“Not a single soul?” Sherbourne asked. “No friends from finishing school, ladies who made their come out with you, former governesses, that sort of thing?”
Charlotte had wondered similarly about her husband: Who were his friends? “Most of the women I made my come out with have long since married and started families. Finishing school was years ago, and I have a wealth of sisters and cousins. One young lady who was like a sister to me has gone to her reward.”
Saying the words hurt. Charlotte thought often of Fern Porter, but she almost never spoke of her.
“A good friend?” Sherbourne asked.
Outside the rain pounded down, and the countryside went by in a dreary brown blur. Autumn was more advanced here, not a benevolent easing of summer’s heat, but a harbinger of winter’s dark and cold.
“She was a best friend,” Charlotte said softly. “Fern and I were inseparable from the first day we met at the age of eleven. We shared a room at school, we shared hopes and fears, and got into such mischief. When we had to separate over holidays, we’d write to each other daily. I had hoped she’d marry one of my cousins, though she was a mere minister’s daughter.”
Sherbourne’s arm had found its way around Charlotte’s shoulders again. Maybe husbands and wives traveled like this, all snuggled up and informal despite the potholes.
“Fern became enamored of a handsome bounder after we finished school,” Charlotte went on. “She couldn’t afford London seasons, but her family scraped together some means, and we sewed her dresses ourselves. When she came to town, she went everywhere with me. Then I realized she’d stopped joining me on many of our outings.”
“She was smitten?”
Sherbourne’s tone was indulgent, the mature male making a tolerant allowance for the follies of young women. Charlotte could leave him to his ignorance, but Fern’s memory deserved honesty.
“She was smitten, then she was ruined, then she was dead.”
Sherbourne took Charlotte’s hand. “I’m sorry. I hope she did not take her own life.”
This was the hardest part, the part that still had the power to make Charlotte’s throat ache. “She had a child, a little boy. She wrote to me, said she was happy despite all because she loved that child more than life. She did not recover from her lying in. The child’s father—a lord’s son—never acknowledged her letters, never so much as apologized for her ruin.”
Charlotte braced herself for a platitude, which she would somehow manage to endure without tossing Sherbourne from the coach.
These things happen.
A cautionary tale.
Where was the girl’s family when she was going so badly astray?
Such a pity.
And the one she dreaded most: You were her friend. Why couldn’t you talk sense into her?
Why did nobody ever talk sense into the man who caused such tragedies? Why wasn’t he at least deprived of the ability to wreck another young woman’s life and leave another child to be raised in poverty and disgrace?
“Who was the father?” Sherbourne asked.
“I don’t know. I have a likeness of him that Fern sent me to save for the child lest her family destroy it, but I have no idea of his name. He frequented Mayfair ballrooms, so he had means as well as family connections. He also had a fiancée with fat settlements, though he didn’t bother to tell Fern that until it was too late. If I ever find out who he is, I won’t answer for the consequences.”
Sherbourne propped a boot on the opposite bench. “If you do find out, I might be able to ruin him. I’m part owner of a bank that holds many mortgages for the Mayfair set, and I have some influence in Parliament. If his family is titled, so much the better. We can make an example of him and ensure all and sundry know why his debts are being called in.”
Charlotte ought to scold her husband for putting his boot on the opposite bench, but she was too stunned by his response.
“You would take the part of my late friend against a lord’s son?”
Sherbourne kissed her knuckles. “With pleasure. What foolish young people get up to when chaperones are lax is not my business, but there’s a child involved. If it were your child, the father would have been held responsible, and probably forced to marry you, regardless of a fiancée or breach of promise suit. The mother was relatively poor, and thus the bounder suffered no consequences. He probably knew that as he was charming his way under her skirts.”
“Thank you,” Charlotte said, subsiding against him.
Sherbourne’s motivations were his own—he was apparently critical of a class system based on arbitrary ancestry rather than merit—but he shared Charlotte’s sense of outrage. If, some fine day, she found out who had destroyed Fern’s good name, Sherbourne would make a thorough job of that man’s downfall.
A lovely wedding present, did Sherbourne but know it. The loveliest.
Chapter Seven
“Leave the ladies alone,” Haverford said. “They have much to discuss, and you owe me a drink.”
His Grace had been Sherbourne’s neighbor since birth. Their parents and grandparents had been at outs, and thus he and Haverford had been raised to nod curtly at each other in the churchyard—and then only if the vicar was watching.
“Did I, or did I not recently enter into the state of holy matrimony?” Sherbourne countered. “As such, does it not fall to you to offer me a drink, Your Grace?”
Sherbourne felt entitled to grouse, for Haverford and his duchess had deprived the new bride of the honor of being carried over the threshold by her husband. As soon as the horses had halted, the duchess had flown down the steps of Sherbourne Hall and enveloped Sherbourne in a hug, while Haverford had stood smirking on the terrace. Then Her Grace had swept Charlotte into an equally indecorous embrace and bustled her into the house.
The senior staff had been lined up in the foyer, ready to greet their new lady, and Sherbourne had been relegated to making introductions rather than grand gestures.
“I’ll overlook your poor hospitality,” Haverford said, pouring two glasses of brandy, “because you are road weary and a traveling coach is nowhere to spend a honeymoon. What were you thinking, whisking the lady from town like that?” He passed Sherbourne a glass, then raised his own. “To wedded bliss.”
Sherbourne drank to that. “I was thinking to escape London before I went mad.”
“You wanted to see how the mine is progressing.” An accusation, from Haverford, who was skeptical of all industries not mentioned approvingly in the Old Testament.
Sherbourne had wanted to get Charlotte home before autumn turned to winter. “The lady’s family specifically asked that we wed by special license. If they couldn’t be bothered to gather for the nuptials, then why linger in town?”
Haverford tossed another square of peat onto the fire in the library’s hearth. “Did you perhaps anticipate the vows? I’m told that’s something of a Windham tradition.”
“That is none of Your Grace’s bloody business, but no, we did not anticipate our vows. I’ll thank you to stop wasting my peat.”
“Said the man who’s mad to dig a coal mine, and we’re family now.” Haverford was smirking again. “Your business is my business.”
Haverford used the cast iron poker to fuss with the fire, and Sherbourne wrestled an urge to toss the duke into the corridor. Haverford was a healthy specimen, dark-haired, tall, and fit, but Sherbourne was an expert on the proper use of the element of surprise.
“I come home,” Sherbourne said, “my new bride at my side, and then she’s not at my side. She’s disappeared to do God knows what with a sister she’s had nearly three decades to gossip and conspire with. They saw each other at your own wedding, mere weeks ago, and when I asked Her Grace to oversee a bit of tidying up here at Sherbourne Hall, I did not expect her to kidnap my bride on my very doorstep.”