Pink Carnation 05 - The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

by Willig, Lauren

  Medmenham was still buzzing around her ear, like a fly. “Do you return to Girdings? Or shall you stay in London to grace the gatherings of the metropolis?”

  “As long as Their Majesties are in London, I will be, too. I wait on Her Majesty,” Charlotte explained, pulling herself together. “It’s my three-month turn as maid of honor.”

  “I trust, then, that I may wait on you.”

  Trust. The word had a bittersweet echo to it. Charlotte could hear herself, like a fool, prattling to Robert in the chapel antechamber, bragging that to trust was to render someone worthy of trust. And Robert, all those long weeks ago, replying, “That sounds like a very dangerous philosophy.”

  He must have known, even then, what he had intended to do.

  Rotten apples, indeed!

  Charlotte busied herself with the leaves of her fan, which had been painted with a charming scene of Richmond Palace. “Never trust, Sir Francis. It’s a dubious venture.”

  “Will you, then, give me leave to hope?”

  “Shall we say, instead, that you may hazard a visit?”

  “That,” said Sir Francis, “would be a wager very much to my taste. For you, dear lady, who could fail to hazard far more?”

  One name came to mind.

  “I imagine that for a hardened gamester, one wager does as well as another,” Charlotte said honestly. “And that the determining factor would be which first comes to hand.”

  If she hadn’t been there, would it have been Penelope or one of the others singled out for the new duke’s attentions? It was like looking at the world reflected in the back of a spoon, everything upside down and out of proportion.

  “I had never thought you a cynic, Lady Charlotte.” Sir Francis sounded like he very much approved the change.

  Charlotte lifted a hand in instinctive revulsion. “Say practical, rather than cynical.”

  “Two words for the same thing.”

  “No.” Caught up in the philosophy of it, Charlotte nearly forgot she was talking to Medmenham. “A cynic looks for the worst. A pragmatist merely weathers it when he stumbles upon it.”

  “Or she?” asked Lord Francis, a little too knowingly.

  Charlotte took refuge behind her fan. “Does it make any difference? Life makes little distinction for one’s sex in these matters, I should think.”

  “Radical notions for a member of the Queen’s household, Lady Charlotte,” drawled Medmenham. “Have you any others?”

  That almost made Charlotte smile. There was nothing the least bit radical about her. In fact, she was the most conventional creature alive. She believed in true love, and loyalty to one’s monarch, and death before dishonor. It was just that, sometimes, things didn’t quite turn out as one would have wished. In those cases, there was nothing to do but carry on. And on and on and on.

  Charlotte smiled achingly up at him. “No, Sir Francis. Not radical notions. Merely practical ones.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “A pleasant girl, your cousin.” Medmenham’s voice pounded against Robert’s aching head like the devil’s own hammers.

  That had not gone well.

  In fact, it was hard to imagine a way in which that could have gone any worse, short of flood, fire, or a large batch of locusts. What in all the blazes was Charlotte doing in London? In his imagination, Charlotte was perpetually at Girdings, leaning over the parapet of the roof with the wind playing through her hair. That was the point of towers, after all. They kept their princesses safe. She was safe at Girdings. Safe from him.

  Three weeks later, he could smell the reek of the caves rising off his skin like rot. He had spent years trying to remake himself, trying to scour the stench of the tavern from his skin. But when it came down to it, for all his years of self-abnegation, he was no better than his father, whoring his way through life without moderation or honor.

  Charlotte deserved better than that.

  “You think so?” Robert adopted the bored drawl that was de rigueur among Medmenham’s set. After three weeks, it came as easily as breathing. “I’m sure she’s pleasant enough, but it is the utter end of tedium to be constantly burdened with attendance on a young relation. Especially when there are so many more entertaining companions to be had.”

  He deliberately let his gaze linger on a particularly buxom countess, who giggled and turned to whisper behind her fan to a friend.

  Medmenham, unfortunately, was not to be distracted. Folding his arms across his chest, he contemplated Charlotte with the lazy scrutiny of a gentleman considering the purchase of a new mare. “I might be willing to take her off your hands, Dovedale. For a large enough douceur, of course.”

  “Angling for a dowry, Medmenham?” Robert didn’t bother to keep the sharp edge off his voice.

  Medmenham was unperturbed. “Which of us isn’t?”

  “There are greater heiresses in London.”

  Medmenham’s inscrutable gaze followed Charlotte as she, curtsying, handed the Queen a dropped handkerchief before falling back into ranks with the other maids of honor. “Perhaps I find myself in want of connections at Court.”

  “Your friend, the Prince of Wales, will be disappointed to find you gone over to his father’s camp.”

  “My dear Dovedale, I inhabit no camp but my own. I believe I shall ask your cousin for a ride in the park tomorrow. She can ride, can’t she?”

  “The topic has never come up,” Robert said shortly, wondering how in the devil Medmenham managed to make absolutely everything sound like a double entendre. “I see Innes waits on the King.”

  “Yes,” said Medmenham idly. “His brother procured him the post, believing that time spent in the royal monastery would reform Innes’s disposition. A foolish notion, that.”

  “Especially with you on hand to effect a counterreformation.” Robert managed to make it sound more compliment than criticism. “Does the Order meet again soon?”

  “Patience, patience, good Dovedale. In a week, I think. That should be time enough.”

  Time enough for what?

  It was all Robert could do to paste on the requisite expression of jaded ennui when all he wanted to do was shake Medmenham until he told him what he needed to know. He bitterly loathed clinging to Medmenham’s coattails but tentative forays into finding Wrothan on his own had confirmed him in the unhappy conviction that the only way to Wrothan was through Medmenham. No one else seemed to know the least thing about a man answering to his description—and Robert was afraid to ask too much for fear of giving the game away. Espionage, he realized, was not his forte.

  The project that had begun as a simple plan to find and exterminate Wrothan had changed into something far more dangerous and complex. To kill the man who had killed his mentor, that was one thing. But now, knowing that Wrothan was actively plotting with the French—or, at least, a Frenchman—Robert knew there was no way he could just run Wrothan through and walk away, leaving Wrothan’s contact free to coolly carry on with whatever dastardly doings he had in train. How could he ignore something that might cost more lives? It wasn’t just the Colonel anymore or the other men who had died due to the sale of intelligence before Assaye. It could be whole battalions of men at stake. Lord Henry had a position at court; Lord Freddy’s father was one of the King’s ministers; even the loathsome Frobisher had a brother at the War Office. All had access to secrets of state; all might be stripped of those secrets for the price of a gallon of strong cider or a whiff of drugged smoke in a subterranean chamber.

  If Wrothan and his French contact were using the Order of the Lotus’s orgies as a means of meeting, that would be the best place to catch them, truss them, and haul them off to justice. As soon as he knew where and when the meeting was to be, he could put his plans into operation. And then he could leave. Leave London, leave England, leave Europe. The ultimate location didn’t matter, just so long as it was a very long way away, away from Charlotte and Girdings and this bizarre homesickness for something that had never been his to long for in the f
irst place.

  Despite himself, Robert’s eyes wandered to the cluster of ladies around the Queen, drawn, as always, to Charlotte. She was smiling at something one of the others had said, smiling too broadly for it to be anything but false. And he knew, without knowing how he knew, that she was as aware of him as he was of her, and would be, no matter where in the room he roamed.

  It was only a matter of weeks, Robert reminded himself. Then Wrothan would be found, his work here would be done, and Charlotte could marry the sort of man she was meant to marry.

  Just so long as that man wasn’t Medmenham.

  As soon as the Queen released her, Charlotte did what she always did in moments of great emotional distress.

  She made straight for the library.

  The pages and footmen and guards who peopled the Queen’s House already knew Charlotte by sight. They let her pass without comment, which was a very good thing, since Charlotte wasn’t sure quite what would come out if she opened her mouth. She had kept it pressed very tightly shut all through the long afternoon at the Queen’s side, smiling, smiling, smiling. She had smiled through the end of the reception, smiled through the trip from St. James back to the Queen’s House, smiled as Princess Augusta read aloud from The Lay of the Last Minstrel, smiled until she wanted to scream from the strain of smiling, all the while reliving, in excruciating detail, every second of the past few weeks, from Robert’s arrival at Girdings through his stunning defection just now.

  At the end of it, all Charlotte was left with was the sense of having been terribly, horribly wrong. For someone who prided herself on her ability to read, she had painfully misread everything that had happened, every word, every gesture, every embrace. That almost kiss hadn’t been almost because he didn’t want to sully her; it had been almost because he just wasn’t that interested. As for the roof . . . good heavens, she had all but kidnapped him. He had even called it a kidnapping. Then, once she had him alone and poised on the edge of a sheer five-story drop, she had practically attacked him.

  Charlotte managed a sickly smile. There was something funny about the image of a strapping army man cowering in terror from the amorous advances of a diminutive debutante. “Demmed fierce things, those debutantes,” she could hear them telling one another in their clubs. “Gotta watch out for the little ones. Get you around the knees and don’t let go.”

  Charlotte swallowed a laugh that sounded a bit too much like incipient hysteria for comfort.

  That would cause a scandal, wouldn’t it? “Queen’s New Maid of Honor Goes Batty at Buckingham House.” Charlotte glanced carefully left and right as she slipped out of the Queen’s apartments, but no one seemed to have noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  Charlotte’s train whispered along the marble stairs behind her as she descended to the ground floor. She no longer found its swishing quite so satisfying as she had before. All around her, painted into the walls along the Great Stairs, murals depicting the sad career of Dido and Aeneas leered down at her.

  Had Aeneas simply been amusing himself, too? Beguiling the long hours on Carthage with the first willing woman who came to hand? Given the smug expression on Aeneas’s face, just where the double flight met and turned into a single one, Charlotte rather suspected as much. Like Robert, Aeneas had simply turned and run in the middle of the night. And yet men called him a hero. Surely there was something wrong with that?

  According to legend, England had been founded by another Trojan, a comrade of Aeneas’s named Brutus. If Robert was any indication, the old strain bred true.

  Charlotte winced at the recollection of how slavishly adoring she had been, doting on his every word and painting pretty daydreams about knights in armor. She had, she realized, had an entire romance with an object out of her own imagination. Take one reasonably handsome man, paste on armor, and, voilà! instant hero.

  He had even tried to warn her, with all that business about rotten apples. But she had been too intent on being adoring to pay the least bit of attention to what he was actually saying. No wonder he had decided to take what was so willingly offered! Until the novelty of playing hero palled. Was that why he had left so abruptly? Did he find her adoration too stomach-turningly cloying to bear for another hour?

  Well, she was no Dido to fling herself onto a pyre, even if she felt dazed and battered, as though she had just tumbled off the edge of a fairy tale into a strange new world where none of the old happy certitudes held sway.

  Crossing into the complex of rooms that housed the King’s apartments, Charlotte maneuvered her hoops through the doors of the Great Library, just one of three vast rooms constructed by the King to house his remarkable collection of books. Court dress might be charming in a drawing room, but it vastly complicated one’s interactions with doorways and furniture. Narrow dresses might not be nearly so glamorous, thought Charlotte, squishing her hoops as she squeezed through the door, but they were a good deal easier to move about it.

  Charlotte breathed in the library smell like a tonic, the comforting scent of fresh leather bindings and decaying old paper. At this time of day, there were no visitors to goggle at her in her Court dress, no scholars to glower at her for invading their intellectual precinct. Even the King’s librarian had left his post at the vast desk on one side of the room. Even the desk had been designed to do its part for storing books. The sides housed immense folios, each as high as Charlotte’s hips.

  It wasn’t the folios Charlotte was after. Taking her candle, she held it up to the long rows of books that lined the walls. She was in search of a heroine.

  All her life, Charlotte had picked books on which to pattern herself, trying on heroines the way other girls sampled new dresses. All through the four long years of successive Seasons, she had worked so very hard to turn herself into Evelina—eager, wide-eyed, innocent Evelina—in the assurance that, in the end, virtue would reap its own reward and patience would be rewarded with true love, just as Evelina was rewarded with Lord Orville.

  Charlotte felt bitterly betrayed, and not just by Robert.

  Evelina had lied to her. Evelina and Pamela and all the other companions of her solitary hours at Girdings, all the dusty books of her mother’s youth with their dewy-eyed heroines whose unassailable virtue won the affections of the hero and drove the villains to long death-bed speeches of abject repentance.

  Where was the heroine for her now? She didn’t want to be Dido or Cleopatra, dead by their own hands. She rather liked living, even if her knight in shining armor had turned out to be an asp. Somewhere in the King’s wealth of books there had to be another model to be found, a heroine scorned who didn’t bury her knife in her breast or fling herself off a parapet or go mad when told to get herself to a nunnery.

  Dismissing the books in front of her, Charlotte turned restlessly, holding her candle high, only to fall back with a cry as a hideous apparition shambled into the light. With a harsh, indrawn breath, Charlotte managed to get control of herself and the candle, which danced a little jig in her hand before she managed to grasp the base. In those moments, shape separated from shadow, making it clear that it wasn’t a beast after all, but a man, and not just any man.

  It was the King, but the King as she had never seen him. His jacket was undone and his shirt had come untucked from his breeches, the ends trailing untidily down. His silk stockings were rumpled, and his hair stood up sparse and gray on his poor, wigless head. He looked like a broken old man, turned out on the parish, but for the great Star of the Garter that shone on his breast.

  “Emily?” he called out in a wavering voice, his pet name for his youngest daughter.

  The Princess Amelia was exactly of an age with Charlotte, slight and fair. It was an easy enough mistake to have made, but it still made Charlotte feel like an imposter intruding on a private moment, especially with the King in such disarray.

  “No, sir.” Charlotte stepped out into the light of the fire and dropped a hasty curtsy. “It’s Lady Charlotte. Lady Charlotte Lansdowne. You said I
might use the library.”

  “Lansdowne . . . Lansdowne.” The King mulled over the name. “I knew a Lansdowne once. A good fellow, Lansdowne.”

  “I believe you refer to my father, sir,” ventured Charlotte.

  For a moment the King looked confused. “Yes, yes,” he said at last, shuffling closer and squinting at her as though he were having trouble seeing. Appropriating Charlotte’s candle, he held it so close to her face that it was all Charlotte could do not to flinch back. Against the dancing flame, his pupils were oddly distended, turning the King’s protuberant blue eyes nearly black. “You are the little Lansdowne, eh what?”

  “Yes, sire.” Charlotte kept her spine straight and her voice soft.

  The candle wavered in the King’s hand as he mercifully fell back a step. Dark spots danced in front of Charlotte’s eyes where the flame had burned on the retina. “The little Lansdowne,” he repeated. “The little Lansdowne who likes Burney. You do like Miss Burney, eh what?”

  “Very much, sir.” Now did not seem to be the time to voice her latent reservations about Fanny Burney’s portrayal of human nature. “You were kind enough to make me a very pretty present of her books.”

  “Miss Burney was a friend to me, a true friend.” To Charlotte’s shock, tears began to wander along the weathered cheeks. “Where is one to find such friends again? Lost, lost, lost, all lost.”

  The sheen of tears in the folds of his face glittered in ironic counterpoint to the gleaming Star of the Garter on his breast. An icy weight settled in Charlotte’s stomach. She felt frozen in horror, watching the broken shambles of the monarch who had only hours before affably received various notables and asked after her grandmother’s dog.