The Temptation of the Night Jasmine by Lauren Willig

Author:Lauren Willig [Lauren Willig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780749040253
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2011-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

‘Why exactly do you want me to go to a madhouse with you?’ asked Henrietta forty-five minutes later, adjusting the ribbons on her bonnet as the carriage racketed down Clerkenwell Road towards Dr Simmons and his hospital. ‘Not that I mind, but it does seem an odd way to spend an afternoon.’

‘It’s not a madhouse, exactly,’ hedged Charlotte. ‘More of a mad hospital.’ Without thinking, she scrubbed her gloved hands together like Lady Macbeth. Beneath the kid, she fancied she could still smell the reek of the king’s sickroom on her skin, that acrid stench of sweat and despair.

‘Isn’t that the same thing by a different name?’

‘I just like the sound of it better,’ Charlotte confessed. ‘It sounds less …’

‘Mad?’ Henrietta supplied. From beneath the brim of her bonnet, she peered keenly at Charlotte. ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with—’

‘No!’ With more dignity, she added, ‘I’m not asking you to check me in, if that’s what you mean. Going mad for love went out of fashion several centuries ago.’

‘I’m not implying that you’re going mad,’ Henrietta began carefully. ‘But you have had something of a, well …’

‘Shock?’ With as much conviction as she could muster, Charlotte said, ‘That’s all done with. It’s over. Finished.’

Fiddling with the buttons on her glove, Henrietta said with false nonchalance, ‘Stwyth informed me that you had a caller this morning.’

‘Stwyth told you?’ Charlotte wasn’t sure who she was more irritated with, Robert for calling or Stwyth for tattling. On closer consideration, Robert. Definitely Robert.

‘Well, I am technically your chaperone,’ pointed out Henrietta. ‘I need to know these things.’

The notion of Henrietta, dear though she might be, monitoring her meetings made Charlotte’s shoulders tense in automatic negation. After all the years of whispering and giggling in the corners of ballrooms, conducting emergency hair repairs and pinning up hems that had come down, to have one act as an authority over the other just felt wrong. Charlotte was perfectly content to let Henrietta enjoy her new position as a young matron, but not if it meant an alteration in the way that Henrietta treated her. Was this what had sent Penelope storming out onto the balcony with Freddy Staines?

‘What about being my friend?’ asked Charlotte quietly.

‘Even more reason to know!’ exclaimed Henrietta expansively. Her voice dropped a little, betraying a deep vein of genuine hurt. ‘I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me yourself.’

Charlotte took refuge in the scenery, although she couldn’t have said with any honesty what they were passing. ‘There was nothing to tell. Nothing worth telling, that is. Honestly. If there had been, I would have told you.’

‘He didn’t—’ Henrietta began hopefully.

‘Apologise?’ filled in Charlotte. ‘No.’

‘Oh,’ said her best friend, her voice full of disappointment.

Henrietta’s disappointment was nothing compared with her own. It would be too tempting to let herself believe that Robert had come because he couldn’t stay away, that the strange note in his voice had been a sign of repressed emotion, that his concern about Medmenham was a sign that he still wanted her for himself.

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