Warrick stopped pacing and turned to her. “My lady, I came here to tell you that your granddaughter must be properly chaperoned.”
“I see.” The dowager put her lemonade down. “Is it your opinion that I’m not chaperoning her properly?”
Warrick’s face darkened further. Soon he’d be as red as a bruise, poor boy. “She was up at all hours with Darlington, and now she goes wherever she wishes with Belozersky. It’s not my position to tell you—”
“And yet here you are, telling me anyway. Your Grace, perhaps instead you should listen?” She fixed her eyes on him. “My granddaughter may well be married by the end of the summer, so I will give her latitude to get to know her suitors in the way she feels is best. They have each made their intentions entirely clear. You, on the other hand, present more of a conundrum. Your Grace, why did I see Charlotte sneaking out of your bedchamber so late last night?”
Warrick stared, and the dowager wondered if it would have been kinder to ask a gardener to pick up a shovel and whack the poor man over the head.
“What?”
“Oh dear! Were you so vodka-addled that you don’t recall? In that case, perhaps you’d prefer to tell me why my granddaughter looked so rumpled after your sojourn in the woods with her on the trip down from London?”
As she suspected, he had no answer.
“Nothing to say, Your Grace?” Lady Alice smiled up at him. “In that case I must ask—what exactly areyourintentions toward my granddaughter?”
The dowager often wondered what was more effective in conversation, a killing retort or the silence after. Certainly as the seconds stretched, the cool hush of the orangerie seemed to be torturing Warrick, as if the ferns and orchids had climbed out of their neat beds and begun to shriek. It was rare for a man like him—a war hero and a duke—to find himself so firmly in the wrong. Did it feel like an earthquake inside, when that much self-righteousness toppled down at once?
“Lady Alice, I…”
He ground to a halt again, which struck the dowager as promising.
“Yes, Your Grace?”
Warrick clenched his fists and unclenched them again, but there was no punching his way out of this one.
And you don’twantto escape, dear boy, thought the dowager as she waited patiently for the obvious to dawn.Can’t you see that if you’d both unbend a little, you’d be perfect for each other?
Warrick squared his shoulders and straightened his spine, looking like a man staring down the hangman’s noose. “Lady Alice, my apologies. My intentions are… entirely honorable, as they must be.”
The dowager beamed at him. “Wonderful, Your Grace. Then I assume you’ll start courting her?”
And if you do so with that face, I suspect it won’t go well for you.
“Yes, of course, your ladyship.” Warrick bowed stiffly.
“One last thing. I’ve never watched Charlotte too closely, and that’s because I trust her. Perhaps you should try it?”
Warrick nodded once and wheeled away, striding off through the dangling vines.
“That,” she whispered to herself, full of satisfaction as she watched him go, “is how one chaperones.”
CHAPTER 29
Charlotte had dressed carefully forher picnic, but she dressed even more carefully for dinner that night.
Too carefully!snipped a voice inside, which she ignored.
Clothes could be armor, but clothes could also be punishment, and Warrick deserved the rack, first for forgetting what had happened in his bedchamber, and second for mucking up her head so badly that she couldn’t concentrate on Prince Belozersky. Third—Charlotte took a deep breath, because the third point was the sharpest.Third, because it was time to admit that the hurt from all those years ago still lingered.
Why do you care?she asked herself.
I don’t, she answered firmly, and yet she reached for a gown that would bring Warrick to his knees. It was sewn of heavy white silk that fell in cool folds to the floor, but the bodice dipped so low that Gran had raised her eyebrows the first time she saw it and said, “Are you being mindful of your allowance for once in your life? You’ve certainly stinted on the fabric, dear.”
But was it enough?
Charlotte studied herself in the looking glass and tiptoed into Anna’s room to rummage around in the Ramsay jewelry chest, settling on a brooch with an enormous pale pink, square-cut topaz, which she pinned between her breasts.
