Page 34 of Duke of Sapphire

“Should I go back to the manor, Your Grace?” the footman said quietly. “Fetch more men?”

Henry considered it. He looked at the darkness between the trees. If there was anyone else in these woods—if her father’s men or Redmont’s had found her first and were still close—a second party crashing back through with lanterns and noise would give them every warning, they needed.

“No,” he said. “Stay here.”

He lifted the lantern in a shown the light it produced in a slow arc.

Something moved above him. In the oak. A small rustle, the kind a squirrel made at night when disturbed. He looked up. The lantern only reached the lower branches. Darkness rested above that. He lowered the light and moved on, stepping away from the trunk, scanning the path ahead.

He had gone perhaps four steps when he heard it. A branch, distinctly, snapping. Then a muffled sound.

Henry turned.

A shape was descending the tree. It came down with more confidence than grace, reaching for one branch and then another, skirts bunched in one hand, and then it dropped the last several feet and landed in the leaves below with a sound that was half thud and half dignified collapse.

Henry stood absolutely still.

Charlotte.

She straightened. Her hair had come entirely loose and was hanging in multiple directions at once. There was a long tear in the skirt of her frock from hip to knee. She had a smear of something dark across her chin. She looked, overall, like someone who had spent three hours in a tree.

Which was, it transpired, exactly what she had done.

He crossed to her in four steps. “Are you all right?”

She smoothed her skirt with enormous composure, given the circumstances. “Perfectly fine. I only climbed the tree to get some air.”

“In a tree.”

“And why not?”

He stared at her. He was aware—dimly, somewhere beneath the relief that was currently conducting itself like a runaway carriage through his chest—that he ought to say something coherent. Nothing came. He stared at her hair, which had achieved a truly remarkable degree of disorder, and at the torn frock, and at the complete absence of any expression on her face that suggested she found this situation unusual in any way.

“What,” Henry said, “do you think you are doing? Coming out here in the dark with no care whatsoever for your safety—” He stopped. Breathed. “You had the entire household frightened half to death.”

“I was perfectly safe.”

“You were in a tree.”

“In an exceptionally sturdy tree.”

“Charlotte—" His voice came out harder than he intended. “Redmont’s men were on the post roads not far behind us. Your father’s inquiry is running through half the offices in England. If anyone had found you out here alone at midnight⁠—”

“But no one did.” She held his gaze. “I am standing here. I am entirely intact. Except for the frock, which was already not in its best form.”

“That is not the⁠—”

“And I would not have had any need to come out here at all,” she said, with considerable feeling, “if it were not for your utterly preposterous⁠—”

She stopped.

Henry followed her line of sight to a footman, who was standing six feet away with the lantern, staring at a point somewhere above everyone’s head resolutely.

Charlotte cleared her throat.

Henry stared at the footman. “Cover your ears.”

The footman covered his ears with both hands. Charlotte looked briefly as though she might laugh.