“I cannot abide the man and will have to sit through an entire supper with him now. Papa seems to think him quite perfect.”
Charlotte selected two dresses and held them up as was their custom. Sarah cocked her head to the side with a gentle smile and pointed to the one on the right. It was a pale gown of pink, and something Charlotte wore rather often—she felt that Sarah might not wish for her to go out of her way to impress Lord Kilby either.
The two women tried to speak of other topics as Charlotte got ready, but as the time for the dinner bell drew closer, she became increasingly irritable. She could not bear the thought that she might be irrevocably bound to this man after so short a time in society.
As she walked down the stairs, she took a deep breath, steeling herself for the meal to come. When she entered the dining room, Lord Kilby and her father were already seated at the table, both of them rising as she entered the room.
Charlotte came up short at the smile on her father’s face. She had not seen him so relaxed or jovial for months.
This does not bode well.
As the starters were served, the two men conversed easily about matters of business, and Charlotte sat silently eating her food, thinking of the duke’s happy manners and how much she had enjoyed their time at the bookshop the day before.
“Once I have a new lady to tend to the house, of course, I would welcome her putting her stamp on the place,” Kilby said, his dark eyes moving to Charlotte.
“Charlotte has been running our country estate for the last three years as her mother’s illness progressed.”
Charlotte glared at her father with barely disguised fury as he explained her suitability to become Kilby’s wife. She fidgeted in her seat, taking a sip of her wine and unsure how to respond.
“That is a noble thing indeed,” Kilby said. “I was so sorry to hear of her passing. You must have been a great comfort to her in the final weeks of her life.”
“Thank you, my Lord,” Charlotte said tonelessly. “I was.”
Once again, the bitterness of her father’s absence in those last weeks cut her to the core. He had barely visited her mother before she died. At the time, Charlotte had felt it might be due to grief, but when her mother eventually lost the battle and faded away before Charlotte’s eyes in the early hours of a freezing cold morning in December, her father had seemed relieved if nothing else.
It had been an awful time, the worst in Charlotte’s life, yet her father had been unmoved.
Lord Kilby continued to speak of the work being done to his estate. Charlotte listened more carefully to the sheer number of properties the man listed and became increasingly confused about how he had acquired them all. It seemed strange that he should own so much. He was very well-connected, but he did not possess one of the greatest fortunes in society by any means.
She forced herself to smile and nod at appropriate intervals but felt increasingly suffocated by the company and the enthusiasm in her father’s eyes. Every word the earl spoke could have been laced with gold for all the attention her father paid to it.
Try as she might, there was little more she could do than sit there and listen. Both men were eager to hear their own voices and rarely included her in the discussion. She was very pleased when the interminable dinner ended, and she could retreat to her room and the pages of her journal.
Her heart ached as she read her entries from the days before.
The duke is so personable…he has such kind eyes when he is unaware, I am looking at him…his cousin Elizabeth is so friendly and pleasant.
Nothing about her interactions this evening had filled her with any joy; they had simply caused her dread and discomfort. As she wrote that evening’s entry, it seemed dull and lifeless in comparison to the day before.
A headache pounded between her ears, and she was exhausted and drained as she picked up her quill, writing feverishly, the words pouring forth, trying to untangle the thoughts in her mind and quiet them enough to drag her down into sleep.
***
The following morning, Colin paced restlessly in his study, the morning’s correspondence lying neglected on his desk. His thoughts were swirling with thoughts of Lady Wentworth and their time together.
He had tried to fathom throughout the night why he had felt compelled to buy her those books as a gift. He did not regret it, but he also did not understand it. It would no doubt have shown his feelings for her in some form, and those feelings were far more complex than he had first believed.
Indeed, he had barely been able to get her out of his mind for a full hour, and even his dreams had been plagued by images of her face. In the final dream she had stood holding reams of paper that fell endlessly from her fingers. Her face was turned toward him, her expression grave as the ink began to stain her hands and the folds of her dress.
He had woken in a cold sweat, the hoot of an owl sounding loudly outside his window and the first rays of light coming over the horizon.
Now, he paced in his study, thoughts of Charlotte and what his father had been dealing with filling his mind beyond everything else. He thought of his mother, of his tenants, of the many lives that were tied to his fortunes, and what might occur if he found them to be in peril.
Once more, he was beneath his father’s steady gaze, but increasingly, the anger he had tried to hold back was taking over, and he was feeling more and more resentment for him by the day. He stopped in the centre of the room, looking out at the bright clear sky, the sound of the London Street beneath him.
How can the world continue as though nothing is amiss when everything has been turned on its head?
Nothing was certain, and the darkness was creeping in. The only bright shining point in his existence was a woman he barelyknew who had somehow given him the strength to face another day.
