Potent Pleasures (15 page)

It was about ten o’clock on a Sunday night and Adelaide knew where her daughter ought to be—in her bed, drowsily thinking about her engagements the next day. But instead of heading toward Charlotte’s bedchamber, Adelaide unerringly walked up the stairs to the third floor. Sure enough, candles were burning all around the walls of Charlotte’s studio.

Charlotte was standing absolutely still, looking at a portrait on its easel in the middle of the room.

“Darling,” said her mother. “May I come in?” She walked around to stand behind her daughter. “Why,” she said, startled, “it’s lovely, sweetheart. Truly lovely. My goodness.”

Charlotte had finished her portrait of Sophie York. Sophie was posed on the branch of a broken-down tree, in the clearing of a forest. The ground was covered with bluebells, stretching into the distances of the forest glade. The folds of Sophie’s dress were perfectly reproduced, her petite curves elegantly rendered by Charlotte’s brush—but her look! Rather than looking dreamily into the middle distance, as peers invariably did in portraits, Sophie was looking straight at the beholder, a small smile hovering around the corners of her mouth. She appeared to be laughing at the very absurdity of sitting on a branch. And there was a twinkling invitation in her eye … in fact, Charlotte had made Sophie look rather less than a perfect lady, Adelaide decided. Something about the fullness of her lower lip, perhaps? But, of course, Sophie wasn’t a perfect lady. That was what gave her mama so much anxiety.

“Oh, Lord,” Adelaide sighed. “You aren’t going to let Eloise see this, are you, dearest?”

“Oh, no, Mama,” Charlotte said, smiling. “I think I’ll keep it and give it to whomever Sophie marries, when she marries. Because she looks so enticing, doesn’t she?”

Adelaide smiled back. “It’s a very good portrait, Charlotte. It really looks like Sophie.” She was rapidly rethinking what she had come to say. Why were she and Marcel so worried about broaching difficult subjects with Charlotte? These new young women … they knew so much more than she had as a young girl.

She retreated to the sofa and invitingly patted the cushion next to her. “Darling, we need to have a talk.”

Charlotte sat down rather reluctantly. She had a fair idea of the subject her mother wanted to discuss. Lately she felt as if wherever she turned someone threw her a significant look and asked how she found the Earl of Sheffield and Downes. A small frown creased her forehead. There was something very odd about all this intense interest. People seemed to be so fascinated by Alex’s pursuit of her. Comparatively speaking, they paid almost no attention to Braddon Chatwin’s courtship even though he too was an earl.

She herself thought about Alexander all the time, day and night. She swayed alarmingly between exhilaration at his obvious attraction, and sharp feelings of mortification at the idea of accepting his hand. She felt as if her imagination had been taken over by a genie who alternately produced intoxicating images of an unclothed Alex and desolate images of her future self, relegated to the house while her husband was out seducing other women. Probably in her own garden, she thought glumly.

Adelaide didn’t know where to start. “Your father and I have noticed,” she said finally, “that the Earl of Sheffield and Downes is paying you rather pointed attention.”

“Yes, he is,” said Charlotte.

“We … we felt,” Adelaide said stumblingly, “that you should know the circumstances of his previous marriage.”

“His previous marriage,” Charlotte echoed.

“You know that he was married before?” Adelaide asked.

“Yes, I met his daughter,” Charlotte replied.

“Oh,” Adelaide said flatly. She felt incapable of addressing the issue of the daughter. “Well, Alexander Foakes was married to a woman named Maria, Maria something. Your father knows her name,” she added hastily. “After a year the woman petitioned the Pope for an annulment of their marriage. On grounds of impotence.” She looked expectantly at her daughter.

“Impotence,” Charlotte repeated. “What’s that?”

This was what Adelaide had feared. She floundered into a tangled series of half-truths and euphemisms, none of which Charlotte clearly understood.

“Are you saying that he has no … no male part?” Charlotte asked sharply. “Because it’s not true.”

Her mother’s head swung up. Too embarrassed to meet her daughter’s eyes, she had been staring carefully at her folded hands. Now she looked straight at Charlotte. “And how do you know that?” she asked, rather grimly.

“He’s the one, Mama.” Charlotte’s hands were twisting unconsciously in her lap. “He’s the one from three years ago.”

“Ah,” said Adelaide. There was a small pause. “Impotent doesn’t precisely mean that the organ in question doesn’t exist, Charlotte. It simply means that it doesn’t function … properly.”

Charlotte had no idea what her mother was talking about.

“I can’t do it!” Adelaide cried in frustration. “This isn’t a proper conversation.” Her eyes strayed to Charlotte’s new portrait and she had a sudden inspiration.

“Perhaps you could ask Sophie about impotence? I’m sorry to be such a blunder-head, my darling, but these things are just not … not in my vocabulary. I explained the important things to your sisters because I didn’t want them to be abominably ignorant on their wedding nights. My mother said nothing to me at all, and the whole event was quite a shock.”

I bet it was, Charlotte thought grimly, remembering the stabbing pain she experienced in the garden. It was a question that had perplexed her ever since. How do women put up with all that pain, every night?

“It’s all right, Mama,” she said soothingly. “Whatever the problem is, it doesn’t matter. You see, I have made up my mind not to marry Alex,” she continued. “I have already refused his offer, and when it finally dawns on him that I really mean it, I’m sure that he will find some other woman to …” Her voice shrunk into silence.

Adelaide looked at Charlotte sharply. There was a good deal more going on here than met the eye. “If he
was
the one from three years ago,” she said hesitatingly, “might it not be a good idea to marry him? After all, he …”

“No.” Something about the closed tightness of Charlotte’s face made Adelaide discard the subject.

There was a pause. Charlotte gathered herself together and gently drew her mother to her feet. “Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll ask Sophie about it, and you can reassure papa that I do not intend to marry Alexander Foakes, no matter what his problem may be.” Although, she added silently, I don’t believe for a single moment that he has any impediment in that region!

Her mother hesitated at the door. “Charlotte, have you heard that Alexander has a twin brother?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think that perhaps you might have confused the two men?” Adelaide persisted unhappily. She simply had to suggest it. “They are as alike as two peas, you know. Even people who know them well can’t tell them apart.”

“I can’t believe you’re suggesting this! You know what happened that night. How can you possibly think that I wouldn’t recognize the man when I saw him?”

“But, darling, it was dark, wasn’t it? And it was years ago, and wasn’t he wearing a mask?”

“There’s … there is simply no possibility,” Charlotte whispered. “I even recognized his smell, and the shape of his cheekbones, and the curve of his jaw.”

“Sweetheart,” her mother said softly, gathering her into her arms.

“It’s him, Mama,” Charlotte said. “It’s he who doesn’t recognize me!”

Adelaide stiffened. She had never even considered this possibility. In her reconstruction Alexander recognized the beautiful maiden whose virtue he had blemished, and pursued her (despite his affliction) out of loyalty, or desire, perhaps. But not recognize her daughter? Her beautiful, exquisitely beautiful daughter! She looked at Charlotte in pure amazement.

Even now, with tears stealing down her cheeks, her daughter was objectively one of the loveliest women she had ever seen. Her face had grown more slender in the past few years, accentuating her cheekbones, and her new short haircut emphasized her large eyes. But all the essential parts of Charlotte were unchanged. Her eyebrows, her sweet, flying eyebrows that she had even as a newborn baby—how could he possibly have forgotten those eyebrows?

A surge of rage swept over Adelaide that was unlike anything she had experienced before. She knew precisely how mother tigers felt when their young were threatened.

“That bastard!” she said through clenched teeth. “That absolute, unmitigated scoundrel. I’ll have his head!”

Charlotte was shocked out of her misery. Her mother rarely expressed any strong emotion outside comfortable ones, like love for her children. The most agitated Charlotte had ever seen her was when the gatekeeper at their country estate gave his wife a black eye while in his cups. Even then she just marched up to the gatekeeper and told him that if she ever heard that he had drunk more than three tankards of ale at one sitting he’d be fired on the spot. But now she was actually panting with rage.

“Mother.” Charlotte put a hand on her arm.

Adelaide looked at her fiercely.

“There’s nothing to be done about it, Mama,” Charlotte persisted. “In fact, one could think that I made a very lucky escape. I … I don’t know that I would have resisted him if I hadn’t met him three years ago, and then I wouldn’t know that he is such a—”

“Libertine!” her mother snapped.

“Whatever he is,” Charlotte said shakily, “he’s forgotten that he ever met me. And he can’t find out that he has, Mama! You must see how humiliating that would be for me.” She wiped away the tears that kept tracking slowly down her cheeks, willy-nilly. “He says he wants to marry me. But he didn’t even try to find me before. I think it was probably just a moonlight frolic for him,” she said, with a tone of acute self-disgust. “I just keep thinking,
why
. Why did I let him take me into the garden? I thought it was so magical. I thought it was …” She turned away and rested her forehead against the cool wall of her studio. “What a silly, stupid little fool I was! Captured by moonlight and drunk on lemonade, ruined by a man who thought so little of it he doesn’t even remember the event! It meant nothing to him, nothing to him and everything to me …” Sobs racked her body as she rocked back and forth, face caught in her hands.

Adelaide stood rock still, unable to think of anything to comfort her weeping child. Silently she drew Charlotte back to the settee they had just left. They sat quietly until Charlotte’s tears finally stopped falling and she caught her breath.

“I think you should marry him,” Adelaide finally said quietly.

Charlotte raised her tearstained face.
“What?”

“I think you should marry him,” Adelaide repeated. “We need to think calmly, darling. We have been thinking with the heart, and not with the head. The fact is that men do not take sexual encounters very seriously. Oh, not your father,” she added as Charlotte’s eyes widened. “Your father is remarkable.

“But, Charlotte, the majority of my friends have watched their husbands … well, have known that their husbands were bedding one female or another. Why, dearest Georgina has had to inure herself to all manner of affronts.”

“You mean Julia’s mother?” Charlotte asked, fascinated despite herself. “Squire Brentorton seems to be such a kindly man.”

“He is, darling, he is. But he’s a man, and there aren’t many who set store by their wedding vows. John truly loves Georgina, but he just doesn’t see it the same way she does. At least he hasn’t set up a mistress, or anything of that nature! And he never sleeps with women of our class, which is a great boon, believe me. Why do you think that Sissy’s mother pleads a weak heart so often? She simply can’t stand to watch her husband swan around the ballroom with that piece of muslin he’s set up on Mayfair Street.”

“What?” Charlotte gaped.

“I think her name is Melinda, something ridiculous like that; she’s a major’s widow, supposedly. But it’s common knowledge that Nigel Commonweal spends most of his time at her house, and while she doesn’t get invited to the best houses, she does seem to finagle invitations to most of the large balls. Prudence just doesn’t have the backbone to ignore it, not that I blame her. I have been terribly lucky with your father; I have never been confronted with anything of this nature.”

“You don’t mean that papa too …”

“I don’t think so,” Adelaide said. She sighed. “No, I’m fairly sure he has not. But if he has not, darling, then he must be one of perhaps five men in the
ton
who don’t occasionally sleep with ladies other than their wives. The important point is that these men don’t necessarily dislike their wives. Men simply see sexual acts rather more flexibly than do women.”

“I cannot like it, Mama,” Charlotte said, frowning.

Adelaide had to smile. On the surface, Charlotte looked to be entirely her daughter, but occasionally she was so like Marcel it made her heart melt. Just so would Marcel announce that he disliked a certain social impropriety.

“No woman likes it,” she replied simply. “Well, that’s not true. There are also women in the
ton
who occasion-ally …”

Charlotte’s eyes widened again. “Who?” This was just the kind of gossip that abruptly ceased when she sat down with a group of matrons. As an unmarried girl, she was far too innocent to know such things, they said.

“That’s not the point,” Adelaide said with a glimmer of a smile in her eyes. “The point is that while Alexander Foakes may have forgotten a brief encounter in the garden, he seems to be ardently pursuing you now and perhaps you ought to marry him—” She broke off, frowning. “But I forgot; I forgot all about his … problem.”

Charlotte waited patiently until it seemed that her mother was not going to elaborate. “It seems rather dismal to marry a man
knowing
that he will be unfaithful to you, Mama,” she finally observed. “Surely Sissy’s mother never thought that her husband would establish a friendship with a major’s widow.”

Adelaide was trying to work through her tangled thoughts. “If he … if he is unable, then he would not make such an attachment. Although the condition doesn’t make Alexander a good prospect as a husband either,” she added, remembering Marcel’s adamant objections.