HER MOTHER TOLD THE DUKE SHE COULDN’T READ—THEN HE FOUND HER SECRET ROOM OF LAW BOOKS

Chapter 21

There was one conversation Charlotte never repeated to anyone, and it happened on a Tuesday afternoon in October, in the small sitting room where her mother had once told her that truth did not pay mortgages.

Margaret had sent for her. That alone was unusual. Margaret did not send for people; she arranged to be found.

Charlotte came in and found her mother seated by the window with a box on her knees — not the lacquered box of correspondence, but an older one, scuffed at the corners, the kind of thing a girl might keep.

“How much do you know about my mother?” Margaret asked.

“Very little.”

“No. Very little is exactly what you know.” She opened the box. Inside were letters, and a small leather book, and a painted miniature of a woman with a long nose and a severe expression.

“My mother was the eldest of five daughters,” Margaret said. “Her father lost everything in the year she turned seventeen. Not to a villain. To a canal.”

Charlotte sat down.

“They went from a house in Surrey to three rooms above a shop in Bath. My mother was engaged at the time. The engagement ended within six weeks — not because the man was cruel, but because his mother did the arithmetic aloud over dinner, and once it had been said aloud there was no unsaying it.”

Margaret turned the miniature over in her hands.

“She married my father when she was thirty. He was a wine merchant, and he was kind, and he was eleven years older, and she was grateful to him every day of her life — which is a terrible thing to watch in a mother, and a worse thing to become.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“I was nineteen when I married your father,” Margaret went on. “We had eleven good years. Then your grandfather began to fail, and the trust came under review, and I began to understand that a woman in my position has exactly one asset, and it is not charm and it is not beauty and it is not even money.”

“What is it?”

“Reputation.” Margaret said the word without any of the irony Charlotte had expected. “Not virtue. Reputation. The thing other people believe about you when they are deciding whether to lend, or invite, or marry their son to your daughter. It is not the same as money, but it can be exchanged for money in almost every market that matters.”

Charlotte thought about that for a long moment.

“And I damaged it.”

“You did not damage it. I had spent eleven years building it out of very little, and I did not want to see it spent down by a daughter who could not be explained.”

“Explained.”

“To whom?” Margaret looked up. “To anyone. That was the whole problem, Charlotte. There was no room in the structure for a woman who was better at the family’s business than the family. There was not one sentence in the whole language of London that would let me say my eldest daughter is the cleverest person I have ever met and have it be a recommendation rather than an apology.”

Charlotte’s throat tightened. She did not speak.

“So I made a different sentence,” Margaret said. “I made the sentence that everyone would accept. And I told it so many times that I stopped hearing it as a sentence, and started hearing it as a fact.” She closed the box. “That is the whole of my defence, and I am well aware it is not one.”

The room was quiet. Somewhere below them a servant moved through the hall with a tray.

“Why are you telling me this now?” Charlotte asked.

“Because you are about to become publicly important,” Margaret said, “and I would rather you went into it knowing exactly what I was, so that you do not spend ten years trying to guess.”

Charlotte looked at her mother for a long time.

“I am not going to forgive you today,” she said.

“I did not ask you to.”

“Good.”

“No.” Margaret set the box aside. “But I would like you to understand that I was not wrong about the danger. I was wrong about who the danger was. I thought it was you. It was the man in the drawing room with the pleasant voice.”

Charlotte stood up. At the door she stopped.

“Did Grandmother ever talk about the canal?”

“Never. Not once in thirty years.” Margaret’s smile was thin and tired and entirely real. “And if you ever meet a woman who tells you she has forgiven her mother, you should check her figures.”