But of course he has the funds, she had been about to say. It was all his. The opera box, the houses, the horses, Girdings, everything, down to the very honey in the beehives. Only it wasn’t, was it? Not while her grandmother held the keys. By law, it had been all Robert’s for over a decade, but he hadn’t had any use of it, of any of it.

“He isn’t even living at Dovedale House, is he?” Henrietta asked curiously, as if it were a matter of purely academic interest.

Charlotte knew the answer to that one. “Bachelor lodgings,” she croaked. She wasn’t quite sure why her throat had suddenly gone so dry. “He told me he took bachelor lodgings in the Albany.”

As if he didn’t intend to stay. Or, she realized, with a sinking feeling, as if he never felt like he could stay in the first place.

Charlotte looked across the way, at the bustling box where Medmenham’s cronies were amusing themselves with ribald jokes and scurrilous stories. Medmenham presided with quizzing glass in hand, entirely at home among the velvet and gilt. Robert, in contrast, kept to the back of the box, to the shadows, as though primed for a quick retreat. As he had retreated from Girdings all those years ago?

Her grandmother certainly hadn’t done anything to make him welcome.

And she was just as bad. Charlotte could feel her cheeks burn with two bright flags of color. What had she done to make him feel at home in his own home? She had never stopped to think of how strange it might be for him, any of it, of how big and daunting Girdings might seem, or how utterly alien the code of behavior that governed the small world of the ton. She hadn’t thought about him at all; she had simply used him for her own purposes, first as playmate and then as a repository for her romantic fancies.

Old anger wrestled with new guilt in a writhing mass of undigestible emotion. To have kissed her and then fled wasn’t the act of a gentleman — but what had her part been in that?

He had tried to tell her. Charlotte’s restless hands crushed the lace edge of her fan as she remembered their conversation in the dining room on Twelfth Night, and how she had brushed away his tentative admissions about his own inadequacies as Duke, too preoccupied with wondering what he thought of her, only concerned with how whatever he said related to her. In retrospect, her own behavior struck her as embarrassingly childish and more than a little selfish.

“I wonder if it is all very strange for him,” she said tentatively, half hoping that Miles would say no. “Coming back to all this, I mean.”

“I can’t think how it wouldn’t be,” said Miles, casually heaping coals of fire on her head. “And your grandmother has been known to make grown men jump out of drawing room windows.”

“It was a ballroom window,” said Charlotte defensively. “And I don’t think Percy Ponsonby really counts as a grown man.”

“Fair enough,” said Miles equably. “But you can’t deny that the Dowager tends to inspire the urge to emigrate. I used to think I wanted to run away and join the army,” he added reminiscently.

“You also thought you wanted to be a woodcutter,” reminded Henrietta caustically.

“I like chopping things down,” said Miles cheerfully.

“He chopped down mother’s favorite rosebush,” said Henrietta to Charlotte.

“It wasn’t her favorite,” Miles protested. “And it grew back.”

Their familiar bickering faded into a blur in the background. Charlotte feigned interest in the stage, but she did not see the brightly costumed actors any more than she heard Miles and Henrietta’s banter. Instead, she was busily realigning the past few weeks within her head, worrying at them, turning bits and pieces upside down to create an entirely new picture of events. Maybe Robert wasn’t a Lovelace, or an Orville, either, but something entirely different. For once, Charlotte could think of no literary counterpart into which she could slot Robert’s behavior.

Girdings and the town house were both his. He would have been well within his rights to dispossess both her and her grandmother. Her grandmother had her dower property and a comfortable allowance of her own. Nobody would have condemned him for it, or even thought anything of it. It was the way the world worked.

Instead, he had behaved as though he were the interloper, rather than they, attending the house party at Girdings more as guest than host, never indicating by word or deed that he minded the usurpation of his rightful place. The only liberty he had taken was in kissing her. And as for that . . . Charlotte’s hands tightened on her fan as it all began to make a very unpleasant sort of sense. After being made to feel like the rankest of interlopers, it must have been terribly tempting to find himself the object of adoration of the not-entirely-ill-favored daughter of the house. Add a windswept parapet, a sky full of stars, and a good deal of wine at dinner, and she didn’t wonder that he had kissed her.

Or that he had thought better of it afterwards. She knew her own limitations.

Charlotte was jarred out of that unpleasant line of thought as Henrietta’s chair bumped against hers as its occupant scrambled to stand.

“Penelope!” Henrietta exclaimed, leaping from her seat and hurrying to the back of the box.

Dropping her mangled fan, Charlotte saw that they had visitors. Penelope pushed into the box, tugging her fiancé along behind her like a dog on a leash. Inevitably as the night follows the day, Medmenham, Innes, and Frobisher followed along behind him, although Charlotte noticed that Frobisher had the good sense to stay to the back of the group, well away from Henrietta and Miles. Was Robert there, too? In the confusion of coats and cravats, gleaming quizzing glasses and frothing linen, it was difficult to tell.

For the first time, Charlotte thought she could see why Robert might have attached himself so strongly to Medmenham. For a man who had been abroad so long, shunned by his own family, Medmenham’s company provided an instant fraternity of his fellows. A rather frightful fraternity, but a fraternity none the less. When was the last time she had gone anywhere without either Henrietta or Penelope in tow?

Lord Freddy stumbled as Penelope let go of him, catching at a chair back for balance.

Penelope regarded her fiancé with a jaundiced eye. “Really, Freddy. How much have you had?”

Even bloated with claret, there was something undeniably winning about Staines’s smile. His were classic British good looks, ruddy cheeked, with that unique dark blond shade of hair peculiar to the British Isles. “Can’t a gentleman have a drink?”

“Not if he can’t hold it without being foxed,” said Penelope rudely.

Staines caught her around the waist. His color was high as he yanked her close in a grasp too intimate for a public place. “A fine thing for my affianced bride to say.”

Penelope gave him a light shove. “We’re not married yet.”

“Are you promising to descend into docility once that blessed day arrives, Miss Deveraux?” drawled Medmenham, baring his teeth at Penelope as though she were the star attraction in a bear baiting. His tone was as gently needling as a pointy stick.

“I shall mend my ways,” said Penelope sweetly, “when Freddy mends his.”

Medmenham affected a bow. “A very pattern for matrimony.”

Not liking the way the conversation was going, or the dangerous glint in Penelope’s eye, Charlotte asked hastily, “When do you leave for India?”

“A week Thursday.” If Penelope had any trepidation about traveling halfway around the world, she certainly didn’t show it. She might have been referring to a trip to Almack’s. “Two days after the wedding.”

“I wish I could come,” Charlotte said wistfully. “You’ll have to be sure to write regularly.”

For a moment, Penelope’s face softened. “By every packet,” she promised. “You can bring them to Henrietta and laugh over my misadventures.”

“Or exult over your triumphs,” Charlotte amended gently. “I’m sure you’ll have maharajas bringing you rubies as big as your palm and besotted British officers leaving leopard skins at your feet.”

“I should hope not,” scoffed Penelope. “The skins would probably smell.”

Charlotte squeezed her hands. “It will be an adventure,” she said softly. “You’ll see.”

Penelope shrugged. “Perhaps.”

Her own troubles momentarily paled into insignificance beside Penelope, off to a strange continent with no one for comfort but her husband. No matter how well Penelope hid it, she had to be nervous. Charlotte knew she would be.

It might, thought Charlotte hopefully, be the making of Penelope’s marriage. Charlotte glanced back over her shoulder to where Freddy Staines was passing a silver flask back and forth with Henry Innes. Penelope had noticed, too. Her eyes were narrowed in an expression of mingled condescension and irritation.

Maybe not.

“I could come with you,” Charlotte suggested, only half joking. “You could be my chaperone.”

Penelope laughed raggedly. “And ruin you, too? I don’t think so. But — thank you.”

Before Charlotte could say anything else, Penelope swept up the train of her skirt, a catlike smile curving the corners of her lips. “I’d best be removing myself,” she said meaningfully. “You’ll have company enough without me.”

“Pen?” Charlotte rose to follow her and bumped smack into a dark suit of evening clothes.

There was a man within the evening clothes, a man tall enough that her eyes were on a level with the stickpin in his cravat. There were no pearls or diamonds or rubies for him, none of the ostentatious decoration affected by the other gentlemen in the box. The stickpin was a plain gold oval, a familiar family crest incised into the metal. The lines of the crest were worn with age, but Charlotte would have known it anywhere: a dove in flight with a sprig of rosemary in its mouth. Rosemary for remembrance. Charlotte had never been entirely sure whether the dove was flying towards home or away.