Charlotte was sensible, she’d have to accept that reasoning.
She marched up to him, and despite her blotchy complexion, flyaway curls, and red nose, Sherbourne resisted the impulse to step back.
“I do not expect you to change the past, though God knows I’ve wished I could. I do, however, expect you to change the future. Cut your ties with Brantford, Lucas. He’s not worth your time, your coin, or your passing thoughts. Cut him out of our lives, and do what you can to limit his access to anybody from whom he might profit. That much is in your grasp, and I’ll content myself with it if I must.”
The expectation in her eyes, the righteous certainly that Sherbourne would not fail her made him want to howl.
“What you ask is impossible. I signed a contract, I gave my word, and Brantford has already let it be known I’m to improve on the terms agreed to, not renege on them.”
Charlotte’s regard shifted to the steady, gimlet gaze he’d seen her turn on a presuming lordling, the same look she’d give a streak of bird droppings on a park bench.
“You don’t even like Brantford. You don’t trust him, you regret your association with him, and now you know he’s dishonored a decent young woman and ignored his own child. Why would you choose his part over the honorable path?”
Charlotte’s question confused so many conflicting priorities and emotions. She wasn’t wrong for asking, but she was Sherbourne’s wife—had taken vows to cleave to him, forsaking all others, even the memory of her departed friend.
“He ruined a young woman,” Sherbourne said. “Now he can ruin me. If I let that happen, it will do nothing to right the wrongs of the past, and everything to imperil the future of our own children. Is that what you want?”
“We have no children,” Charlotte said, glancing around the library as if unsure how she’d come to be there. “If, for better or for worse, you choose to earn coin for the Earl of Brantford knowing what you do about him, then I can assure you, Mr. Sherbourne, we never will.”
He tried to fathom what that ominously calm pronouncement meant as Charlotte crossed to the desk and drew something gold from a skirt pocket—his plainest cravat pin.
“I told myself I could keep this with me in case you ever needed a spare.” She set the little gold accessory on the blotter beside her hairpin. “What I really wanted was a token to remind me of the decent, dear, worthy man whom some miracle of fate placed at my side.”
Sherbourne remained alone by the hearth, angry, sad, resentful—and impressed—while Charlotte quietly left the room.
*
“I understand why you didn’t tell Mr. Sherbourne,” Elizabeth said, choosing a bench near a window dripping with condensation, “but why not tell me, Charlotte? I’m your sister, and I did notice when your best friend disappeared from London without a word of explanation.”
The Haverford conservatory was full of plants brought in from the terraces and gardens in anticipation of cold weather. The greenery should have been soothing, and the fecund, earthy scent comforting.
“Fern was owed my silence,” Charlotte said, remaining on her feet. “I feel like ripping apart everything I see. Like smashing every pot. That contemptible, putrid excrescence on the face of manhood bowed over my hand, Elizabeth.”
Charlotte had washed her hands, thoroughly, before summoning her gig and departing for the castle. She was hungry, queasy, wrung out from crying, and heartbroken over her discussion with Sherbourne.
And Elizabeth, so serene and composed on her bench, was no help at all.
“Be that as it may, Charl, had you thought to confide in me—in any of your family—regarding Miss Porter’s situation we might have been able to help.”
“Fern was my friend.” Charlotte sank onto a plain wooden chair worn grey with age. “She asked me not to interfere, not to risk tainting my own name with scandal.”
“We could have helped with the boy.”
Not with ruining Brantford or holding him responsible, of course. “My husband is allowing my support of the child. Evander will continue to thrive.” Which was something. Sherbourne had not quibbled at that expenditure for an instant. Charlotte plucked a dead bloom from the nearest potted chrysanthemum. “Bethan, what am I to do?”
Weeping was such a lot of bother. It left a woman exhausted, unlovely, and predisposed to repeating the indignity. Sherbourne had been so kind, so patient…
Until he’d made Charlotte so angry.
“You must choose your own course, Charlotte. Anyone would find this contretemps vexing.”
Charlotte twisted off another spent blossom. “I do find the situation vexing.” Terribly and completely, and yet the facts were straightforward: Brantford had not been held accountable. For Sherbourne to enrich the earl was absolutely wrong. For Fern to have been disgraced was wrong.
Everything was wrong.
“I have been so certain for so long that I knew the difference between right and wrong, Bethan. I took vows. The only vows I’ve spoken in my entire life. I’m supposed to honor my husband, and I do, but Fern was lied to and ruined. Brantford was and is in the wrong.”
“Sherbourne would be in the wrong,” Elizabeth said, “if he let Brantford’s threats similarly ruin the colliery. I agree, it’s complicated.”
No help at all.
Charlotte tossed the dead flowers among the pruned roses and pushed to her feet. “I shall be going, then. Thank you for listening.”
Elizabeth took up a watering can and gave an enormous, feathery fern a drink. “You are always welcome here, Charlotte. If Sherbourne should prove difficult, or his temper unruly, don’t be so proud again. Come here and let him stand outside the castle walls begging you to relent. It might do him good, and Haverford would enjoy the very sight.”
That Elizabeth would imply Sherbourne should be humbled for the duke’s entertainment was infuriating, and thus Charlotte’s resentment latched on to an additional target.
“Haverford’s requirements for this mine are a large part of the reason Sherbourne took on a junior investor. The colliery is exorbitantly expensive to set up on Haverford’s terms, many of which are more luxury than necessity, from what I’ve read about mining operations.”
Elizabeth’s watering can had a slow leak dripping from the bottom. A fat droplet hit the duchesses’s ivory satin slipper while she aimed an unreadable look at Charlotte.
“You have ever had the gift of direct speech, Sister, though sometimes your words come close to criticizing a family member. I have always thought you couldn’t help it, that you must speak the truth, however flawed your perception of it might be.”
Faced with Elizabeth’s gracious understanding, Charlotte grasped exactly why Sherbourne had no patience with his titled neighbors.
“Haverford knows next to nothing about mines.” Charlotte pulled her driving gloves out of her reticule and jerked them on. “That is not an insult, that is a fact. His Grace’s ignorance did not stop him from dictating to Sherbourne many details of the colliery’s appointments, and they are expensive details. I could lend Haverford some books. Big, heavy, bound books, and then you might believe me.”
Drip, drip, drip. Thunk. Elizabeth set the watering can on the table, where it would doubtless leak for the next two hours and warp the wood.
Charlotte did not care.
“You are upset,” Elizabeth said, sounding very much like their auntie, the Duchess of Moreland. “I will overlook your tone, because when I believed that Haverford and I were to part, I was a wreck.”
“Now you tell me I’m a wreck and take on your Older Sister of Doom voice. I am not wrong, Elizabeth. Haverford dictated terms in ignorance, and Brantford is awful, and sometimes, I think not a single adult male should be allowed out without a nanny.”