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Chapter 6
The following morning, Charlotte and Louisa awoke for breakfast with Margorie and Louisa’s parents. Their chatter was bright and amicable, seemingly without the lurking darkness beneath—the ever-pressing desire for the girls to marry and leave the nest. Charlotte could just barely sense it behind their eyes—yet allowed the glossy summer morning to blot it out.
“You must have met someone interesting at the ball, Louisa?” her mother asked, her voice lifting just before she tore through her sausage.
Louisa stirred anxiously in her chair. “I don’t know. There were plenty of men there, of course …”
“And she captured the eye of nearly every man in the area,” Charlotte affirmed.
“But none of them caught your eye?” her father asked. He lifted a bit of potato onto a fork and blinked at her.
“I suppose not,” Louisa said. Her eyes turned towards Charlotte, glittering ominously.
Charlotte sensed the approaching conversation like a tide. Although the girls had busied themselves with easy gossip throughout the late hours of the night—mostly surrounding what gowns various women they’d known through their lives had worn to the party—Louisa wasn’t dumb enough to allow what had happened the evening previously to go. She needed to label the situation. She needed answers.
Thus, Charlotte’s heart banged away in her ribcage. She forced herself through ordinary conversation throughout the next forty-five minutes, then allowed herself to be dragged to the garden to sit in the sun’s splendour. Once there, Louisa targeted those dark eyes towards her, craned her ears to ensure that nobody listened in, and said, “Okay. Start from the beginning.”
Charlotte heaved a sigh. She remembered what Louisa had said about secrets between them. It was true that the girls hadn’t bothered with them in all their years of friendship—that a secret was akin to putting the first nail in the coffin on their friendship. She had to own up to the facts.
But when she opened her lips to speak, she found no energy behind the words.
“I don’t know. I was suddenly overcome with the desire to speak with the mystic regarding something she’d suggested to me,” Charlotte said. “It was outlandish and strange, especially given what I already believed about the mystic, about that world of darkness.”
A slight smile wiggled up on the sides of Louisa’s lips. “You were embarrassed that you’d returned? And that man caught you in the act?”
Charlotte groaned. “I suppose so.”
There it was, she supposed. The first nail. She blinked towards the ground, praying that she wouldn’t one day watch the fall of her relationship with Louisa. It meant far too much to her.
“I managed to speak with Margorie before you awoke this morning,” Louisa said suddenly. Her eyes brightened.
“Oh?” Charlotte asked. Had Louisa already forgotten her annoyance?
“I told her about this man. Jeffrey. Naturally, I was smitten—”
“Although you’re ordinarily smitten, aren’t you?”
“I suppose so,” Louisa said, her grin widening. “That said, Margorie had heard of the man. Perhaps it’s of interest to you.”
Charlotte leaned forward in the garden chair. She dropped her hands to her chin, her eyes wide. “Margorie knows Jeffrey?”
“Of him, certainly,” Louisa said. “She and Jeffrey courted around the same time initially—back when Margorie was a wee thing. Nineteen, twenty.”
“It’s difficult to imagine those days. I suppose you’re right, though. Jeffrey seems to be around that age,” Charlotte said.
“Yes. Handsome, late-twenties … what more could a woman like me ask for?”
Charlotte snickered. “What did your sister say about him, then?”
“Apparently, after he stopped courting, he stayed in town a few years longer, then abandoned the county. Nobody really knew where he’d gone. That said, he left for a reason—a rather ominous one.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, apparently, Jeffrey is the younger brother of a man named Alfred, an entirely handsome young man who died after falling down the stairs drunk and out of his mind, around the time that Jeffrey left town,” Louisa said.
At this, Margorie creaked open the garden gate with a half-smile between her cheeks. “Are you girls already gossiping this early in the morning?”
“I’m afraid so,” Charlotte said. “My goodness. This is particularly strange, isn’t it?”
