Page 12 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

“Thank you, Mrs. Drummond. Mrs. Scott has given you all the particulars, yes? Lady Chesleigh’s direction in Brighton and a letter of introduction? Good, good. Then we shall leave the two of you to pack. And I expect the colonel also has work to do,” he added, with a pointed look at Millrose.

“Always, sir. Let me see you out.”

They made their way up the narrow staircase and through the shop, where Scott paused to perform the niceties of an ordinary customer, even going so far as to purchase a packet of his favorite tobacco—“all part of the ruse,” he assured his wife as she wagged a chiding finger.

Afterward, as he handed her into their waiting carriage, she favored him with a gentler, knowing look. “I can guess what you’re up to, Zebby, sending Lieutenant Hopkins with Mrs. Drummond. I do believe you’re the very definition of an incurable romantic. But do you really think it’s wise to go on matchmaking, after the fiasco with Lord and Lady Chesleigh?”

“Fiasco? Let us wait and see, my dear,” he said, pressing his lips to the back of her gloved hand. “Let us wait and see.”

Chapter 4

Caro made a point of rising early enough that she could walk along the Marine Parade alone without incurring too many raised eyebrows.

Society had never settled the matter of how Lady Chesleigh was to be treated: like a lovelorn woman (which she did not appear to be), like a widow (which, as far as anyone had been able to determine, she wasn’t), or like a curiosity and a scandal (which she most certainly was).

In six years’ time, she had almost persuaded herself not to care.

Here, her surroundings were ever changing. Buildings seemed to spring up overnight. At the assemblies and private parties, one was forever glimpsing fresh faces, from season to season and year to year. Even the beach was new each morning, scraped and sculpted by the power of the sea.

A gust of wind off the channel tugged at the veil pinned to her bonnet, and she turned to face the salt-sharp air. As always, the tide pulled her, drew her in, tempting her to become one with its wild heartbeat.

In six years’ time, she had never approached closer than the promenade that ran along the cliff’s edge, set back twenty yards or more from the sea.

Certainly, she had never set foot in the water.

She did not intend to let herself be swept away again.

Even before it had become clear that her husband did not mean to return to her, she had known she could not stay in the house in London. Could not go on sleeping in that bed.

When I’m in your bed, you may call me Maxim.

Away from those memories, he would be nothing more (or less) to her than Lord Chesleigh. Even in the privacy of her thoughts.

So she had met with Lord Chesleigh’s chief solicitor, Mr. Sellers, who had agreed to find a tenant for the house on Curzon Street.

“But where will you go?” he had asked.

“The seaside,” she had answered.

Not because she had ever been, but precisely because she had not.

And when she had recalled her father’s frequent remarks about “the Prince of Wales and his whore,” she had known precisely which stretch of the seaside would suit her best.

If Brighton was good enough for the scandalous Mrs. Fitzherbert, it was good enough for Lady Chesleigh.

Once she had reached the bottom of the inviting garden known as the Steyne, she turned back and let her footman escort her home. The newly completed Royal Crescent, a curved row of black-tiled houses facing the water, was entirely without history, set apart from the ancient village of Brighthelmstone. In the drawing room of Number 2, Mrs. Horn greeted her with black coffee, toast dabbed with gooseberry preserves, and the day’s correspondence.

The stack of invitations had been growing steadily smaller since Michaelmas, as the high season drew to a close. Brighton would not be truly abandoned until the bleakest winter months, but the strand in October was a different world from the strand in July.

Beneath the invitations lay two letters. The first contained her quarterly allowance, which Mr. Sellers had sent for years without fail, always accompanied by a brief note expressing his hope that she was well and his regret that he knew no other news that would interest her. No news of Lord Chesleigh, in other words. She laid the letter aside, unread.

The contents of the second letter were equally familiar, equally unwelcome.

Papa’s hand, this time.

Things must be desperate indeed.

Nearly as desperate as she had been, in the early weeks, and months, when she would have done almost anything—even gone back to her family—in order not to be alone with her thoughts. Tears had sprung to her eyes when her sister Catherine’s first ill-spelled note had arrived, though it did little more than repeat their father’s claim that if she could afford to live among the fashionable set on perpetual holiday, then the Marchioness of Chesleigh must want for nothing.