Caroline eyed her friend with renewed concern. “You don’t believe you are a member of the ton?”

Charlotte felt tears pricking at her eyes for a moment. Then she straightened up, her jaw set. She would not let this best her. She had not survived four long years of living in the same villa as Antonio’s mother just to crumple when her mind refused to cooperate. “I know I am not. Enough of this, Caroline, we are not getting anywhere. What I need now is a plan. Patricia will be married tomorrow. Alasdair informed me this morning that despite the fact that I have been shamed and made the object of fun by everyone who matters, he will not allow us to go to one of his estates where I might reign supreme over the locals. Instead we must stay in town as there has been some damage to the pistons and they must be recast or reformed or whatever it is that one does to pistons. Other than cleaning them, that is. Alasdair took great exception to my cleaning them. Thus, I am to be kept prisoner here in London, housebound, unable to go about in polite company until this latest scandal has died down.”

“That doesn’t sound so very terrible,” Caroline replied. “It sounds rather romantic, actually, sort of a honeymoon where you and Lord Carlisle will be thrown into one another’s company a good deal of the time.”

“It would be ideal if my husband and I had a different relationship,” Charlotte said as she picked up her memorandum book and flipped it open to a clean page. “But as I have a mind that has suddenly turned on me, a heart that is delinquent in falling in love, a body that wants to touch Alasdair in the most inappropriate—if very interesting—places, while my husband would rather work on his machine than dally with me, our time spent together is more a curse than a blessing. No, indeed, Caro, this shilly-shallying around is doing me no good. I must think up a plan, and you are going to help me do it.”

Caroline watched Charlotte as she stared at the blank paper before her, a faint frown wrinkling her brow. “What I need is a perfectly brilliant plan, something unusual, something foolproof. Simply trying to fall in love didn’t work, so logically, the next step must be to have assistance. But who offers assistance in falling in love?”

“Mama always told me who was acceptable to love and who wasn’t. Perhaps she would advise you?”

Charlotte began to gnaw on the end of her pencil. “No, I know whom to love, I just need…oh, I don’t know, something. A little push. A help, an aid of some sort. Something that will guarantee I fall in love with Alasdair.”

“Something like a potion?” Caroline joked, her mind on the copy of Midsummer Night’s Dream she was reading to dearest Algernon.

Charlotte looked up, a beatific smile on her face. Her eyes lit up with that peculiar light that Caroline knew heralded another one of Charlotte’s “brilliant” plans. She always worried when she saw that look.