Read Online Rutland Place by Anne Perry - Free Book Online

nature, even if she had frequently seen humor disconcertingly close beneath.
    “No,” Grandmama admitted grudgingly. “He was civil enough, but he is a foreigner. He cannot afford not to be civil. If he’d been born forty years earlier, I daresay he would have made something of himself in spite of that. There isn’t even a decent war now where a man could go and prove his worth. At least there was the Crimea in Edward’s time—not that he went!”
    “The Crimea is in the Black Sea,” Charlotte pointed out. “I don’t see what it has to do with us.”
    “You have no patriotism,” Grandmama accused. “No sense of Empire! That’s what is wrong with the young. You are not great!”
    “Did Monsieur Alaric leave any message?” Caroline turned around at last. Her face was flushed, but her voice was perfectly steady now.
    “Were you expecting one?” Grandmama squinted at her.
    Caroline breathed in and out again before replying.
    “Since I do not know why he called,” she said, walking over to the door, “I wondered if he left some word. I think I’ll go and ask Maddock.” And she slipped out, leaving Charlotte and the old lady alone.
    Charlotte hesitated. Should she ask the questions that were teeming in her head? The old woman’s sight was poor; she had not seen Caroline’s body, the rigid muscles, the slow, controlled turn of her head. Still, her hearing was excellent when she chose to listen, and her mind was still as sharp and as worldly as it had ever been. But Charlotte realized that there was not anything Grandmama could tell her she had not already guessed for herself.
    “I think I will go and see if Mama can spare the carriage to take me home,” she said after a moment or two. “Before dark.”
    “As you please.” Grandmama sniffed. “I don’t really know what you came for just to go calling, I suppose.”
    “To see Mama,” Charlotte answered.
    “Twice in one week?”
    Charlotte was not disposed to argue. “Goodbye, Grandmama. It has been very nice to see you looking in such good health.”
    The old lady snorted. “Full of yourself,” she said dryly. “Never did know how to behave. Just as well you married beneath you. You’d never have done in Society.”
    All the way home, rolling smoothly through the streets in her father’s carriage, Charlotte was too consumed by her thoughts to take proper pleasure in how much more comfortable the carriage was than the omnibus.
    It was painfully apparent that Caroline’s interest in Paul Alaric was not in the least casual. Charlotte could recall too many of the idiotic details of her own infatuation with her brother-in-law Dominic, before she had met Thomas, to be deceived by this. She knew just that affectation of indifference, the clenching of the stomach in spite of all one could do, the heart in the throat when his name was mentioned, when he smiled at her, when people spoke of them in the same breath. It was all incredibly silly now, and she burned with embarrassment at the memory.
    But she recognized the same feeling in others when she saw it; she had seen it before for Paul Alaric, more than once. She understood Caroline’s stiff back, the overly casual voice, the pretense of disinterest that was not strong enough to stop her from almost running to Maddock to find out if Alaric had left a message.
    It had to be Paul Alaric’s picture in the locket. No wonder Caroline wanted it back! It was not some anonymous admirer from the past, but a face that might be recognized by any resident of Rutland Place, even the bootboys and the scullery maids.
    And there was no possible way she could explain it! There could be no reason but one why she should carry a locket with his picture.
    By the time Charlotte reached home, she had made up her mind to tell Pitt something about it and to ask his advice, simply because she could not bear the burden alone. She did not tell him whose picture was in the locket.
    “Do nothing,” he said gravely. “With