“Did you not know she was a girl dog?” Charlotte patted her feet against the earth, heel-toe-heel-toe. “Oh, I knew. But I wanted her to be in charge. I suppose even at the age of thirteen, I wasn’t content with the limits others placed upon me.” She smiled. “Or my dog.”
“But she was Mother’s dog.” The first tear slid from Maggie’s eye, blobbing across the bridge of her nose as she lay curled.
“She loved your mother with great devotion.” Charlotte chose her words carefully. “She was mine, but that didn’t mean she was like me. That didn’t even mean she could stay with me, or grow older with me. She had to stay here at the vicarage while I traveled. She was better off being safe.”
“What if she wanted to go with you?”
“She didn’t want to. She wanted the life she knew. But I came back to visit her as often as I could.”
Maggie turned onto her back, looking Charlotte full in the face. “Why did you have to go away?”
This was a question Charlotte did not know how to answer. Every time she left, it was harder; every time, the barriers to her return seemed higher. The silence from her parents, the danger of discovery. Of having Charlotte Pearl and Charlotte Perry be identified as one and the same.
And there was a question, too, she did not know how to ask. Would you have liked me to stay ?
Footsteps crossing the yard between vicarage and stable made her look up. Benedict, wearing the too-short coat, his stern face soft with sympathy.
“Colleen told me what had passed,” he explained when he reached the trio. “Miss Maggie, you have my deepest sympathies.”
And with this, Maggie sat upright and sobbed for her lost friend with all the pain in her bruised young heart, and Charlotte cried along with her for every missed day.
* * *
They gathered to bury Captain that evening behind the stable. After some dithering over whether it would be appropriate, Charlotte’s father agreed to say prayers for the dog.
“‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,’” he began in a quavering voice, as the sun drooped and sighed its farewell and the sky bled like fire.
“When, Grandpapa? When will it happen?” Maggie’s voice was hoarse, her nose red, her hair and face dirty.
“I don’t know, child,” said the reverend. “I don’t know when comfort comes.”
The stable had been locked since the half-drowned treasure seeker and his friends had departed, the same day Charlotte met Benedict. She found the great rusty key, shoved open the door, and looked about for a spade. The stable was filled with junk. A cracked vase, a stack of chairs missing their caned seats. A Chinese screen missing a panel. What was a church to do with all that? The detritus was in layers, years of the neglected salves to conscience. Give it to the church.
If this building were Charlotte’s, she would burn it to the ground.
But it wasn’t hers. It was the church’s. Her parents had given decades to the church, and all they had was junk. They had cared for their daughters and lost both in different ways. Charlotte had even taken Barrett from them. And they gave back, in their quiet, unchanging way, a home.
A home for Maggie. A home, when she needed it, for Charlotte.
A home for Captain to rest forever.
There; there was a spade with a broken handle. Enough wood was left that it would be usable, she thought. She took it up and returned to the solemn circle about the dog. Her mother; her father. Colleen and Cook. Maggie, crying openly.
Benedict, who had so quickly come to find a place in this household.
The circle seemed complete without Charlotte.
Charlotte bent, tugged the folding knife from her boot, and handed it to Maggie. “You could bury that with her, if you like. So she’ll always be protected.”
She had also given her shawl to cover the dog. It had wrapped Benedict’s arm, too, after he was cut. For a frivolous garment, it had finally been of some use.
She turned over the first spade full of earth, then the next. Her father was droning something or other, and it seemed Maggie would dry up from all the tears she was shedding, and there was nothing Charlotte could do but set her jaw and dig, again, again, even as the split handle began to blister her palms.
She had hardly begun to move the earth, yet already she hurt. And there was nothing to do but keep digging.
Then a broad hand covered hers, warm and rough, stilling the ragged movement of the spade. “Let me help,” said Benedict. “Let me do this for you.”
He took the spade from her hand, allowing her to step back and stand beside Maggie. To slip an arm around her crying daughter.
With smooth, slow movements, he turned over the earth. Quietly, doing what needed to be done with a graciousness that meant everything.
And that was when she realized: she had fallen in love with him.
Chapter Seventeen
The following day marked the exhibition of Edward Selwyn’s paintings in the ballroom of the Pig and Blanket. This wasn’t the sort of event Benedict felt like racing to attend, and by the time he followed a veiled Charlotte up the inn’s stairs to the ballroom, Randolph had already begun a speech of welcome.
“Some might wonder whether it is inappropriate for an art exhibition to be held where an inquest so recently took place.” The marquess’s voice was cultured. Oily. Like a fake pearl amidst sludge, Benedict decided.
“I say it is not. For what better way to chase darkness from the world but with art? How better to uncover secrets than with the truth held in paintings?”
And with that, Benedict had a feeling this was going to be bad. Very bad.
He had urged Charlotte not to come today; he had offered to go alone, to use his marvelous listening ears to collect every scrap of news possible about the art exhibit. “You could stay with Maggie and comfort her,” he suggested, but even this extremely wise and sensible idea had caused her to hesitate no more than an instant.
“He thinks I have left Strawfield, and so he will not be expecting me to be there. I can’t pass up this advantage.”
But when one was not making the arrangements, one had no advantage.
He pointed this out, and she agreed readily enough. “But it’s my choice, Benedict.” Her voice lowered, as cast down as he had ever heard it. “Just once, I want to know what they’re saying about me as it’s said. Maybe then I can fight back.”
How could he argue with that?
Selwyn had sent over two tickets to the exhibition, which would otherwise have cost two guineas each—the exorbitance of the price intended to keep out all but the elite visitors Randolph had summoned. Likely, Selwyn thought Charlotte’s parents would use the tickets; likely he thought he was about to become beloved and famous among the ton. But Charlotte’s parents had as little interest in Edward Selwyn’s paintings as they did in the fact that fifty thousand pounds worth of gold sovereigns had been stolen, and so they stayed at the vicarage: the father to fret over his congregation, the mother to translate words that would never be read.
Benedict, keeping an anonymous distance from the veiled Charlotte, would have traded places with either of her parents in an instant.
The ballroom was not large, and it was stuffy, as crowded and tobacco-reeking as the inquest into Nancy Goff’s death had been. Combined with the usual scents of a country inn, there were the clotted smells of pomade and perfume so beloved by the wealthy. Perhaps four or five dozen were standing about, waiting for the paintings hung around the room to be uncovered. It was quite a feat for Randolph to have drawn so many from London to a plain village in Derbyshire.
Benedict wondered what sort of entertainment he had promised them, or what bribery or blackmail he had practiced.
“And now,” Randolph oozed in the oozingest tone that ever oozed, “let us all be enlightened!”
Applause, and a whup of fabric as the first covering was dropped.
More applause. Polite murmurs.
Maybe Benedict had been wrong.
Maybe this was exactly what it seemed: an exhibition of Edward Selwyn’s portraiture, for some reason known only to God, the devil, and Randolph.
And then another cover was removed, and another, and the next—and as cloth after cloth fell around the perimeter of the room, the murmurs changed.
“They are all of her,” said one female voice. “Did you know—”
“He painted so many? No idea. And all bare, her figure, except for that necklace. Tut! His poor wife.” This last was spoken with not a little smugness.
“Randolph.” Edward Selwyn spoke above the murmurs. “I understood”—his tone was that of a man who was blinking quickly and trying to smile—“that my portraiture was to be featured.”
“Are these not portraits?” Randolph sounded surprised. “I don’t believe I said whose portrait I would feature. Or what sort of portraits it would be.”
So. Yes. It was bad. Very bad.
A tiny piece of Benedict wished he could see the paintings lined up, Charlotte after Charlotte, all bare and gleaming and cuffed in luxury. But the far greater part knew he must find her. With his cane, he shoved at people’s feet until they squawked and moved aside for him. He felt Charlotte’s presence as a silence amidst the sounds of the crowd.
Very like the day they had met.
“Mrs. Smith?” he asked when he had reached the side of the silent wintergreen-scented figure.
“If only,” said that low, lovely voice that had captured him from the first words she spoke.
“How many paintings are there?” As though it mattered. Too many was clearly the answer.
“So many,” she whispered. “More than ever I posed for. More than I realized. He painted . . .” Her voice broke. “I did not know he painted all of these.”
Seen individually, Benedict had no doubt, the paintings were graceful. Classical. Grouped together, the force of their numbers made them obsessive. Sexual.
Benedict felt the mood of the crowd as a farmer might check the skies. There was an unsteadiness in the movements from foot to foot, a rumbling in the eddies of talk. Ought they to be scandalized? Ought they to buy something? If Randolph endorsed such things—but then, the artist’s wife looked angry . . . .
At Benedict’s side, Charlotte grew smaller and smaller. He wanted to do something to protect her, but anything he did to draw attention to her identity would have the opposite effect. He felt trapped in a smiling statue of a body. Wanting to leave with her. But she stayed, maybe feeling some possessiveness of her own image—and so he stayed, too, his marvelous listening ears catching far more whispering than he wished they would.
And then a familiar voice cut through the rumblings like a bolt of lightning. “Godamighty,” shrieked Mrs. Potter. “Those is pictures of the vicar’s daughter!”
* * *
When the moment came that I had feared for so long, it was not so bad.
Charlotte had heard this saying before, usually at the edges of certain ton parties she had attended. It was a phrase beloved by rich young heirs confessing their gambling losses to doting fathers, or fluttery young brides confiding about their wedding nights.
The saying was true for them. It was not true for Charlotte. For ten years, she had been known to one world as a courtesan and to another as the daughter of a simple country vicar.
Now those worlds smashed together.
This was Randolph’s plan: not to bare her, over and over, obscenely, but to strip her before those who had known her as more than a courtesan.
Maybe—if she stripped herself, too—if she tried not to be crushed by the collision of worlds . . .
She struggled through the squeeze of people, drew in a trembling breath, and snatched the veil from her bonnet. “Indeed it is Miss Perry,” she said. “And it is Charlotte Pearl.”
The crowd was silent.
Now that Charlotte looked about herself without the annoyance of her veil, she knew them. All of them. Mrs. Potter was the only villager—well, this was her inn. The rest were Londoners, the elite who had known La Perle and had probably never thought of what she had been before.
There was a duke she had helped through an erectile problem caused by fear he would have an erectile problem. An earl who had come to her for a listening ear about his fears that he only liked men. The prestige of time spent with La Perle had won him a wife five years before, but they remained childless.
There was a widowed countess who had hounded Charlotte for her dressmaker’s name. A gentleman who had visited her card parties and recited poems about her eyes. The caricaturist who had called on her every Tuesday afternoon, consuming cakes by the dozen and chortling over the latest gossip.
Public gossip, that was. Charlotte never spoke of her private business. No one shall know what goes on between us except for us, she assured them all.
A courtesan was not a whore. A courtesan was a hostess who made discreet arrangements. And a courtesan collected—she thought—many friends. All of these people had known Charlotte, had liked their time with her.
They did not look at her now as though they liked her. They looked . . . disappointed. Mistrustful. Absent of the sheen of her London life and its trappings, La Perle was nothing but a speck of sand.
And then there was Randolph, who had slashed her face, and who was smiling at the effect of his little show. Edward, stunned, who had painted her so many times without her knowing it. Which of them had hurt her more?
This was her autopsy. Every time she had been painted, she had been dissected without even knowing it. Yet her heart had not stopped. It kept beating, stubborn organ.
And last, there stood Benedict at the back of the room. Into the silence, he nodded. Let me love you, he had said, after he knew everything.
That was impossible now. It had always been impossible.
Yet her heart beat. She could still do . . . something. A bold gesture of her own to counter Randolph’s, to wrest away control of the situation.
There was a small dais, used by musicians when this room played host to village balls. Charlotte climbed onto the dais and squared her shoulders. She was La Perle, but not the pure sort.
And she was Charlotte Perry, too.
“Thank you all for coming to the exhibition of Mr. Selwyn’s works,” she said. “I admit, I presumed we would be treated to more variety in his oeuvre, but”—she gave a roguish smile—“one cannot argue with perfection.”
A series of awkward coughs. A chuckle—from Benedict, bless him.
“These paintings tell stories, my friends. I have been Nausicaa. Aphrodite. Iris, beneath a rainbow, and Selene with the moon in my hands.”
“Why have you always been naked?” called someone at the back of the room. A few laughs followed.
“Besides the fact that such paintings are far more likely to find buyers?” Charlotte managed a smile, knowing it would invite more laughter. Friendlier laughter. “I am bare so you can read into the paintings what you wish. Maybe you will see a bit of yourself in there.”
“I haven’t had a hope of looking like that for forty years,” grumped the elderly countess who so admired Charlotte’s gowns.
The tension was beginning to crack, as Charlotte took it into herself. She ventured a glance at Edward. He looked like a dog that had thought it was about to be kicked, then was handed a beefsteak instead.
At his side, Lady Helena’s cheeks had a slapped look, and her nostrils were flaring with deep, unsteady breaths.
Charlotte looked away. Out. Across the crowd. “As you have all traveled so far to attend this exhibition, I hope you will support Mr. Selwyn’s work. If you manage to look at the faces, you’ll see that they are quite well-painted. Mr. Selwyn has, I believe, a bright future as a portraitist. He can paint clothing. Look how well he painted the necklace.”
Laughter, thank goodness.
“As a matter of fact,” Charlotte added, “if anyone should be interested in purchasing the necklace . . . well. You can say you’ve seen it in its natural habitat, can
you not?”
With that, she curtsied, stepped down from the dais, and slipped away. Quickly, pressing through the crowd before anyone could stop her, hands clenched and fisted together to hide their shaking.
It was done. It was done, and it had been that bad.
But it was done.
She found her way into the tiny private parlor where she and Benedict had so recently talked with Mrs. Potter. Someone would find her in a moment, she knew, but she had a few seconds to compose herself. What she wouldn’t give for a bit of cool water to splash on her face and hands. She looked about, but there was nothing to use. Plain chairs, a table, a window, a hearth. Not even a pitcher and basin.
When she looked back toward the doorway, Randolph’s form filled the space. “Beautiful speech,” he said. “I am so glad you were able to attend.”
She hid her nerveless hands behind her back. “That was a cruel trick you played.”
“No more than you deserved for leaving me.”
“Not on me.” She injected scorn into her tone. “On Selwyn. You embarrassed him.”
Randolph gave a careless wave as he stepped into the room. Closer. Closer, bringing with him the scent of bergamot and the unbearable odor of triumph. “He embarrassed himself. Has a bit of an obsession with you, hasn’t he?”
Randolph didn’t know, then. He didn’t know about Maggie. “Can you blame him?” She arched a saucy brow. “You couldn’t let me go either.”
“I’ll always be with you.” He stroked her cheek, running a thumb over the scar. “You can’t hide and pretend to be someone you’re not, Pearl. You can never belong to anyone else.”
She set her jaw, refusing to flinch or look away. “Anyone besides myself, you mean? That’s true. Though it was always true.”
Beneath her brave words, though, her heart quailed at every exception. Because she had belonged to her sister, Margaret, whom she had buried. She was Maggie’s, heart-whole, though the girl had no idea. And she was giving herself away to Benedict Frost, a day at a time.
These divisions did not make her feel lessened. But they did make her feel as though she had left the most precious pieces of her soul in places she could never protect them.
Fortune Favors the Wicked Page 20
