Charlotte listened silently. What was the matter with her? At least Julia knew Mr. Colby. She even adored him. But Julia hadn’t lost her head. They both knew that if Julia had been able to tell her mother, which of course she couldn’t, Lady Brentorton would have approved of her response to the curate’s kiss.

But when a stranger, a total stranger, kissed Charlotte out of the blue, she collapsed into his arms as if she were begging for more. So Charlotte separated her guilt from her anger. How evil could the man be? He must have thought … she didn’t want to think what he must have thought, and quickly covered her burning cheeks with her hands.

It was only when the huge house was quiet, around two in the afternoon, that Charlotte started to cry. Julia had gone riding with her parents; her maid was down in the kitchen. Charlotte soaked her pillow with tears: for the husband she would never have, for the babies she thought to have, for the unfairness of discovering that she—she, Charlotte—was an insatiable woman. She’d have to stay away from men, she thought finally, after crying hopelessly for a long time. She couldn’t trust herself, that was clear. And she couldn’t allow herself to be publicly ruined; her parents would be devastated.

Finally she got out of bed and rang for a bath. She sent the maid out of the room because she wasn’t sure whether there might be other signs of her ruination. But she didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore.

It was only when she leaned back into the steaming water that Charlotte remembered her paintings, and given the way the world had shifted in the last few hours, she allowed that to shift too. Since she couldn’t have a husband, or a baby, she could learn how to paint properly. She would make a focus for her life in the easy sweep of new canvas and wet paint, far from the humiliation she felt at the moment. The thought—the plan—calmed the agonizing jumble of feelings inside Charlotte; she rose from the bath and allowed Julia’s maid to button her into a chaste white gown.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

As Charlotte’s world fell into before and after, so did the world of her mother. When Charlotte returned to Albemarle Square the next day, she didn’t say much. She looked at her mother with a tearless, somber look that made her mother want simultaneously to shake her and to burst into tears. What on earth had happened to Charlotte? She wasn’t herself anymore, as the duchess told her husband in bewilderment. Charlotte became moody and even harsh.