“You promised,” she half whispered. “You promised.” Her face was drawn with pain, but she stood firm, pulling her slender shoulders back to look at his face with dignity. She would not allow herself to curl into a hedgehog and scream aloud.

Alex’s lip curled. “You promised. You promised to love and obey. With my body I thee worship,” he sneered. “I think they had better take that line out of the marriage service, don’t you? It just doesn’t suit the times.”

Charlotte stared at him numbly. He was so handsome, even with stark rage written on his face. Part of her longed to throw herself against Alex’s chest, to beg him to listen, to hug him and kiss him. He was in pain: She could see it in his shadowed eyes and the fierce hunch of his shoulders. But she would not … could not beg him. What she had to do now was protect her child. And Pippa. Pippa couldn’t be pulled from her side after losing her mother. Pippa wouldn’t be able to bear losing another mama. The thought gave steel to Charlotte’s backbone. She thrust the utter despair in her heart to the side.

“You mustn’t take Pippa away,” she said. “She has suffered too much already.”

“It will be better for her,” Alex retorted. He turned away from Charlotte and stared across the great, soft green slope leading toward the house. Then he turned back and looked at his wife. “How can I leave her with a woman who is sleeping with my brother, Charlotte? Will you answer that? Even when I thought you had been false to me before marriage, I didn’t really believe you would keep up that behavior after we married. More fool I.”

“I didn’t—” Charlotte stopped. This was a reiteration of their wedding night. He didn’t believe her then, and he would never believe her now. He was simply too influenced by his first marriage. She felt such a leaden pain in her chest that she almost fell over. There was no point in talking. But one thing she had to say.

“You promised to trust me,” she said, looking straight into his eyes. “You promised.” Then she turned and walked away, and no voice called her back.

Charlotte kept her back very straight, all the way into the house. But she climbed the stairs slowly, one hand on the small of her back. She felt like an old, a very old woman. The baby seemed to be pulling her forward. She finally reached the second floor and, turning left, walked straight into Sophie’s bedchamber.

Sophie gasped and sat up. She had been drowsing in the warm afternoon sun, puzzling over a book of love sonnets written in Portuguese—Sophie, to her mother’s great annoyance, showed an acute and unladylike passion for reading literature in its original language.