Page 84 of Duke of Sapphire

The boy brought up soup, then a roast, then bread and a bottle of wine that was considerably better than Henry had anticipated from a coaching inn on the Great North Road. Charlotte poured her own glass before he could reach for the bottle. He noted this and said nothing.

The soup was finished in the comfortable silence of two people who had been in a carriage together for seven hours and had largely exhausted the conversational possibilities of that particular proximity. The fire was generous. The wine was, as established, better than expected.

Then Charlotte set down her cup and said, “She smelled of rosewater and garden soil.”

Henry looked at her.

“My mother.” She turned the glass in her hand. “That is the first thing I think of, when I think of her. Not what she looked like or what she said to me. Just that smell. Rosewater in the morning and garden soil by afternoon, because she was always in the beds by ten o’clock and she never remembered to change her gloves.”

Henry said nothing. He waited.

“She laughed at things,” Charlotte said. “I mean, everyone laughs. But she had two laughs. The one she used at parties, which was perfectly pleasant and entirely decorative. And then the real one, which came out when something genuinely struck her funny. It was—” She stopped. Something crossed her face. “It was too loud for a countess. She knew it. She did it anyway.”

The fire shifted and Charlotte watched it.

“She told me something when I was eight. We were in the kitchen garden, of all places. She was showing me how to take cuttings. And she told me that the world would offer me many people who thought they knew better than I did what my future should look like.” Charlotte was quiet for a moment. “She said some of them would love me genuinely and still be entirely wrong. That I should know the difference.”

“Did you?” Henry asked.

“Not at first.” Her mouth moved, not quite a smile. “I wanted to please her. And after she died, I wanted to honor her. But wanting and managing are different things, and I spent thirteen years making myself exceedingly small for men who could not see me at all.” She turned the glass again. “Running from my father. That was the first time I thought—oh. This is what she meant. This is what it feels like.”

She said it plainly. No performance in it at all.

Henry looked at the table.

He had been carrying something for the last three weeks—longer if he was honest since the solicitor’s letter had arrived in London and he had read it standing in his study at seven in the morning. He had been carrying it the way he carried most things.

“The monthly letters Nathan sent,” Henry murmured, staring into the flickering embers, “always sat on my desk like an unread summons. I answered them with brief, sterile estate summaries. I’d convinced myself that administrative work is urgent and human connection could wait another season.”

“We often fail to see what is dear to us until it is lost,” Charlotte whispered, and he nodded.

“He asked me to come north six times that I can count,” Henry said. “Possibly more. I always had a reason. There was always an excuse. The shipping concern, the Manchester negotiations, the Chancery matter.” He looked at the fire. “I told myself there would be time. I was very certain of that. That Nathan was there, and the estate was there, and the next invitation would come and I would go.” He stopped. “And then the solicitor’s letter arrived.”

The room was quiet.

“Henry,” Charlotte said.

He looked at her.

“Guilt borrows from the present,” she said. “To pay a debt the past cannot actually receive.” She was looking at him directly, with none of the careful hedging she used when she thought she might be overstepping. “The letters are not unwritten by your suffering over them. Nathan, wherever he is—he would rather you spent the next year living than the next year flagellating yourself over a quarterly estate summary.”

Henry regarded her for a long moment. His chest tightened with the urge to draw her close.

She was right. She was entirely, precisely right, and she had said it the way his mother used to say things—plainly, without softening the edges, because the edges were where the truth lived. He had expected absolution, the standard form of it. He had not expected that.

He did not say any of that.

He looked at the fire.

The bottle was considerably lower by the time the conversation wound itself down, and the fire had gone from generous to merely adequate. The room had contracted, as rooms did late at night, when the walls stopped being background and became the whole of the world.

Charlotte stood. She looked at the chaise longue. It was narrow and short and upholstered in something that had seen better decades.

“That,” she said, “is approximately the length of a very large dog.”

“It is serviceable.”

“It is the length of a very large dog,” she repeated. “And the bed is wide enough to accommodate a reasonable distance between two adults who are, after all, married.”