When she had flagstone under her feet, Charlotte turned to her mother and looked her in the eye. “I’ve found the money to pay your debt, Mother. There’s no need to sell me.”
“Sell you? Such dramatics.” Lady Margot’s mouth tightened. She hardened more and more all the time, until Charlotte sometimes wondered where her mother existed under the ever-thickening layer of scar.
“It doesn’t matter.” Charlotte pulled an envelope from her pocket and pushed it into her mother’s hand. “This is a bank draft for nine thousand pounds. You may present it to the count yourself, or if you prefer, I can—”
The smallest wrinkle appeared on Lady Margot’s forehead.
“Charlotte, you mistake the matter. The margrave is one of the wealthiest men in all Europe—you ought to be thanking me.”
“For wanting to ship me off to Prussia to pay your debt?”
“Is that what you think?” Lady Margot took her daughter by the elbows. “We’ll ship offtogether. You’ve had five years to choose a husband, though why such an important choice was left to—” She broke off. “You seem to believe that your life will be nothing but roses, but the future finds you whether you’re prepared or not.”
“Prussians inoculate against unhappiness, do they?”
Lady Margot ignored that remark. “I’ve chosen carefully. The margrave is rich and easily led, and you will move in the first political circles if you exert yourself but a little. All I want for you is a good life. God forbid you ever know how it feels to be at the mercy of a man. Your grandmother—whom you love so dearly!—should havewarnedme about your father. And your brother should have—”
“Julian was fifteen when Father died. Still a child himself.”
Silence fell between them, a vast chasm of it.
“Mother, you must know…” Charlotte paused, because it wouldn’t do for her voice to crack. “You’re asking me to marry a man I don’t know, to leave England. To give up my silk mill and—”
She didn’t dare say the name Wolfgang.
“We’ll be secure, and rich, andtogether,” cried Lady Margot. “You choose them, over and over. Is it too much to ask that you choose me for once?”
Charlotte took a deep breath, because there was the crux of it. And yet somehow choosing Lady Margot always meant turning away from everything else.
“I never thought I should have to choose. Can I not love all of you?”
Lady Margot dropped Charlotte’s elbows. “It’s the duke, isn’t it? It’s that ridiculous declaration he made, as if fine words meant anything. Your father offered them to me once. Have I taught you so little? Do you not listen to a thing I say?”
“Idolisten. More than you know!” Charlotte cried. “But what if you built me up strong enough to weather loss, weather heartbreak if I need to? What if all the people I’ve chosen—you, Gran, Julian, Anna, the Marbys, and yes, Warrick, too—will catch me if I fall? I’m so lucky to have every last one of you.”
Lady Margot’s mouth twisted. “You’ve decided, then? You’ve decided against me. I never had a chance, did I?”
Charlotte had no reply.
There was another kind of heartbreak, one Lady Margot had never mentioned, that happened slowly between mother and daughter when there were too many things it became impossible to say.
“I’ll pay the count as soon as he finishes his port,” Charlotte said quietly.
“I neveronceasked you to pay my debt.”
“I know. I did it willingly, but I won’t do it a second time.”
She wouldn’t lie to her mother again, either. Lady Margot wasn’t going to change and Charlotte would love her anyway, and some would say that was a gift and others would call it a tragedy, but either way it was enough.
Mother and daughter took two more turns around the terrace in silence and the matter was done.
CHAPTER 44
Tap, tap, tap.
In the darkest hours of the night, the upstairs corridor was a long stretch of shadow lit only by the faint spill of moonlight. Charlotte pulled her pink wrap tight around her, not cold exactly but shivering all the same and too aware of the way the night air whispered over her skin. She tapped on the door again, lightly, and yet in the quiet it sounded loud as a gunshot.
There was a noise from within and a candle flared to light.
