“What?” Glancing wildly up, Charlotte dropped her book and cracked her head against the glass. “Owwwww.”

Robert winced in sympathy.

“I’m sorry,” he said, bending over to retrieve her book. From the look of the binding, it had been in an advanced state of dilapidation even before taking its latest plunge. Robert smoothed out a bent page, closed the cover, and handed it ceremoniously back to her. “I shouldn’t have startled you.”

“That’s all right,” said Charlotte, holding out one hand to take the book from him as she pressed the other to the back of her head. “I was just . . .”

“Elsewhere?” Robert provided for her.

“Very much so.” Charlotte looked tenderly down at her book with the sort of affection usually reserved for well-loved pets and very small children. “Evelina was just carried off by Sir Clement Willoughby!”

Having no idea who either party was, Robert couldn’t tell whether that was a cause for congratulation or condolence. “Is that good or bad?”

“Very bad,” Charlotte informed him. “But fear not, she manages to free herself from his vile clutches.”

“I am immensely reassured to hear that.” Robert looked quizzically down at her. “I gather you’ve seen this Evelina carried off by Sir What’s-His-Name before?”

“Many times,” Charlotte admitted. She regarded the battered binding critically. “I may need to get a new copy soon.”

Robert rather felt that would be in order.

“Shouldn’t you be watching the mummers?” he asked, with mock reproach.

Wriggling her legs out from under her, Charlotte cast about for an excuse. “I saw them last year?”

“And they’re awful,” said Robert drily.

Charlotte grimaced. “And they’re awful. But they do try so hard.”

“It might be less painful if they tried a little less hard.” Robert held out his hand to help her off the window seat, since she seemed to keep getting tangled in her own skirts. “Having St. George battle both Bonaparte and a group of maddened pygmies was certainly a unique concept.”

“It might have been worse,” said Charlotte, shaking out her skirts, which were sadly wrinkled from her sojourn by the window. There was a crease across one cheek where she must have been leaning against the edge of the drape. She looked flushed and comfortable and adorably rumpled. She shoved a stray wisp of her hair back behind her ear, a move that did little to right the rest of her coiffure. “Last year they had Mr. Pitt fighting off the Saracens with a broomstick.”

“I’m sure he’s capable of it,” said Robert diplomatically. “Should there be any Saracens to fight.”

“I believe they’re called Ottomans now,” said Charlotte. She tucked her book neatly under her arm. “I wonder if any of them still think of us as Normans.”

Robert had to confess that it wasn’t a problem that had ever presented itself to him before. “Were we ever?”

“Well . . .” Charlotte bit down on her lower lip as she considered the question. “Grandmama would like to think so, but I’ve found no documents going further back than the sixteenth century. All of the stories about the Lansdownes at the Battle of Hastings and Agincourt come from an Elizabethan chronicle that purports to tell the history of the family. I rather doubt that it’s entirely accurate.”

She looked at him so expectantly that Robert couldn’t quite bring himself to admit that he’d had no idea that they’d had any ancestors anywhere near Agincourt.

“You don’t believe it, then?” he heard himself asking, as if he had every idea what she were talking about.

“Doesn’t it strike you as more than a little bit suspicious that there aren’t any mentions of us at all before the Tudors? The Elizabethans had a lamentable tendency of making up ancestors,” she added confidingly. “Especially if they hadn’t any.”

“Are you saying we’re nothing but upstarts?”

“Not exactly upstarts,” Charlotte hedged. “More . . .”

“Opportunists,” Robert provided. His father must have been a chip off the old block.

“Adventurers,” Charlotte corrected. She rolled the word off her tongue with obvious relish. “Elizabethan privateers sailing the high seas in search of Spanish gold.”

“In other words, pirates.”

“But very gentlemanly ones.”

“Gentlemanly” wasn’t quite the term Robert would have applied to the sort of person who boarded other peoples’ ships, but it seemed cruel to deprive his cousin of her romantic illusions.

“Sir Nicholas Lansdowne was a great favorite of Queen Elizabeth’s,” explained Charlotte. “It’s said that when Sir Walter Raleigh threw down his cloak for the Queen, Sir Nicholas stepped in, swept her up in his arms, and carried her right over Sir Walter’s cloak.”

“Thus keeping his own feet dry?”

“And the Queen’s favor.” Charlotte looked as pleased as though it were she who had trampled on Sir Walter’s cloak.

“I’m surprised Sir Walter didn’t call him out.”

“Oh, he did him one better. He hired a gang of bravadoes to set upon Sir Nicholas that very night.”

“Don’t tell me. Sir Nicholas ran them all through and then sent a mocking note to their master.”

Charlotte shook her head, a mischievous smile plucking at the corners of her lips. “No. He had too much sense for that. He crawled under a carriage, down a back alley, and took the next available ship to the West Indies.”

Robert regarded her with bemused fascination. “Where did you learn all this?” He couldn’t imagine the Duchess blithely telling tales of the peccadilloes of her husband’s ancestors; other peoples’ ancestors, yes, but Dovedales, no.

Tilting her head, Charlotte smiled reminiscently. “My father.”

Robert felt his answering smile freeze on his face.

His cousin didn’t seem to notice. She was a thousand miles away, in the golden haze of once upon a time. “He used to tell me bedtime stories about all the characters lurking in our family tree,” she said fondly. “We do have some wonderful rogues to our credit. Or discredit, I suppose.”

Discredit was one way of putting it. Every time she said “our,” he felt the lash of it like a whip on his back. It didn’t seem right that he ought to be included in that “our,” in that family history, when he had stumbled in off the sides, the collateral line of a collateral line, when he bore the title her father had borne so briefly, the title his own father had plotted and schemed and quite possibly murdered to acquire.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry that I’m here and he’s not.”

Charlotte looked up at him in surprise. “It’s not your fault.”

What could he say to that? It had felt like his fault. It still did. He remembered coming with his father to Girdings all those years ago, like vultures hunting out their prey. Only his father hadn’t bothered to wait until his prey was decently dead before descending on the carcass.

He had never known whether their arrival had hastened the Duke’s death. The loud and constant rows between the Dowager Duchess and his father certainly couldn’t have done anything to improve the Duke’s condition. As to whether his father had done anything else to speed along the Duke’s demise . . . he would never know for sure.

Charlotte’s eyes searched his face. Whatever she saw there made her brow wrinkle with concern. “I wouldn’t want you to think that I don’t want you here. I’d rather have you here than neither of you.” She bit her lip in frustration. “Oh, dear. That came out wrong somehow.”

“No,” said Robert simply. “It didn’t. It came out just right.”

Charlotte didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy trying to make him feel better. “You were so good to me in that awful time,” she said earnestly. “I missed you terribly when you left.”

She had been very easy to be good to. It had been an undemanding way of assuaging his own conscience, taking the time to pay attention to a neglected little girl six years his junior. If he were being honest with himself, it had been as much to distract himself as her, an excuse for staying out of the way of their brawling elders. At least dancing attendance on her had never been dull; she played elaborate games of make-believe, spinning fanciful stories in which he sometimes participated and sometimes just watched.

Robert smiled at the sudden recollection of one of those fancies. “Do you still believe in unicorns?”

Charlotte’s cheeks flared with color. “I can’t believe you remember that after all these years!”

He hadn’t, until now. “How could I forget? It’s not everyone who goes unicorn hunting with a plate of jam tarts.”

“I thought it might be hungry,” protested Charlotte. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“It was.” Robert smiled reminiscently. “Those were excellent tarts.”

“You told me the unicorn had come for them!”

“I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”

Charlotte folded her arms across her chest, trapping her book in front of her breasts. “You mean you liked raspberry tarts.”

“That, too.” Robert grinned down at her, watching as she struggled to keep up her air of mock reproof and failed miserably. He was surprised to hear himself saying, “Perhaps we should go unicorn hunting again sometime.”

Charlotte beamed at him. “Only if you leave some of the tarts for me this time.”

“We’ll have the kitchen make up a double batch.”

“Triple,” corrected Charlotte. “We’ll want some for the unicorn.”

Looking down at her shining face, her hair glinting like a personal halo in the light of the setting sun, Robert could almost believe she might find her unicorn, somewhere out in the gardens of Girdings House. In the army, overseas, he would have scoffed at the notion that such radical innocence could still exist, even tucked away in the remote corners of an English country house. It was a bit like stumbling upon a unicorn, or some other creature generally believed extinct.