“When I considered marriage at all,” Charlotte said, “I saw myself stuck in a cheerful, tidy parlor, pouring tea for an endless procession of gossiping women. My husband would be off until all hours being fitted for a new pair of boots or playing cards with his friends. Children would come along just as I was about to suffer strong hysterics from sheer boredom.”
Sherbourne turned her gently by the shoulders, and another embrace ensued as the wind whipped at Charlotte’s skirts, and a fine mist threatened to turn to rain.
“It won’t be like that,” she said, wanting to laugh and cry at the same time. Laugh for sheer joy, and cry for the young woman who’d spent years dreading a dismal fate. “With us, it won’t be like that.”
Sherbourne kissed her with a restrained hunger that matched the rising wind. “Our marriage will never be like that. Not for either one of us.”
She expected he’d turn loose of her, and they’d hurry down the hill ahead of the next downpour, but Sherbourne instead wrapped her close.
“I’ve changed my mind about something, Mrs. Sherbourne.”
Lord, he was warm. “You don’t want the schoolhouse and the dormitory to be in the same building?”
“Hang the blasted schoolhouse. I told you that we’d consummate our vows at the time and place of our choosing.”
What had once filled Charlotte with trepidation now interested her mightily. “Ours will not be a white marriage, Mr. Sherbourne. You promised me the full menu of husbandly attentions.”
The rain started, a soft shower—for now.
“I will keep my promise, but not at the time and place of our choosing.”
Thinking was difficult when a husband turned such blue, blue eyes on his wife. “And now?”
“We will consummate our vows at the time and place of your choosing, and I pray to the almighty powers that you choose to avail yourself of my intimate favors soon and often.”
* * *
Charlotte’s hems were a mess by the time Sherbourne returned her to Sherbourne Hall, but she didn’t seem to notice, much less mind. When he handed her down from the landau, he and his wife stood for a moment nearly embracing, regarding each other.
He wanted her—he’d shown her that before they’d become engaged—but he also wanted her to want him back, and—mirabile dictu—she apparently did.
Despite the difference in their stations, despite the dubious beginning of their union, Charlotte was willing to go forward in good faith.
Or so she’d have him believe. She beamed up at him as if he’d promised to buy her an entire jewelry establishment on Ludgate Hill.
Minx. “Shall we go inside, Mrs. Sherbourne?”
She twined her arm with his. “I asked Cook to make us a proper lunch. Hot soup, beef and ham with all the trimmings. She said you eat whatever she puts in front of you, but that will have to stop.”
“You’d starve me?” Now that Charlotte had mentioned food, Sherbourne realized he was famished.
“I’d pamper you. The menus should reflect your likes and dislikes. Because you are so invariably appreciative, Cook isn’t sure what those are.”
And here, he’d thought sending his regular compliments to the kitchen was simply good manners.
As the groom led the carriage horses away, the front door of the house swung open, revealing the butler, standing militarily straight in the foyer. Sherbourne considered carrying Charlotte over the threshold, then discarded that daft notion, but did set about removing her bonnet and cloak once he’d escorted her inside.
A husband performed those courtesies, and now Sherbourne understood why: They were an excuse to stand close to his wife and to touch her.
“I like hot food to come to the table hot,” Sherbourne said, untying Charlotte’s bonnet ribbons, “and Cook excels at that miracle. I like meat well cooked, but not burned, which she also invariably manages. I like good wine, which Crandall here has a knack for choosing.”
Crandall gave Charlotte’s bonnet a shake, sending water droplets all over the carpet. “My thanks, sir.”
Sherbourne passed the butler Charlotte’s cloak, and Charlotte began unbuttoning her husband’s greatcoat.
“I like some flowers on the table,” she said. “Nothing elaborate. One shouldn’t have to peer around a centerpiece as if one were wildlife in the hedge.”
She gave Sherbourne a shove. He turned and she slid the garment from his shoulders. Turnbull had done likewise numerous times—minus the shove—but the gesture had felt entirely different.
Charlotte handed the coat to Crandall, then took Sherbourne’s top hat.
“Rotten weather.” Sherbourne eyed himself in the mirror, and swiped at his hair to erase the creases left by his hat.
“Let me.” Charlotte ran her fingers through his hair, as Crandall took an inordinately long time to hang their outer apparel on the hooks opposite the porter’s nook.
Amusement and frustrated desire were an interesting combination. Sherbourne clasped his wife’s wrists. “That will be quite enough, madam.”
She merely wrapped herself about his arm again. “Did you know that the Windhams are great believers in naps in the middle of the day?”
“If you bestow any more such helpful insights regarding your family’s domestic habits, I will not survive until sundown.”
“Yes, you will.” Charlotte went up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “It’s tonight for which you must fortify yourself.”
And for the next forty-seven years. Sherbourne had always enjoyed a challenge. “Will you rest after lunch? I promised Jones I’d go back to the works. The old boy frets if I don’t spend at least half my day arguing with him.”
“Does he have an assistant?”
“He has boys to order about. They are less expensive than an assistant engineer.”
Why were there no fresh flowers at Sherbourne Hall? Autumn was advancing, but surely the conservatory had a few blooms yet.
“If Mr. Jones should go visit family,” Charlotte said, “or if he falls prey to another ague, who can find anything amid all the maps, papers, bills, and estimates littering that tent?”
An extraordinary thought assailed Sherbourne as he seated his wife at the table in the breakfast parlor: Charlotte would make an excellent assistant to Hannibal Jones. Her air of feminine authority would accomplish more than Sherbourne’s orders ever had.
But then, if Charlotte were on site at the works, Sherbourne would be distracted by his wife bustling about and smelling of flowers the livelong day.
“Prior to my London trip, I had a fair sense of where Jones had stacked which documents.” Sherbourne took his own seat and sent the footman at the sideboard a glance. “In my absence, Jones has become disorganized.” Or possibly a tornado had touched down inside the engineer’s tent.
The footman remained at his post, gloved hands folded, gaze straight ahead.
“We’ll start with the soup,” Charlotte said, offering the servant a smile. “A small portion for me, though I suspect Mr. Sherbourne is in good appetite.”
That salvo could not go unanswered. Sherbourne lifted his wife’s hand to his lips. “I’m famished.”
“Of course, ma’am.” The footman, Ninian Morgan by name, refused to meet Sherbourne’s gaze while the soup was served, but Sherbourne’s loyal servant was clearly amused.
Charlotte used their first proper meal as husband and wife to interrogate Sherbourne about the mine. When would it be operational? How much ore would it ship? What quality? How many men would be employed? Her appetite for information matched Sherbourne’s appreciation for the food on the table. She consumed facts and figures at a great rate, all the while asking how Sherbourne liked this dish or that cut of meat.
And to think he’d worried that they’d have nothing to talk about.
“Will you rest this afternoon?” he asked, as the plates were cleared. As soon as the question was out of his mouth, he realized he’d put it to her once before.
“Rest? From what?”
“From running all over the works with me this morning. Hiking to the summit, braving the elements.” Kissing me witless.
“This morning’s outing, while interesting and enjoyable, was hardly taxing. I have lists to make, and I might pay a call on my sister.”
Sherbourne rose to hold Charlotte’s chair, and debated whether to steal a kiss now that the room was free of servants. “Am I to accompany you on this call?”
“Asked the condemned man of his jailer? Do you truly dislike Haverford that much?”
“I resent him,” Sherbourne said. “He was born into wealth and consequence he did nothing to earn.”
Charlotte patted Sherbourne’s cheek. “So were you, so was I, which is why we must use our resources responsibly and not squander them on fleeting indulgences.”
Sherbourne stopped with her at the door to the corridor. “I’m not a damned duke, and if I have nineteen generations of sons, none of them will be dukes, either.”
“But the twenty-first might, Mr. Sherbourne, while if I have a thousand generations of daughters, none of them will ever be a duke. Women are half the population, but once we marry, we legally cease to exist, simply because we had the great misfortune to be born female. The highest ambition my daughters might have is to marry a duke and bear his children. Perhaps you’d like to trade places with me? I’m told childbirth is the most painful privilege known to…well, not man, because men never have to endure it.”
She blinked up at him, as if this were a serious debate.
“I will concede that I was born to significant privilege,” he said. “I also work my arse off.”
Charlotte withdrew the pin from Sherbourne’s cravat, rearranged the linen folds, and fastened them again. “Haverford spends his days lounging about on velvet pillows, then? I must take Elizabeth to task for allowing such sloth.”
Good God, she was dauntless. “Maybe that’s why I resent Haverford—because he’s so blasted saintly. Farmers name their children after him, old women gossip with him in the churchyard, and he actually listens to them.”
“Dastardly of him. What’s the real reason you and he don’t get on well?”
The morning spent hiking around the work site had left Sherbourne hungry. This exchange with Charlotte taxed him in a different sense. His wife made him think, and not about the expenses involved in establishing a working colliery.
“Haverford owed me a substantial sum.”
Charlotte made a “yes, yes, and?” motion with her hand. “Now he owes you much less.”
“Now he owes me nothing, because I forgave him the balance of the loan as a wedding present. Tore up the promissory notes and sent them to him with a signed release. For years, though, he took it upon himself to improve this tenant farm, or import that new strain of sheep. He employed half the valley in his great, crumbling castle, and he kept the shops in the village in custom feeding and clothing his army of servants.”
“And?”
“And he could manage all of that because I forbore to collect on the debts he owed me. In a sense, all of his commerce and charity, every bit of it, was undertaken with my money. He’s well loved and respected, while I’m the modern-day Grendel, laying waste to a paradise of Haverford’s making. I want to sink this mine, Charlotte, not because it will make me rich—it won’t, though I expect it to be profitable—but because the land can’t support all the families who dwell here.”
She was listening, which was more than Haverford seemed to do.
“Haverford means well,” Sherbourne went on, “but he lacks vision. I can employ a hundred men at that mine, while Haverford would have to come up with at least twenty farms to keep them in work. We aren’t making any new farms, and unless we take to the Dutch habit of reclaiming land from the sea, we never will. Corn prices fluctuate wildly, but the world will always, always need to keep warm.”
Why couldn’t Haverford, a reasonably intelligent man, see that?
Charlotte slipped her arms around Sherbourne’s waist and gave him her weight.
What sort of reply was this? Sherbourne stood in the doorway, awkwardly poised to hug her in return, then settling to the embrace for an odd, quiet moment.
“You are a good man,” Charlotte said. “I didn’t think you were a bad man, but I’m glad to know that your ambition is not merely for yourself. In this, you and Haverford are the same. The welfare of your neighbors concerns you. You know it, and I know it.”
For her that seemed to decide the matter. Sherbourne rested his cheek against her temple. Her hair was still damp from the rain and bore the fragrance of gardenias, a sweet, substantial scent that calmed him.
Or perhaps holding his wife did that. She was warm and pliant in his arms, and abruptly, the prospect of an afternoon spent yelling at Mr. Jones in a cold, damp tent held no appeal.
Charlotte nuzzled his cravat. “One of the lists I’ll make is of local families upon whom we will call. We are newly married, and thus socializing is required.”
They were to converse while holding each other, right in the doorway of the breakfast parlor. Married life was a procession of revelations.
“I will endure the civilities if I must.”
“You must. We will also have guests for dinner, and work up to a dinner party or two. At Christmas, we’ll have an open house.”
All of which would cost money. “I will try to contain my ebullient anticipation of these ordeals.”
“We will contain our anticipation together, Mr. Sherbourne. I would rather be setting Mr. Jones’s tent to rights than fussing over menus, but in pursuit of cordial relations with the neighbors, sacrifices must be made.”
The prospect of a nap appealed—merely a nap, with Charlotte, behind a locked bedroom door. “Must they?”
“You will never be a duke, thank God,” Charlotte said, easing away, “but this whole valley will know you for the gentleman you are if I have to dance with every one of their spotty sons to make it so.”
A gentleman. More to the point, her gentleman.
Maybe that was as good as being duke—or maybe it was better.
Chapter Nine
Charlotte’s husband had parted from her at the front door with a maddeningly perfunctory kiss, but then, the butler had stood not six feet away holding Sherbourne’s hat and gloves. Mr. Sherbourne, for all his way with a passionate kiss, was dignified—for now.
Marriage to a Windham took a toll on any man excessively attached to decorum.
“Will I do?” Charlotte asked, surveying her reflection in the bedroom’s cheval mirror.
“You’ll do splendidly, ma’am,” Heulwen replied. “That’s a very fetching carriage dress. My hair gets all a fright in this damp, but you don’t have that problem.”
“I do, but one must persevere in the face of challenges.” Heulwen’s comment brought to mind a missing amber hairpin. Eleven was a bothersome number when, for years, Charlotte had managed with twelve. She’d taken to using her nacre set until she could find the twelfth amber pin.
“Heulwen, where might I safely keep a small sum of money or other form of valuable?”
Charlotte would never have posed that question to a London servant, even a retainer of longstanding, absent exigent circumstances. All of the Mrs. Wesleys’ circumstances were exigent, however, and needs must.
Heulwen left off rearranging bed pillows. “Whatever are you asking, ma’am? Nobody on Mr. Sherbourne’s staff would steal from him. That would be wicked and stupid.” Heulwen’s expression bore consternation, also a hint of suspicion.
“I may want to surprise Mr. Sherbourne,” Charlotte said, “with a nightgown I’ve embroidered for his enjoyment, or with a new cravat pin that matches his eyes. For such gifts to be effective, I need a private place to store personal items.”
Lying had never been Charlotte’s strong suit, and Heulwen’s frown said she wasn’t convinced. “You could use a hat box. No man troubles himself to look in hat boxes.”
“An excellent suggestio
n, and you remind me that I have the perfect bonnet for this dreary weather.”
Charlotte sent her maid into the dressing closet to riffle through the hat boxes. Why had she asked Heulwen such a question? She ought to have solved the dilemma herself, of course, or as a last resort, prevailed upon Elizabeth for help.
The lanes were muddy, so the trip to Haverford Castle was undertaken at a frustratingly decorous pace. The groom driving the gig refused to proceed at anything faster than a walk, lest the mud fly up and ruin madam’s cloak.
Sherbourne’s servants were either devoted to him or terrified of him—perhaps both.
As the gig rounded a bend, a woman came into view walking alone beside the road. She wore a plain brown cloak and plain straw bonnet, and carried a covered wicker basket over her arm.
“Give her room,” Charlotte said, “or she’ll be brushing the mud from her skirts for the next week.”
The groom, who’d been introduced to Charlotte as Morgan, attempted to steer the carriage to the side, but the lane was ancient, with high berms both left and right.
“Good day,” the woman called in cheerful Welsh. She was young, dark-haired, and sturdily built. Her most striking feature was her friendly blue eyes.
Fern had had such eyes. “Good day,” Charlotte replied. “Morgan, a moment please.”
The coach rolled to a stop between puddles.
“I’m Clara MacPherson,” the woman said. “My father is the vicar. You must be the new Mrs. Sherbourne, and you will doubtless be appalled at my lack of manners.”
Civilities in the countryside were vastly less bothersome than elsewhere. “I am Charlotte Sherbourne, Miss MacPherson, and we must contrive when nobody is on hand to make introductions. Are you bound in our direction?”
The groom cleared his throat.
“That depends on where you’re going,” Miss MacPherson replied. “Oh, don’t look all sniffy at me, Hector Morgan. Visiting the less fortunate is our Christian duty.”
“If you say so, Miss MacPherson.” Morgan’s words were deferential, while his ironic tone argued the point.
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