Perhaps even a trifle annoyed?
“Ever since last week’s dinner party, you have been preoccupied.” Charlotte patted the cushion next to her. “Come sit with me.”
Sherbourne cast a longing glance at his calculations, though Charlotte knew they did not call to him the way they did to her. Sherbourne was worried, and his fretting required him to do something, not simply sit and read a week-old London newspaper to keep up with the gossip.
He took the place beside her. “You have made a nest on my sofa. If you’ve bided here to keep me company, you needn’t.”
Charlotte pushed her quilts aside, rose, and stood before her husband. “Boots off, Mr. Sherbourne.”
He extended his left foot, expression wary. His boots were worn, though this pair lacked any evidence of mud. Charlotte took off first one, then the other, and set them in the corridor. She pulled up a hassock, and put her husband’s feet in her lap.
“Has it occurred to you, sir, that you might have been keeping me company?” She wrapped her arms around his feet. “My aunt likes to have her feet rubbed. This is a family secret. Are your feet cold?”
Sherbourne’s manner had been colder lately. Preoccupied, quiet, reserved—worried, very likely.
“My feet are tired,” Sherbourne said, leaning his head back against the cushions. “Shall we to bed?”
“Soon. Have you had a look at Debrett’s?” Charlotte had suggested that exercise over breakfast yesterday.
“I have, and can tell you that Brantford is the eighth earl of that title, the viscountcy having been raised to an earldom by Charles II. The present earl is married to the former Miss Veronica Carruthers, of the Carruthers family of East Anglia, and her father is a baron. No children have yet graced Brantford’s nursery, which means I had less to memorize.”
“No children will be gracing our nursery yet either.” Heat flooded Charlotte’s cheeks as soon as she’d made that announcement.
Sherbourne regarded her for a stern moment, then his brows rose. “The inevitable inconvenience troubles you?”
She peeled off his stockings. “These things happen in the ordinary course.” Though how did couples discuss them?
“Shall I sleep elsewhere?”
“You needn’t.” Sherbourne often began the night stretched out on his side of the bed, staring at the canopy, arms crossed behind his head. When Charlotte woke in the middle of the night, she was invariably wrapped in his embrace.
And he in hers.
“You’re sure?” he asked. “It wouldn’t be any bother.”
Charlotte had a nagging suspicion her husband would rather sleep elsewhere, but that for him to establish his own quarters on some higher floor of the house was the wrong direction to go at this point in their marriage.
“I’d miss you, Mr. Sherbourne. You are a lovely bedfellow.”
A week ago, he might have returned that compliment. Now the fire hissed and popped at Charlotte’s back, and the silence grew.
She rubbed his feet, taking time to learn more of him, and casting around for a topic that did not involve the mine, the Earl of Brantford, or immediate family.
“Does your ankle ever pain you?”
“The memory of sprawling on my face before the entire dining hall of boys pains me.”
“Was that mishap courtesy of the same helpful soul who broke your nose?” His nose had been broken at public school, though it had healed almost undetectably.
“One of his loyal henchman, and a different one broke my arm. They ran around in a pack, laughed at one another’s jokes, got drunk together. Typical younger sons and lordlings. That feels good.”
She’d ventured to the thick muscles of his calf. “With whom did you run around and get drunk?”
“Nobody, and I learned not to excel at my studies, either.”
“But you’re quite bright.”
A smile quirked and was gone. “Coming from you, that’s high praise. At school, if I did poorly, I was an ignorant mushroom, trying to get above my station. If I did well, I was a presuming upstart who needed to be put in his place. I was beaten for mumbling, for a disrespectful tone of voice, for not reciting quickly enough, for rushing through my recitations, for failing to respect my betters when the other boys made up all manner of lies about me. My father laughed and told me I was getting exactly the education I needed.”
Charlotte hugged his feet. “Is that the education you envision for our sons?” An education in prejudice, isolation, brutality, and snobbery?
“We haven’t any sons yet and apparently none on the way.”
Charlotte was tempted to shove his feet off her lap, storm out, and lock the bedroom door. She didn’t, because in casual admissions and pensive silences, she was coming to understand how much courage Sherbourne had displayed when he’d married her.
Those young fools breaking his bones for sport had been from “the best” families. The instructors and headmasters seizing on any pretext to beat him had been beholden to those same families. Brantford, who expected a handsome return on his investment, acted as if he were doing Sherbourne a favor by adding to Sherbourne’s burdens.
The very neighbors who’d boxed Sherbourne into turning a profit from an exorbitantly expensive new venture were titled aristocrats held in high regard throughout the realm—and thanks to Charlotte, they were also Sherbourne’s family.
She was his wife. He’d have her loyal support, and others could learn from her example.
“Tomorrow morning,” Charlotte said, “you send a cheerful note over to Haverford Castle, welcoming Brantford to the neighborhood. You inform him that your lady wife is eager to entertain him as the first official guest following our nuptials, and that all at the colliery is in readiness for a tour on the first available fine day.”
The past few days had seen a flurry of busyness at the works, with string pegged out to mark the houses atop the hill, the first of the tram tracks laid, and laborers from both the Haverford and Radnor holdings swelling the ranks of the masons.
“I’m to be cheerful?” Sherbourne lifted his feet from Charlotte’s lap and pulled on a stocking. “Perhaps you ought to send this note. Cheerfulness eludes me lately.”
She picked up the other stocking. “I can draft the note, but it must be written in your hand. Where is Debrett’s?”
“You don’t have it memorized?”
Charlotte balled up the stocking and pitched it at Sherbourne’s head. “Written correspondence requires different forms of address than greetings offered in person. What is Brantford’s Christian name?”
Sherbourne donned the second stocking and rose. “Quinton, the family name is Bramley, if I recall his signature. Charlotte, may I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“How do you know a Harold Porter, from rural Brecknockshire?”
Sherbourne stood above her, looking tall, tired, and unreadable by the firelight.
Charlotte rose and kissed him while her mind whirled. “An old, old friend. I went to school with his sister.”
“Young ladies do not correspond with single gentlemen,” Sherbourne said. “I may not have taken any firsts at university or spent much time with my nose in Debrett’s, but I know that much.”
“Mr. Porter is married, as am I.” And Heulwen was in for a severe talking to, for Charlotte had asked that the letter to Mr. Porter be taken directly to the posting inn. “Are you reading my correspondence now, Mr. Sherbourne?”
He looped his arms around Charlotte’s shoulders. “I need for this mine to succeed, Charlotte.”
What did that have to do with letters to old friends and Mrs. Wesleys? “Then I need for it to succeed as well.”