Page 35 of An Unwilling Earl
“Mrs. Smith, please tell me you didn’t stay up half the night taking this gown in for me?”
“Aww. Get on with you.” The housekeeper had blushed and scrunched her eyes in pleasure. “It only took me a few hours in the evening.”
Charlotte turned this way and that in front of the mirror. It was styled essentially the same as the yellow gown—too much lace and too many ribbons—but it was pretty, and it was well made, and better than that, it was clean.
“Truly,” Charlotte said. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do this.”
Charlotte took her coffee in Jacob’s office, sitting by the window as the weak sunlight filtered in. It seemed so normal to sit here and drink coffee and look at the street and the people passing by.
Normal had been missing from her life for a long, long time.
She spied a stack of newspapers on a corner table and fetched them to settle back in the window seat and enjoy her morning as she hadn’t enjoyed it since her papa had died.
But the headline screaming at her made her heart flutter, and she put down her coffee, her stomach churning.
She quickly scanned the story, her breath coming faster, her brain unable to keep up with how fast her eyes were moving across the page.
Four women dead.
Beheaded.
Two with their hands cut off.
All found in the Thames.
She grabbed the next newspaper, but there was no mention of it. Two more newspapers into the stack she found another article, but it seemed that Scotland Yard had no real clues and no direction in which to go. They assumed the dead girls were servants, but that’s all they knew.
Charlotte let the paper drop to her lap, and she closed her eyes, thinking of a dismembered head and sightless, glassy eyes.
She pressed her fist to her mouth to keep the coffee from coming back up and thought of the dark basement at Aunt Martha’s house and how Charlotte had refused to go down there, even if it had meant a beating for disobedience.
…
Jacob didn’t want to miss his longstanding appointment with Armbruster that afternoon, but neither did he want to leave Charlotte alone for much longer. He’d already left her to her devices for the better part of the day, and he was uneasy. Who knew what mischief she could get herself into?
He told himself he missed her because she was vulnerable and needed his help. Not because she was easy to talk to and he enjoyed her company or that he wanted to kiss her again.
“April fifteenth,” Armbruster said.
Jacob paused, halfway to sitting down, and frowned at his friend. “Is that date supposed to mean something?”
“Put it in your book. Mother has organized a get-together, just a few hundred of her closest friends. You’re invited. In fact, it’s in your honor.”
“A few hundred friends is not a get-together. That is a ball.”His honor?
Armbruster shrugged. “Call it want you want, but you better be there.”
“I don’t go to those things. You know that. I know nothing about balls. What do I do? How do I act?”
“Like you do and act now. No different.”
“So not show up?” Jacob asked, perking up.
“Except that.”
He did not like parties. Even small parties. Intimate dinners, maybe, but large affairs made him nervous. He wasn’t very good at small talk, and he always felt like the biggest fool.
Armbruster leaned forward. “I have information on the dead women.”
