“I don’t know,” admitted Charlotte. “We didn’t discuss any of that.”

In fact, they hadn’t discussed much of anything at all, other than — what had they discussed? Charlotte found she couldn’t remember any of it at all. There had been silly trivia about her childhood games on the roof, a short discussion about the geography of Girdings, speculation about the antics in the ballroom in their absence, but nothing that might have any bearing on their future.

Charlotte craned her neck to peer around the ballroom. It was taking Robert an awfully long time to find her. Of course, he did have to stop and say hello to people and do his duty as nominal host. A newly returned duke was a novelty not to be ignored by the ton; there would be many who would want to detain him in conversation after his long time abroad. But she did hope he would appear soon. Their promised next dance had already become the next and the next and there was still no sign of him.

Henrietta was also craning to see through the crowd. “Look!”

Charlotte looked, fizzing with anticipation.

“There’s Penelope!” Henrietta finished, gesturing and waving. “I haven’t seen her since supper.”

A little of Charlotte’s fizz went out of her. It wasn’t that she wasn’t glad to see Penelope, but the longer Robert tarried, the more like a dream their interlude on the roof became.

“M’lady.” It was one of the liveried footmen, bearing a silver tray. Instead of a glass, the tray bore a folded note. There was no seal on the note and no address. “For you, m’lady.”

Puzzled, Charlotte lifted the small piece of paper and opened it. In a bold, scrawling hand were written all of two words. Forgive me.

For what?

“Who gave this to you?” Charlotte asked, trying very hard not to sound as anxious as she felt. There was a very unpleasant buzzing in her ears, like a whole horde of mosquitoes.

The footman stood, straight-backed, staring directly in front of him, as he had been trained. Charlotte had always found it distinctly disconcerting conversing with someone forbidden to look you in the eye; it felt doubly so now. “The Duke, my lady.”

“Did he have any further message for me?”

“He said to tell you that circumstances required him to depart Girdings, my lady, and he did not know when he was to return.”

“I see,” said Charlotte, although she didn’t see at all. Paper crackled between her fingers. “Thank you. That will be all.”

“He’s left?” demanded Henrietta. “Tonight?”

Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to look at Henrietta, but stared as straight ahead as the footman. “So it would appear.”

“But why? What does the note say?”

Charlotte held it up in nerveless fingers. Forgive me.

For leaving?

There had to be a logical excuse. An emergency. What else would necessitate so precipitate a departure in the middle of one’s own party? A friend might have been taken ill. He might have received an urgent summons from his old regiment. Charlotte’s mind churned out a multitude of soothing plausabilities. She would have preferred if Robert had made some indication of when he might return, but at least he had contacted her before he left. That had to count for something. With so haphazard a departure, there wouldn’t have been time to write anything more. In fact, she should consider herself honored that he had taken the time to write anything at all. It showed he had been thinking about her, that he cared about her, that he knew she would worry when he didn’t appear, that he wanted her forgiveness.

It all made her feel a great deal better. Charlotte rubbed her cold fingers against the velvet of her skirt, forcing the blood back into them.

Forgive me.

Of course, she would. It was all perfectly understandable — or would be, once he came back and explained the whole story.

“I don’t understand,” mourned Henrietta, brooding over the note.

“Understand what?” Penelope’s hair was mussed and her eyes were very bright. She looked, in fact, like someone who had just been soundly kissed.

Charlotte found herself seized with an anxious desire to find a mirror and make sure she didn’t look like that. Not that it was the same, of course. What she had with Robert was worlds away from Penelope’s casual encounters. It was happily ever after, she was sure of it. Even if Robert had mysteriously decamped.

Again.

Charlotte fought away a vague sense of unease.

“There’s nothing to understand,” she said, making the best of it as best she could. “Robert was unexpectedly called away.”

Penelope narrowed her tea-colored eyes. “Was he?”

“Sometimes these things just can’t be helped,” said Charlotte, as much for herself as Penelope.

“Oh, yes, they can.” Penelope folded her arms across her chest with the air of one girding herself for battle. “Would you like to know where your Sir Galahad has gone? He’s off with Sir Francis Medmenham, prospecting for greener pastures.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Pen — ”

Penelope shook off Henrietta’s hand. “Well, it’s true! I heard it myself. I heard your precious duke tell Sir Francis Medmenham that you weren’t the sort he’d be interested in dallying with. And then they went off together.”

Charlotte’s throat felt very dry. “When was this?”

“Upstairs, just about an hour ago. Sir Francis saw him near your room and commented on your both leaving the ball at the same time.”

Charlotte’s lungs expanded with sheer relief. “That explains it, then. Robert was protecting my reputation.”

“He was protecting his own — ”

“Pen!”

“He wouldn’t want Sir Francis to know we were upstairs together,” explained Charlotte hastily, before open warfare could break out between her friends. “It all makes perfect sense. What else was he to tell him under the circumstances?”

“I can think of a few things,” said Penelope.

“Well, so can we all,” broke in Henrietta, in a conciliatory tone that made Penelope’s eyes narrow dangerously, “but he’s only a man, after all. And he was trying to protect Charlotte.”

“By leaving,” said Penelope flatly. “By going off to carouse with Medmenham.”

Charlotte shook her head so emphatically that a hairpin fell out. “If he left with Medmenham, it was only to distract him. He doesn’t like Medmenham. He’s told me so.”

“He’s told Medmenham the same about you.” Penelope rolled her eyes in frustration. “He left you, Lottie. He ran off without saying good-bye.”

Charlotte stiffened at the sound of the old nursery nickname. “He sent me a note.”

“Not much of one.” Penelope grabbed both of her hands. Charlotte could feel the crush of her fingers through both their pairs of gloves. “I just don’t want to see you make a mistake out of — romantic blindness! You can have him if you like, but don’t have him thinking that he’s something he isn’t.”

“He isn’t. I mean, I don’t.” Yanking her hands free of Penelope’s, Charlotte seized on a simpler point. “What were you doing upstairs?”

“The same thing you were,” said Penelope with a bluntness that made the color creep into Charlotte’s cheeks. She hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms before. It made her feel oddly unclean.

“Upstairs?” said Henrietta despairingly. To go off into alcoves was one thing, bedrooms quite another.

It gave Charlotte a slightly squirmy feeling in the pit of her stomach to realize how carelessly she had been dicing with her own reputation. If she and Robert had been discovered upstairs . . . No wonder Robert had blurted out whatever he had to Medmenham.

Penelope looked off across the room, over the long row of couples circling in unison as they performed the final figure of the dance. In profile, her expression was carefully blank.

“The alcoves were all occupied, so we went upstairs instead.”

The violinist drew his bow across the strings one final time. Throughout the room, gentlemen bowed and ladies curtsied to signify the end of the dance. With her back to the dance floor, Penelope failed to notice.

“I was with Freddy Staines,” finished Penelope, in a tone deliberately designed to provoke. “In his room.”

The words echoed with unnatural loudness down the suddenly silent room.

Henrietta’s face went ashen.

Like an animal scenting fire, Penelope’s eyes darted from side to side. Beneath Penelope’s still, straight posture, Charlotte could sense the panic coming off her in waves, the frozen panic of a trapped animal that knows it has nowhere left to run.

“You mean Fanny’s room?” Charlotte said very loudly. “Fanny Stillworth?”

There was no such person as Fanny Stillworth, but it was the best she could think of under the circumstances.

As if realizing their gaffe, the musicians struck up again, plunging into a rather frenetic quadrille, but almost no one was dancing. They were all too busy watching the dreadful drama unfolding at the far end of the gallery, where one of their own had just willfully flung herself outside the bounds of polite society. Halfway down the room, Penelope’s mother looked ready to imitate some of the less attractive sorts of Greek gods and devour her own young.

“You heard what I said.” Penelope’s face was a tragic mask, like the bust of Medea in the library, carved into lines of bitter satisfaction. She looked like a queen on the scaffold, staring down the peasantry. “Everyone heard what I said.”

Without another word, she turned on her heel and strode out of the gallery, her flaming head held high.

“Pen — ” Casting an anguished glance over her shoulder at Charlotte, Henrietta hurried out after her.

Charlotte made to follow but she was yanked to a stop by a hand on her arm. Mrs. Ponsonby’s pudgy fingers tightened around her sleeve with surprising force.

“No!” declared Mrs. Ponsonby, in ringing tones that carried clear over the efforts of the sweating musicians and the dancing couples, her fingers digging painfully into Charlotte’s arm. “Do not go after her! We do not know her now.”

Mrs. Ponsonby’s bosom swelled with self-righteous zeal and not a little bit of selfish satisfaction. She had had her eye on Lord Frederick for her own daughter, Lucy, and everyone knew it.

She was not the only mother who had disliked Penelope on those grounds. They all clustered in now, like savages for the kill, ready to grind their spears into whatever vulnerable flesh they could find.

The murderous haze in the air made Charlotte’s stomach turn in a way that had nothing to do with Mrs. Ponsonby’s poor choice of perfume.

“Perhaps you don’t,” said Charlotte, shaking off Mrs. Ponsonby’s clinging grasp, and followed after her friends.

“You can’t touch pitch without being tarred!” Mrs. Ponsonby called shrilly, if inaccurately, after her.

Hastening after friends, Charlotte refused to give her the satisfaction of looking back.

Mrs. Ponsonby was wrong. She might be naïve, but she knew enough of the world to know that it took a great deal of pitch to blacken a duke’s daughter. Not like poor Penelope, who didn’t even have an “Honorable” in front of her name to scrub her reputation clean.

Charlotte’s heart wrenched for her friend. It was so like Penelope to try to protect her and land herself in a stew because of it. So generous and yet so entirely wrong-headed. Because, among other things, she didn’t need protection from Robert. Whatever he might have said to Sir Francis, whatever his reasons for leaving, his intentions towards her were honorable.

She was sure of it.

Chapter Eleven

As the boat drew him across the River Styx, Robert knew he was truly in hell.

It had been four days since he had left Girdings, four days since he had stood on the roof with Charlotte, four days since he had struck his own Mephistophelean bargain in the hallway outside Charlotte’s chambers. It felt more like four years. The descent from the roof of Girdings to the subterranean caverns of West Wycombe had to be measured in more than miles. The distance between the Dovedale domains and those of Medmenham felt as vast as that between paradise and inferno. Once one began the descent, one didn’t go back.

At the time, it had seemed like a logical enough decision. An offer of immediate initiation into Medmenham’s Hellfire Club meant that he could find Wrothan that much faster. The faster he found Wrothan, the faster he could return to Girdings. Quick, clean, over.