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ChapterOne

“Read it again,” Charlotte’s father, the Earl of Ramsbury, demanded.

“What’s the point?” Lady Ramsbury bemoaned. “It’s not going to change anything! We know what it?—”

“Read it again, woman!” he snapped at her. Charlotte’s mother, not one to tolerate being spoken to like that, raised a warning eyebrow at her husband, who grimaced and said in a softer tone, “Please.”

She nodded once, happy with the change in tone, then raised the single slip of paper before her and read from it. “Father, Mother, I am so sorry, but I simply cannot marry the Duke of Hayward. Please forgive me.” She lowered the slip of paper and looked at her husband. “See!”

“Give me that!” Charlotte’s father snatched the piece of paper from his wife and read it quickly and then did so again. Each time he reread it, his face grew a darker shade of red, and his body shook as if he might explode.

“He looks like a tomato,” Nathanial, Charlotte’s eleven-year-old brother, joked.

“He does! He does!” His twin brother, Stephen, giggled.

“Hush!” Hannah, Charlotte’s sixteen-year-old sister, warned them, doing what she could to shepherd the two boys out of the room.

“A tomato! A tomato!” Nathanial cried in joy, to which his brother broke into hysterics.

“Nathanial, Stephen…” Charlotte was quick to help her sister direct the two giggling boys out of the room. They didn’t want to leave, happy to dodge from her arms and jump about the furniture as if it was all a game, caring not for the fury that was about to erupt from their father. “Will you just?—”

“Here.” Hannah managed to grab Nathanial by his right arm, pulling her into him, while at the same time, Charlotte got hold of Stephen, wrapped her arms around his body, and dragged him to the door. “Do you need me to stay?” Hannah asked Charlotte as she hovered in the doorway.

Charlotte looked back into the drawing room at her father, who was still shaking as he read the letter over and over again, as if hoping that by some magic, the text might change and all this would be a bad memory. He was furious, that was clear. And that fury had to be poured out somewhere, so better on her than her younger sister and brothers.

“No, it’s fine,” she said in a hushed whisper. “Put the two little devils to bed. I’ll deal with this.”

Hannah opened her mouth to argue but then spared a glance at their father and seemed to think better of it. She said a silent thank-you to Charlotte and then ducked out of the room, holding her two little brothers by their arms as she dragged them through the halls and toward their rooms. They laughed and cried out in joy, blissfully unaware of the calamity that was taking place in the room they’d just left.

And then, with nothing else for it, Charlotte took a deep breath, closed the drawing room door, and joined her mother and father for what she knew was going to be one of the more unpleasant conversations she’d had in a long time.

“How could she!” her father roared the moment the door was closed. “Does she think this is some kind of joke!” He waved the note in his wife’s face. “Does she think she will get away with this—she won’t! I will chase her across England if that’s what it takes!”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Charlotte’s mother said in an attempt to soothe her enraged husband. “Last minute jitters.”

“Jitters! She’s gone! Fled the darn estate! That isn’t jitters! That’s… that’s… It’s unheard of!”

“You knew she didn’t want this,” her mother pointed out.

“Oh, so this is my fault!”

“I didn’t say that.”

“What, then?!”

Again, Lady Ramsbury eyed her husband in warning. “Will you please lower your voice? Shouting at me isn’t going to bring our daughter back.”

“I know that!” he snapped, only to catch his wife’s eye and suck through his teeth, forcing himself to calm down. “I know that,” he muttered bitterly. “But the point is the same, isn’t it? Beatrice has fled the estate to only God knows where. And with the Duke coming here tomorrow…” He shook his head, a sense of fear in his eyes. “What is he going to say when we tell him what happened?”

“Maybe he will see the funny side.”

“The funny side!”

“Or our daughter will see sense and return before then.” Charlotte’s mother stepped closer to her husband and rested a calming hand on his shoulder. “She isn’t a simpleton, Phineas. She knows that she can’t run forever. And she knows that if she does, it will only make things worse. She will come back to us. She will marry the Duke. I am certain of it.”

Charlotte’s father scrunched his face into a tight ball. “She better, or there will be hell to pay.”

Charlotte wished that she shared in her mother’s optimism. Although, she also sensed that her mother didn’t believe a word of what she was saying, simply voicing reason because it was needed to keep her father from literally exploding all over the drawing room. Both knew Beatrice as well as one could, and both knew that she wasn’t the type to make a move like this if she didn’t mean to go through with it.