A Rogue of Her Own (Windham Brides #4)(30)
Charlotte ought to scold her husband for putting his boot on the opposite bench, but she was too stunned by his response.
“You would take the part of my late friend against a lord’s son?”
Sherbourne kissed her knuckles. “With pleasure. What foolish young people get up to when chaperones are lax is not my business, but there’s a child involved. If it were your child, the father would have been held responsible, and probably forced to marry you, regardless of a fiancée or breach of promise suit. The mother was relatively poor, and thus the bounder suffered no consequences. He probably knew that as he was charming his way under her skirts.”
“Thank you,” Charlotte said, subsiding against him.
Sherbourne’s motivations were his own—he was apparently critical of a class system based on arbitrary ancestry rather than merit—but he shared Charlotte’s sense of outrage. If, some fine day, she found out who had destroyed Fern’s good name, Sherbourne would make a thorough job of that man’s downfall.
A lovely wedding present, did Sherbourne but know it. The loveliest.
Chapter Seven
“Leave the ladies alone,” Haverford said. “They have much to discuss, and you owe me a drink.”
His Grace had been Sherbourne’s neighbor since birth. Their parents and grandparents had been at outs, and thus he and Haverford had been raised to nod curtly at each other in the churchyard—and then only if the vicar was watching.
“Did I, or did I not recently enter into the state of holy matrimony?” Sherbourne countered. “As such, does it not fall to you to offer me a drink, Your Grace?”
Sherbourne felt entitled to grouse, for Haverford and his duchess had deprived the new bride of the honor of being carried over the threshold by her husband. As soon as the horses had halted, the duchess had flown down the steps of Sherbourne Hall and enveloped Sherbourne in a hug, while Haverford had stood smirking on the terrace. Then Her Grace had swept Charlotte into an equally indecorous embrace and bustled her into the house.
The senior staff had been lined up in the foyer, ready to greet their new lady, and Sherbourne had been relegated to making introductions rather than grand gestures.
“I’ll overlook your poor hospitality,” Haverford said, pouring two glasses of brandy, “because you are road weary and a traveling coach is nowhere to spend a honeymoon. What were you thinking, whisking the lady from town like that?” He passed Sherbourne a glass, then raised his own. “To wedded bliss.”
Sherbourne drank to that. “I was thinking to escape London before I went mad.”
“You wanted to see how the mine is progressing.” An accusation, from Haverford, who was skeptical of all industries not mentioned approvingly in the Old Testament.
Sherbourne had wanted to get Charlotte home before autumn turned to winter. “The lady’s family specifically asked that we wed by special license. If they couldn’t be bothered to gather for the nuptials, then why linger in town?”
Haverford tossed another square of peat onto the fire in the library’s hearth. “Did you perhaps anticipate the vows? I’m told that’s something of a Windham tradition.”
“That is none of Your Grace’s bloody business, but no, we did not anticipate our vows. I’ll thank you to stop wasting my peat.”
“Said the man who’s mad to dig a coal mine, and we’re family now.” Haverford was smirking again. “Your business is my business.”
Haverford used the cast iron poker to fuss with the fire, and Sherbourne wrestled an urge to toss the duke into the corridor. Haverford was a healthy specimen, dark-haired, tall, and fit, but Sherbourne was an expert on the proper use of the element of surprise.
“I come home,” Sherbourne said, “my new bride at my side, and then she’s not at my side. She’s disappeared to do God knows what with a sister she’s had nearly three decades to gossip and conspire with. They saw each other at your own wedding, mere weeks ago, and when I asked Her Grace to oversee a bit of tidying up here at Sherbourne Hall, I did not expect her to kidnap my bride on my very doorstep.”
Haverford put down the poker and lounged against the mantel as if he owned the house, the grounds, its fixtures, outbuildings, and livestock. “Been going short of sleep have you? Tending conscientiously to your marital duties?”
“I have escorted my lady wife more than one hundred fifty miles along the king’s highway in less than favorable weather. You will please collect your wife and don’t allow her back on this property for a week. Perpetual absence on your part would be a singularly insightful wedding gift.”
Sherbourne took another sip of his brandy—only the best quality graced his decanters—when he wanted to hurl his drink at the wall. Was a quiet meal with his new wife too much to ask? A little privacy to show her about her new home?
A chance to think through her disclosures in the coach? Charlotte’s tale of illicit love gone awry was significant. Whoever authored the downfall of Charlotte’s friend had in a sense ruined Charlotte as well, for much of her innocence had died with her friend.
“That is not the expression of a man contemplating marital bliss,” Haverford said, wandering away from the fireplace. “Give the ladies time to visit over a pot of tea. Elizabeth was ecstatic to learn of your engagement to Charlotte, and my duchess should be allowed a chance to interrogate her sister.”