Page 82 of Lessons for Marquesses
Taking it for what it was, a shameful confession, Charlotte’s features softened. “Come, dear, let’s get you to bed.”
She followed her aunt into her room, staring at the twisted bedcovers resembling her insides. She already knew how mere minutes could change a life. What she was thinking when Charlotte cleared her throat and Georgiana faced her.
Her aunt held out a hammer and a handful of nails. “You are much more proficient at its use than I, dear. Please nail the door shut now and you need never be sorry again.”
Georgiana looked from her aunt to the door. Was she a bloody pin cushion for everyone to stab their opinions,resentment, and rules into? If she was old enough for debtor’s prison, well, she was old enough to be alone with a man.
Georgiana stifled a raging tirade and said, “No.”
Her aunt blinked as if Georgiana’s refusal had not been clear. “Dear, please nail the door shut.”
"I will not.”
"Then you will move from your room. It is scand?—”
“Have you ever been in love?” Georgiana planted a fist at her hip.
The most she knew about her aunt: she was her dead mother’s sister, a spinster from Yorkshire who had left her family at eighteen. And she was a judgmental stickler of the highest order.
Charlotte bristled. “I see no reason for this line of questioning.”
“I would that you divulge any tenderness of feeling you might once have had for another.”
Charlotte closed her eyes as if to a troublesome child. “You are not in love with Mr. Wolf, I can assure you.”
“You assure me? You know my heart?”
“I know you are guileless in the ways of men. And susceptible in your current state of financial misfortune. Mr. Wolf is dangerous, dear. He plays you false; I feel this in my very bones.”
“And I feel he is not. But thank you for your counsel.”
High color rose from Charlotte’s chaste collar, gaining ground until it shaded her brow right below her enormous mob cap. “Mr. Wolf will tear your heart into a million pieces. He will leave you hardened to the world and shattered. You will never know this girl again who stands before me, full of hope and innocence. And you silently ask how I know this, and I shall answer. Because, I too, once had a Mr. Wolf in my life. And the woman you see before you was made by him.”
Charlotte carefully set the hammer and nails to the washstand, bid Georgiana a strained good night, and left the room.
Georgiana fell sideways on her bed, her aunt’s morbid premonitions swirling in her brain.
Her aunt would never believe there was a man, a good man, who would accept Georgiana as she was. But hadn’t Oliver accepted Mr. Wolf, befriended him even?
Mr. Wolf had won the Fordyce Stakes. He was a member of the Jockey Club. She had known him just over a month, but she felt she knew him long. He was the second son of a baron, his father had died of a bilious liver, his mother was independent, he loved salads, his favorite color was blue, he’d attended Eton, his favorite memory was of his grandfather, his left hand plagued him. He had saved her on a castle wall. And the memory of something, someone, kept him up at night. He had held her in his arms, had felt the need to quell her fears, and tell her he had done nothing with Lady Sybil.
Didn’t all of this mean something?
Two days later, because they had not yet gone to bed, Julian and his stoic-reprobates saw Georgiana, her aunt, Oliver, and Mr. Wolf off as they left for Chedworth. With Mr. Wolf mounted on his hunter Teague, Georgiana vowed to ride Wild Squire to Chedworth in sight of the coach to ensure Charlotte’s comfort. She didn’t know why exactly, since Charlotte never quite cared for Georgiana’s comfort.
Julian shouted as they departed, “Give the Evil Leprechaun my regards!”
If only the Evil Leprechaun was all she feared at Chedworth. Each stride brought her closer to her past, with Mr. Wolf a coach width and length in front of her. A distance surely to cheer her aunt.
Near Chedworth, it started drizzling. She wasn’t surprised the sun had been shining when they set out from Farendon and now, with the Jacobean manor looming, looked as though it had never. That was Chedworth. Georgiana was as familiar with it as breathing. Her parents’ love, her mother’s ghost, all the ghosts.
She slowed Wild Squire to a walk at the mansion’s pinnacles jutting out from the tree line and breathed in the scent of rain and moss drifting on the wind. Mr. Wolf trotted up and matched her pace.
“Forbidding,” he remarked.
“It will suit you well.”
“I thought Farendon suited me.”
