“Youwere,”he argued back, and she had to smother her vexation. “And it helped me pretend that what I was doing was right. Knowing you... it has shown me that London is not etched in black and white. It has given mehope, Char, that I might change becauseyouhave changed. Tell me,” he brushed a lock of hair behind her ear, “Tell me I haven’t changed you as you have changed me.”
She had never thought Benjamin a philosopher. Perhaps he was right, and she did not know him at all. Or maybe she knew him the way one might know the moon—as a crescent first, brought to full bloom by the sun. Wasshehis sun?
God above, she needed to sleep.
Before she could chance an answer, her lips parting long enough to say, “Look…”, the door to the drawing room swung open.
Her father and Matthew stood at the doorway, with the footman who had greeted Benjamin following shortly behind. The both of them were dressed in their sleep clothes, and they were luminous with anger.
Benjamin turned away from Charlotte, but he did not move from her. He stood before her like she was his treasure, the villainous Fitzroy men come to plunder.
“I thought George had gone mad,” her brother murmured. His dark chestnut hair stuck out at all angles. “I see it isyouwho has lost your wits, sister. I’d wager your dignity too.”
Charlotte stepped around Benjamin, careful to not scare her father. He looked so small in his filigree patterned gown,no more a duke than a mouse.
“Huxley has merely come to—“
“We have heard, Charlotte,” her father said, his voice heavy with sleep. His light, milky eyes looked at Benjamin. “Is it your ambition to soil all of London in your efforts to entrap my daughter, poet?”
“Father!” Charlotte cried. She stepped closer. “You will not speak to him with such cruelty.”
“You would orderusabout now, sister?” Matthew crooned. He turned to George, “Would you stop your gawking and fetch me some tea?!” he wailed, and off the boy scurried. “Anything for the two of you? A lick of sense, perhaps?”
Really, Charlotte could not imagine a more scandalous scene if she tried. Hurriedly, she tied back up her gown. “If you would only listen—“
To her surprise, Benjamin put an arm before her. “I have asked Lady Charlotte for her hand in marriage.”
“What?” the three Fitzroys chorused.
“Oh, that is good,” Matthew laughed.
“Marriage?” her father repeated.
“Marriage. I realize I have not gone through the correct channels, but—“
Matthew scoffed. “Barging into your prospective father-in-law’s home and catching him in his undergarments isnotthe done thing, you say? Color me surprised.”
Charlotte staggered back, falling into the chair they had been fighting over. The room fell to bickering, Matthew utterly sardonic as Benjamin tried to plead his case. The whole thing was theater. She watched the argument unfold, witnessing it as if under water.
Benjamin Fletcher, the man who was not a poet, nor a fraud, but a reformed highwayman, who had played more parts in the time she had known him than she had fingers... had asked for her hand in marriage. While she was hardly a champion of good judgment, he had seemed rather honest about his intentions to boot. She peered up at him as he waved his hands about, edging closer and closer to her smirking brother until she feared they would trade blows. Was it possible he meant to live a life of virtue? Could a man be so cruel in his actions and yet pure of heart?
She imagined what might happen if she saidyes. The Duke of Gamston would cease his mollycoddling, for one, out of respect for her decision or to avoid the headache. Her family would come around in time if only to avoid further scandal. Eleanor would likely find the whole ordeal amusing, a little serving too, having never to worry about disappointing their father over marrying a baron as Charlotte had promised herself to a poet. Well, a supposed poet. And Benjamin… she couldn’t conceive of how he would spend his days until their inevitable break, but she couldn’t picture him happy. He was altogether too restless, too flippant, and too strong-willed for a life of being Charlotte’s pup.
Yet, as she looked him over, a funny thing happened. She let the image of him sink in, from the tips of his rough fingers to the points of his sideburns. She saw his Italian mother in the vibrancy of his skin. She saw the years of service in the way he held himself. She saw the fire in his eyes. Charlotte saw all that and something more.
The man he could be at my side.
Funnily enough, it didn’t seem so strange a fit. Almost like he was born for it.
And so, while war waged on all around her, while she could barely feel her toes in her slippers for how tired she was, she got to her feet, gave a little shake of her head, and murmured, “I accept.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR
The rented flat on South Audley Street was hardly a haven. It was a small, poorly insulated collection of rooms, having been left in a state of disrepair by the previous tenant. The man had been an artist of sorts, or so Charlotte had said, having left for Paris before the War. Her father owned the building to which the flat belonged, and it had been included in her dowry long before their meeting.
Benjamin had done what he could to make the place feel more like a home than a tortured artist’s pit, and he was rather proud of the amendments. Truth be told,anyabode would have been an improvement over the dark townhouse in Five Fields—in which he had not set foot since returning to pick up some things shortly after Charlotte had agreed to become his betrothed.
He still could not wrap his head around it. Three weeks had passed since that morning at the Fitzroy nest. Each morning, he expected to wake to find it had all been a dream. He would be a boy of six again, his mother waiting for him at the base of the stairs. There would be no Gamston, no war, no Harper. But there would be no Charlotte either, and, for that, he would not turn back the hands of time to a less complicated episode of his life.