She Sat on a Stranger’s Lap to Hide From Her Former Love — Then Two Hundred Guests Fell Silent When Charlotte Realized the Man Beneath Her Was the Feared Duke Hosting the Ball.

PART 4

Sophie Basset was seventeen, with four thousand pounds and a season coming in the spring, and both women in that parlor had done the arithmetic independently before ten o’clock that morning. A girl of seventeen, coming out from her grandmother’s house — a house whose companion had just sat on a duke’s lap at a public ball in front of two hundred witnesses. There was no version of it that worked. Charlotte had run through perhaps nine of them at six that morning and found every one wanting.

“I am not going to insult you by pretending it is anything else,” said Lady Pru, still at the window. “It is not what people will say about you. I have lived sixty years in this county; I could weather what they say about you. It is that every woman with a son will quietly begin asking herself what sort of household Sophie Basset was raised in, and there is no answer to that question, and it will follow that girl for four years.”

“I know it, ma’am,” said Charlotte. “And I want you to know I have sat with it since five this morning, trying to find a way around it. I have not found one.”

“Neither have I,” said Lady Pru, “and I am three-and-sixty years old, and I have never in my life been so ashamed of anything.”

“Ma’am—”

“Do not,” her godmother said, turning at last, and her face was entirely wet, which Charlotte had never once seen. “Do not be kind to me about it, Charlotte, because I have not earned it, and it will finish me. I am putting you out of this house for my granddaughter’s sake, and I am going to do it well, and I am going to do it whatever you say — and you may be angry with me, and I should a great deal rather you were.”

Charlotte found, to her own considerable surprise, that she was not angry at all — and that this, somehow, was the worst part of the entire morning.

“I am not angry,” she said. “You took me in the month my father died. I would do exactly what you are doing if I were you, and had a granddaughter of seventeen. And that is what I have been sitting with since five o’clock — not that anyone has been cruel to me, but that every single person in this business is doing the sensible thing, and it is going to cost me the whole of my life regardless.”

The arrangement took four days to make, and it was as good as Lady Pru could contrive, which was not very good. A Mrs. Ferrand nine miles off wanted a companion and was known to be difficult, at twenty-two pounds. A widow near the town wanted someone for her children, at eighteen, but would not take a woman the county was already talking about. And in Bath there was a Miss Adelie — two-and-seventy, blind, four companions gone through in three years — who did not read the county papers, did not receive callers, and would not have cared in the least if her companion had sat on the king.

Charlotte took Bath. She gave her reasons in four sentences and never once wavered from them. “Mrs. Ferrand is nine miles from here; she will know by Sunday. The widow will not have me, and I do not blame her. A blind woman who receives nobody is the one place in England where what happened at that ball does not exist. I am not going to spend four years being managed by people who know.”

She left on the Tuesday. The four days between were the strangest of her life — not because anything happened, but because nothing did, and everyone in the house knew she was leaving, and not one person mentioned it aloud. The servants were extraordinarily kind, which she found hardest to bear. A young housemaid stopped her on the back stairs and said, red-faced and hurrying away before Charlotte could answer, “It weren’t fair, miss.”

On the Monday, Sophie Basset found her in the small parlor, seventeen and freshly, badly, cried-out.

“Grandmama says you are going to Bath.”

“I am. Because of me.”

“Sit down,” Charlotte said, “and listen to me, because this is the only conversation about this that you and I are ever going to have, and I want it done properly. I am going to Bath because I sat down on a man at a ball in front of two hundred people. That is the whole reason, and it is mine, and I did it with my own legs. Your grandmother is doing the only sensible thing any woman in her position could do, and if I were three-and-sixty with a granddaughter of seventeen and four thousand pounds, I should do precisely the same — and faster. There is not one single thing in any of this that is yours, Sophie. Not one. If you carry it about with you, it will be because it feels dreadful — and feeling dreadful is not the same as being to blame. I have watched people confuse those two things, and it has never once helped anybody.”

“I do not want you to go,” Sophie said.

“No,” said Charlotte, and found her own voice had gone, and made it come back. “I do not much want to go either. But I am going, and you are going to have a season, and in a few years you will very likely have forgotten the whole of this — and I want you to, and that is not bitterness, and I mean it entirely.”

Lady Pru gave her a character so extravagantly good that Charlotte had to stop reading it in the coach, and forty pounds she tried twice to refuse and took on the third attempt. And at the door of the coach, her godmother took both her hands.

“I have thought about that man’s leg since Sunday morning,” she said. “Not the scandal — the leg. You sat on a stranger for forty minutes to keep two hundred people from learning he could not stand, and you have never mentioned it to anyone but me, and you will not. And he has not written, Charlotte. Four days, and he has not written to me, and he has not written to you, and he has not called at this house. That man is going to have to decide something, and he has had four days and has not decided it. Go to Bath knowing that this is his to do, and not yours.”