“Thus keeping his own feet dry?”

“And the Queen’s favor.” Charlotte looked as pleased as though it were she who had trampled on Sir Walter’s cloak.

“I’m surprised Sir Walter didn’t call him out.”

“Oh, he did him one better. He hired a gang of bravadoes to set upon Sir Nicholas that very night.”

“Don’t tell me. Sir Nicholas ran them all through and then sent a mocking note to their master.”

Charlotte shook her head, a mischievous smile plucking at the corners of her lips. “No. He had too much sense for that. He crawled under a carriage, down a back alley, and took the next available ship to the West Indies.”

Robert regarded her with bemused fascination. “Where did you learn all this?” He couldn’t imagine the Duchess blithely telling tales of the peccadilloes of her husband’s ancestors; other peoples’ ancestors, yes, but Dovedales, no.

Tilting her head, Charlotte smiled reminiscently. “My father.”

Robert felt his answering smile freeze on his face.

His cousin didn’t seem to notice. She was a thousand miles away, in the golden haze of once upon a time. “He used to tell me bedtime stories about all the characters lurking in our family tree,” she said fondly. “We do have some wonderful rogues to our credit. Or discredit, I suppose.”

Discredit was one way of putting it. Every time she said “our,” he felt the lash of it like a whip on his back. It didn’t seem right that he ought to be included in that “our,” in that family history, when he had stumbled in off the sides, the collateral line of a collateral line, when he bore the title her father had borne so briefly, the title his own father had plotted and schemed and quite possibly murdered to acquire.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry that I’m here and he’s not.”

Charlotte looked up at him in surprise. “It’s not your fault.”

What could he say to that? It had felt like his fault. It still did. He remembered coming with his father to Girdings all those years ago, like vultures hunting out their prey. Only his father hadn’t bothered to wait until his prey was decently dead before descending on the carcass.

He had never known whether their arrival had hastened the Duke’s death. The loud and constant rows between the Dowager Duchess and his father certainly couldn’t have done anything to improve the Duke’s condition. As to whether his father had done anything else to speed along the Duke’s demise . . . he would never know for sure.

Charlotte’s eyes searched his face. Whatever she saw there made her brow wrinkle with concern. “I wouldn’t want you to think that I don’t want you here. I’d rather have you here than neither of you.” She bit her lip in frustration. “Oh, dear. That came out wrong somehow.”

“No,” said Robert simply. “It didn’t. It came out just right.”

Charlotte didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy trying to make him feel better. “You were so good to me in that awful time,” she said earnestly. “I missed you terribly when you left.”

She had been very easy to be good to. It had been an undemanding way of assuaging his own conscience, taking the time to pay attention to a neglected little girl six years his junior. If he were being honest with himself, it had been as much to distract himself as her, an excuse for staying out of the way of their brawling elders. At least dancing attendance on her had never been dull; she played elaborate games of make-believe, spinning fanciful stories in which he sometimes participated and sometimes just watched.

Robert smiled at the sudden recollection of one of those fancies. “Do you still believe in unicorns?”

Charlotte’s cheeks flared with color. “I can’t believe you remember that after all these years!”

He hadn’t, until now. “How could I forget? It’s not everyone who goes unicorn hunting with a plate of jam tarts.”

“I thought it might be hungry,” protested Charlotte. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“It was.” Robert smiled reminiscently. “Those were excellent tarts.”

“You told me the unicorn had come for them!”

“I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”

Charlotte folded her arms across her chest, trapping her book in front of her breasts. “You mean you liked raspberry tarts.”

“That, too.” Robert grinned down at her, watching as she struggled to keep up her air of mock reproof and failed miserably. He was surprised to hear himself saying, “Perhaps we should go unicorn hunting again sometime.”

Charlotte beamed at him. “Only if you leave some of the tarts for me this time.”

“We’ll have the kitchen make up a double batch.”

“Triple,” corrected Charlotte. “We’ll want some for the unicorn.”

Looking down at her shining face, her hair glinting like a personal halo in the light of the setting sun, Robert could almost believe she might find her unicorn, somewhere out in the gardens of Girdings House. In the army, overseas, he would have scoffed at the notion that such radical innocence could still exist, even tucked away in the remote corners of an English country house. It was a bit like stumbling upon a unicorn, or some other creature generally believed extinct.

Reaching forward, Robert tucked one of her flyaway curls back behind her ear. “You look like a lady in a medieval tapestry. All you need is the unicorn at your feet.”

“And one of those big, conical hats,” suggested Charlotte, tilting her head in a way that he remembered from all those years ago. “I believe those are de rigueur for unicorn-hunting maidens.”

“We’ll have to find you one,” said Robert. “There must be one somewhere in this great pile.”

Clasping his hands behind his back, he glanced around the gallery. Great pile didn’t even begin to describe it. The sheer vastness of Girdings House resisted comprehension. Forget conical hats — one could store a whole regiment away in a corner of one wing and never even know they were there.

Robert was startled out of his thoughts by the tentative touch of a hand against his arm.

He looked down to Charlotte regarding him earnestly, her book tucked under one arm.

“I really am glad to have you back. I would never want you to think otherwise. You were all that made that time bearable.”

“The feeling was mutual,” he said soberly. Robert thought of Medmenham and Staines in the other room, of the sour smell of spilled port, and the hideous dark holes being burned into his soul, and realized with surprise that he hadn’t given a thought to any of them the whole time he had been in the gallery. “It still is.”

Charlotte’s face lit with such gratitude that Robert found himself, for once, entirely at a loss. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t deserve that kind of approbation, he wanted to tell her that he wasn’t worthy of such simple, uncritical affection, but his throat closed around the words.

Instead, he did what he did best. He pasted an easy smile across his face, held out his arm, and said teasingly, “Shall we see about finding you that hat?”

“Yes, let’s,” said his lady with the unicorn, and she walked out with her arm tucked trustingly through his.

Chapter Four

“How goes the Parade of Eligibles?” demanded Lady Henrietta Dorrington, flinging herself into a chair beside Charlotte.

They were in the Gallery of Girdings, where all the furniture had been pushed back against the walls to make room for dancing. Tonight’s was only an informal dance, a prelude to the grander festivities that would take place the following day. Some of the local families from the county had been invited. They stood in their own little groups around the edges of the room, the red-faced squires and their fresh-faced daughters looking like the characters in Charlotte’s books.

Tomorrow, a larger party would be coming up from London, replacing the locals and augmenting the house party. There would be proper London musicians, champagne flowing down the center of the table, and hothouse flowers blooming improbably out of immense marble urns. There were rumors that the Prince of Wales himself might make one of the party, rumors that Charlotte suspected her grandmother had put about herself for the sheer fun of watching people scrounging around corners, looking under sofas for misplaced royals.

Henrietta and her husband had only joined the house party that afternoon, just in time for the Twelfth Night celebrations, having spent the bulk of the holiday with Henrietta’s family in Kent, engaging in what Henrietta blithely referred to as “a spot of parental placation.” Charlotte was ridiculously glad to see both of them. She was bursting to discuss the last week with Henrietta, to present everything that had occurred to her more assured friend for dissection and analysis. Not that Charlotte was sure there really was anything there to dissect, short of her own imagination, but it was rather nice to be the one with something to dissect for a change.

“Eligibles?” demanded Miles, following Henrietta into their little corner and tripping over a small gilt chair in the process. “You mean this lot?”

Charlotte smiled and scooted over, making room for Miles to stand next to Henrietta. Scorning the chair and the equally dainty benches, Miles chose instead to prop his broad shoulders against the pale blue silk of the wall, towering comfortably over his wife and her friends.

Penelope pulled her chair away, too, but not to make room. Penelope made no pretense of her feelings about her best friend’s marriage. In anyone else, her attitude would have been called sulking. In Penelope, it was more like a slow smolder. If looks could char, Miles would have long since gone up in flames.

“They have no charm, no conversation, and most of them have no chins,” put in Penelope caustically. “Other than that, it’s been just scrumptious.”

“They’re not the most inspiring collection of humanity,” Charlotte admitted. “I’m not sure why Grandmama chose them.”

“Because,” said Penelope, “all the good ones have already been taken. All we’re left with are the louts and the lechers. Usually in the same package.”

Miles’s ears perked up. “Do you need any help keeping the lechers at bay?” he asked Charlotte. “I’m told I loom rather well.”

He looked immensely cheered at the prospect of enlivening his stay at Girdings with a spot of intimidation.

“As much as I appreciate the offer, I don’t think it will be the least bit necessary.” Charlotte looked down at her modest gown of silver net over green satin. It had seemed so pretty at the modiste’s — and that was just what it was. Not alluring, not seductive, just pretty. She sighed. “I need a little less go hence and a little more come hither.”

“That depends on whom you’re hithering,” declared Henrietta.

Miles crinkled his nose. “Hithering?”

Henrietta waved that aside. “Is there anyone the least bit hitherable in this assemblage of gargoyles?”

Charlotte betrayed herself with a quick glance across the room to the spot where Robert stood, exchanging pleasantries with Sir Francis Medmenham. She hadn’t needed to look around the room to ascertain where he was; she just knew, the same way an astronomer knew the position of stars in the firmament. Over the past eight days she had become something of an adept on the subject of Robert. If he were a university topic, she would qualify for an advanced degree.

Henrietta’s hazel eyes narrowed shrewdly. “So that’s the way the land lies.”

“There isn’t any land there,” said Charlotte regretfully. “Not even a very small island.”

“Island?” Miles echoed.

Henrietta understood instantly. “You don’t know that.”

“He calls me cousin.”

“Well, you are his cousin,” interjected Miles. “What is he supposed to call you? Spot?”

Finding himself the recipient of two outraged female glares, Miles backed up, both physically and metaphorically. “Not that you have any. Spots, that is. It’s just a figure of speech.”

“I understand,” said Charlotte generously. She hadn’t forgotten all the times Miles had saved her from her usual post by the wall by sacrificing himself for a dance. It had all been at Henrietta’s behest, of course, but Charlotte loved both of them all the more for it, Henrietta for ordering and Miles for obeying, and both of them for caring enough for her to try to pretend it was otherwise.

“We need to minimize your cousinly qualities,” mused Henrietta.

“How can you minimize her cousinliness when she is his cousin?” demanded Miles. “You have many talents, Hen, but I don’t think you can go about lopping the limbs off family trees just like that.”