“I think,” said Robert, “that it was Wrothan’s attempt to pique the jaded appetites of the Hellfire crowd by offering them something foreign and exotic. He took the basic Hellfire Club framework — ”

“Cassocks and fireworks,” supplied Charlotte knowledgeably.

“ — and layered it with a lot of faux-Indian mumbo jumbo, including a man in a very large elephant mask pretending to be an elephant god.”

Unlike the gentlemen in the caves, Charlotte was not impressed. “But what did he do?”

Between the drugged smoke and the pure superstitious terror evoked at having a beast half-man, half-animal suddenly coming at one, a performance would have seemed superfluous. “Not terribly much. At least, not that I saw. I left soon after he made his appearance.” That much, at least, was true. “I only joined the Hellfire Club to follow Wrothan. And I didn’t enjoy it,” he added idiotically.

Charlotte twisted her head to look up at him. He didn’t blame her for looking puzzled. He didn’t quite understand what he was doing himself.

“I just didn’t want you to think I was the same as those others, Medmenham and Staines and the rest,” Robert tried to explain. “That’s all.”

It wasn’t nearly all, but he didn’t seem to be doing too well with the English language at the moment.

“I did wonder,” said Charlotte, not quite looking at him, “why you were spending so much time with Medmenham. I had thought it might be — ”

“Might be what?” Appropriating the space beside her, Robert angled his head, trying to see her more clearly. It didn’t do any good. With her head bowed, all he could see was a scrap of profile through a mass of tangled hair.

Charlotte scraped her hair back, keeping her hand there to hold it out of the way. “That you might be lonely,” she said. “I thought you might be looking for an entrée into the ton.”

“With Medmenham?” Robert sounded as horrified as he felt. “Is that what you really thought of me?”

Charlotte looked at him steadily. “What else was I supposed to think? I had very little evidence to rely on.”

You had me, he wanted to say. You should have relied on me.

But why should she have?

Because she was Charlotte, that was why. Because she gave new meaning to the term “blind devotion.” Because she was the woman who had announced that it was better to trust and be disappointed than never to have trusted at all. It didn’t matter that he had warned her against all that, that he had taken her to task about her trusting nature and those who might take advantage of it. It was completely different when he was the one who needed to take advantage of it.

God, he was a rotten apple.

Robert braced his hands against the rail. “I owe you an explanation, don’t I?”

It was meant to be rhetorical, but Charlotte didn’t take it that way. Cocking her head to one side, she considered.

“You did once,” she said, as though she were considering an academic proposition involving something very long ago and far away. It chilled Robert to the bone.

“I still do,” he said fiercely. “Even if it is long overdue. I was . . . you see, I had a personal score to settle with Wrothan. Not just a personal score,” he hastened to correct himself. “It was more of a pledge.” There, that sounded better. “To a dying man.”

Was it wrong to bring the Colonel into it? It seemed a bit cheap, to be wooing a woman by trotting out the corpse of a friend. Robert frowned out over the river. He could recall something along those lines in a Shakespeare play he had seen years ago, on leave, a suitor applying to a lady over a hero’s corpse. “Was ever woman in this humor wooed?” had been the line. The man, he remembered, had been Richard III. Robert didn’t much like the comparison.

In profile, it was hard to tell what Charlotte was thinking, and her voice gave nothing away other than a detached interest in the topic. “So it wasn’t just about the sale of secrets, then?”

“No.” Would the Colonel have minded? Robert remembered how, after all those years, the gruff Scotsman had still kept a lock of his wife’s hair in his breast pocket, twenty years after her death. When Robert, as a know-it-all sixteen-year-old, had carelessly asked why he didn’t marry again — with the consequent improvements in housekeeping and meals — the Colonel had simply patted his pocket and said that he was married and would be until he died. At the time, Robert had simply rolled his eyes and gone off drinking with a set of long-forgotten mates. But, now. . . . Yes, the Colonel would understand. “I had . . . a sort of mentor in India. More than a mentor, really. He all but adopted me.”

“I’m glad somebody did.”

“I badly needed adopting,” Robert admitted. At sixteen, he had been reckless, belligerent, constantly spoiling for a fight. It was a fight that had brought him to the attention of the Colonel, brawling with a fellow lieutenant. The Colonel had decided, like Calvin come to Geneva, that Robert was his cross to bear and, by God, he was going to make an officer and a gentleman out of him if one of them died in the process.

And so he had died. Robert wondered, as he had wondered before, what would have happened if he had had the foresight to prevent it, if he had gone to the appropriate authorities the night before instead of putting it all off till after the battle.

“What happened?” asked Charlotte, breaking him out of his reflections.

“Wrothan shot him in the back. He shot him in the middle of a battle, when he thought no one would know the difference.” And he had almost been right. If Robert hadn’t known of Wrothan’s treachery, he might have supposed the same himself, and the Colonel would have gone down as yet another casualty of war. And Wrothan . . .

Wrothan would still be dead at the Frenchman’s hand.

Perhaps it was justice, of a sort. Robert would still have preferred to have administered it himself.

“I knew Staines from India,” Robert hurried on. “That is, I knew of him. He was part of Wrothan’s set.”

“So you followed Staines to Girdings,” Charlotte summed up. “That was why you came back.”

“Yes.” She was too self-contained, too quiet. It made him nervous. “I should have told you before. I just didn’t want you all tangled up in it.” Given that she was now irrevocably tangled, it seemed a singularly inane thing to have said.

Keeping her eyes on the water, Charlotte asked, as if they were strangers at an Assembly, “Now that your revenge is all done, will you go back to India?”

Black dread welled up around him, like the river. “Do you want me to? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

Charlotte blinked up at him. “I don’t see why what I want would have anything to do with it.”

“Don’t you?” Robert braced a hand beside hers on the rail, trapping her between him and the river. It was a hell of a time for a declaration, but he was sick of waiting, of prevaricating. “It has everything to do with it. If you want me to go, I’ll go. If you want me to stay, I’ll stay. Just give me my orders, and I’ll obey.”

Just so long as she commanded him to stay.

Charlotte eyed him curiously and came to her own conclusions. “Is this what you wanted to talk about tomorrow?”

Robert nodded brusquely.

Charlotte’s lips quirked upwards in a lopsided smile, like a tragic-comic mask. “There’s no need for grand gestures, you know,” she said, “or rash promises to leave the country. I wasn’t planning to make any more scenes or to take you to task for things that shouldn’t have happened and can’t be undone. We can put everything behind us and be friendly again.” She regarded her clasped hands as if they were a book she was weary of reading. “It will make life — easier.”

“Easier,” Robert repeated flatly. What in the deuce was she talking about?

“Easier,” she agreed. “Since our paths will, invariably, cross. And I do think we could be friends. As we were. Before. We were friends, weren’t we?”

Robert’s voice came out harsher than intended. “I wasn’t talking about being friends, Charlotte!”

“Then what — ?” Her eyes were wide and confused and defensive. “I don’t understand.” Or she didn’t want to understand.

“I’ve missed you,” he said rapidly, trying to put it as plainly as he could before they went off on cross-purposes yet again. “I want you back.”

Charlotte held up a hand as though to ward him off, scrunching herself as far back against the rail as it would let her.

“Back?” she said incredulously, with a breathless laugh that broke in the middle. “You said it yourself. We scarcely know each other. You can’t have back what you’ve never had.”

“Never had?” Robert demanded, his eyes locking with hers. “Would you swear to that? Can you really, in all honesty, claim that there was never anything between us?”

Charlotte flushed. With temper, rather than shame, from the looks of it. “You told me it was all an illusion, an enchantment. Those were your words, not mine.”

“I lied.” That didn’t sound terribly good, did it? Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Every time he opened his mouth, he just stuck his foot farther down it. “I knew I had to stay close to Medmenham and the Hellfire crowd in order to make good my promise. I meant to protect you from them,” he finished lamely. “I didn’t want you hurt.”

Charlotte made a little snorting noise. Robert had to admit that it probably more accurately summarized the situation than anything else she could have said.

“I blundered. Badly. Forgive me?” His voice went up hopefully on the last words. Even to his own ears, it sounded a little weak. But it was worth a try. And it had worked before.