Randolph loomed tall, his saturnine features marked with displeasure. “Another fine speech. But it’s not for you to decide when our association is at an end.”
“Actually, it is.” She twisted, seeking to push past him and out of the room.
He smacked her, backhanded, across the face. The emerald ring cracked against her teeth, cutting her lip.
The sound of the blow rang in her ears long after the room had gone silent. Her head reeled; numbness deadened her face, and then it flashed hot and agonizing and her mouth filled with blood.
He smiled.
She spit at him, spraying his impeccable linen shirt with blood where it shone above his waistcoat. “And to think I once called you protector.”
His chin drew back. “You dare spit at a peer?”
“You’re no peer of mine,” she sneered. “I know you care for nothing more than your pride, so maybe this will salve it: you did not lose me, because I was never your possession.”
A rap on the doorframe, then Benedict stuck in his head. “Miss Perry. And Randolph, did I hear? You’ll be glad to know that idiot Selwyn has already sold three paintings.”
Randolph tugged a handkerchief from his pocket with a flourish. Rather than offer it to Charlotte, whose lip was bleeding freely now, he brushed at the specks on his shirt. Of course. “That is odd,” he said, “since only one painting was for sale. Mine. The rest were on loan from their owners.”
“Yes, well, I gather he won’t have any trouble painting more to order,” said Benedict. “He seems to have a talent for it.”
“Lovely chat, Randolph,” Charlotte mumbled thickly. “Or whatever the opposite of loveliness is. I don’t expect we will need to speak again for any reason.”
“La Perle, La Perle.” He looked up from ministering to his injured shirt, and for a second she saw a flash of something besides chill triumph in his eyes. “I could have made something of you.”
“I was already something before you met me.” She turned away, facing Benedict where he still stood in the doorway. He held out a handkerchief—he must have caught the clotted sound of her voice—and she spat gratefully into it. “Mr. Frost, will you see me home?” This last word caught in her throat.
“Home, you call it,” said the marquess from behind her. “For how long, do you think?”
And she realized how tidy his revenge had been. By holding the exhibition in her parents’ village, he ensured that even if Charlotte somehow managed to escape, their proper, steady lives were ruined.
He liked hurting, and he had already left Charlotte scarred. Now he intended the next wound to fall upon her family.
* * *
She would not even let Benedict take her arm on the way back to the vicarage. “I have to go. I have to get out of here.”
She strode, quick and tense, and he tucked his cane under his arm and followed the sound of her footsteps.
He heard no one else on the village street—yet. All Strawfield was in the Pig and Blanket’s taproom, all London upstairs. Soon, though, the two halves of society would talk. Likely Mrs. Potter already had.
“You can’t run from this, Charlotte.”
She halted a few steps ahead of him, whirling in a furious spray of gravel. “What have you to say about it? I can go where I wish . . . do what I wish . . . .”
“Yes, but is this what you wish?”
Her breath was sudden and short, a gulp. “It has never been what I wished.”
He closed the distance between them and chucked her under the chin with a curled forefinger. “Not even a little bit? Not ever? Not when you first went to London?”
She brushed his hand aside. “Benedict, stop. No. I always left a place when I had to, not when I was ready to. I’m not ready to leave Strawfield now, but . . .”
His hand fell to his side. “Because of the gold?”
“Not because of the gold.” More of those terrible gulping breaths, as if she would deprive herself of air before she would give in to tears. “Because . . . I started to think that I could have . . . a family.”
“With Maggie?”
“With you.” The words were barely more than a whisper; then she laughed, a terrible, grating sound. “There, that’s one part of me that hadn’t been bared yet today. Have my heart. Pin it up on the wall for the ton to ogle and mock.”
He hardly knew what to say, how to feel. His own heart seemed to have stopped beating a while ago, and within he was only numb. “Charlotte.”
“Don’t say it. I shouldn’t have said anything myself.”
But it had to be said—for her sake, and for his. “Charlotte, I’m a Naval Knight. I have no home of my own. My income is contingent on my living in a spare, bare room. Alone. A family is the one thing I can never have.”
“You could give it up,” she said. “And . . .”
“And live on air? The kindness of strangers?” He shook his head. “I’m doing that now, but I can’t live like that forever. Besides—I’ve given up one career after another. I never finish anything. The only thing on earth I’m good at is roaming.”
He wanted to be in some far-off part of the world right now, to stop saying these words to her.
He wanted the things he said not to be true. Each word felt like a blow, and when one struck oneself, one knew all the weak spots.
“I understand.” She turned away again, her voice dipping. “It was just an idea. I have those sometimes.”
“I do, too,” he said. “But I know they can’t come to anything.”
But she was already walking away, and he had to make his way to the vicarage alone.
* * *
Charlotte came upon her parents in the front parlor, sharing a rare moment together along with a pot of tea.
“Child!” Her father stood, alarmed. “What has happened to you?”
For a moment, heart-sore, she thought he was talking about what a fool she’d made of herself with Benedict. Then she recalled the bloodstained handkerchief wrapped tightly in her fingers; the swollen and cut lip that served as end punctuation to her relationship with Randolph.
And then she was heart-sore all over again, in a different way.
“The art exhibition . . .” She trailed off. Tried again. “It was me. All paintings of me.” She spared them the details of what sort of paintings these had been.
Mrs. Perry caught on first. “Oh. Oh. Oh, Charlotte. Oh, now everyone—oh, mercy on us. Who knows? All of Strawfield? Will they—”
“Calm yourself, Mrs. Perry,” said the vicar. He took his wife’s hands in his, brow creasing in thought. “So, Charlotte. Your . . . London life is known here.”
“If it’s not already, it will be within the day.”
Charlotte’s mother groaned.
Her father drew in a deep breath, pulling himself upright. “Well. Then. I shall probably lose the living as vicar, and we shall have to leave here.”
He said this quite calmly, as though a crisis had crystallized all his anxieties and fidgets into this one truth.
His wife groaned again.
Charlotte could bear this no longer; she felt like an intruder, a bringer of infinite trouble. “Where is Maggie? I have to tell her. Something.”
But she already knew the answer. Without waiting for their reply, she banged out of the front door and darted across the lawn separating house from stable.
Maggie was sitting, knees pulled up and arms wrapped around them, beside the mound of earth that covered Captain. Benedict was there, talking to her quietly, but when he heard Charlotte approach, he stood. “I’ll leave you ladies to your own conversation,” he said with a ghost of his usual roguery. “Thought I scented some Jacob’s ladder near the stone wall. Wouldn’t that be a nice bloom for Captain?”
And off he strode, as though he knew exactly where he was going.
Charlotte folded herself next to Maggie in the identical pose. “What were you and Mr. Frost talking about?” Cravenly, she hoped he had broken some news to her.
<
br /> Thin shoulders shrugged. “He just asked how I was. He said he knew I liked Captain.” The girlish voice became smaller with each word.
“He’s a nice man,” Charlotte said. She summoned her courage. “And, Maggie, I am . . . not a nice woman.”
Maggie’s arms dropped from about her legs. “What happened? What do you mean, Aunt Charlotte?”
“I did some things while I was traveling that some people don’t like.”
“What things?”
“Um.” Charlotte floundered for an explanation. “I took money to spend time with people.”
Maggie squinted, blinking fair lashes over her green eyes. “Like a job?”
“It was a job of sorts. Yes. But—”
“Well, that’s all right. Lots of people have jobs. Grandpapa has a job as vicar.”
“Right, yes. But because of my job—which some people think is bad—then Grandpapa might have to stop being vicar here.”
“I don’t understand. What does your job have to do with Grandpapa being the vicar of Strawfield?”
Good question, my girl. “Some people think that a vicar’s family has to be perfect.”
“That’s stupid. Nobody’s perfect.” Mindful of her spiritual education, she added, “Except Jesus. But even He threw things sometimes.”
The unassailable logic of a child. “You marvelous girl.” Charlotte smiled at her—and after a moment, Maggie smiled back.
She didn’t deserve that smile. She had to make this darling child, this wonderful precious girl, understand that Charlotte had hurt her. That she, Charlotte, had ruined everything. Had been in the process of ruining everything since she was a girl of eighteen, and that Maggie was going to lose everything she had ever known, and it was all Charlotte’s fault.
So she knocked away the chock that had kept her daughter’s heart steady for so long. “There’s something else you have to know. Maggie—I’m your mother.”
Maggie went still, as still as she had when she held Captain’s prone body. “I don’t understand. You’re my aunt.”
“I’m your mother.” It was more difficult to say this second time.
“Were you married to my father?”
“No, and that’s part of what makes me . . . not nice.”
It was so hard to tell this to a girl poised between childhood and the worries of a young woman. Maggie had been sheltered, too much so, from the coldness of being ostracized.
Charlotte reached out a hand. Maggie shrank away from her, toppling sideways onto Captain’s grave.
Charlotte tried to explain. “That’s why we always said you were my sister’s child. She was married. You are baptized as hers, Maggie. In the eyes of the world, you are respectable as I can never be.”
Scooting forward on her elbows, Maggie crawled off of the mound over her dog, rolled to a seated position, and stared at Charlotte through fallen hair. “Every time you told me about my mother, it was a lie.”
“No, everything I told you about my sister was true.”
“But she wasn’t my mother.”
“No,” Charlotte said softly. “No. She wasn’t your mother.”
“And Captain wasn’t my mother’s dog. She wasn’t left to me. She wasn’t a—a sign of someone my mother had loved.”
“I always liked Captain.” Charlotte’s reply was weak. “And she loved you. You were so good to her. You were her friend, and—”
“And she died outside without me.” Maggie stood, abruptly as a puppet being jerked upright. “She was my only friend.”
“I know.” Here it was, the punishment that cut her heart. It hurt more deeply than she could have imagined. She had had an idea, she supposed, that she would tell Maggie one day, and Maggie would fling eager arms around Charlotte’s waist and say she had known all along.
It was just an idea.
She had those sometimes, and they were always worthless.
“Do you love me?” said Maggie, and her voice was much older than it had been a few minutes before.
“Yes. More than anything. Enough to give you up to give you a better life.”
“Then do it again. I want you to leave here.”
Turning on her heel, she walked away, thin and small against the gray stone line of the wall between the vicarage and the Selwyn lands.
Charlotte was numb before the pain, as her face had been right after Randolph struck her. Maggie had stabbed her, and if she were lucky she would bleed out before she realized how much she hurt.
But everything she had said had, at last, been true. Especially the last: that she loved Maggie.
And for her child, she would do anything. Even leave, hurting herself, if it would spare Maggie the smallest bit of pain.
Chapter Eighteen
Benedict’s search for the Jacob’s ladder had been an excuse to leave Charlotte and Maggie alone. He did not truly expect to find any of the strongly scented flowers. They were rare on the edge of the moors, elusive and sweet. Like a feeling he could not grasp.
Under his boots, scrubby grass crunched unevenly. There were spots of bare earth amidst the grass, making him wobble. He trailed the metal tip of his cane along the stone wall, following its line away from the stable.
He hated having to admit there was something he couldn’t do, even if it had nothing to do with being blind. He couldn’t give Charlotte what she wanted of him. He couldn’t even think about what he wanted. Had he thought he could escape from the cages of his life? This was but a reprieve before the door crashed shut again.
Crash.
The sound was so sudden and loud that he halted in surprise.
And then he realized it had come not from within, but from the direction of the stable, and he hauled up his cane and raced back the way from which he had come.
Finding the splintery wooden wall of the stable, he ran fingertips along it until he came to the corner. A few more steps, and he reached the door. It gaped open, dust filtering free and tickling his nose.
Another crash, several thumps, a muttered curse.
He stepped within the stable’s coolness, inhaling the scents of hay and old wood and rot. “Hullo? Does someone need help?”
“It’s just me, Benedict. I’m trying to find a trunk.” Charlotte’s voice, muffled by stacks of things and the stretch of effort, issued from about two yards ahead.
“Why do you need a trunk?”
Charlotte exhaled hard; he imagined her blowing hair out of her face.
“Barrett took mine.”
“Nice sidestep, but you know what I mean.”
“Because I am leaving. People need trunks when they leave.”
“What? No. No, you don’t.” He took a step forward, kicking something flat that slid lightly away. A picture maybe, or a screen. “You can’t leave Strawfield just when your parents’ lives are about to blow up in their faces.”
She heaved something aside, and her voice came more clearly. “Can’t I? How will it help them if I stay? How will it help any of us to have to look each other in the face and see how much we’ve hurt each other?”
He kicked at the flat picture-thing again. “They didn’t take the news well, then.”
She hesitated. “I don’t know, actually. I’ve rarely seen my father so calm, and that includes at ordinary mealtimes when the beef is a little tough.”
Another thump and totter and tumble, as a stack of entombed rubbish tipped over. “But that doesn’t matter. I’m not leaving for my own sake. I’m leaving for theirs.” Her voice wobbled and broke on this final word.
Shite. “You’re leaving for Maggie’s sake, aren’t you? What happened? Did someone tell her about you?”
“I told her. Everything.”
He had to sit down. Unfortunately, he happened to be in front of a pitchfork, and he quickly stood again. “You told her you’re her mother.”
“Yes. And she asked me to leave.”
He whistled. “Well—you mustn’t. Children will say the worst things, but they don’t m
ean them.”
There followed a crash so loud, glassy and shattering, that he suspected she had shoved something over just for the sake of breaking it. “You say I cannot leave for the sake of my family. My parents say they must leave because of me. And Maggie says she wants me to leave. Just me.
“The voting is against you, Sailor Boy, and we haven’t even polled the good people of Strawfield yet. What do you think Mrs. Potter would say when she passed me in the street, when she was so harsh about Nance meeting a young man? Do you think I’d be allowed in the village’s only taproom? Do you think anyone would sit in my father’s church?”
“Do you care?”
“Yes, I care. Because Maggie will have to hear whatever people say about me. Today she lost a mother she’d thought of as a perfect angel, and in return she got me.”
He kicked at the hard-packed dirt floor. Where was that picture? He wanted to kick something more. He wanted to rail and howl.
In case Charlotte could see him through the labyrinth of fallen items, though, he smiled. He couldn’t be a beast. “You are accomplished at virtuous works. That’s even better than being angelic.”
“Don’t, Benedict. Don’t. She’s always been better off without me, and now she knows why. They’ll all be better off without me.” A heavy thump, and a few words that were little more than a whisper. “I owe them this.”
And he understood. That was what love did, wasn’t it—left when it was one-sided? He had loved his parents, and he hadn’t known if they could ever love him back. Not completely, not as he was. So he left when he was little older than Maggie was now, and he went to sea.
In the end, it hadn’t solved anything. It separated him from Georgette. He didn’t want Charlotte to lose the only family she had, too.
But she had had enough difficult choices piled upon her today, and he couldn’t argue with her. If Maggie wanted her to leave, and she wanted to honor that request, then they ought to be allowed to go their separate ways.
“I’ll help you find a trunk,” he said quietly. “If you’ll quit shoving things about. I can use my cane, and I’ll find one by the echo of it, and you can—”
Fortune Favors the Wicked Page 21
