“That bastard!” she said through clenched teeth. “That absolute, unmitigated scoundrel. I’ll have his head!”

Charlotte was shocked out of her misery. Her mother rarely expressed any strong emotion outside comfortable ones, like love for her children. The most agitated Charlotte had ever seen her was when the gatekeeper at their country estate gave his wife a black eye while in his cups. Even then she just marched up to the gatekeeper and told him that if she ever heard that he had drunk more than three tankards of ale at one sitting he’d be fired on the spot. But now she was actually panting with rage.

“Mother.” Charlotte put a hand on her arm.

Adelaide looked at her fiercely.

“There’s nothing to be done about it, Mama,” Charlotte persisted. “In fact, one could think that I made a very lucky escape. I … I don’t know that I would have resisted him if I hadn’t met him three years ago, and then I wouldn’t know that he is such a—”

“Libertine!” her mother snapped.

“Whatever he is,” Charlotte said shakily, “he’s forgotten that he ever met me. And he can’t find out that he has, Mama! You must see how humiliating that would be for me.” She wiped away the tears that kept tracking slowly down her cheeks, willy-nilly. “He says he wants to marry me. But he didn’t even try to find me before. I think it was probably just a moonlight frolic for him,” she said, with a tone of acute self-disgust. “I just keep thinking, why. Why did I let him take me into the garden? I thought it was so magical. I thought it was …” She turned away and rested her forehead against the cool wall of her studio. “What a silly, stupid little fool I was! Captured by moonlight and drunk on lemonade, ruined by a man who thought so little of it he doesn’t even remember the event! It meant nothing to him, nothing to him and everything to me …” Sobs racked her body as she rocked back and forth, face caught in her hands.

Adelaide stood rock still, unable to think of anything to comfort her weeping child. Silently she drew Charlotte back to the settee they had just left. They sat quietly until Charlotte’s tears finally stopped falling and she caught her breath.

“I think you should marry him,” Adelaide finally said quietly.

Charlotte raised her tearstained face. “What?”

“I think you should marry him,” Adelaide repeated. “We need to think calmly, darling. We have been thinking with the heart, and not with the head. The fact is that men do not take sexual encounters very seriously. Oh, not your father,” she added as Charlotte’s eyes widened. “Your father is remarkable.