Would that he had. “I assume you tried to dissuade her?”
“I knew nothing of it—he enjoined Fern to secrecy and for good reason. If I’d suspected that vile abomination was sniffing about her skirts, I’d have set my cousins to chasing him off that cliff at gunpoint.” A shuddery sigh went through her. “Hate is a taxing emotion, but Brantford deserves my hatred, Lucas. He deserves to be pilloried for the rest of his life.”
Charlotte was not meant for hatred, but neither could she tolerate injustice. Sherbourne treasured that about her. He needed her moral clarity in his life, needed her common sense—and her affection.
“When did you become aware that your friend was conducting a liaison?”
Charlotte bit his thigh. “Fern did not conduct a liaison. She made a poor family’s version of a come out, and if I’m to believe her, she avoided Brantford. I certainly didn’t see her showing favor to any particular man, though she later admitted she’d danced with him occasionally. Brantford’s attentions would have been considered gentlemanly, even generous, given the difference in their stations. All the while, he was stealing kisses and tempting her to clandestine meetings.”
Very likely, Brantford’s cronies would have known what he was about, for he would have bragged of his progress and joked about his objective. Men did, and other men pretended not to take the boasting seriously, for then no guilt need trouble them, either. The same unspoken rules meant that boys at school could beat Sherbourne without mercy, while other boys pretended not to notice.
“When did you learn that your friend had misstepped?”
Charlotte sat up, though she kept the quilt about her. “She did not misstep. She was seduced by a conscienceless snake, one promising undying love and matrimony. He cozened her consent and her affections with his lies, and then he betrayed her trust.”
All true enough, and yet, young ladies were warned almost from birth against such scoundrels. Sherbourne would start warning his daughters from the moment of their conception.
“He offered marriage?”
“He did, on bended knee. I am very glad your proposal wasn’t offered from that ridiculous posture. He gave her a ring, which I also have, and he got her with child. Fern turned to me only when her situation was past denying. Her own father wanted nothing to do with her, but her brother agreed to take her in, and he and his wife are raising the child.”
Insight lifted a burden from Sherbourne’s memory. “Your old friend, Mr. Porter?”
“The very one. He might have been as hypocritical as his father, but I promised him sufficient coin to raise the boy, and in the end, he and his wife were kind to Fern.”
Would they have been as kind without Charlotte’s money? “You are supporting the child?”
Charlotte shot him a glance over her shoulder. “You are now, indirectly. I set aside a sum from my pin money. Do you mind?”
Sherbourne did not dare mind. “I mind that you didn’t tell me. I don’t begrudge the lad necessities when I was raised with every comfort. Few would come to the aid of a fallen woman as you have, Charlotte. Your loyalty is commendable.”
Charlotte rose and folded the quilt over the reading chair. “Is there more you would say? I intend to continue supporting the boy, Lucas. His father’s sins are not his fault.”
Sherbourne stood and took her hand. Her palm was hot and damp, her cheeks red, and her eyes glittery with spent tears. The lock of hair he’d cut short curled up at an odd angle by her jaw.
His wife was far from composed in her present state, and yet she was dear.
“The failings of the boy’s mother are also not of his making. Anybody with human parents should agree with you there. If we’re to believe our history books, King William himself was the child of a fallen woman.”
Charlotte withdrew her hand. “Fallen woman, Lucas? You call my friend a fallen woman? Why do you not refer to Brantford as a fallen man? Why is there never any such creature as a fallen man?”
Charlotte paced to the hearth, indignation ringing with every footfall. “When did Fern fall from honor? When she rebuked his lordship for his inappropriate correspondence? When she avoided him in London? When she believed his lies and trusted his promises? Why call her fallen, when with malice aforethought and a dash of casual violence, Brantford despoiled her, ruined her, got her with child, cast her out, made no provision for his own progeny, and none for the mother of his child, either?”
Skirts swishing, Charlotte paced before the fire. “Tell me again why my friend, my friend who died after delivering Brantford’s unclaimed son, is fallen, while his lordship is worth all the hours you put in at the colliery, all the late nights, all the careful estimates and hard work. Why should that man be allowed to continue to draw breath, much less profit from your efforts while he does?”
Too late, Sherbourne realized he was in the midst of a negotiation. Charlotte had a grievance, in the truest sense of the word—she grieved for her friend, and for the trust any young woman expected to be able to place in male decency. Both were gone, one just as surely as the other.
Which could not be helped.
“Charlotte, my fate has now become entangled with Brantford’s. He was in the wrong where Miss Porter was concerned, without doubt he was in the wrong, but we cannot change the past.”
Charlotte was sensible, she’d have to accept that reasoning.
She marched up to him, and despite her blotchy complexion, flyaway curls, and red nose, Sherbourne resisted the impulse to step back.
“I do not expect you to change the past, though God knows I’ve wished I could. I do, however, expect you to change the future. Cut your ties with Brantford, Lucas. He’s not worth your time, your coin, or your passing thoughts. Cut him out of our lives, and do what you can to limit his access to anybody from whom he might profit. That much is in your grasp, and I’ll content myself with it if I must.”
The expectation in her eyes, the righteous certainly that Sherbourne would not fail her made him want to howl.
“What you ask is impossible. I signed a contract, I gave my word, and Brantford has already let it be known I’m to improve on the terms agreed to, not renege on them.”
Charlotte’s regard shifted to the steady, gimlet gaze he’d seen her turn on a presuming lordling, the same look she’d give a streak of bird droppings on a park bench.
“You don’t even like Brantford. You don’t trust him, you regret your association with him, and now you know he’s dishonored a decent young woman and ignored his own child. Why would you choose his part over the honorable path?”
Charlotte’s question confused so many conflicting priorities and emotions. She wasn’t wrong for asking, but she was Sherbourne’s wife—had taken vows to cleave to him, forsaking all others, even the memory of her departed friend.
“He ruined a young woman,” Sherbourne said. “Now he can ruin me. If I let that happen, it will do nothing to right the wrongs of the past, and everything to imperil the future of our own children. Is that what you want?”
“We have no children,” Charlotte said, glancing around the library as if unsure how she’d come to be there. “If, for better or for worse, you choose to earn coin for the Earl of Brantford knowing what you do about him, then I can assure you, Mr. Sherbourne, we never will.”
He tried to fathom what that ominously calm pronouncement meant as Charlotte crossed to the desk and drew something gold from a skirt pocket—his plainest cravat pin.
“I told myself I could keep this with me in case you ever needed a spare.” She set the little gold accessory on the blotter beside her hairpin. “What I really wanted was a token to remind me of the decent, dear, worthy man whom some miracle of fate placed at my side.”
Sherbourne remained alone by the hearth, angry, sad, resentful—and impressed—while Charlotte quietly left the room.
* * *
“I understand why you didn’t tell Mr. Sherbourne,” Elizabeth said, choosing a bench near a window dripping with cond
ensation, “but why not tell me, Charlotte? I’m your sister, and I did notice when your best friend disappeared from London without a word of explanation.”
The Haverford conservatory was full of plants brought in from the terraces and gardens in anticipation of cold weather. The greenery should have been soothing, and the fecund, earthy scent comforting.
“Fern was owed my silence,” Charlotte said, remaining on her feet. “I feel like ripping apart everything I see. Like smashing every pot. That contemptible, putrid excrescence on the face of manhood bowed over my hand, Elizabeth.”
Charlotte had washed her hands, thoroughly, before summoning her gig and departing for the castle. She was hungry, queasy, wrung out from crying, and heartbroken over her discussion with Sherbourne.
And Elizabeth, so serene and composed on her bench, was no help at all.
“Be that as it may, Charl, had you thought to confide in me—in any of your family—regarding Miss Porter’s situation we might have been able to help.”
“Fern was my friend.” Charlotte sank onto a plain wooden chair worn grey with age. “She asked me not to interfere, not to risk tainting my own name with scandal.”
“We could have helped with the boy.”
Not with ruining Brantford or holding him responsible, of course. “My husband is allowing my support of the child. Evander will continue to thrive.” Which was something. Sherbourne had not quibbled at that expenditure for an instant. Charlotte plucked a dead bloom from the nearest potted chrysanthemum. “Bethan, what am I to do?”
Weeping was such a lot of bother. It left a woman exhausted, unlovely, and predisposed to repeating the indignity. Sherbourne had been so kind, so patient…
Until he’d made Charlotte so angry.
“You must choose your own course, Charlotte. Anyone would find this contretemps vexing.”
Charlotte twisted off another spent blossom. “I do find the situation vexing.” Terribly and completely, and yet the facts were straightforward: Brantford had not been held accountable. For Sherbourne to enrich the earl was absolutely wrong. For Fern to have been disgraced was wrong.
Everything was wrong.
“I have been so certain for so long that I knew the difference between right and wrong, Bethan. I took vows. The only vows I’ve spoken in my entire life. I’m supposed to honor my husband, and I do, but Fern was lied to and ruined. Brantford was and is in the wrong.”
“Sherbourne would be in the wrong,” Elizabeth said, “if he let Brantford’s threats similarly ruin the colliery. I agree, it’s complicated.”
No help at all.
Charlotte tossed the dead flowers among the pruned roses and pushed to her feet. “I shall be going, then. Thank you for listening.”
Elizabeth took up a watering can and gave an enormous, feathery fern a drink. “You are always welcome here, Charlotte. If Sherbourne should prove difficult, or his temper unruly, don’t be so proud again. Come here and let him stand outside the castle walls begging you to relent. It might do him good, and Haverford would enjoy the very sight.”
That Elizabeth would imply Sherbourne should be humbled for the duke’s entertainment was infuriating, and thus Charlotte’s resentment latched on to an additional target.
“Haverford’s requirements for this mine are a large part of the reason Sherbourne took on a junior investor. The colliery is exorbitantly expensive to set up on Haverford’s terms, many of which are more luxury than necessity, from what I’ve read about mining operations.”
Elizabeth’s watering can had a slow leak dripping from the bottom. A fat droplet hit the duchesses’s ivory satin slipper while she aimed an unreadable look at Charlotte.
“You have ever had the gift of direct speech, Sister, though sometimes your words come close to criticizing a family member. I have always thought you couldn’t help it, that you must speak the truth, however flawed your perception of it might be.”
Faced with Elizabeth’s gracious understanding, Charlotte grasped exactly why Sherbourne had no patience with his titled neighbors.
“Haverford knows next to nothing about mines.” Charlotte pulled her driving gloves out of her reticule and jerked them on. “That is not an insult, that is a fact. His Grace’s ignorance did not stop him from dictating to Sherbourne many details of the colliery’s appointments, and they are expensive details. I could lend Haverford some books. Big, heavy, bound books, and then you might believe me.”
Drip, drip, drip. Thunk. Elizabeth set the watering can on the table, where it would doubtless leak for the next two hours and warp the wood.
Charlotte did not care.
“You are upset,” Elizabeth said, sounding very much like their auntie, the Duchess of Moreland. “I will overlook your tone, because when I believed that Haverford and I were to part, I was a wreck.”
“Now you tell me I’m a wreck and take on your Older Sister of Doom voice. I am not wrong, Elizabeth. Haverford dictated terms in ignorance, and Brantford is awful, and sometimes, I think not a single adult male should be allowed out without a nanny.”
Charlotte set the watering can onto the packed earth floor, batted aside a gauzy frond of foliage, and marched to the door. She jerked on the door latch, but the humidity of the conservatory had made the mechanism unreliable. She was still rattling the door when Elizabeth’s arms came around her.
“You love him,” she said. “You love Sherbourne, else you’d never be this overwrought. You love that man like you’ve never loved another.”
Charlotte’s ire subsided, to the bright, steady flame of indignation she’d carried thanks to Brantford for years.
“Love isn’t supposed to hurt, Bethan. Not like this. Never like this.”
“You have been hurting for a long time,” Elizabeth said, stepping back. “I didn’t see it, probably nobody saw it, but now you can’t look away from it. That’s good, Charl. We can’t heal wounds that remain unacknowledged. I’ll say something to Haverford about the mines.”
Sherbourne had seen the bewilderment behind Charlotte’s exasperation and testiness, and abruptly, all Charlotte wanted was to assure herself that her husband was whole and well. She longed to hear the decisive click of his abacus, to feel the muscular security of his arms about her in the dark.
“I’m sorry for my temper,” she said. “You’re right. I am terribly overset.”
Charlotte saw herself out, and as the horse trotted back to Sherbourne Hall, she admitted that Elizabeth was right about something else too: Charlotte loved her husband, loved him with an abiding respect that had been a significant relief, given how few men she encountered who bothered to earn her esteem. Sherbourne was at the top of that very short list, and if he should tumble, felled by financial pride, Charlotte’s heart would never recover.
Chapter Nineteen
A frisson of sympathy for Hannibal Jones stole through Sherbourne’s mind as he stared at the figures on the page. Charlotte would delight in deciphering these crabbed calculations—would have delighted in them, had she not stormed off to the safety of her sister’s castle, likely never to be seen again.
For the first time in his life, Sherbourne was tempted to consume a quantity of strong drink. Perhaps that was Hannibal Jones’s problem. He drank because Mrs. Jones was lost to him forever.
If Sherbourne mourned abandonment by his wife after less than a month of marriage, what must Jones be suffering, and how must that affect his concentration?
The library door clicked open, and Sherbourne tossed down his pen, ready to rebuke any footman who’d failed to knock when the master was intent on brooding away the evening. Brooding and possibly getting drunk.
“I missed luncheon and my sister failed to offer sustenance,” Charlotte said. “I’ve ordered a tray.”
The relief that coursed through Sherbourne was undignified and nearly complete, but for a thin vein of resentment running near his pride. He rose and remained behind his desk rather than approach his wife.
“Mrs. Sherbourne.
Good afternoon.”
“Darkness has fallen. I am sorry for my earlier temper, for I ought not to have spoken to my lawfully wedded husband in anger, and yet I am angry still.”
She could be furious, and he’d still rejoice that she hadn’t left him—yet—though if she intended to cling to her anger, then Sherbourne could feel less guilty about his own.
Charlotte was no longer in her driving ensemble. She wore a day dress of unrelieved brown, her hair was ruthlessly caught up in chignon, and no trace of her earlier tears remained. She reminded him of the acerbic young woman who’d endured a bumbling proposal from Viscount Neederby.
“Your ire is understandable.” Sherbourne was prepared to be gracious but firm, and thus he sidestepped the word “justified.”
Charlotte gave the globe a spin. “Then you’re willing to cut Brantford loose?”
“Of course not. I’ve signed a contract with him, and he’ll be difficult if I’m anything other than generously accommodating.”
“I see.”
Sherbourne knew better. He knew better than to take that bit of bait, redolent with wifely indignation. “What do you see?”
She spun the globe the opposite direction. “I see that honor ceases to matter when a man’s business interests are at stake. I had thought a gentleman’s honor ought to be more scrupulously in evidence where coin is apt to tempt him from the path of decency. I see that I was wrong. Profit renders honor null and void.”
Her finger trailed along the spinning surface of the globe, a diversion children enjoyed. When the sphere came to a stop, she was touching darkest Peru.
“I esteem you above all others,” she went on. “You persist in the face of discouragement. You have a vision for the nation’s future that encompasses all walks of life, not simply your own interests. You can admit when you’ve erred, and that makes the present situation all the more baffling, because Brantford is so very, very wrong. He has no place in your affairs.”
A Rogue of Her Own Page 26
