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 8

He went to Bath in the eighth week, without writing first, because he had spent six weeks not writing and discovered he had entirely lost the trick of it.

Miss Adelie’s house stood tall and dark in a street off the top of the town, smelling of old wool. Gabriel stood on the step a full minute before he knocked. Charlotte came down to him in a gray gown with her sleeves pinned, having read aloud since two.

She stopped in the doorway. “Your grace. Is your leg—”

“My leg is perfectly well, and that is not why I have come, and I want that said in the first four seconds,” said Gabriel Hail. “May I sit? Not for my own sake — if I stand, you will feel obliged to, and you have been reading aloud since two. I would rather you sat.”

She sat.

“I said it,” he told her, “at the magistrates’ dinner, eight days ago, in front of forty men. The leg. The two years. All of it. And what I said about you — that you did not do it for me and never claimed to, that you knew what was wrong with me inside four seconds because of your father, that you stayed forty minutes, and that you have never said one word to one person since.”

“Thank you,” Charlotte said.

“Do not thank me, please.” He set his hands on his knees. “I have come three days on the road to say four things, in order, and the first is the only one that matters. I knew from the Monday morning — not the sixth week, the Monday. I knew what had happened to you, what it had cost, and precisely what I owed and how to pay it — and I sat at Renford for six weeks and did not, because I was afraid of a room of forty men. That is not confusion. I was never confused for one hour of it. I knew, and I let it go on. I wanted to say that to your face before anything else, because there is a version of this where I arrive in Bath having been rather noble about a dinner, and I am not going to be allowed that one.”

Charlotte looked at him a long moment. “No,” she said. “You are not owed that one. I have had eight weeks in this house, and I have thought of you a great deal, and not always kindly. I worked out within a fortnight exactly why you were not writing — the trust, your cousin, all of it — because I am not a fool, and because my father spent six years frightened of precisely the same thing, in miniature. Understanding it did not help me in the smallest degree. I was reading to a blind woman four hours a day at twenty pounds a year, and you were at Renford, and knowing exactly why a man is not doing a thing puts not one shilling in a woman’s pocket.” She sat forward. “So do not tell me the second, third, and fourth things yet, because I have had eight weeks, and I have got mine arranged, and I shall not manage it if I am interrupted.”

“Say it.”

“You did not ask me either,” she said. He looked at her, not understanding. “On the fourth day in the coach, I worked out what I had actually got wrong that night — and it was not sitting down. I have never once been sorry for sitting down, and I am not sorry now. It was that I stayed forty minutes and ran the whole of it — your hand, the standing, the wine — and decided, inside four seconds, every single thing you needed, and never once asked whether you wanted it. My father hated that. He hated it in physicians, and in his sister, and by the last year he hated it in me, and I did not understand why until I was seven-and-twenty in a coach to Bath. And then I sat in this house eight weeks, waiting for a letter from a man who was deciding what to do about me without asking me anything either — and I found I could not be as angry as I wanted to be, because I had done exactly the same thing to him, in a chair.” She met his eyes squarely. “So that is the first thing, your grace, and it is mine, not yours. We have both spent this whole business managing each other, and we have both been extremely good at it, and I am seven-and-twenty, and I have not got the constitution for another forty years of it.”

Nobody spoke for a moment.

“Then ask me something,” said Gabriel.

“I beg your pardon.”

“You have just told me neither of us has asked the other anything. So ask me something, and I shall answer truthfully, and then I shall ask you, and you will do the same. We may as well begin it in this room; I do not know where else it would begin.”

Charlotte sat with that for a long moment.

“What do you actually want?” she said. “Not what you have decided is owed.”

“I want to marry you,” said Gabriel Hail. “I have wanted it since about the fourth week, and I did not write, because a letter that begins with an apology and ends with a proposal makes the apology worthless, and I could not work out how to do the one without the other. I have no business asking it. You have not a farthing, and I have twelve thousand a year, and every soul in this county will say the companion who sat on a duke’s lap got exactly what she was after, and they will say it for twenty years, and I cannot do one single thing about that.”

“No,” said Charlotte Ray. “You cannot. Now you may ask me one.”

He thought about it properly, and she watched him do it, and said afterward it was the moment she decided.

“What do you want, Miss Ray? On your own account. If nobody in England were being sensible about anything.”

Charlotte discovered, with something close to shock, that she had been waiting twelve years for one person to ask her that question.