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She took a moment to look over the paper sleeve she had brought with her, then held it to her chest. This was it. This was the moment the whole world would come to know her work—not as part of some plagiarizer’s ploy, not as Mr. Charles F. Huxley. As her, as a lady with the power to write. She would explain to the printers thatshewas Huxley and would ask that the next poems be printed under her name. She would take back her crown and make the pretender watch… and watch he would, as she took the whole of London by storm. It was, in the funniest of ways, a dream come true.
“Good in heaven! Charlotte, would you slow down?”
She turned to see Matthew walking after her, looking rather refined, dare she say, in his sienna jacket and hat. All right, perhaps it was not aperfectdream due to her brother’s presence, but it was close as Charlotte could get while being minded by a chaperone.
“I would much rather you hastened your step, brother,” she shot back, pleasantly satisfied with herself for making him sweat. “Really, you should be ashamed of yourself, being outrun by a woman.”
“I might feel some shame if youwerea woman,” he panted as he joined her at last. “But all evidence points to your being a daemon come to test me.” He put his hands on his hips. “Why? Oh, why could we have not had Booth drop us off before the bloody printers themselves? Why ask him to park on the other side of Green?”
Charlotte furrowed her brow.Because if we had parked before the printers, I couldn’t send you back to fetch my gloves, so I might sneak away. “Because a little activity is good for the soul,” she offered instead as a lie, wiping all discontent from her face. “Are you coming? It’s only a little further up.”
She handed him the sleeve of her poems and pulled on her hat. She may have been a scoundrel for testing the limits of her brother’s credulity—and patience—but she could still look presentable.
“I am,” Matthew whined beside her. “You know, you might tell me what you intend for us to do here before we arrive.”
“I told you—I want to have something printed.”
“Do entertain me with the details, sister.”
Charlotte cocked her head, snatching her sleeve back from him in case he was curious enough to take a look. “Eleanor and I wish to start a ladies’ reading club, perhaps host literature salons ere long.” She shot her brother a teasing look. “Not that I expect you to care.”
“And the printers are for… what?”
They stopped before the large red door to the building’s vestibule, destiny laying just beyond its frosted panes of glass. “The printers are for printing, silly. In this case,” she reached into her paper sleeve, careful to take out only the decoy she had prepared, leaving her poems safe within their confines, “a pamphlet to attract members. I thought we might pop into Hathaway’s afterward and see if they could drop a notice in one of their ladies’ publications as well.”
Matthew arched a brow. “Well, you’ve certainly thought this through.”
She had. All night, in fact. For all the ill the Singberry ball had wrought, it had made one thing crystal clear: Charlotte’s poems were her life, and she was not about to let a vagrant reap them from her. She could suffer a life of scandal but never one of regret. She was to walk into the publishing house and let them know exactly who Huxley was.
With a derisive smile, she gestured for him to open the door. “It’s not like you at all, to be quite so…” he muttered as he opened it.
“Proper? You underestimate me, dear Matthew.” She snapped her head back and brought a finger to her mouth. “Instead of teasing me, you might congratulate me for acting the proper lady.”
“When pigs fly, dear Charlotte. When pigs fly.”
Casting a glance at the twin doors before her, Charlotte’s heart leaped in her chest. The time had come for her to set her plan in motion, and she found herself feeling quite nervous. For most of her life, she had rushed head-first into trouble, not thinking twice about the consequences. But things had been different since her last chance at freedom since she had stolen away in the middle of the night like a ghost—since she had broken her father’s heart.
She debated the matter a little further, not pronouncing herself inwardly either way. She gasped when she felt her brother’s hand on her shoulder, awakening her from her thinking.
“Charlotte?” he called. “Charlotte, look through there and tell me what you see.”
She turned to see where he was pointing, just beyond the large, black door to Hathaway & Bacon. Between its panes of crisscrossed glass, Charlotte could just about make out the squiggly outline of a man.
“A door,” she replied flatly. “I see a door, and behind it, a man.”
“You do not recognize him?” Matthew was looking down at her with a glint of amusement. It was most unlike him.
“Should I? He looks like every other man in London from where I stand.”
“Because you’re standing at a funny angle. Here,” he ordered and pulled her to the center of the door—the glass was not so warped there. It took only a second for her to realize who was waiting for her in the publishers, and her heart sank to her stomach.
“You don’t suppose that’s the poet from last night, do you? The one with whom you danced. Oh, what was his name?”
“Mr. Charles Huxley,” she bit out, each word tasting like ash in her mouth. She could not begin to conceive of what he was doing here, today of all days, this morning of all mornings. Surely, he was not tailing her as well as stealing her work. Constantly one step ahead of her he was, fantastically so. It made no sense. “What do you suppose he’s doing?”
“I thought you were the bookworm among us. Most like, he’s publishing something new.”
Or picking up a note on my behalf,Charlotte realized, and quickly turned to Matthew. Time was of the essence. “Oh, Matthew. I have done something so terribly silly.” She lifted up her hands. “My gloves. I seem to have… forgotten them. Yes, in the carriage. Would you be a dear and go fetch them for me? I should be so embarrassed if one of our friends was to catch me without them.”
