Page 18 of To Tame the Wild Rake
“‘E’s gone,” the woman offered. “Some fancy lady come in a carriage. Good as a parade, it were. Foreign men on ’orses, an’ all.”
The Beast spun around and felled her with a blow, roaring, “No!” The Winderfield bitch had forestalled him. With great difficulty, he reined in his anger. They would pay. They would all pay. “Out!” he roared. “Everyone, out.” He needed to think. He needed to come up with a plan to punish them all, but not bring the army down on him.
In moments, the room was empty, his people having scurried for their holes. There would be a way. He would have the boy and his revenge.
Charlotte heard Sarah moving around their private sitting room while the first light of a tardy November dawn was still struggling to filter through the fog. She’d been awake early herself, though her sleep during the day yesterday had been barely enough to take the edge off her fatigue.
Sarah had arrived home yesterday morning just as Charlotte and Bentham were arriving home from the Ashbury Clinic with Tony. Charlotte knew that Bentham was anxious to talk to Sarah, but it was not the right time. Bentham was focussed on his patient and Sarah had just arrived home after an early start and a half-day’s journey. But the looks each bent on the other when they thought themselves unobserved suggested that Sarah’s husband hunt was over.
Sarah continued to avoid Bentham when he returned later in the day to see Tony, staying hidden upstairs. “I cannot face Lord Bentham today,” she told Charlotte. “Please ask him to call at eleven tomorrow morning.”
The boy had a broken leg and two cracked ribs. He’d escaped out of the window of the room where he had been imprisoned, and climbed the building to take the rooftop route to safety, clambering up and down slopes and jumping across gaps.
One such gap defeated him. “My foot slipped,” he grumbled. “Would’ve made it easy, else.”
It was a simple fracture, Bentham said, and they could expect Tony to make a full recovery. In the meantime, they could treat the pain with cold compresses and low doses of laudanum for a few days.
Aldridge also wanted to call, to talk to Tony. Charlotte had sent him away yesterday, but he would come back today, beyond a doubt. Charlotte’s mind fed her images of Aldridge, no matter how much she tried to rip it back to something else. Anything else.
He had been magnificent yesterday. She had gone to him in desperation, with no one else to turn to, and he had got dressed immediately and come with her. Her mind replayed the scene she had walked in on, and her mouth dried before she forced her thoughts into a different path.
As Charlotte pretended to sleep on, the maid crept in as silently as possible to stir up the fire so that the room would be warm for Charlotte to wake in.
Sarah was back early. From what Sarah said, the house party had been a disaster. But her son Elias seemed far keener to talk about being invited to call Sarah ‘Mama’ than in sharing the bullying he’d suffered.
Aldridge said that he hadn’t been to a brothel in a decade. He’d had a mistress, though. The whole world knew the Rose of Frampton had been in his keeping for three years, and he had worn a black armband for her when she died.
“Argh!” Charlotte flounced out of bed. Better to make an early start than to go on fighting her errant imagination.
She opened the door to the bedchamber and called out a good morning as she retreated back towards the bed to pick up the robe that lay ready.
“You are up early,” Sarah said, appearing in the doorway. “Shall I send for your hot chocolate?”
“A coffee this morning, I think,” Charlotte told her.
Sarah retreated to speak to one of the footmen who waited in the hall to run messages. Charlotte followed her into their shared sitting room. “Could you not sleep, dearest?” she asked.
“No more than you, I think, and for similar reasons.” Sarah sighed. “Are you sure that you cannot marry Aldridge, Charlotte? One has only to see him watching you to know he cares.”
Did Aldridge watch Charlotte when she wasn’t aware in the same way that Sarah and Bentham looked at one another? That combination of appreciation and hunger?
No point in pretending that she was not affected by the man. Sarah knew her too well. “I have given him no encouragement,” Charlotte pointed out.
Sarah raised an eyebrow. “Which makes it all the more remarkable.”
Charlotte shrugged. “Have you forgotten how I found him when I went for his help?” She had told Sarah the whole story the last night. Charlotte blushed at the memory of Aldridge’s barely clad body with the two naked women on the bed behind him. How was she going to look Lady Thirby and her friend in the eyes ever again? Mind you, at leastshehad been clothed.
Sarah laughed. “You know as well as I do that the Thirby woman has been chasing him these past two years. He is not made of granite, Charlotte. He has been a rake, after all, and you have, as you just said, given him no encouragement.”
“Nor will I,” Charlotte insisted, reining in her errant imagination. “You know I can’t, Sarah. After the incident, I do not know if I can bear to let a man—even Aldridge—do…that. But even if I could, he will need an heir.”
“You could tell him you are probably barren,” Sarah replied, naming the problem with brutal precision. “You want him; I know you do.”
“The chief role of the duchess is to bear an heir,” Charlotte reminded her sister. “Whatever I feel about Aldridge, I cannot burden him with a barren wife.”
Sarah shook her head. “Should you not let him decide whether what he would lose is more important than what he would gain?”
A knock on the door heralded the maid with their morning beverages. Charlotte contented herself with a glare at her sister. When the door closed behind the maid, Sarah showed she’d understood the message. “I am sorry, Charlotte. It is just that I wish you happy.”
