All her life, Charlotte had picked books on which to pattern herself, trying on heroines the way other girls sampled new dresses. All through the four long years of successive Seasons, she had worked so very hard to turn herself into Evelina — eager, wide-eyed, innocent Evelina — in the assurance that, in the end, virtue would reap its own reward and patience would be rewarded with true love, just as Evelina was rewarded with Lord Orville.

Charlotte felt bitterly betrayed, and not just by Robert.

Evelina had lied to her. Evelina and Pamela and all the other companions of her solitary hours at Girdings, all the dusty books of her mother’s youth with their dewy-eyed heroines whose unassailable virtue won the affections of the hero and drove the villains to long death-bed speeches of abject repentance.

Where was the heroine for her now? She didn’t want to be Dido or Cleopatra, dead by their own hands. She rather liked living, even if her knight in shining armor had turned out to be an asp. Somewhere in the King’s wealth of books there had to be another model to be found, a heroine scorned who didn’t bury her knife in her breast or fling herself off a parapet or go mad when told to get herself to a nunnery.

Dismissing the books in front of her, Charlotte turned restlessly, holding her candle high, only to fall back with a cry as a hideous apparition shambled into the light. With a harsh, indrawn breath, Charlotte managed to get control of herself and the candle, which danced a little jig in her hand before she managed to grasp the base. In those moments, shape separated from shadow, making it clear that it wasn’t a beast after all, but a man, and not just any man.

It was the King, but the King as she had never seen him. His jacket was undone and his shirt had come untucked from his breeches, the ends trailing untidily down. His silk stockings were rumpled, and his hair stood up sparse and gray on his poor, wigless head. He looked like a broken old man, turned out on the parish, but for the great Star of the Garter that shone on his breast.

“Emily?” he called out in a wavering voice, his pet name for his youngest daughter.

The Princess Amelia was exactly of an age with Charlotte, slight and fair. It was an easy enough mistake to have made, but it still made Charlotte feel like an imposter intruding on a private moment, especially with the King in such disarray.

“No, sir.” Charlotte stepped out into the light of the fire and dropped a hasty curtsy. “It’s Lady Charlotte. Lady Charlotte Lansdowne. You said I might use the library.”

“Lansdowne . . . Lansdowne.” The King mulled over the name. “I knew a Lansdowne once. A good fellow, Lansdowne.”

“I believe you refer to my father, sir,” ventured Charlotte.

For a moment the King looked confused. “Yes, yes,” he said at last, shuffling closer and squinting at her as though he were having trouble seeing. Appropriating Charlotte’s candle, he held it so close to her face that it was all Charlotte could do not to flinch back. Against the dancing flame, his pupils were oddly distended, turning the King’s protuberant blue eyes nearly black. “You are the little Lansdowne, eh what?”

“Yes, sire.” Charlotte kept her spine straight and her voice soft.

The candle wavered in the King’s hand as he mercifully fell back a step. Dark spots danced in front of Charlotte’s eyes where the flame had burned on the retina. “The little Lansdowne,” he repeated. “The little Lansdowne who likes Burney. You do like Miss Burney, eh what?”

“Very much, sir.” Now did not seem to be the time to voice her latent reservations about Fanny Burney’s portrayal of human nature. “You were kind enough to make me a very pretty present of her books.”

“Miss Burney was a friend to me, a true friend.” To Charlotte’s shock, tears began to wander along the weathered cheeks. “Where is one to find such friends again? Lost, lost, lost, all lost.”

The sheen of tears in the folds of his face glittered in ironic counterpoint to the gleaming Star of the Garter on his breast. An icy weight settled in Charlotte’s stomach. She felt frozen in horror, watching the broken shambles of the monarch who had only hours before affably received various notables and asked after her grandmother’s dog.

Had it begun this way before? No one at the Palace liked to talk of it, but the memory of it was like a palpable presence in the Palace at all times, there in the quick, sideways glances when the King began speaking too quickly, or the strain that sometimes entered the Queen’s face when she looked at him when she thought no one else was watching. Although the royal household had tried to keep it quiet, Charlotte knew that the dreadful mania had emerged again only three years ago. Leaving state acts unsigned, the King had been taken off to Kew, “for a rest,” it was said, but the mad-doctors had gone with him.

“Sire . . . ,” said Charlotte helplessly. “Are you . . . are you quite well?”

The King pressed a trembling hand to his stomach. “The foul fiend does bite me in the belly,” he whispered hoarsely. “The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me.”

The dogs were clearly straight out of King Lear, but the grimace that transfigured the King’s face left no doubt that the stomach pain was more than a literary allusion. “Sire,” said Charlotte again, “if you are ill — ”

“No!” he said, so violently that she fell back a step. “I will not be ill. Don’t let them make me ill, Lady Charlotte.”

“No, sire,” Charlotte whispered, feeling tears well in her own eyes. “I shan’t let them, I promise.”

Surely it had to be a good sign that he had remembered her name? From all accounts of his previous illnesses, they had all begun with a rapid spate of speech. The King wasn’t speaking quickly now. If anything, his words had a sluggish quality to them, like a man who didn’t know whether he woke or dreamed.

The veined old hands closed around her own, weak as parchment. “You are a good friend, Lady Charlotte,” the King said brokenly. “A good friend.”

He spoke with such touching affection that it was all Charlotte could do not to give way to tears herself. “It would be hard not to be a good friend to Your Majesty when you have always been so good to me.”

Please let him not be mad, she prayed. Please let him just be tired and sick. Anyone might be tired and sick and confused . . . just not mad. If the King were to be mad again, the possibilities were horrifying. All state business to grind to a halt, the hideous struggles over who should take the reins of government, the Prince of Wales’s ghoulish glee at his father’s incapacity, and, worst of all, the sorrow of the Queen. It was said that last time her desolation had been terrible to behold.

“This is why it is best to have daughters.” For a moment, Charlotte thought that he had confused her again with the Princess Amelia, but he added, in a stronger tone, “Never have sons, Lady Charlotte, or they shall publish your letters in the papers.”

“Yes, sire.” The reference was clear. Not a month before, the Prince of Wales, in a fit of pique, had made public all his correspondence with the King, whining about the King’s treatment of him.

“Monstrous unnatural creatures, eh what? Eh what? Has the world ever seen such pelican sons?”

“No, sire.” It was all Charlotte could do not to rise up on her toes and wave in relief as the door to the King’s bedchamber burst open and a decidedly harried figure in knee breeches and plum coat came hurrying out.

She was less relieved when she saw who it was.

“Sire!” panted Lord Henry Innes, resting his large palms on his knees. “You haven’t finished your tonic.”

“A stomach tonic?” Charlotte asked hopefully.

Lord Henry dismissed her with a glance.

“This way, Your Majesty,” he said with forced joviality, as though she weren’t even there. “The doctor is waiting for you.”

Blinking in the light, the King followed him obediently enough, but the lost expression in his eyes was enough to make a stone weep.

As Lord Henry handed him over to a white-wigged attendant, the King glanced piteously over his shoulder at Charlotte. “You won’t let them make me ill again, will you, Emily?”

“No,” Charlotte whispered as the King was whisked away out of sight. “No, Your Majesty.”

With the King safely away, Lord Henry braced himself between Charlotte and the door, standing like Henry VIII with his legs spread wide and his hands on his hips. It was a pose that worked better in a doublet and tights, with a ham haunch in one hand.

“Apologies for that, Lady . . . er . . .”

Charlotte’s wide-skirted Court dress and single egret feather provided the indication of her rank, but otherwise he was at a loss. Charlotte imagined he didn’t spend much time looking at ladies’ faces, at least not if the way his gaze was angled towards her neckline was any indication.

“Charlotte,” said Charlotte. “Lady Charlotte Lansdowne. I’m in waiting to the Queen.”

Charlotte forbore to add that he had just spent the Christmas season living in her house. That would only cause unnecessary confusion, and Charlotte was far more concerned about the king than a man who had obviously been dropped on his head as a youth. Repeatedly.

And this was the sort of man with whom Robert chose to spend his time? That ought to have warned her, if nothing else had.

Lord Henry might only be capable of one idea at a time, but whichever he held, he held doggedly. “If you’re with the Queen,” he said, with the air of a man pronouncing a mathematical theorem, “shouldn’t you be upstairs?”

“I came down for a book.”