Chapter 4

Roland bit back the urge to curse fit to raise the rafters. He and Charmian were finally about to sort out the trouble between them – and it was clear that there was some mystery to solve as well. After their years of no communication, he wasn’t willing to lose this chance. She might go silent on him again. That had driven him to the brink of insanity. “Don’t answer it.”

Charmian didn’t look any happier about the interruption. “There might be a problem.”

“There is a problem. The fact that you left me three years ago and I haven’t seen you since,” he snapped.

She flinched as there was another knock. “I’m sorry. I have to…”

When she crossed to open the door, she revealed her aunt in the clothes she’d worn all evening. “Charmian, you’re awake?”

Charmian didn’t bother confirming what was visibly true. “Do you need me downstairs, Aunt Janet?”

Roland strained to hear some disturbance, but the inn was quiet, apart from the rumble of various snores and the distant roar of the river.

“No. No. Can I come in?”

Roland ground his teeth. He’d long ago realized that Charmian’s family had interfered in his marriage. He only had to recall the stony reception that her mother had given him at Holden House when he’d turned up, determined to get his wife back.

Charmian cast him a nervous glance. “It’s late. Can’t it wait until the morning?”

Janet Barton bore a strong resemblance to her niece. The same red hair and fine features and green eyes. Those eyes were worried right now. “No. I need to talk to you.”

“Should I send Roland downstairs?” Charmian stepped back to let the woman in.

“Yes. No.”

Charmian looked bewildered. Roland couldn’t blame her. He’d only met Janet tonight, but he’d seen enough to recognize a woman of strong character. Her current uncertainty didn’t fit with that.

“Which is it, Aunt?”

“I think Sir Roland needs to hear what I have to say.”

Roland stood. The room wasn’t large. With three people inside, it was overcrowded. He noticed that the woman carried a leather satchel. His curiosity sparked. Janet looked as if she bore the weight of the world on her shoulders. She also looked unmistakably guilty. What the hell was going on?

Charmian now looked troubled rather than puzzled. “What’s the matter?”

Janet looked guiltier than ever. “I…”

Instead of continuing, she slid the satchel from her shoulder and offered it to Charmian. Whatever it held, there was a lot of it. The worn leather bulged.

Charmian took the bag, but didn’t immediately open it. “What is it, Aunt Janet?”

Her aunt looked strained and pale. She licked her lips and wrung her hands. “I just ask you to remember the state you were in when you came back to us. Your mother and I believed we were doing the best thing. I’m still not convinced we were wrong. But…”

With shaking hands, Charmian opened the satchel. Roland felt sick, even before Charmian checked the contents. He had an idea of what was inside.

She shot her aunt a killing look. “L-letters?” she stammered. “I don’t understand.”

Janet squared her shoulders in a way Roland had seen her niece do a hundred times. “You should sit down.”

Charmian’s shock receded and she flushed with anger, as she looked again at the satchel then at her aunt. “I don’t want to sit down. I want to know what all my letters to Roland and…” With a shaking hand, she sifted through the satchel’s contents. “…and his letters to me are doing in your possession.”

Her voice was like a whiplash, and it was clear that Janet felt the bite of the strike. Her eyes were glassy with tears, as she regarded her niece. Tears and love, much as Roland didn’t want to recognize it. “We, your mother and I, were so worried about you when you came home from York and your disastrous mistake.”

“Our marriage, you mean,” Roland grated out.

Janet leveled tragic eyes on him, and he realized that she’d concentrated so hard on Charmian that he’d hardly registered in her awareness. “It was a mistake. Haven’t three years apart proven that?”

Charmian looked furious. Even worse, she looked devastated.

“Three years apart that you and my mother engineered.” Her voice was flat. He could tell that she struggled to control her tumultuous reaction.

Janet adopted a persecuted air. “We feared for your sanity when you came back to us. Don’t you remember? You couldn’t eat, you couldn’t sleep, you cried for a week, then you sank into a silence that was worse.”

Charmian directed a glower at him. She was a proud creature. She wouldn’t like him hearing this.

Roland didn’t like hearing it either. He hated to think of her suffering. All this time, he’d imagined her angry and disdainful. Her distress didn’t flatter his vanity. He’d always wanted the best for her. He still did.

“Perhaps because I missed the man I love,” she said, as if the words didn’t slice through him like a knife. Because he’d loved her, too, and losing her had come close to destroying him.

Roland didn’t place too much faith in her declaration of past love. He didn’t underestimate the changes that their separation had wrought.

Janet’s jaw took on a stubborn line familiar from his acquaintance with Charmian. “There’s no good to be had from mixing the classes. Someone always gets their heart broken, and it’s nearly always the woman. I told your father he was wrong when he sent you to that ridiculous school in Bath. He was asking for trouble. I was right, wasn’t I? The Bartons belong with the working people, however much money your father made. The gentry care for nobody but themselves.”

“You’ve always said that, Aunt, and I’ve never known why.”

Janet’s face tightened, as if she smelled something fetid. “Because it happened to me, just as it happened to you, my darling girl.”

Aghast, Charmian gaped at her aunt. “You married someone from the upper classes?”

Janet’s grunt expressed contempt. “There was no marriage, but I fell for the squire’s son’s pretty lies, convinced myself I was in love.” The bitterness in the word made even Roland wince. “Then he went off and married a rich baronet’s ugly daughter instead. I loathed that you went through the same thing.”

Roland made a dismissive gesture. “But Charmian didn’t go through the same thing. We married. We were set to be happy together.”

Janet looked at him as if she despised him. “Then why did she come home with her heart broken?”

“My heart was broken because I never saw Roland again,” Charmian said. “No wonder you and Mamma were in such a hurry to rush me off to Puddlebrook after that first week. Even if Roland came looking for me, he’d never find me here.”

“I did come looking for you. Over and over.” Memories of his grief and frustration threatened to choke him. “But your mother wouldn’t tell me where you’d gone. She said you didn’t want to see me again.”

The satchel dropped to the ground with a thud, as Charmian stared at him in astonishment. “You came looking for me?”

“Of course I did. You were – you are – my wife. I wanted you back.”

She looked unconvinced. “Even after that terrible fight?”

He shrugged, although he was as far from nonchalant about all this as it was possible to be. “We could have worked it out.” He cast a fulminating glare at Janet, and his voice hardened. “Given the chance. At least I thought so, although you clearly bore a grudge. But, Charmian, you know where I live. Why didn’t you come to Leeder Hall?”

Her hands twined at her waist in a gesture of distress that mirrored her aunt’s. “I wasn’t sure you wanted me to.”

Roland frowned. He’d already told her that he wanted her back. He wasn’t going to humble himself by admitting the devastation that she’d left behind after she abandoned him. Or not while her aunt remained to listen, anyway.

He was sure that his pride would be pulverized before they were done, whatever else happened. The question was whether he’d end up humiliated but still bereft, or whether this unplanned meeting offered a fresh beginning with his beautiful wife.

“Even so, we were married. That wasn’t going to disappear for the wishing.”

She flinched. “Did you want it to go away?”

“Did you?”

She made an apologetic gesture. “I thought of looking for you so often, but my mother and Aunt Janet said that if you loved me, you’d come for me. And you didn’t.”

“And you accepted what they said without question?”

Shame dulled her lovely green eyes. “I did for the first few months. Especially when you didn’t answer my letters. After a couple of days of feeling very sorry for myself, I wrote again and again, and there was only silence.”

Roland scowled at Janet. “And I wrote to you to receive the same silence in return.”

Janet looked even guiltier. “There was no future for the two of you. I’m still not sure there is.”

“But that’s not for you to say, is it?” Roland snapped.

Charmian regarded her aunt with confusion as well as anger. “You must have had a plan. What did you imagine was going to happen as the years went on? Neither Roland nor I could marry again while the other was alive.”

Janet looked hunted. “I don’t know, Charmian. Your mother and I were so worried about you. We just wanted to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid. We thought we’d wait until you were strong enough to make your own decisions. That’s why we kept the letters. Your mother sent on anything she received in Somerset, so if ever you were capable of making a choice, you could read them.”

“But how could I make my own decisions when you hid Roland’s letters and stole mine, and nobody told me that he’d come looking for me?”

“We acted in your best interests.” Janet’s hands twisted so tightly that her knuckles shone white. “We couldn’t bear seeing you so distraught.”

“And you’d already had your heart broken by a careless rake,” she said.

Janet had never married, Roland realized. Clearly that early experience had scarred her for life. It was a pity, but it wasn’t an excuse. “It wasn’t fair to tar me with the same brush as your first love.”

Janet looked at him with genuine hatred. “Why not? It’s clear that you left my niece in pieces. You should never have met, let alone been foolish enough to marry. I told my brother that no matter how much money he made, he could never expect the gentry to treat him as anything except a trumped-up servant. The Bartons work for their living. You and your ilk sit around, drinking brandy and causing trouble. I wish to God her parents had never tried to raise Charmian as a lady. There’s no disgrace in earning your daily bread. There is disgrace in leading innocent girls on, then forsaking them.”

Roland was angry, an anger stemming from years of misery and loneliness and longing. It was difficult not to shout at the woman.

“You know nothing about me.” His voice might remain soft, but his tone was acid. “And Charmian isn’t you. What happened to you didn’t happen to Charmian.”

Janet looked stubborn. “I know what I saw.”

“I was going to come to Leeder Hall,” Charmain said, shooting a worried glance between her aunt and Roland. She must feel the rising temperature in the room.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Celia Hibberd wrote to say that you were taking the Grand Tour.”

He frowned. “Did she know we were married?”

“I didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell anyone except my family. It was just one of those gossipy letters between friends, you know. Did you tell her we eloped? If you did, she never mentioned it.”

“No, I didn’t tell anyone that I’d found a bride who left me within a fortnight,” he bit out.

“Your pride again.”

Charmian’s disdain stung. Yes, he’d been proud at the start. Too proud. But it hadn’t taken him long to realize that pride gave a man no comfort when his bed was empty and his heart ached for the woman he loved.

He wasn’t about to admit that. It seemed that his pride retained its sway. “Pride was all you left me with.”

She flinched at his answer. “If you were heading off on your travels, you weren’t suffering too badly.”

A protest died on his lips. After six months without a word from the bride he’d married with such joy, he’d been sick to the soul. England only held painful memories. He’d escaped to foreign climes, hoping that Italy or France might offer balm for his suffering. They didn’t.

His only chance to restore his spirits was seeing his wife again. Three wretched years hadn’t changed that. Even tonight when she was so prickly, she made him feel more alive than he had since she’d left.

“Once we heard that, we knew we’d made the right decision,” Janet said. “When you’re a rich aristocrat, it’s so easy to run away from your sorrows.”

He glowered at the woman. “Except I was only away a couple of months and I wrote over and over to Charmian the whole time. And I came to find her again, as soon as I returned to England.”

By then, he’d realized that there was no future for him without Charmian. Or no future that he wanted.

Janet went back to looking guilty, while Charmian stared at him out of devastated eyes. “Roland, I’m so sorry you went through all that. I promise I didn’t know.”

When he met that troubled green gaze, he asked the question that had tormented him every moment of every day since that stupid quarrel in York. “Would it have made any difference if you had?”

He’d waited so long for the answer. It seemed he had to wait some more.

Charmian shot a glare at her aunt. “Aunt Janet, you should leave us now.”

“But—”

“You’ve already interfered enough, wouldn’t you agree?” The question’s sweetness was poisonous.

Janet whitened and looked stricken, but her tone indicated that she left under protest. “As you wish.”

Charmian waited until the door closed behind her aunt before she faced Roland. “Well, husband, what happens now?”