“Book?” Lord Henry looked blankly around the library as though it had only just dawned on him that that was what the room was for, and that the little rectangular thingies embedded in the walls weren’t just another decorating motif. “Ah, right. Don’t have much use for the things myself. Bit late for a book, isn’t it?”

Now wasn’t the appropriate moment to give him her speech on how good fiction transcended time. Other matters demanded more immediate attention. Charlotte felt slightly sick at the thought of it, but it had to be faced.

“Is his Majesty” — Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to voice the dreaded word — “in need of assistance? Should I fetch the Queen?”

“No, no,” Lord Henry said heartily, waving his huge hands in negation. “No need to disturb the Queen. Don’t want to raise a ruckus, eh what?” Apparently, the King’s speech habits were catching.

Charlotte carried on doggedly. “But if — ”

“Nothing of the sort!” exclaimed Lord Henry, a little too hastily. “His Majesty only had a bit of a stomach upset. Took a little too much rich food today. Doctor’s on hand. Nothing to be worried about.”

“But he seemed to be wandering in his speech. . . .”

Lord Henry shrugged in a way that implied a little woman had no business bothering an important attendant of the King with trivialities. “Nothing like pain to make us all a little loopy, eh? Don’t want to keep you. Best be going back to the Queen, what?”

Stepping back across the threshold into the King’s rooms, he started to push the panel closed.

“One thing, Lord Henry.” Lord Henry’s hand stayed on the door panel and his eyes rolled back in his head in an oh-no-here-it-comes gesture. “Should his Majesty’s . . . stomach upset worsen, you will send word to the Queen, won’t you?”

What Lord Henry really wanted to send for was a muzzle for use on interfering maids of honor. He did not exactly have the most guarded of countenances. He must, Charlotte thought irrelevantly, lose a fortune every time he sat down to cards.

“It’s just a stomach upset,” he repeated. “No need to concern yourself.” He didn’t exactly add “bloody interfering female,” but the words were implied. And, then, in a last burst of lucid speech, “Tell that cousin of yours I’ll be seeing him next Thursday!”

With a concatenation of wood against wood, Charlotte found herself staring at a closed door.

She felt a powerful urge to kick it.

Chapter Fifteen

The next day dawned clear and bright. In the light of morning, with the sunlight streaming through the east-facing windows of her borrowed bedroom at Loring House, the events of the night before seemed nothing more than a hideous phantasm, too outrageous to be real.

Curled up in her comfortable nest of linen and down, with the branches of the trees in the square waving a cheerful good morning, Charlotte couldn’t help but feel that she had been extremely silly. She indulged in a moment of gratitude that she hadn’t acted on her first impulse and run tattling to the Queen. With her spirits already in turmoil from her interview with Robert, carried away by the Gothic atmosphere of books and candlelight, she had given way to exaggerated imaginings fueled by — what? Nothing more than the King confusing her, in a dark room, with his daughter Amelia, and complaining of stomachache, albeit in somewhat florid terms. Candlelight played all sorts of tricks.

Goodness only knew her powers of perception hadn’t been anything to boast about of late.

Rolling over, Charlotte buried her face in her pillow. The down billowed comfortably around her face. Perhaps she could just stay here. For a year or so. She felt sore all over, in that hollow way one did after an emotional crisis once the storm had already flooded through. It was easier to be angry than to be hollow, but the anger just wouldn’t seem to come. Oh, but she had been an idiot!

With a resolute shove, Charlotte emerged from the bedclothes flushed but determined. No more calling herself names — even if she had been utterly, entirely idiotic to have believed . . . well, that was all beside the point now, wasn’t it? She had had a long, teary session with Henrietta the night before, but that was all over now. There was nothing to be done but to take the whole, sorry incident as a salutary lesson and never, ever behave so foolishly ever again. No more tears, no more regrets, and absolutely no more Robert.

She supposed she would have to see him again from time to time in the normal course of things, but there was no reason to dwell on it. Girdings had twenty-two bedrooms and twelve major reception rooms; they could live in the same house for years without so much as passing each other in the hallway.

Rolling out of the bed trailing the bedclothes along with her, Charlotte squinted shortsightedly at the china clock on the mantelpiece. Eleven o’clock! Henrietta must have left orders she wasn’t to be disturbed. Either that, or the entire staff was still engaged in laundering the flotilla of handkerchiefs she had gone through last night, while Henrietta patted her arm and repeated “but I don’t understand” until Charlotte didn’t know whether to hug her or kick her in the ankle; Miles hovered just outside the drawing room door with the air of a man who would like to be helpful but doesn’t know how, popping in from time to time with bloodthirsty and unhelpful solutions like keelhauling, horse-whipping, and light braising in boiling oil, which at least had the benefit of making Charlotte hiccup through her handkerchief with snotty gasps of laughter in between bouts of concerted sobbing.

At least the keelhauling had been preferable to Henrietta’s determined incomprehension. “But he seemed so devoted!” didn’t do anyone the least bit of good, no matter how well Henrietta meant by it.

Hopping in her haste, Charlotte kicked off a bit of sheet that was unaccountably clinging to her ankle and shimmied into her chemise, managing to get it wrong way round on the first go. The maid must have come while she was sleeping and cleared up the discarded debris of her court dress. Not so much as a crushed egret feather remained on the floor as a reminder of the night before. Someone had even removed the broken quill she had left lying next to her diary and replaced the stained blotter. Her poor diary had taken quite a beating the night before.

But that was all done with. Charlotte defiantly donned a bright red spencer over her white muslin dress. The Queen liked red, after all. And she wasn’t going to skulk around in mourning just because her fairy tale had turned out to be nothing but an extended fit of self-delusion.

But she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about that, was she?

Grabbing up her reticule, Charlotte hurried down the front stairs, dodging a length of drapery that someone had unaccountably left hanging from the banister. Henrietta was in the process of redecorating Loring House from the ground up, so one had to be alert for ladders, lengths of fabric, and bits of miscellaneous masonry. Not only Henrietta and Miles but the entire staff of Loring House had been lovely about adopting her as a surrogate daughter of the house. Fortunately, the servants seemed to find her habit of leaving books open on odd surfaces more endearing than annoying.

As Charlotte made her way to the door, buttoning her gloves and expertly navigating around three chairs that usually lived in the south drawing room, a carefully calculated cough brought her up short. Miles’s butler Stwyth had mastered the art of exhalations that, at the same time, managed to be both unassuming and yet resonate through an entire room. It was a most impressive talent.

“There is a gentleman to see you, Lady Charlotte,” he intoned. Stwyth’s displeasure at this social irregularity was displayed only in the quivering tufts of hair above either ear, which served as a fairly reliable barometer of the old retainer’s moods. “I have taken the liberty of showing him into the morning room.”

A gentleman, was it? Sir Francis Medmenham must have made good his promise to call. It was rather flattering that he had been quite so prompt. Charlotte doubted Lovelace would ever have hauled himself from his bed before noon, just to pursue Clarissa.

“Thank you, Stwyth,” she said with a smile that made Stwyth thaw ever so slightly. “Good morning — Robert?”

If she had tufts of hair like Stwyth’s, they would have been quivering for England.

“Charlotte,” he acknowledged, turning away from his perusal of the French porcelain on the mantel to greet her. The morning light wasn’t kind to him. Fatigue — or more likely dissipation, Charlotte reminded herself — had riven deep purple patches beneath his eyes. “I take it you were expecting someone else?”

“I certainly wasn’t expecting you,” blurted out Charlotte, jolted into honestly. “I thought our paths weren’t to cross.”

“Consider this more of a brief and necessary uncrossing.”

It was like looking at a stranger, but a stranger wearing a loved one’s face. It wasn’t fair, Charlotte thought furiously, for him to look so familiar and yet be so strange. It was one thing to know that the man she thought she saw wasn’t the man she was seeing; it was another thing to teach her heart to believe it. Even now, part of her still wanted to coo and flutter at him.

Charlotte crossed her arms tight across her chest, a makeshift sort of armor against an insidious enemy. “To what do I owe this uncrossing, then?”

Robert pushed abruptly away from the mantelpiece, very rudely presenting her with his back as he stalked with jerky movements towards the window. All the practiced gallantry he had displayed at Girdings seemed to have disappeared along with his pretended affections. But it wasn’t his gallantries that Charlotte missed the most; it was those moments when he was at his most matter-of-fact, too plainspoken to be anything but sincere. It had been an excellent act.