Fortune Favors the Wicked (24 page)

Gone from Strawfield, and her parents hadn't even written to her.

This put a severe weight onto her state of tolerable contentment.

With the exception of the crushed-almond tart, she didn't miss Strawfield, a village to which she had never quite felt herself to belong. But as worn as her parents had become, she'd never thought they would leave it.

She sent a letter to Stephen Lilac to see what he could find out. The wiry Runner had confirmed the receipt of the Strawfield treasure by the Royal Mint, and he had seen half the reward issued to her parents.

They had gone to Bath, he wrote back, with their granddaughter. Had sold some jewelry and he had given up the post as vicar of Strawfield.

So. At least they were cared for, even if they could not forgive her.

As for the other half of the Royal Mint's stolen sovereigns?

Charlotte had laughed to read the news. Lord Hugo Starling had had a hand in their recovery. She never had met the man, but maybe someday she would.

No. She wouldn't. She didn't mix with the elite anymore.

Be that as it may, the gold sovereigns were released on schedule in July. The king's face was everywhere across his realm, not that the poor madman knew it.

And at some point during the month, her courses came. A relief, of course. She had established herself as Charlotte Perry, an unmarried woman of means.

No more lies.

And nothing of Benedict. Which was good. She had grown used to not having him, her heart hollowed in one terrible wrench. Eventually it would fill.

“I am tolerably content,” she insisted every time Barrett asked. “It would be greedy to hope for more.” Barrett said nothing, but sent out tear-spotted pillowcases for laundering.

At the end of the month, Charlotte began writing again.

Not a memoir of her time as a courtesan. Something new. Something fresh.

This time, she would write a love story, and she would give it the ending she wished.

* * *

The knock at the door came too early for the mail and too late for the fish. And it should have come to the servants' door either way.

“Barrett!” Charlotte called.

Barrett was everywhere at once, as usual, which meant the chances of her being exactly where one wished were low. With a rueful sigh, Charlotte set aside her paper and quill. Her hands were inky; well, it couldn't be helped. Whoever was at the door would just have to understand.

It was Benedict.

Benedict Frost, looking gruff and big and blunt, wearing a dark blue coat that fit him perfectly.

“Benedict,” she breathed, as though she could not quite say his name enough.

When he smiled, he was the handsomest man she had ever seen. When his smile fell and turned tentative, he was even more so.

“Miss Perry.” He made a proper bow. “You see before you a complete and total civilian.”

“Why do I see such a thing?” She fumbled to understand his appearance before her. “How did you find me?”

He straightened up. “After a staggering amount of negotiation, I gave up my place as a Naval Knight, which”—he waved a hand—“meant I couldn't live in a castle anymore. Always sounded better than it really was.”

“Right.” She hesitated. “Yes.” It meant much more than not having a room in Windsor Castle anymore, she knew. As a civilian, without the income from his pension and half pay status, he was penniless.

“As for finding you,” he added, “I requested your direction from your parents. I left Strawfield after you did, once they had decided where to go.”

“I see.” Which was true—almost. He was not the sort to throw himself upon her charity. And that was quite the elegant coat he was wearing. “Out with it, Frost. What have you done?”

“Ah.” He looked a little guilty. “Something I swore I'd never do, but I did it for a good reason. I sold my memoir to George Pitman—or rather, I paid Pitman to publish it on commission. He advertised it as the wildest of novels, and it is doing quite well. I've made several hundred pounds already, and Pitman is asking me for another in the series.”

“But . . .” She fumbled for understanding. “You worked so hard on it. It was your
life
.”

“Just a little piece of it.” He held thumb and forefinger a wee distance apart. “I'll have more. It's doing much more good this way than by taking up space in my trunk.”

“What of your sister?”

“I sent her half the money I received from selling the bookshop to our cousins. She had more than a few travel expenses to cover.” With a little smile, he added, “Georgette took care of herself. When I found her, she informed me that she hadn't taken any help from me yet, and she didn't need to now. But I reminded her the inheritance was from our parents, and that it was terribly unfair everything had come to me as the eldest. Eventually she accepted the money—on the condition that we visit one another several times a year.”

“Are you . . . all right with that?”

“She's happy. So—yes.” He cleared his throat. “But I'll tell you about all that later. For now, may I come in?”

He was asking to take a step over her threshold. To become part of her life again.

Her heart hammered where she thought only hollowness remained.

“There is something I ought to tell you first,” she said.

“Your favorite sentence.” He paused. “Who are you now?”

“That's just it. I'm Charlotte Perry, a respectable spinster. I have friends and a subscription at a lending library and accounts at the local shops.” She shook her head, though he couldn't see the gesture. “I can't allow you in if you're only going to leave again.”

“Indeed.” He tipped his head, a sly expression crossing his features. “It's remarkably easy to get married in Scotland. None of this fuss about expensive licenses and waiting for banns and whatnot.”

“Are you asking?”

“No.” He dropped to one knee, right there on the stone stoop. “I'm begging. I know you've a home here, and a new life, and you don't need me—but I need you. My heart has a space in it, just your size.”

“Your heart is very large,” she said faintly.

“I never thought it was, particularly,” he admitted. “I've been a selfish sort of fellow, wanting to be alone and go alone and . . . alone, alone. Tedious stuff. You seem to have made me rethink a few things.”

Oh
.

“Get up off your knees,” she said. “That must be so cold.”

He clambered to his feet, pulling himself up with the hickory cane that, she now noticed, he had leaned against the side of the house by the door. “Does that mean you're saying yes?”

“Not quite,” she said. “What of the man who felt England was too small for him? How can I know life with me won't become a cage to you?”

“Because I choose it—that is, if you'll have me. It makes all the difference to leave when one wishes, and to go where one wishes. Not to be getting away from something, but to be going somewhere you want to be.” His hands worked nervously about the cane. “To a home. With someone I love.”

Oh
.

“Also,” he added gamely, “we aren't in England. I can almost hear the sea from here, and if you want to, maybe someday we can cross it. I was happy in Edinburgh when I lived here before, studying medicine. If you'll allow me to be with you, I think I'll be happier still.”

“You're babbling,” she said. “Go back to the part about making a home with someone you love.”

His lips curved. “Did you like that part?”

“I did,” she admitted, “like that part.”

“Good. I like it, too.” He rested the cane against the side of the house again. “I was such a fool, Charlotte. I loved you long before I realized it, long before my pride allowed me to sort out a new way to live. I love you now, and I don't intend to stop, and I hope you'll give me another chance to make a life with you.”

She smiled, catching his hand and bringing it to her face so he could feel her expression. “Tell me the part again about love.”

His fingers were gentle, learning the shape of her all over again.
Charlotte, there you are
. “I love you. A Charlotte by any other name is just as sweet, but yours is the one I love best.”

“Don't get too fond of it,” she said. “Because soon it will change to Charlotte Frost.”

“That's a yes, then?”

“That's a yes. And an ‘I love you, too.'”

Despite her joy, a tiny piece of her heart still ached, incomplete. Until he added, “If you'd want Miss Maggie to visit us—well, that would be nice, wouldn't it?”

“It would,” she agreed. “It really would.”

And she pulled him indoors, kissing him so hard that, for a sweet and seductive interlude, there was nothing else in the world.

As summer turned to autumn, the fame of Edward Selwyn's paintings of
La Perle
grew, rippling across the border to Scotland. Edinburgh had its own society, its own wealthy who enjoyed the symbols of fashion and acquisition. It was inevitable that someone would seek out a painting of the nude Nausicaa or the bare Boadicea.

Charlotte knew this. But the days passed in waves of light and dark, work and play, and it was easy to forget there had ever been another life.

One day Benedict returned home, half-dismayed and half-laughing. He rested his cane against the back of Charlotte's writing chair, kissed her on top of the head, and handed her a small parcel. “The new quills you requested, Madam Shakespeare.”

“Thank you,” she said. Now filling some two hundred sheets of foolscap, her novel had consumed every pen in the house. She set aside her work and shoved back the little table on which she wrote. “Wherefore art thou smiling in that odd way, Romeo?”

“Ha. Yes. I encountered the keeper of the Rose and Thorn while I was running your errand.”

The closest inn, with a pleasantly clean and warm taproom. Charlotte had a nodding friendship with the publican's wife, and Barrett went there several times a week. Sweet on one of the ostlers, Charlotte suspected.

“It seems,” Benedict continued, “that the Rose and Thorn has acquired a painting of Charlotte Pearl in a trade from a patron with a bar tab the size of a king's ransom.”

“I have been traded for ale? How lowering.”

“A
king's ransom
worth of ale. That's . . . I don't really know how much ale it would take to ransom a king, but surely a lot.” Benedict grinned. “Here's the best part, though: when he hung the painting in the public room, he said someone told him the picture looked a little like Mrs. Frost. So he wanted to know if I thought that improper.”

She considered. Her life was so different now, resting little on the past. Many people in Edinburgh were passing through or had come from somewhere else. The water was nearby, and it was wide.

“I don't think it much matters at all,” she decided. “But what did you say to him?”

“I said I couldn't speak to the resemblance myself, but by all accounts
La Perle
was a great beauty and so is my wife. Of course, my wife is a respectable married woman.”

“With a scar on her face, who rarely if ever appears outdoors in the nude,” Charlotte added.

“All true,” said Benedict. “The publican agreed that you were a right handsome woman, and that the painting was right handsome, too. And that was that.”

“And that was that,” she repeated. “Perhaps I have left behind the nude wanton in those paintings.”

“A nude wanton? I hope not entirely. You make me wish you had been sculpted, my dear, so I might enjoy these portrayals.”

“Ah, but you can run your hands over the original inspiration.”

And he did.

* * *

Charlotte had wed Benedict the day after his arrival in Edinburgh. The day after that, she wrote to her parents at the Bath address collected from Stephen Lilac.

The letter of congratulations, signed by both parents, came as soon afterward as the Royal Mail could speed their good wishes along. They were happy for her; they thought Benedict a good man.

They thanked her for her help. They were happy in Bath, in a retirement she had not known they coveted, and Maggie had befriended several girls near her own age. Mrs. Perry was working on a new translation.

Best of all was the end: the promise that they would write again soon.

To Charlotte, the letter felt like a bandage around some wound within her. Maybe her parents, like she, had been waiting for the other to write the first letter. To make the first gesture of forgiveness for all those years apart.

Yes, they were still apart, but it felt different now. A carriage ride, and a bit of time, could bring them together, and the togetherness would be welcome.

She missed Maggie, of course, but that was an old familiar ache. She had been missing Maggie in some way or another since she first put her infant into her sister's arms.

And then came a letter from Maggie herself.

The first one was short.

Charlotte was tempted to write back a great screed of delight, but she restrained herself. With Benedict's aid, she crafted an affectionate reply that invited more letters.

The next letter was longer. Most intriguingly so.

When they invited her to come to Edinburgh for a visit, the reply came with no salutation at all—which Charlotte hoped was a sign of confused excitement.

Of course it is all right,
Charlotte wrote, though she wanted to write
Never leave at all.

The day Maggie and Colleen were meant to arrive, Charlotte watched out the front window of the cottage all day.

“I could just tell you when their carriage is coming,” Benedict murmured as he scratched out a line on his noctograph. A new scene for his next novel about the blind traveler. Unbounded by fact, this time he was really enjoying himself. “I'll hear it. You could hear it, too, for that matter, if you could settle. Come, write beside me.”

This was a habit they'd got into in recent weeks, as each worked on a novel. Charlotte was not sure she would ever finish hers, as all her characters wanted to do now was kiss and cavort. Writing it had soothed some need within her during a lonely time. Now she was more apt to peek at Benedict's straight-ruled work and contribute saucy anecdotes in which the fortunate traveler could take part.

Today, though, she sprang from her chair as soon as she touched the seat. “I can't settle,” she said. “I can't—I need to
do
something.”

Striding through the front parlor, through the corridor, through the kitchen, she made her way into the kitchen garden plot and ruthlessly weeded everything that dared poke through the soil in the wrong space.

She had had to learn their shape and type, sometimes through error. Different plants grew here than in London or Derbyshire. But when one matched a fruit or a flower with the right type of soil, it thrived.

She worked her fingers into the cool earth, trying not to think too much. Her heart was divided, part at her husband's side within the front parlor, part on the long road north, and she ached with wanting all the pieces together.

Behind her, the kitchen door opened. One of the maids, no doubt, coming to pick the herbs and vegetables needed for dinner.

But the footsteps that approached were light and hesitant. Not those of a bustling maid, but of a girl.

Even before Charlotte turned around, she was smiling. And then came the loveliest sentence she had ever heard.