The gig passed between the houses at the edge of the village. The posting inn, which sat across from the church, came into view.
“You are taking preemptive measures,” Sherbourne said. “If Brantford should slander me in the clubs, you have nocked your familial arrow and are ready to let fly.”
Was that what she had done? “I expect Haverford and Radnor will do likewise with their associates. Brantford can go to the courts if he’s truly intent on scandal, but in the clubs and committees, he won’t get very far.”
“Not with a dozen Windhams arrayed against him.” Sherbourne brought the horse to a halt in the inn yard, and a boy swaddled to the ears in a wool scarf came to hold the horse. “We are alike in many ways, Mrs. Sherbourne. I would never have thought to enlist your family’s aid.”
Was that a concession, a flag of truce?
Sherbourne climbed down and came around to Charlotte’s side of the gig. He was tall enough that Charlotte was eye to eye with her husband as she sat on the bench.
She tucked the end of his scarf over his shoulders. “I didn’t enlist their aid when it would have done Fern some good. They could have given her money for a physician, convinced her parents to take her in so she wasn’t banished to a Welsh backwater. I did not ask for help for Fern. I relied only on myself. I was wrong. I see that.”
Sherbourne’s gaze was bleak. “Now you need to rely on me, and I’ve disappointed you.”
He had disappointed her, but not in the manner he thought. “The problem Brantford poses is one of funds,” Charlotte said, “not of integrity. I wish I had reached that conclusion sooner—I do enjoy working with figures—but we will contrive, Mr. Sherbourne.”
He stepped back, out of fussing range. “What are you saying, Charlotte? That you married a climbing cit whose actions are driven by greed?”
“Not greed, pride. Didn’t I just say as much? I have married the most diabolically stubborn, clodpated, determined, thickheaded—”
A movement against the silently falling snow caught Charlotte’s attention. From the belfry in the church steeple, a flash of red fluttered where no bird should be on such a wintry day.
“Somebody’s up there,” Charlotte said, using Sherbourne’s shoulder to steady herself as she clambered from the gig. “Would the masons be working in this weather?”
“Nobody should be in that belfry. The work isn’t finished, and until my master mason pronounces the steeple sound again, it’s no place for—”
“That’s Heulwen,” Charlotte said, waving her arm. From high, high above the street, the maid gazed out unseeing, her red cloak a beacon in the falling snow. “Why in the world would she be up there, away from her duties without permission, and in this miserable weather?”
In the next instant, Charlotte knew why: the shawls worn in a house that was warmer than most, the unrelenting preoccupation with a handsome groom, listlessness when the groom’s interest faded, then a mood withdrawn to the point of melancholia.
“I’ve seen this before,” Charlotte said, dread choking her. “She’s ruined, and he cast her aside, and she’s ashamed and angry. I have to stop her.”
Charlotte took off across the snowy road, flung open the heavy church door, and charged up the steps leading to the belfry, knowing—knowing, knowing—that she’d never get to Heulwen in time to prevent a tragedy.
Another tragedy.
*
Sherbourne was exhausted, cold, upset with his wife, and reeling from too many verbal blows: Charlotte claimed she did not care about his money, but what had he to offer her other than money?
She regarded his pride as problematic? What was to sustain him if not pride?
She loved him?
Her other imprecations had pained him, but that salvo had stunned him nearly witless, and she’d tossed it off as a commonplace. I love you—please take me to the posting inn.
Now she’d disappeared into the church and more blows fell on Sherbourne’s heart.
Heulwen was up in that steeple and outweighed Charlotte by a good four stone. If the maid was suffering a nervous affliction, she could toss Charlotte from the belfry before Charlotte understood the danger.
Charlotte was terrified of heights, and the steeple was the tallest structure in the village.
She loved him, she was the woman he’d raise his children with, and nothing could be allowed—
Sherbourne’s feet started moving without him making a decision to pursue Charlotte into the church. Why would a woman eat orange peels, for God’s sake? Why would she fall asleep halfway through a sermon that was neither boring nor lengthy? Why would she call on the Caerdenwal household—home of the chubbiest infant Sherbourne had laid eyes on—and neglect to socialize with any other neighbors?
The stairway wound around inside the bell tower, and Charlotte’s steps retreated high above.
“Charlotte! Stop!”
Even if she’d heard him, she’d never obey a direct command. “Charlotte, please wait for me.”
Silence, and Sherbourne forced himself to slow down. If Heulwen was upset, Sherbourne barging into the situation like a maddened bull would do nothing to aid matters.
If Heulwen harmed Charlotte, he would not answer for the consequences. He crept up the last two dozen steps, leaned against the wall, and—despite every instinct he possessed—waited in silence, while Charlotte, all on her own, faced yet another demon.
*
Heulwen stood silhouetted against the frigid, whitening landscape. She was a pillar of despair, but thank God and bright red cloaks, she was yet safe. The belfry was like a balcony open on three sides, with bell ropes running through a sizeable square opening in the floor.
“Come away from there,” Charlotte said, trying for her best imitation of an impatient Aunt Esther. “You’ll catch your death in this bitter wind, and then I will be without my eyes and ears among the household staff.”
Heulwen remained on the far side of the belfry, the snow dusting her cloak with white. “It’s no good, ma’am. You don’t spy on the help, and they all know what’s afoot with me already.”
Her voice was dead, her gaze flat.
“Who will lace me up, then? My husband abandons me at the crack of doom for the charms of his dratted mine and comes home too tired to do more than fall into his bath, clutching yet another treatise or budget.”
This complaint, though honest, merited only a sad ghost of a smile. “You and the master rub along well enough, missus. He should not have allowed you to come up here.”
Charlotte stalked around the thick ropes hanging down the middle of the belfry. “Heulwen, Mr. Sherbourne knows better than to approach me with allowing or permitting on his mind. He no more allows me to join you admiring the view here than I allow him to hare off for his mine each morning. You aren’t even wearing a scarf.”
And the poor woman had been crying. Tears had tracked down her pale, freckled cheeks. She flicked a sidelong glance at Charlotte, and the well of hopelessness in the maid’s eyes was bottomless.
“This is about Hector Morgan, isn’t it?”
“Not anymore. He says he can’t marry me or he’ll lose his post, and then we’ll both be out of work. The whole valley will know why, and he’ll be as disgraced as I am.”
The groom’s reasoning was lamentably sound. Employees in domestic service were not to marry. Their entire allegiance was to be their employers, and their wages weren’t adequate to support children in any case.
“That is sheer balderdash,” Charlotte said. “The man is never as disgraced as the woman, he never risks his life as a consequence of his folly, and he never spends the rest of his days paying for his pleasures. Did Hector promise you marriage?”
“No.” Heulwen swiped bare fingers across her cheek. “He said what we did couldn’t get a babe, because he didn’t…I should not have conceived.”
“He withdrew,” Charlotte spat. “Thought himself a great saint for yielding the last inch of pleasure, without bothering to learn that his sacrifice was likely in vain.”