Mrs. van Stork looked at her. “You will have nothing to do with Lady Charlotte from now on, Chloe. Your own reputation is most fragile. When you marry the baron, everyone will be watching to see whether your ‘city’ birth comes out, and you show yourself to be less than a gentlewoman. Lady Charlotte may well be innocent, but she is ruined now. If you are not careful, the same injustice could happen to you.”

Chloe nodded. But silently she decided that after she married Will she would not repudiate Charlotte. Her mother was wrong. Chloe had made plenty of friends among the aristocratic girls she went to school with, and Charlotte was different from most of them. You could read her heart in her eyes, Chloe thought, with an unfamiliar touch of poetry. The sight of Charlotte and Alex’s first dance together as a newly married couple had emblazoned itself on her mind. Charlotte loved Alex. She would never, never betray him, even if she did discover that they could have no children. Of that Chloe was sure.

Mercifully, Charlotte herself found so many aspects of her husband’s country estate needing attention that she had little time to think about wedding nights, brothers-in-law, or ruined reputations. Alex’s father had spent almost no time at his county seat, Downes Manor. The curtains were moth-eaten and in some rooms wallpaper was actually peeling from the walls. Charlotte hired an army of local women and had all sixty-five rooms cleaned from top to bottom. She spent hours with Percy Rowland, a representative of one of London’s best fabric houses. True, Percy eyed the notorious countess curiously on his first visit to the estate, but after the first few minutes Charlotte’s meticulous eye for color absorbed all his attention.

With Percy’s help, she refinished three sitting rooms, the grand dining room, and the ladies’ parlor. Items of furniture were hauled off to be re-covered, only to return a few weeks later swathed in dull gold or plummy crimson. Charlotte’s stomach grew large and her back twinged protestingly every time she rose from a chair; she turned her attention to the nursery. The nursery became a charming fairy castle, its walls covered with fanciful murals—but Charlotte was starting to view the stairs up to that nursery with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. She had a water closet installed on the first floor of the house and began thinking about the moldering, dark master bedchamber. And by the time Alex’s bedchamber had been transformed into an elegant, airy set of chambers, papered in a Florentine design, Charlotte was heartily tired of both Percy and pregnancy.