After checking with Charlotte’s maid to assure himself that the invalid was sleeping comfortably, Max strolled out to the stables and ordered Ajax to be saddled up. There was nothing like a long and punishing ride to clear the mind.
He did not return until late afternoon and did not see Charlotte until evening when she appeared for dinner. Accustomed to being active and in the center of things, she had quickly grown tired of being an invalid and, overcoming all Lucy’s protestations, had insisted on dressing and going downstairs for dinner. “Oh, my lady, the doctor said that you were to rest,” Lucy had protested tearfully.
“I have rested, Lucy, until I am bored beyond expression. I
must
get up or I shall go mad.” Charlotte slid gingerly out of bed. The room did not spin before her eyes, but remained reassuringly stable. “There,” she remarked with satisfaction, “I am not even dizzy. Now help me into the bath and then fetch my peach sarcenet, if you would be so kind, and the white lace shawl. I believe I shall take some fresh air on the terrace before dinner.”
There was nothing more to be said. Lucy knew her mistress well
enough to recognize when her mind was made up; further remonstrances would be useless.
It was on the terrace that Lord Lydon found her. Charlotte was gazing out over the park as the bluish mist floated over the vast green expanse of lawn. The sky was a delicate pink and the air soft and heavy with the scent of roses from the garden at one end of the terrace.
“I am delighted to see you so quickly recovered.” The phrase sounded hopelessly still and formal. Damn! Max could not remember a time when he had failed to charm a woman and now, here he was, as awkward as though he had never spoken to one before in his life. A hideous silence hovered between them. “Perhaps you know that the Wadleighs have been here and, er, left.”
“Yes, William mentioned something of the sort.” At last she turned to face him, but she could do no more than glance quickly up at him and then she focused again on the park beyond.
“I promised Tom Piggott my protection if he spoke the truth and he confessed that he had tried to, ah,
dispose of
William, but that it was Cecil who had ordered him to do so.”
“Ah.” Charlotte could think of nothing to say. Her throat was dry and her heart was pounding. Had she gotten up too soon after all? No, her head no longer hurt her and she was not dizzy. She had even removed the bandage and allowed Lucy to bathe the bruise and cut with lavender water. No, it was not the bump on her head that was making her feel so strange; it was the intensity in the gray eyes fixed so steadily on her, and it was the hazy memory of the gentle way he had held her when she was semiconscious and the tender words he had whispered. Had he meant it? She wanted to know, but at the same time she was afraid to know.
“Charlotte?”
At last she looked up at him. He gathered her hands into his and drew her close. “They are gone. They will never bother you and William again.”
“Thank you,” she whispered faintly. She could feel his breath ruffling her hair, and she longed for him to hold her tight against the reassuringly broad chest, but instead he disengaged one hand and cupped her chin and raised it to look deep into her eyes.
“I am so sorry that they bothered you at all. I should have been here to watch over you, to protect you. It never should have happened.” His voice was raw with pain. “But I promise you I shall
never leave you alone like that again. I shall always be with you to protect you.”
She shook her head, giving a tiny, inarticulate murmur of protest.
“I know, I know, you have taken care of yourself and William quite successfully all these years without my help and you do not need it now, but I
want
to help. I…there is no other way to say it…I love you.”
Her eyes flew open in surprise.
“Is that such a shocking thing? How could I have spent so many happy days with you, shared as much with you as I have, and not love you?”
“But…but Lady Hillyard, the other ladies at Lydon Court…” At last Charlotte had found her voice.
“The other ladies,”
he echoed wryly.
“The other ladies
were a diversion, an antidote to boredom, call it what you will, but it was a purely physical thing. They meant nothing to me, or I to them. You mean something to me, everything to me—friendship, companionship, and…love. I want to mean the same to you.”
“Oh.” Charlotte did not sound entirely convinced.
“What can I say, but that I love you? I cannot explain it more than that, but that is what love is, inexplicable. I never experienced it before; certainly I did not seek it and I could not have known what it was until I felt it. But I feel it now, and there is no doubt in my mind that I love you. I want to be with you forever.” Gently he tilted her chin and softly touched his lips to hers. He
must
make her understand. He felt the warmth of her mouth under his and all the longing and emptiness he had suffered without her washed over him. He pulled her into his arms, sliding one hand up her back to the nape of her neck and burying it in her dark hair while the other tightened on her slim waist. With a groan he kissed her harder until her lips parted under his and her body melted against him.
Charlotte could not help herself. Her body had been craving this ever since she had kissed him good-bye at Lydon. The warmth of his hands through the thin material of her dress made her feel alive again, as though somehow, since she had parted from him, she had been sleeping and now she was fully awake. Without understanding it she knew her body longed for his, for the solidity of it, the strength of it.
Slowly her hands crept up his chest and around his neck. She clung to him and gave herself up to the delicious feeling of being
wanted, of wanting and being fulfilled all at the same moment. The vague sense of emptiness that had been plaguing her since her return to Harcourt was gone, washed away by the joy of love and desire. She did love him, she did desire him; she knew that now.
Max raised his head to catch his breath. “Marry me.”
“Marry you?” Charlotte was brought up short. She had wanted the moment to last forever, to forget about the world and its problems and revel in the joy of being close to him.
“Yes, my love. It
is
customary, you know.”
“But, but…I never thought of it.”
“I am well aware of that, but I am asking you to think of it now.”
Charlotte’s thoughts were in a whirl. Leave Harcourt, leave William, give up the well-ordered life she had created for them both? A cold shiver of doubt ran through her. “I don’t know. Could we not just…”
“No we could not, Charlotte, my love, I do not just desire you; I want you to share my life. I want to share yours, its joys and its sorrows. I want to be together. At last I know what it means not to be alone in the world.” He was losing her. A knot of fear gripped his stomach as he read the uncertainty in her eyes. How ironic, after all these years of avoiding women who wished to hold on to him, that he was now desperately, and so unsuccessfully, trying to do just that. “Charlotte, think of William.” Max played his trump card. He knew it was unfair, but he was so sure that he was doing the right thing he did not care.
“William?”
“He likes me, he trusts me. I like him. He enjoyed being at Lydon Court and he will need a man in his life as he grows older. With the best will in the world, my love, you cannot help him with some things.”
“You would have William with us?”
“But of course I would. You would not think, you could not think… Surely you know me better than that, Charlotte. I would never offer you a home and not include William. I would never dedicate my life to you and not to William too.”
“Oh, oh…” She sniffed audibly and hunted frantically for a handkerchief.
“Fortunately, these days I have them in ready supply.” Max pulled a clean white square of linen from his pocket.
“And I have been a regular watering pot.”
“Change affects all of us in different ways. Come along. It is time for dinner. I shall not press you any more on this. It is a momentous thing and it is unfair of me to want an immediate answer.”
“Thank you. I fear I am not used to this sort of thing. I am not very equipped to deal with it.” Charlotte gulped and gave the marquess a watery smile.
“I should hope not.” He drew her arm through his and led her into the dining room.
Chapter Thirty-four
The marquess was as good as his word. All through dinner he kept up the flow of conversation, telling William more about his plans for breeding his horses, praising him on his handling of the curricle, sharing stories of his own accidents and near accidents, and did not refer once to their conversation on the terrace. Nor did he mention anything about the decision to Charlotte when he bade her good night. He did not need to; she could think of nothing else.
All that night she tossed and turned. She wanted to say yes. She wanted to be part of the companionship and sharing he spoke of. She had missed that after leaving Lydon. Somehow life had seemed rather dull and routine after she had returned to Harcourt. All the things she had formerly enjoyed—riding, reading, taking long walks in the countryside, sitting lazily in the sun and fishing with William—seemed to have lost their appeal. And problems had been just that, problems, with no one to help, instead of challenges to be explored and discussed as she had done with the marquess. She had felt restless and dissatisfied. Even her body, which until now she had taken for granted, had seemed out of sorts. The simple pleasures in which she had indulged—bathing in the lake, riding hell-for-leather through the fields, walking briskly on a fresh summer morning, or strolling in the dusk and watching the sun warm the stones of Harcourt with its last slanting rays, had all been less pleasurable, less fulfilling since she had returned from Lydon Court, and what had been a full life had seemed oddly empty.
The marquess’s reappearance had changed all that. Indisposed as she had been when he arrived, Charlotte still felt more alive than she had in all the time since she had left Lydon Court. When she had opened her eyes to see him smiling down at her, had felt his arm around her shoulders and his hand on her forehead smoothing away her hair, all the ache and weariness from the accident, all the
listlessness she had felt since leaving Lydon Court had simply evaporated and the emptiness had vanished.
She admitted it to herself now. The symptoms that had been plaguing her since her return to Harcourt could all be attributed to missing the marquess, pure and simple. He had said he was in love with her; was she in love with him too. Deep down inside she had sensed that, but she had not allowed herself to recognize it until he had held her and kissed her, and then there was no longer any ignoring it.
But that was for now, for this particular moment. What about the future? Could she bear it when she lost it again? If she allowed herself to give in and build someone else into her life to the point that she relied upon him for love and companionship, for sharing problems with her and helping her cope with things, then, the agony of it all when he was no longer there would be worse than it would have been if she had not allowed herself to enjoy it at all. The pain of losing it would be far worse than the pain of never having had it. She knew that sort of pain—had lived with it for years—and she knew she could continue to live with it. But that had only been the unfulfilled longing for a mother and father. This would be far worse; it might destroy her altogether, and she could not afford that—for William’s sake.
The worst of it was that during this agony of indecision, all this tossing and turning, Charlotte had the most overwhelming urge to run to the marquess for comfort and advice. He would understand what she was going through. He had been through it all himself. He knew what it was to be alone, with no one but himself to count on. He knew what it felt like to be self-reliant, dealing with things in one’s own way without the interference of others. And he knew the enormity of what he was asking her to do, to trust someone else, to allow someone else into a carefully ordered world; for he himself had faced that same enormous decision. However, he seemed to have made that decision; she could not.
Charlotte got out of bed and padded over to the window. The moon lit up the park and the fields below, outlining the dark shadows of the enormous, spreading oaks, gleaming on the pond. All her life she had longed to see the world beyond Harcourt; now someone was offering that to her and she was afraid to leave. She had always scorned people, like the Winslow girls, who governed their behavior by
what is done
and
what is not done,
for accepting the status quo, but was she now not guilty of the same thing, clinging to the safety of what she knew, of what had been, and turning her back on what might be? Sighing, she returned to the bed and lay there staring at the canopy overhead, hoping against hope that inspiration would come to her, for she could not seem to think her way out of this muddle as she had thought her way out of muddles before.
Charlotte was not the only one who was wide awake. Max, too, was unable to sleep, but unlike Charlotte, he had not even made the pretense of going to bed. Instead, he sat fully clothed in front of the fire in his bedchamber, a glass of brandy in his hand.
Think, Lydon, think,
he urged himself over and over.
You have never let anything or anyone get the best of you before this; you will not do so now over the most important thing in your life. There must be a way!
He glanced at the portrait over the fireplace. It was a young boy with a gun and his dog. The clothes were from a previous generation, but the face was vaguely familiar. Recognition dawned. Of course, it was Hugo! It was Hugo who had plunged him into this mess, asking him to look after his son and his daughter, a daughter whom he had made independent and self-reliant to a fault, a daughter who was afraid to… That was it! It was Hugo who had plunged him into this mess, and it was Hugo who would get him out of it.