Лорен Уиллиг - The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

“Happy?” snorted the Duchess. “Happy? They’re dead ! Dead! And without an heir. All they left me was you.” And precious little I had to work with, her voice seemed to say.

Charlotte remembered that tiny graveyard in Surrey, a narrow plot behind the pleasant stone vicarage. She remembered the small, curved headstone with the raw Roman lettering that had marked her baby brother’s grave. The heir. And behind it, like an echo, the larger stone that shaded her mother’s final rest. It was her brother’s birth that had taken her mother’s life. But it hadn’t been for the production of the heir. If he had lived, they would have loved him for what he was, for being a child and theirs, just as they had loved her, whether she was capable of inheriting Girdings or not.

“If you had married Dovedale as you ought,” her grandmother was saying, “it would have put it all right. My great-grandson would have been next Duke of Dovedale. All you had to do was tell him yes.”

Charlotte’s face felt as though it had been made of very fine porcelain that was starting to crack around the edges. Looking her grandmother straight in the eyes, she said very quietly, “But that still wouldn’t bring my father back.”

Caught mid-tirade, the Dowager sucked in sharply, like the hiss of a snake against the lacquer walls.

Charlotte didn’t need to see the crumpled flesh beneath her grandmother’s eyes, the sag beneath her cheekbones, to know the shot had struck home.

She might have followed up her advantage, flung at her grandmother any of the stored-up slights of the past twelve years, but it didn’t feel worth the argument. Nothing was. With Robert gone, any victory would be a Pyrrhic one.

It was all too much in too short a time, her grandmother’s machinations, Robert’s departure, the scene in front of the King, everything. All she wanted was to go home. Not to Loring House or to the room she had occupied on and off since her first Season at Dovedale House, but truly home, far away from London and Robert and the humiliation of knowing that a rake had been bought to pretend to court her — and that it had worked.

“I would like to return to Girdings,” Charlotte said woodenly.

The Dowager turned abruptly towards the door, her stiff petticoats slithering across the polished floor. She held herself very straight, presenting Charlotte with a view of her elaborately arranged gray hair, pinched and powdered in the style of an earlier generation. There was no softness in her stance, no yielding. She was every inch a duchess and every inch alone.

“Do what you like,” she said brusquely, her back to Charlotte. “You will, anyway.”

Springtime at Girdings had always been one of Charlotte’s favorite seasons. Not spring proper, but that period just before, when one awoke to find that the wind had softened, that the ground was soft and moist and dark, and that the still-bare tree branches bore tiny bobbles of buds that hadn’t been there before.

At least, it had always been that way before.

It wasn’t that Charlotte didn’t try; she did. She took long walks through the winter-bare gardens and forced herself to take deep bracing breaths, telling herself all the while how utterly lovely it was. She read poetry aloud to herself, as though by declaiming the lines to the empty library she might catch her own attention. She plunged into her old books as though the fate of the kingdom depended on the reading of them, plowing methodically through favorites that had never failed to excite her imagination before.

It was no use. She had lost the key to that old enchanted land. The words on the page were simply that, nothing but print, flat and bare. The tournaments she had once attended, where richly caparisoned knights clashed for her favor, were closed to her, unidimensional pictures on pages that tore when she turned them too roughly. The heroes who had courted her, the villains who had menaced her in the Vauxhalls and Ranelaghs of half a century before had deserted her, and when she tried to make them speak, their plaster lips parroted platitudes in her own voice. Charlotte found herself dropping books unread by her bed, pacing lines in the flowered carpet that had never been there before and, on one particularly miserable midnight, dragging all the furniture away from the walls in an impulsive attempt at redecoration that inspired her grandmother to declare that she had gone mad and took three footmen to set it all right again.

It was, Charlotte realized, not nearly so satisfying as she had remembered carrying on a conversation all by herself.

As February dripped away into March, with dismal rains and chilling frosts, Charlotte was forced to admit that discretion might not always be the better part of valor. Maybe valor was the better part of valor. She had thought she was being so sensible, rejecting Robert — but what if she hadn’t been sensible? What if she had just been scared?

Half a dozen times Charlotte took up her pen to write to him, but she foundered before she even completed the address. “Somewhere in India” wasn’t terribly much to go on. Penelope, on the other hand, was; Penelope, who was already halfway across an ocean. The prospect filled Charlotte with new energy. Once, her grandmother might have balked at the notion of allowing her to visit a friend a world away, but there were benefits to being in disgrace. Her grandmother had washed her hands of her. Noisily. Multiple times. And her grandmother adored Penelope.

At the very worst, in India, she might come face-to-face with Robert across a drawing room and encounter only indifference, proof that his affections were the ephemeral product of circumstance, like a mist that dissolved in the heat of the sun. At least she would have tried. At least she would know, rather than fidgeting and pining and wondering about might-have-beens.

On a misty morning in the middle of March, Charlotte tucked her writing desk under her arm and tromped out into the garden to compose a letter to Penelope. Little bits of damp clung like crystal beads to the yew hedges. The air was rich with the scent of damp, loamy earth and fresh-baked jam tart.

Charlotte crunched to a halt right before stepping into the jam tart. She had no idea what a jam tart was doing in the middle of the path. It wasn’t even the right season for jam tarts. And yet there it was, unmistakably a tart and equally unmistakably filled with jam.

The tart had been placed smack in front of her favorite bench, right there on the ground. It couldn’t have been there long or the birds would have been at it. As it was, a squirrel was already staring down a sparrow, each daring the other to make a run for it.

Who left a tart on the ground like that? That it had been deliberately left was quite clear. Across the top crust, someone had painted an arrow out of raspberry jam. The arrow pointed down the path, past an amused Venus, straight to another jam tart. With another arrow.

It was unicorn bait.

Charlotte felt a crazy hope beginning to swell in her chest that had nothing to do with the promise of spring or the scent of loam and everything to do with the bizarre incongruity of a tart in the middle of a garden path, the sort of tarts a teenage Robert used to tease Cook into baking. They would lay them out just so, in a line to the edge of the woods, since Charlotte was firmly convinced that no unicorn could resist the lure of raspberry jam and that if they just waited long enough, one day they would see a shimmering silver steed nuzzling his way down the row of pastries, muzzle streaked with jam.

The only person who knew about the tarts was far away across the seas, on his way to India. Wasn’t he? The only cause she had to believe it was his own departing salvo.