Page 8 of Miss Barton's Mysterious Husband
Janet Barton bore a strong resemblance to her niece. The same red hair and fine features and green eyes. Those eyes were worried right now. “No. I need to talk to you.”
“Should I send Roland downstairs?” Charmian stepped back to let the woman in.
“Yes. No.”
Charmian looked bewildered. Roland couldn’t blame her. He’d only met Janet tonight, but he’d seen enough to recognize a woman of strong character. Her current uncertainty didn’t fit with that.
“Which is it, Aunt?”
“I think Sir Roland needs to hear what I have to say.”
Roland stood. The room wasn’t large. With three people inside, it was overcrowded. He noticed that the woman carried a leather satchel. His curiosity sparked. Janet looked as if she bore the weight of the world on her shoulders. She also looked unmistakably guilty. What the hell was going on?
Charmian now looked troubled rather than puzzled. “What’s the matter?”
Janet looked guiltier than ever. “I…”
Instead of continuing, she slid the satchel from her shoulder and offered it to Charmian. Whatever it held, there was a lot of it. The worn leather bulged.
Charmian took the bag, but didn’t immediately open it. “What is it, Aunt Janet?”
Her aunt looked strained and pale. She licked her lips and wrung her hands. “I just ask you to remember the state you were in when you came back to us. Your mother and I believed we were doing the best thing. I’m still not convinced we were wrong. But…”
With shaking hands, Charmian opened the satchel. Roland felt sick, even before Charmian checked the contents. He had an idea of what was inside.
She shot her aunt a killing look. “L-letters?” she stammered. “I don’t understand.”
Janet squared her shoulders in a way Roland had seen her niece do a hundred times. “You should sit down.”
Charmian’s shock receded and she flushed with anger, as she looked again at the satchel then at her aunt. “I don’t want to sit down. I want to know what all my letters to Roland and…” With a shaking hand, she sifted through the satchel’s contents. “…and his letters to me are doing in your possession.”
Her voice was like a whiplash, and it was clear that Janet felt the bite of the strike. Her eyes were glassy with tears, as she regarded her niece. Tears and love, much as Roland didn’t want to recognize it. “We, your mother and I, were so worried about you when you came home from York and your disastrous mistake.”
“Our marriage, you mean,” Roland grated out.
Janet leveled tragic eyes on him, and he realized that she’d concentrated so hard on Charmian that he’d hardly registered in her awareness. “It was a mistake. Haven’t three years apart proven that?”
Charmian looked furious. Even worse, she looked devastated.
“Three years apart that you and my mother engineered.” Her voice was flat. He could tell that she struggled to control her tumultuous reaction.
Janet adopted a persecuted air. “We feared for your sanity when you came back to us. Don’t you remember? You couldn’t eat, you couldn’t sleep, you cried for a week, then you sank into a silence that was worse.”
Charmian directed a glower at him. She was a proud creature. She wouldn’t like him hearing this.
Roland didn’t like hearing it either. He hated to think of her suffering. All this time, he’d imagined her angry and disdainful.Her distress didn’t flatter his vanity. He’d always wanted the best for her. He still did.
“Perhaps because I missed the man I love,” she said, as if the words didn’t slice through him like a knife. Because he’d loved her, too, and losing her had come close to destroying him.
Roland didn’t place too much faith in her declaration of past love. He didn’t underestimate the changes that their separation had wrought.
Janet’s jaw took on a stubborn line familiar from his acquaintance with Charmian. “There’s no good to be had from mixing the classes. Someone always gets their heart broken, and it’s nearly always the woman. I told your father he was wrong when he sent you to that ridiculous school in Bath. He was asking for trouble. I was right, wasn’t I? The Bartons belong with the working people, however much money your father made. The gentry care for nobody but themselves.”
“You’ve always said that, Aunt, and I’ve never known why.”
Janet’s face tightened, as if she smelled something fetid. “Because it happened to me, just as it happened to you, my darling girl.”
Aghast, Charmian gaped at her aunt. “You married someone from the upper classes?”
