Chapter Twenty-Two

‘Oh, I’m sorry—’ She stopped in the doorway, one leg lifted to keep the weight off her ankle as she caught sight of the figure perched at the end of her bed.

Señora Quincy turned her head fractionally. Her hands were folded in her lap as she stared out of the window. ‘Oh, Charlotte, no. Forgive me,’ she said, going to move. ‘I should not be in here. I thought you were not coming back.’

‘Please, stay sitting,’ Charlotte demurred.

‘I just wanted to see it again.’

‘It used to be yours?’

The old lady nodded. ‘And Arlo’s was on the other side.’ Where Nathan slept now.

‘How did you manage to get up here?’ Charlotte asked, hopping carefully into the room.

‘Two of those men lifted me.’ She tutted, displeased by the necessity of it. ‘Still . . .’ She raised her arms slightly to indicate the old-fashioned room. ‘It was worth it.’ She glanced across at Charlotte, seeing how her ankle was bandaged and held up. ‘How did you get up here? You can hardly move.’

‘Scooted up on my backside,’ Charlotte grinned, hopping over to the small armchair opposite the end of the bed. ‘Not very elegant. My mother would have died if she’d seen me.’

‘Couldn’t someone have helped you? Where are the others?’

‘Marina’s gone back to her room – she wanted to check on you obviously. And Nathan’s still in town, working.’

The old lady rolled her eyes. ‘Digging the dirt, is he?’

‘Uncovering truths,’ Charlotte said. ‘He’s not here to apportion blame but to unearth reasons that explain – even support – your actions.’

Señora Quincy stared out of the window again. ‘Those who need to know, know,’ she said quietly.

‘He thinks you fell in love with the wrong man.’

‘Oh, I did that all right,’ the señora agreed, but she didn’t add anything and she sat quietly instead for a long time, her awareness of her surroundings seeming to come and go.

Charlotte let her own gaze drift out of the window, over the gardens. The silence suited her too. She felt worn out and battered from the past few days: London, coming back here, facing off to a bull, that kiss, that kiss . . . what did it mean? There was unfinished business between them, Nathan’s eyes had told her that much as they’d left him in town. But the facts were the facts, no matter how hard she wished them otherwise: he still had a wife and child. Surely that was their ending?

‘It’s funny, I can remember it all so clearly – that night I left,’ the old lady said abruptly, cutting into her thoughts. ‘I cut my hair at that basin through there, escaped through that window . . . It was all ahead of me. My life was beginning that night, I could feel it.’ She looked up at the beamed ceiling, the shuttered window. ‘He hasn’t touched the room at all. It’s just as it was when I lived here.’ She patted the bedspread gently. ‘I can even remember my mother making this.’