“He is perfect.” Mary squeezed her hands. “He is upstairs, sleeping. He is healthy, growing, and perfect, Charlotte.”
Charlotte’s face crumpled again. She pressed Mary’s hands against her mouth and closed her eyes, and the tears ran over her knuckles.
Evander stepped into the room. Charlotte’s gaze found him, and the weeping paused, replaced by something more uncertain. She released Mary’s hands and curtsied. The gesture was formal and stiff, the deference of a woman who understood exactly how much trouble she had caused the man standing before her.
“Your Grace. I cannot begin to express my gratitude. What you have done for Tommy, for my sister?—”
“Sit down, Lady Charlotte.” Evander’s voice was not unkind, but it carried no warmth. “We have a great deal to discuss, and you have traveled a long way.”
Charlotte sat. Mary sat beside her, their hands still clasped. Evander remained standing.
“Your son is safe and well cared for,” Evander said. “Mary has been his mother in every way that matters since the day he arrived.” He let the words land. “Richard told us his account of what happened. The betrothal. The pregnancy. The plan to disappear. I have listened, and I have brought your sister here, and now I need to hear the truth from you.”
Charlotte’s chin trembled. She looked at Mary, then at Evander, and her mouth opened, but before she could speak, footsteps sounded in the corridor.
Richard appeared in the parlor doorway.
Charlotte went rigid. Her hand tightened on Mary’s. Richard stood on the threshold, pale and unshaven, and the two of them looked at each other across the room with the hollow recognition of two people bound together by a secret that had finally reached its end.
“Charlotte,” Richard said. “It’s time.”
Charlotte closed her eyes. When she opened them, the tears had stopped, and something harder had taken their place. Resolve, perhaps. Or surrender.
She looked at Mary.
“There are things I need to tell you,” Charlotte said. “About Tommy. About his father.” Her voice dropped. “About why I really left.”
Mary’s grip on her sister’s hand tightened. Evander lowered himself into the chair opposite and folded his arms.
The parlor was quiet. The fire crackled.
And Charlotte began to speak.
CHAPTER 26
“His name is William.”
Charlotte sat on the edge of the settee with her hands twisted in her lap, her knuckles white.
Richard stood near the fireplace, silent, his arms folded. Evander occupied the chair opposite, still and watchful. Mary sat beside her sister, close enough that their shoulders touched, because whatever Charlotte was about to say, she would not say it alone.
“William Harcourt,” Charlotte continued. Her voice was raw, scraped thin by the journey and the tears and the weight of five months of silence. “He is a scholar. He studies legal history at the Royal Society. We met at a lecture I attended with Papa last fall. He was presenting a paper on seventeenth-century land disputes, and I had no interest in land disputes, but his voice…” Charlotte pressed her lips together. “His voice made me want to stay in the room.”
Mary watched her sister’s face. The Charlotte she remembered, the poised, capable elder sister who had helped manage their father’s household and turned down three proposals, had been replaced by someone smaller. Someone hollowed by months of hiding, with shadows beneath her eyes and a tremor in her hands that had not been there before.
“We began meeting in secret,” Charlotte said. “At bookshops. In the park, when Papa was at his club. William is not a lord or a gentleman of means. He is a younger son of a country clergyman with nothing but his education and his work. Papa would never have approved. I knew that.” Her fingers tightened in her lap. “I did not care.”
“Charlotte.” Mary kept her voice gentle. “How long?”
“Four months before the betrothal was announced. William and I were…” The flush climbed Charlotte’s neck. “We were in love, Mary. Or I believed we were. He was kind, serious, and he listened to me, truly listened, not the way men listen when they are waiting for you to stop talking so they can say what they planned to say regardless. He asked me questions. About what I read. About what I thought. About what I wanted.” Charlotte’s voice cracked. “No one had ever asked me what I wanted.”
Mary’s throat tightened. She reached for Charlotte’s hand and held it.
“The passion carried us away.” Charlotte stared at their joined hands. “I will not pretend otherwise. I take full responsibility for that choice. But I was about to be married to a man I did notlove, and William made me feel as though my life belonged to me for the first time.”
Richard shifted near the fireplace. Charlotte glanced at him, and something passed between them, a shared understanding that Mary could see but not read.
“When did you discover the pregnancy?” Mary asked.