“Has anyone reproached you?” Charlotte’s temper flared. “Just tell me and I will speak to…”
“No, no, nothing like that, miss.”
“Believe me, I will see to it that they don’t.” Lucy gave her a smile but didn’t look convinced. And indeed Charlotte understood that she could do little about servants’ gossip.
“There’s no need to worry,” said Lucy, as if she spoke to herself as well as Charlotte. “I expect we’ll be going back to London as soon as may be?”
“I was just thinking the same. But I believe stagecoaches generally leave in the early morning.”
Lucy nodded. She gestured with the towel she was holding. “Best get ready for dinner, then.” Her blue eyes were somehow bereft. Charlotte didn’t understand it, but she felt the same melancholy in herself. She and Lucy had been together so long. She was a friend more than a servant, and yet… there seemed no way to voice the feelings that they clearly shared. “What would I do without you, Lucy?”
The words made the maid stiffen. Why?
“No worry about that,” Lucy replied. “I’m right here. Come and wash before the water goes cold.”
***
Dinner in the “small” dining parlor was stilted. With servers continually in and out, bringing dishes and removing them, waiting just behind a swinging door to fulfill any requests, there was no opportunity for private talk. Charlotte, nearly bursting with the news she had to give Alec, struggled to find topics of conversation. She was also terribly aware of how odd it was for her to be dining alone with him, to be visiting him alone. She felt watched, and judged, and thoroughly uncomfortable. And Alec seemed a different man from the one who had left her bedchamber just a few days ago, much more like the distant gentleman she’d first met on the day of Henry’s death. “What… do you have any news of the men who were marching to Nottingham?” she asked him.
“How do you know about that?” was the sharp reply.
“I… heard… about it.” She couldn’t tell him—here—that she’d been crouched in the darkness as they whipped themselves up to set off.
He closed his lips on another question. “A courier came by with news this afternoon, since I am one of the local magistrates. They marched on through Ripley, gathering more men, willing or not so willing in some cases. Toward Codnor and Langley Mill—you won’t know these places, of course—they woke up several innkeepers demanding beer and bread and cheese. The beer made things worse, I’m sure. It was raining hard by then, and I’d wager a good few slipped away home. Twenty Light Dragoons caught the remainder at Giltbrook, and they scattered under the charge. About forty men were captured. Not the leaders, they think, but those will be taken soon enough. The government won’t rest until they are. Lord Sidmouth has a network of agents who will ferret them out.”
Sidmouth was the Home Secretary, Charlotte remembered. “What will happen to them?” she wondered.
“Transportation to Australia for some. The leaders will surely be hanged.” He said it with a weary finality.
“If that man…” Charlotte could almost remember the name shouted out. “If they hadn’t fired on the house in the village…” Alec was scowling at her; she had forgotten again that he didn’t know she’d been there.
“They killed a servant in Mary Hepworth’s house in South Wingfield,” he agreed after a short silence. “But even if they hadn’t, the punishments would be the same. ‘Armed insurrection’ will not be tolerated.”
“Insurrection?”
“That’s what it is being called—that and high treason. Some of the leaders had formed ‘revolutionary committees’ and sketched out plans for a general uprising. These are not words any government can easily tolerate. The impulse may have come from unemployment and privation, but…” Alec threw his napkin on the table. “Have you finished eating?”
She had been moving the last bites around with her fork. She shouldn’t waste food when people were starving, Charlotte thought. But she didn’t want it. “Yes.”
He rose. “Then perhaps we can go into the library and discuss… the family business that brought you here.”
“Yes,” she said again. Nervous now that the moment had finally come, Charlotte followed him out of the room.
***
Ethan had no duties, as he was unexpectedly home, and neither did Lucy while her mistress was at dinner. So he shouldn’t have had much difficulty spiriting her out of the house into the long golden June evening. Lucy