Лорен Уиллиг - The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

“Not exactly upstarts,” Charlotte hedged. “More . . .”

“Opportunists,” Robert provided. His father must have been a chip off the old block.

“Adventurers,” Charlotte corrected. She rolled the word off her tongue with obvious relish. “Elizabethan privateers sailing the high seas in search of Spanish gold.”

“In other words, pirates.”

“But very gentlemanly ones.”

“Gentlemanly” wasn’t quite the term Robert would have applied to the sort of person who boarded other peoples’ ships, but it seemed cruel to deprive his cousin of her romantic illusions.

“Sir Nicholas Lansdowne was a great favorite of Queen Elizabeth’s,” explained Charlotte. “It’s said that when Sir Walter Raleigh threw down his cloak for the Queen, Sir Nicholas stepped in, swept her up in his arms, and carried her right over Sir Walter’s cloak.”

“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.