Page 46 of Unforeseen Affairs (The Sedleys #6)

“If you could manage,” Dr. Collier said, “keep still for a moment.”

Charlotte did not bother to respond. She had mastered the art of stillness many years ago.

“It says here,” said her father as he looked up from the copy of The Daily Albion he clenched in his hands, “that Sir Colin Gearing was more than gracious, allowing reporters the benefit of a full evening’s worth of questions.”

Ajax Sedley then rolled up the paper and slapped it against his thigh.

“A full evening ? While my daughter sat writhing in pain?”

Charlotte wanted to respond with a blithe retort, but she held her tongue and remained still, as Dr. Collier had instructed her. Instead she merely raised an eyebrow and stared her father down, keeping her arm loose and extended so the doctor could continue his examination.

“Very well done, thank you,” the gentle doctor murmured as he turned her wrist over in his hands.

Colin had initially taken Charlotte to a physician in Manchester to have her wrist set, but her father had beseeched Dr. Collier to give his opinion on the job the first doctor had done.

Dr. Collier had arrived in Lancashire earlier that day, and upon Ajax’s insistence had undone Charlotte’s dressing to examine her arm.

It had been nearly a week since their misadventure, and far too many things had happened since for Charlotte’s liking.

However, given that she’d gone and fallen in love—something she’d never counted as a possibility—she knew well enough that disruption after disruption was bound to follow.

The first of which being that she’d been holed up at her cousin Marcus’s house in Knockton with a flummoxed Cousin Bess as soon as the family had figured out her whereabouts.

Once she had been delivered there, it wasn’t long before every remaining Sedley in existence arrived. Including her father.

The second disruption to her calm and quiet existence had been the sequestering of Colin.

Despite the Sedley predilection for scandal and poorly planned affairs, wise Cousin Marcus took charge of the situation and did his best to minimize the drama, though his process unfortunately involved sending Colin to stay with the local lord for the time being.

Though Baron Methering was not only the local lord, but also Marcus’s father-in-law, and his house, Methering Manor, was only a short ride away.

The baron turned out to be quite happy with the arrangement, having done his best to keep abreast of all Royal Navy goings-on for most of his life, and he was thrilled to have in his house a bona fide hero.

Charlotte, for her part, did not care for the arrangement at all.

The day before she had seen Colin only briefly, at luncheon, and they’d not been left alone for even a minute.

He had whispered to her that the baron was mad, and that aside from his incessant questions about the Navy, he spoke only of hoplite races.

When Charlotte had asked what a hoplite race was, a deflated look came over Colin’s face.

“Were I only like you, and completely ignorant once again,” he’d muttered sadly.

“Well?” her father blustered, now shaking the newspaper in one hand for emphasis as he demanded an explanation.

“It was not a full evening,” Charlotte said, once Dr. Collier had released her arm. “You, Papa, of all people ought to know how writers are. Hyperbolic, to say the least.”

“Me, of all people? I… I don’t know what you’re after.” Her father’s gaze dropped for a moment as he scrambled to find another foothold for his anger.

Charlotte, of course, knew all about her father’s hobby of pseudonymously penning yellowbacks and trashy popular fiction. He’d taken pains to conceal it from her—as well as most others—but she’d figured it out soon after first setting foot in his household.

He forced a cough, then straightened himself up to his full height.

“And the very notion of these papers…” he began, as he started to walk up and down the length of the sitting room. “What sort of man sends off for them, so that he might recount his so-called famed exploits for them yet again?”

Charlotte wanted to point out that Ajax himself had been quite taken with said exploits only weeks before. But that wasn’t the point, so she did not bring it up.

“I explained this to you already. He only did it as an incentive to bring the reporters to the theater, so that they would witness what we revealed about Mr. Bass and write all about it. That was the information we needed disseminated. Sir Colin loathes discussing the incident at sea; I doubt you’ll hear him speak of it again. ”

“You are very lucky,” Dr. Collier interjected, removing his spectacles with one hand and tucking them into his breast pocket. “The distal radius is a bone that heals quite quickly. If you can manage to rest, you’ll be good as new in no time.”

“I shall try,” Charlotte replied, glad for a distraction from her father’s dramatic pacing and complaining.

“Well, he’d better not bring it up again before the wedding,” her father groused in mock frustration, “for I expect a good three hundred in attendance, and nearly every one of them will be wanting him to give tale of the swiftness of the Iapyx , at which point we’ll be forced to hear about it ad nauseam . ”

“Sedley, please,” Dr. Collier admonished, holding Charlotte’s wrist again as he reached for the tray alongside him where his supplies had been neatly laid out.

“Ajax, dear, what else does the story say?”

Charlotte’s stepmother sat nearby, resplendent in a deep blue housedress, with one pale hand placed tellingly atop her stomach.

Charlotte had been worried that the rail journey might prove too much for her in such a condition, but as always, Susanna’s quiet strength had been underestimated.

She had taken charge immediately upon her arrival; meanwhile, Charlotte’s father had been as much use as a chocolate teapot.

In one moment he would be grinning and joking with anyone who would listen, and in the next blustering about the grave injustice done to Charlotte and fretting about what people would say, all the while smoothing over his mustache anxiously with one hand.

Her father halted, sighed, and returned to the couch where Susanna sat.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, before shaking the newspaper out once more. “ Sir Colin Gearing had meant to take in the theatrical spectacle of Thaddeus Taggart Bass that evening, accompanying his fiancée, Miss Charlotte Sedley… ”

Dr. Collier placed a splint along Charlotte’s wrist, apologizing when she jerked slightly.

“It’s nothing,” Charlotte said, shutting her eyes.

She wished very much that Colin was here, or she with him over at the dark and gloomy Methering Manor.

The old stronghold sounded far more interesting than the sandstone of Platt Lodge, her cousin’s much more modern home.

Methering Manor seemed the type of place where bones had been ground up with the mortar and slathered between the stones, binding their ghosts to the house for eternity.

Even if Colin had not been staying there, she would have preferred being locked away there to being stuck here, with every Sedley cousin prying into her plans and teasing out her feelings about her future as a naval wife.

The only ones missing so far were her cousin Harmonia and her family, who were due to arrive later that day.

Dr. Collier began winding the dressing around her arm.

What if Colin were to see a ghost at Methering Manor? She made a mental note to ask Mrs. Hartley—Marcus’s wife and Baron Methering’s daughter—what she knew about the spirits there.

“ Mr. Trenwith, formerly an associate of Mr. Bass, is currently being held at Strangeways. ”

“Hmm,” her stepmother replied, genuine concern laced through just the one sound.

“What’s this? Sympathy for the man who attacked our daughter with a deadly weapon?”

“No,” Susanna said, sighing. “Just that it’s a nasty business, for everyone involved. One can’t help but feel empathy—”

“Oh, yes one can,” her father said brightly. “It’s rather easy, I find.”

Suddenly the door to the sitting room burst open, and a small tangle of fur plodded forth, panting profusely as if strained to its absolute limit solely by living.

“Everyone,” Cousin Bess declared, pausing at the threshold to adjust her hold upon her shawl, “has arrived. The children are around the back, in the garden.”

“Oh, wonderful!” Susanna said, shifting as if she meant to stand. “I ought to go and see, to make sure Thalia and Lucius are playing well with Georgiana.”

“You will do nothing of the sort,” Ajax replied in mock chastisement. “They’ll settle into it easily enough, no doubt. Care for tea, Collier?”

The doctor, now repacking his bag, smiled without looking up. “Rickard has arrived, you say?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Rickard ought to be down shortly,” Cousin Bess said, lowering herself into an armchair with a massive sigh. “They were met at the railway station by—”

Her father cleared his throat, looking sternly from Cousin Bess to Charlotte.

“What?” Bess said, frowning. “What did I say?”

Curious. Who had met Harmonia and her husband at the railway station? A hopeful thought entered her heart.

“Tea, you said? Very well, then,” the doctor replied amiably.

Wonderful. First her parents, then Cousin Bess, and now Harmonia and her husband.

The room was already far too claustrophobic for Charlotte’s liking.

No doubt Marcus would also appear from nowhere at the last minute, along with his aristocratic wife who would insist they stand on ceremony and force polite conversation.

At least Dr. Collier was on the quiet side.