Page 28 of To Seduce a Stranger

“Thank you for telling me this,” she said. “But . . .” Doubt still lingered at the edges of her mind. “Do you never catch a glimpse of something in him, something . . . hard, sometimes?”

Mari nodded. “Oh, yes.” She lifted her fork and prodded at the cold eggs on her plate. “I think it’s fear.”

Fear? Of what could a man like Edward be afraid?

Apparently regretting that she had been so forthcoming, Mari rose suddenly and walked away without speaking. Before Charlotte had recovered from her surprise at the abrupt end to their conversation, Mari returned with a checked apron in a pinafore style, substantial enough that the entire front of Charlotte’s gown would be covered when she put it on. “Seems a pity to ruin another dress,” she said, holding it out.

“Merci,” Charlotte replied, hardly conscious of her words.

Mari began to clear their dishes. Plates and silver clattered in the sink as she moved automatically through the familiar tasks of the kitchen, the work she had been doing almost all her life. Charlotte could hear Edward asking her, Is that what you want to do? And what had been Mari’s reply? It’s something to have a choice.

“Thank you for an excellent breakfast, Mari. We are very fortunate you chose to come here, or else we might all starve.”

“Garrick wasn’t wasting away when we arrived,” she pointed out as she scraped the uneaten eggs into a bowl and set it at her feet. Noir appeared as if from nowhere and began to eat. “You would have managed. Somehow.”

“Perhaps,” Charlotte said, although privately, she had her doubts. Tying on the apron, she stepped to Mari’s side and began to dry the dishes as Mari washed. “I wonder . . . When you set out for England, is this what you thought you’d be doing here?”

Mari’s hands dropped into the water, scattering bubbles and splattering Charlotte. “I never—”

“Don’t say you did not have a dream,” Charlotte spoke over her. “Everyone does.” Heaven knew, she had dreamed of something else every time she had been forced to listen to one of Aunt Penhurst’s tirades. If she had not, she might be listening to them still.

“I had been promised my freedom.” She shrugged. “It felt . . . dangerous, somehow, to look beyond that. Like tempting fate.”

Charlotte could not help but notice that Mari had not really denied having another dream, although she was reluctant to reveal it, even now. Or perhaps she was still figuring out what she wanted.

Fair enough. If Mari had asked Charlotte the same question, the honest answer would have been no. Or, more accurately, non. It would be wrong to compare their past struggles, for nothing could compare to what Mari had endured. But when all was said and done, they were both women, caught in a world not of their making, trying to determine the road they would take.

How strange for their paths to cross at Ravenswood.

“Will you let me know when the cleaning supplies arrive from the village?” Charlotte asked, folding the linen towel and laying it aside.

“And where will I find you, Mrs. Cary?”

Mrs. Cary. Not a slip of the tongue, of course. Quite deliberate. Mockery, then? But, no. Not that either, although she could not put her finger on what it was.

“I intend to take a look around upstairs, first,” Charlotte said.

“Are you searching for something in particular?”

“No, of course not.”

Mari shot her a look, and guilt pricked Charlotte’s conscience. But how could she seek an answer if she wasn’t yet sure of the question?

* * *

Little Norbury—not strictly speaking a part of the Ravenswood estate, although of course it depended on the estate’s prosperity for its own—had always been a small village. The stage did not pass through, so there were few visitors, no inn, little to interest a stranger. A church, a pub, and a couple of shops, all of which drew their business from the tenants on the neighboring farms.

No surprise then to find the village in a condition nearly as dire as the manor’s.

On the edge of town sat the vicarage—empty, as Markham had warned him it would be. Beside it stood the church, too stark and ancient an edifice to have been much bothered, at least externally, by a few years’ neglect. As he walked past, his eyes scanned the churchyard, its moss-covered stones shaded from the early morning light. With a quickening of breath, he entered, passing through a rusted wrought-iron gate whose hinges protested mightily against his touch.

Near the back of the graveyard stood a few taller monuments, divided from the others by another low fence. His feet carried him over the uneven ground, through the narrow spaces between markers that had been skewed and tilted by shifting earth and the passage of time, until he reached that separate space. The family plot.

Cary. The name seemed to press on him from every side. Men. Women. Children—their parents’ hope, extinguished like the flame of a candle. The eleventh Earl of Beckley, his grandfather, whom he knew only from the stern-faced portrait in the gallery. Even a pampered spaniel, whose presence there no one had ever been able to explain. Had some clergyman really allowed a dog to be buried in consecrated ground?

At last his eyes rested on the stone he had not realized he had come there to see.

LAETITIA HOWELL CARY