“Well?”

Charlotte lifted her head as an uneven thumping sound signaled the approach of her grandmother. Her drawn face and hollow eyes told their own story.

The Dowager Duchess’s lips opened and closed in the sort of mute rage that summoned storm clouds and sank ships. She took refuge in a bout of soundless laughter. “Handed to you on a platter,” she gasped, “and still you manage to lose him! You have a rare talent. How did you do it? How do you make a proposal turn to dust?”

“We had a difference of opinion,” said Charlotte tightly, not meeting her grandmother’s eyes.

“Opinion, is it?” The Duchess exhibited her opinion of opinions with a hearty snort. “A fine time for you to choose to develop opinions, after all these years! Opinions have no place in making a match. If we were to let measly little things like opinions interfere with betrothals, who would ever get married? Answer me that!”

Charlotte looked away. “It was more than a little opinion,” she mumbled. The habit of obedience died hard.

The Dowager paid no attention. She shook her cane to the heavens like a wizened Lady Macbeth calling on spirits. “Do you think dukes just fall from trees? All my plans, all my efforts — all that money, bribing idiot roués to dance with you so Dovedale would think you had countenance. Sheep! Men are sheep! And I’ve never seen one yet that hasn’t let himself be led to the shearing. But never before have I seen a shepherdess run away from the sheep!”

The metaphor didn’t quite work, but Charlotte’s mind was on other things. “You paid people to dance with me?”

“Enough to keep your friends in fans and powder for a very long time,” said the Dowager grimly, as if reexamining an imaginary ledger. “And that’s just the men! Medmenham alone cost me five thousand pounds, the gilded weasel. Not that he didn’t earn it,” she admitted grudgingly. “I always say you get what you pay for.”

“Medmenham did what?” Charlotte gaped at her grandmother.

The Dowager rapped her stick impatiently against the uncarpeted floor. “You heard me, gel! Or is your hearing going, as well as your wits? I got Medmenham to lend a hand bringing your duke to the parson’s noose.”

Charlotte’s head was ringing. Very slowly and very clearly she enunciated, “You offered Sir Francis Medmenham Robert’s money to get Robert to the altar.”

“It was for his own good,” said the Dowager self-righteously. “Until you had to go and botch it. He needed a Lansdowne of the true line. And you — ”

Charlotte broke in before her grandmother could inform her what she needed. It was the first time she could remember ever interrupting her grandmother, but she was too rattled to marvel at it. “Did it ever occur to you,” demanded Charlotte, “that he might propose to me of his own accord?”

The Dowager just looked at her.

“Of course,” Charlotte said shakily, her whole body beginning to tremble. “Of course not. I should have known.”

“You should be thanking me, is what you should be doing,” said the Dowager stridently. “Did you think I would let the daughter of a duke marry anyone less than one?”

“What of love?” asked Charlotte incoherently.

Her grandmother leapt on her words like a gardener squashing a slug. “Love has no place in a marital alliance, you ninny. Do you think I loved Dovedale? Most certainly not! That would have been common. Bourgeois, even. We had a perfectly satisfactory partnership. It was your fool of a father who had to ruin it all by running off and marrying — ”

Charlotte went stiff with rage. “Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say anything about my parents. They were lovely. And they loved me.”

“Lovely,” muttered the Duchess. “Love.” She made it sound like the rankest sort of refuse. “Your mother ruined plans that were twenty years in the making, all for love. If your father had married the Belliston girl, we would have had a full quarter of Parliament in our pocket. Dovedale would have been greater than Marlborough, greater than Devonshire.”

“They were happy,” said Charlotte tightly, not trusting herself to say more. The rich black and gold walls of the Queen’s breakfast room seemed to press in on her, too rich, too lush, a visual symbol of the pomp and power for which her grandmother had been willing to barter her only child’s happiness.

“Happy?” snorted the Duchess. “Happy? They’re dead! Dead! And without an heir. All they left me was you.” And precious little I had to work with, her voice seemed to say.

Charlotte remembered that tiny graveyard in Surrey, a narrow plot behind the pleasant stone vicarage. She remembered the small, curved headstone with the raw Roman lettering that had marked her baby brother’s grave. The heir. And behind it, like an echo, the larger stone that shaded her mother’s final rest. It was her brother’s birth that had taken her mother’s life. But it hadn’t been for the production of the heir. If he had lived, they would have loved him for what he was, for being a child and theirs, just as they had loved her, whether she was capable of inheriting Girdings or not.

“If you had married Dovedale as you ought,” her grandmother was saying, “it would have put it all right. My great-grandson would have been next Duke of Dovedale. All you had to do was tell him yes.”

Charlotte’s face felt as though it had been made of very fine porcelain that was starting to crack around the edges. Looking her grandmother straight in the eyes, she said very quietly, “But that still wouldn’t bring my father back.”

Caught mid-tirade, the Dowager sucked in sharply, like the hiss of a snake against the lacquer walls.

Charlotte didn’t need to see the crumpled flesh beneath her grandmother’s eyes, the sag beneath her cheekbones, to know the shot had struck home.

She might have followed up her advantage, flung at her grandmother any of the stored-up slights of the past twelve years, but it didn’t feel worth the argument. Nothing was. With Robert gone, any victory would be a Pyrrhic one.

It was all too much in too short a time, her grandmother’s machinations, Robert’s departure, the scene in front of the King, everything. All she wanted was to go home. Not to Loring House or to the room she had occupied on and off since her first Season at Dovedale House, but truly home, far away from London and Robert and the humiliation of knowing that a rake had been bought to pretend to court her — and that it had worked.

“I would like to return to Girdings,” Charlotte said woodenly.

The Dowager turned abruptly towards the door, her stiff petticoats slithering across the polished floor. She held herself very straight, presenting Charlotte with a view of her elaborately arranged gray hair, pinched and powdered in the style of an earlier generation. There was no softness in her stance, no yielding. She was every inch a duchess and every inch alone.

“Do what you like,” she said brusquely, her back to Charlotte. “You will, anyway.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Springtime at Girdings had always been one of Charlotte’s favorite seasons. Not spring proper, but that period just before, when one awoke to find that the wind had softened, that the ground was soft and moist and dark, and that the still-bare tree branches bore tiny bobbles of buds that hadn’t been there before.

At least, it had always been that way before.

It wasn’t that Charlotte didn’t try; she did. She took long walks through the winter-bare gardens and forced herself to take deep bracing breaths, telling herself all the while how utterly lovely it was. She read poetry aloud to herself, as though by declaiming the lines to the empty library she might catch her own attention. She plunged into her old books as though the fate of the kingdom depended on the reading of them, plowing methodically through favorites that had never failed to excite her imagination before.

It was no use. She had lost the key to that old enchanted land. The words on the page were simply that, nothing but print, flat and bare. The tournaments she had once attended, where richly caparisoned knights clashed for her favor, were closed to her, unidimensional pictures on pages that tore when she turned them too roughly. The heroes who had courted her, the villains who had menaced her in the Vauxhalls and Ranelaghs of half a century before had deserted her, and when she tried to make them speak, their plaster lips parroted platitudes in her own voice. Charlotte found herself dropping books unread by her bed, pacing lines in the flowered carpet that had never been there before and, on one particularly miserable midnight, dragging all the furniture away from the walls in an impulsive attempt at redecoration that inspired her grandmother to declare that she had gone mad and took three footmen to set it all right again.

It was, Charlotte realized, not nearly so satisfying as she had remembered carrying on a conversation all by herself.

As February dripped away into March, with dismal rains and chilling frosts, Charlotte was forced to admit that discretion might not always be the better part of valor. Maybe valor was the better part of valor. She had thought she was being so sensible, rejecting Robert — but what if she hadn’t been sensible? What if she had just been scared?

Half a dozen times Charlotte took up her pen to write to him, but she foundered before she even completed the address. “Somewhere in India” wasn’t terribly much to go on. Penelope, on the other hand, was; Penelope, who was already halfway across an ocean. The prospect filled Charlotte with new energy. Once, her grandmother might have balked at the notion of allowing her to visit a friend a world away, but there were benefits to being in disgrace. Her grandmother had washed her hands of her. Noisily. Multiple times. And her grandmother adored Penelope.