloom . . .

“A mistake,” he repeated. “A bit of Yuletide madness.”

“Madness, maybe,” said Charlotte, hating the pleading note she heard in her own voice, “but a very lovely sort of madness.”

Robert looked at her with regret. The expression she saw there chilled her to the bone.

“Lovely,” he said softly, “in its place. Remember what you said about enchantments, Charlotte? You were right. They can’t survive in the workaday world.”

Even now, the sound of her name on his lips sounded like a caress. Charlotte shook her head very hard, so hard, her ears rang with it. “Not all of them, perhaps, but this one . . .”

“Is over,” he said with gentle finality.

It was the gentleness of it that ripped through Charlotte’s composure, piercing her straight to the very core.

She lifted her head, her ostrich plume standing high. “I don’t believe you,” she said, with all the dignity she could muster. “You wouldn’t have” — she twisted over her shoulder and lowered her voice to a whisper. There was no point in being ruined like Penelope — “kissed me if you hadn’t meant it. I know you, Robert.”

“Do you?” That had clearly been the wrong thing to say. Something dangerous flickered beneath the cerulean surface of his eyes, something dark and unpleasant, like a sea serpent stirring under otherwise placid waters. “Do you really, Charlotte?”

There was a barbed undertone to his silken voice that suggested that answering would be a very bad idea.

“How long did we have together at Girdings? Ten days? Twelve?”

“Fourteen,” blurted out Charlotte, a little too quickly. She had counted over each one hundreds of time, thumbing through her memories like beads on a rosary.

“Fourteen,” acknowledged Robert. “A whole fortnight.”

Put that way, it did sound rather paltry.

“A whole fortnight to see directly into someone else’s soul.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t even take a fortnight,” said Charlotte stubbornly. “Sometimes you just know. As I know you. Good heavens, Robert, I’ve known you since we were children!”

“For all of, what, a month? Two months? Twelve years ago?”

“Character doesn’t lie,” Charlotte said doggedly. “You were so kind, so good to me — ”

“Who else was I supposed to talk to? Your grandmother? You were my only option.”

“As I was this time?” Charlotte demanded, making a face at him to underline the absurdity of it all. They had been surrounded by a house party full of people, for heaven’s sake. Admittedly, some of them, like Turnip Fitzhugh, weren’t exactly in the running for an England’s Best Conversationalist competition, but it wasn’t as though anyone had twisted his arm and forced him to seek her out at the breakfast table or sit with her in the library for hours every afternoon.

Robert, however, seemed to miss the humor in it.

He looked at her long and hard, his face as impassive as the guards-men stationed by the doors. “Yes.”

Charlotte could only stare at him, in complete bewilderment. Who was this, and where he had hidden the real Robert?

Robert saved her the trouble of saying anything more. Bowing over her nerveless hand, he said smoothly, “Thank you, Lady Charlotte, for enlivening an exceedingly dull sojourn in the country. I don’t believe our paths need cross in town.”