Alex arrived at Dunston Castle, his estate in Scotland, some ten days before Charlotte and her small entourage. He had spent the trip either sitting alone in his coach or riding on Bucephalus, which he greatly preferred. In either situation he cursed the fact that in his rage he had consigned Charlotte to the servants’ coach. Why hadn’t he left her in his coach, where he could have railed at her to his heart’s content? Then, slowly, a feeling of mingled distaste and shame about his own behavior crept into his heart, and he was glad that his wife was out of sight. But out of mind she was not.

Surges of rage still attacked him when he thought about Charlotte’s deception, but he began to regain an ability to analyze. One day he realized that he was allowing his still vibrant anger about Maria’s betrayals to cloud the situation with Charlotte. And after that perception it was only two days until he sat bolt upright in the morning, Charlotte’s voice echoing in his head.

“I didn’t sleep with other men! I only slept with you, once, years ago!”

And then there was Charlotte talking about sex: “I didn’t know … it was wonderful, so wonderful … it wasn’t at all like the other time. No pain …”

So Charlotte wasn’t quite the arrant betrayer that Maria had been. No, she had slept with only one man, years ago—and she thought it had been him. It cast an ugly light on why she agreed to marry him, but that didn’t matter, Alex thought, consigning dreams of love to the fire. He was no idiot. It was clear what had happened. Charlotte had slept with Patrick, and due to the unlucky fact of Patrick being out of England when the two of them met, she believed she had lost her virginity to him. Alex swallowed hard. He and Patrick had shared women in the past … but never a wife. It was a hard thing to contemplate. Still, if one had to marry under these circumstances, wasn’t it better that the other man had been one’s twin?

He thought about this for the last few days before Charlotte arrived, calming his intense irritability by casting fishing lines into foggy Scottish streams and pulling out trout that no one wanted to eat. So he threw them back. He spent hours staring at the gray-green water as it rippled slightly in the wake of his line.