The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

Chapter Seventeen

Henrietta looked at Charlotte as though she suspected her of being a little mad after all. “That is what the orderly just called him.”

Charlotte did her best to speak without moving her lips. The result was not an entire success. “That isn’t what I meant. That is not the man I saw in the King’s bedchamber.”

“You mean . . .”

Charlotte wished she knew what she meant. “I don’t know. There must be some mistake.” Abandoning Henrietta, she ventured towards the approaching men. Raising a hand, she called out, “Dr. Simmons?”

He certainly appeared to be under the delusion that he was Dr. Simmons.

“Yes?” he asked slightly impatiently. “I am informed that you wish to speak with me.”

It would be tempting to believe that it was a delusion, that he was a patient whose madness had taken on the form of impersonating his own doctor. But too many details militated against that theory. Even if the orderlies hadn’t deferred to him, his clothes were too expensive and too neatly kept to belong to one of the patients. His expression, while irritable, was eminently rational.

Who wouldn’t be a bit annoyed at being dragged from his work to attend a pair of flighty young ladies? He was probably afraid they were there for an afternoon’s diversion, touring the cells of the insane for sport, as they did in Bedlam, where, for a penny, anyone could enter to gawk and jeer. Charlotte had heard visitors were even permitted to bring long sticks with which to poke at the inmates. From the way the orderlies had ranged themselves on either side of the door, it was clear that such behavior was not allowed at St. Luke’s.

But if he was Dr. Simmons, who was the man back at the Palace?

On an impulse, Charlotte batted her eyelashes at him and said in a fluttery sort of voice, “I had hoped I might trouble you for a consultation. It is my grandmother, you see. I fear she may be . . .”

“No longer possessed of all her proper faculties?” the doctor finished helpfully.

“I fear so,” said Charlotte sadly. “She has taken to having herself carried around her own home on a gilded palanquin, striking out at any who dare approach her with a sort of scepter.”

Next to her, Henrietta’s bonnet brim quivered.

“I see,” said the doctor briskly. “In essence, your grandmother suffers from violent delusions.”

Henrietta stuffed her hands against her mouth to contain a fit of coughing that escaped around her gloved fingers in a series of explosive snorts. The doctor took a discreet step back.

Charlotte followed him, winding her bonnet string coyly around one finger and doing her best to look adoringly daft. But not too daft. She didn’t want to find herself in hot vinegar up to her ankles “I have heard that in such cases,” she said breathlessly, “where the subject is prone to violence, that a form of restraining waistcoat might applied.”

“Ah,” said the doctor. “You mean the straight waistcoat. I highly recommend it as a means of convincing the patient that violent behavior will not be tolerated.”

“What do you think of vinegar treatments? I’ve heard wonderful things of vinegar treatments as a means of moving the humors. And blistering. In multiple places.”

“Each of those may be efficacious in its proper application. The blistering, in particular, often does wonders to drive away delirium. Of course, I should need to see the patient before recommending a course of treatment.”

“That would be delightful, Dr. Simmons!” Charlotte clapped her hands together in a very ecstasy of delight. “I shouldn’t like to take you away from your other patrons, though, if you were engaged elsewhere.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem, Miss — ”

Charlotte began backing away towards the carriage. She hoped he didn’t know enough about the peerage to recognize the crest on the side. “Oh, thank you! I really must be getting back. We don’t like to leave Grandmama for too long. She starts throwing things,” Charlotte confided in a stage whisper. “Coming, Dulcinea?”

“Dulcinea?” demanded Henrietta as they collapsed breathless back in the carriage.

“I had madness on the mind,” said Charlotte apologetically. “So Dulcinea seemed to fit.”

“I suppose I should be grateful that you didn’t make me Ophelia!” Henrietta impatiently yanked at the ribbons of her bonnet and tossed it carelessly onto the seat beside her. “Now will you tell me what that was all about?”

“I think,” said Charlotte thoughtfully, “we can safely say that Dr. Simmons has not been retained by the Prince of Wales. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been nearly so eager to treat my poor, dear Grandmama.”

“And the straight waistcoat and all that?”

“Currently in use on the King.”

“Oh,” said Henrietta, sobering.

“If this Dr. Simmons is to be believed, everything being done to the King is medically sound.”

“It still sounds like torture to me,” said Henrietta, with a shudder.

“And to me,” admitted Charlotte. “Especially having seen it.”

A somber silence fell over the inside of the carriage as the two friends contemplated the plight of their King.

When Henrietta finally spoke, she voiced what they were both thinking. “If this Dr. Simmons isn’t treating the King, who is? There couldn’t be two Dr. Simmons, could there?”

That would be by far the simplest explanation, but it also seemed the least probable. “Not at St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, I shouldn’t think. The doctor treating the King specifically mentioned returning to his patients at St. Luke’s.”

“Perhaps your Dr. Simmons got the name of the hospital wrong?”

“What doctor mistakes his own hospital?”

“Hmm. Good point.” Henrietta lapsed again into silence.

Staring out the window, Charlotte struggled to recall that uncomfortable interlude scrunched up against the side of the cabinet, scrounging for any clue that might unravel the bizarre tangle. What was she going to tell the Queen? Her simple assignment had suddenly become very, very complicated.

Outside, the early winter dusk was already falling. Charlotte could see her own face reflected in ghostly double in the windowpane. She frowned, and her shadow self frowned back at her.

A seemingly insignificant detail niggled at the back of Charlotte’s mind. “Colonel McMahon said that it was Sir Francis Medmenham who had recommended Simmons.”

“The real Simmons, or the false one?”

“I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “He might have recommended the real one, never knowing an imposter would interpose himself. Or he might have put forward the false candidate for purposes of his own.”

“What cause would Medmenham have for inserting an imposter into the King’s household?”

“He is a member of the Prince’s party,” said Charlotte slowly, “and should the King go mad, he might benefit immensely from it.”

“You’re not implying — ”

A bizarre sort of picture was beginning to form. Charlotte wasn’t sure if it was the true one, but it did make its own sort of sense. “If the King goes mad for long enough, the Prince will advance another Regency bill. And if he becomes Regent — ”

“Medmenham will have his pick of plum positions,” Henrietta finished for her. “If it’s power that he’s after.”

“I can’t really see Sir Francis necessarily serving in an official capacity, can you? He’s no Charles James Fox. But it might be enough for him to be the silent power behind the throne. He would like lording it over a Prince Regent, wouldn’t he?”

Just as he obviously enjoyed lording it over a certain duke of her acquaintance. If a mere duke was a coup, how much more so the ruling power in the realm?

“We need to know more about Medmenham,” pronounced Henrietta, in the air of one delivering a royal command. “Besides, I find him oddly intriguing.”

“Henrietta!”

“Not that kind of intriguing! I meant as a potential villain. I have excellent instincts when it comes to spotting wrongdoers.”

“We don’t know that Medmenham is a wrongdoer. The real Dr. Simmons may very well have cured his aunt.”

“Does he have an aunt?” asked Henrietta.

Charlotte raised both hands in a gesture of helplessness. “For all we know, he might have a dozen.”

“That’s easy enough to find out,” Henrietta said decidedly as the carriage drew up before Loring House. The waiting footmen advanced to open the door and unroll the folding stairs.

“It may be even easier than you think,” said Charlotte, gathering her skirts to descend. “I hear that he intends — ”

A dark figure loomed up out of the night. Charlotte caught at the steadying arm of the footman as she nearly tumbled off the second step.

Blending with the bushes beside the house, he seemed huge, a monster out of myth, the dark cousin to the unicorn. As he stepped into the square of light cast by the drawing room windows, it became clear that it wasn’t a monster but a man. When she saw which man it was, Charlotte wasn’t sure she wouldn’t prefer the monster. At least a monster had a certain élan to it. Perfidious men were as common as the muck on the street.

“Charlotte?” Henrietta came careening down the steps after her. “What — oh.”

The Duke of Dovedale bobbed stiffly at the neck. He looked as though the high points of his shirt collar pained him. “Lady Henrietta. Cousin Charlotte.”

“To what do we owe this . . . er . . . ?” Henrietta looked from Robert, stiff as the iron railings, to Charlotte, prickly as winter rosebushes, and lapsed into silence. Not even the most optimistic hostess could possibly call his appearance a pleasure.

“I fear that when I visited this morning, I inadvertently left a bagatelle behind me.”

“Your dignity?” suggested Charlotte, her breath misting like smoke in the cold air.

Behind her, she could hear Henrietta’s swift intake of breath, half horrified, half amused. Charlotte didn’t care.

Something like appreciation flashed through Robert’s blue eyes. Or perhaps it was just the light from the torchères burning on either side of the door. “My snuffbox.”

Charlotte folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t think it’s in those bushes.”

“My dignity, you mean?” said Robert blandly.

Charlotte narrowed her eyes at him, hating him with every bone in her body. It was unforgivable of him to sound like that, amused and urbane, so very like the man with whom she had fancied herself in love.

“Your snuffbox,” she said, a little too forcefully.

“Well, that’s easily solved, isn’t it?” Quickly interposing herself between them, Henrietta threaded her arm through Charlotte’s in a mingled gesture of support and restraint. With a swooping gesture, she indicated that the Duke should precede them through the open door, where the footmen waited on either side, silently storing up every detail to repeat in the servants’ hall later that evening. “I’m sure Stwyth will be happy to help you recover it — your snuffbox, I mean.”

Turning back to Robert, Henrietta asked, “Where did you leave it? The snuffbox, that is.”

With Robert in it, the entry hall, which could easily fit at least two of Charlotte’s grandmother’s tenants’ cottages, felt ridiculously small.

“I left it in the morning room,” he said, speaking to Henrietta, but looking at Charlotte. “This morning.”

“Morning is an excellent time to use the morning room,” commented Henrietta to no one in particular. “And the snuffbox is — ?”

Robert frowned in that way men do when asked to describe trumperies. “A snuffbox?”

“Stwyth?” commanded Henrietta.

Taking his cue, Stwyth shuffled off to hunt for what Charlotte was sure would be the latest in invisible snuffboxes. If you couldn’t see it, could it still be in the height on fashion? Goodness, she was so angry she was positively giddy with it.

Her only saving grace was that Robert, for all his vaunted urbanity, looked as uncomfortable as she did. Good. Charlotte took a small, malicious satisfaction in his catching his foot on a roll of drapery fabric that was unaccountably lying half unrolled just inside the front door.

“Oh, dear,” Henrietta clucked, making distressed hostess noises. “That really shouldn’t be out here. Will you excuse me for a moment?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sure Charlotte will entertain you in my absence.”

Charlotte wasn’t feeling the least bit entertaining, unless one was talking about the sort of entertainment that involved goring gladiators.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she said, not looking at Robert. It wasn’t quite so easy as it sounded. Not looking at Robert made the corners of her eyes hurt.

“Nonsense,” said Henrietta blithely. “I’ll be right back.”

With a swish of petticoats, she was gone, off to run an errand as imaginary as Robert’s snuffbox. Charlotte looked grimly after Henrietta’s retreating back. She knew exactly what her best friend was doing. Finding Robert on her doorstep twice in one day, Henrietta had obviously concluded that the pull of true love had overcome whatever temporary madness had driven Robert from Charlotte’s side. Or, as Henrietta would put it, that Robert had finally come to his senses. And she had left them alone to get on with the grand reconciliation she was sure would ensue. Knowing Henrietta, she was probably currently planning what to wear to the wedding.

Charlotte was not amused.

She had had enough. Completely, utterly, up to here, enough with everyone thinking they could run her life for her, from Henrietta, who tried to marry her off by leaving her alone in an entry hall, to ridiculous Robert, who couldn’t decide whether they were speaking or not speaking but definitely knew that he didn’t want her to go riding with Medmenham.

As far as Charlotte was concerned, they could all take a long, cold bath in the Thames.

Buoyed with righteous anger, Charlotte turned on her sometime knight in shining armor, who was as much the possessor of a snuffbox as she was the Queen of England. Did he really think she was ninny enough to buy that ridiculous story?

A nasty little voice in the back of her head reminded her that she had, in fact, been more than willing to swallow any story he cared to tell her not so very long ago. The thought of it only made her angrier.

“Why are you really here?” she demanded, glowering at him like a grand inquisitor with a heretic in his sights.

If Robert was taken aback by her tone, he didn’t show it.

“I’m rather fond of that snuffbox,” he said mildly. “It has a very attractive painting of Carlton House on the lid.”

Charlotte doubted he even owned a snuffbox. Robert made a most unconvincing dandy. The finicky clothes he had adopted since coming to London sat oddly on his athletic frame, like someone trying to swaddle a sword in lace draperies. Unless, of course, this lace-clad Robert was the real Robert, and the rough-and-ready soldier the act he had put on for her at Girdings. Which was real? Trying to sort it out made her head spin. That just made her even crankier.

“Did you take snuff much in India?” she jeered. She had never known that she had it in her to jeer. It was amazing the new talents one discovered under duress.

Robert wandered idly towards a marble topped table, where the day’s correspondence sat piled on a silver tray. “Perhaps my new station demands new habits.”

“Do you change your habits so easily as that?” Charlotte didn’t bother to hide the scorn in her voice.

She was punishing him, she knew, for not being what she had wanted him to be. It might not be fair of her, but it wasn’t any more fair of him to keep coming back when he had promised to stay away. Funny, to think she would once have given almost anything for his promise to come back. Now, all she wanted was for him to leave her in peace.

Perhaps, if she repeated that to herself often enough, she might even start to believe it. She had, unfortunately, got into the habit of daydreaming about him. While his habits might change easily, hers never had.

His eyes met hers, reflected in the hall mirror. It was rather uncanny, looking at his reflection instead of the man. But wasn’t that what she had been seeing all along? Only a reflection and a distorted one, at that, as pocked by untruths as this one was by the beveling in the Venetian glass.

“No,” he said at last, his eyes constant on hers in the mirror. “In fact, I find my habits very hard to change.”

Charlotte kept her voice hard. “I hope you are not going to make a habit of this. Of visiting here, I mean.”

Robert thumbed idly through the letters and invitations piled in the silver tray, lowering his head so that she couldn’t see his face, even in reflection. “Is that what you really want?”

It was very disconcerting speaking to the mirrored top of someone’s head. She could see the pale gilt where the Indian sun had streaked his hair and the darker hair beginning to grow out beneath it under the influence of a colder climate.

Charlotte spoke more loudly than she had intended, “I hadn’t realized that what I want is of any consequence.”

She didn’t need to see his face to see his shoulders stiffen as her words hit home.

“Charlotte, I didn’t mean — ”

He turned so abruptly that she automatically took a step backwards, even though there were several feet between them. He turned so abruptly that he forgot about the letter in his hand that hadn’t quite made it all the way into his sleeve.

She could see her name — or at least the half of it that wasn’t hidden beneath the lace edged cuff of his shirt — on the top fold. It was a heavy cream paper, subscribed in a bold, masculine hand, sealed with a blob of midnight blue wax. Charlotte didn’t need to break the seal to know who had written it.

Amazed at her own boldness, she tapped Robert smartly on the arm before the note could disappear entirely into his sleeve. “I’ll take that.”

Robert made no move to hand it to her. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

Was there nothing about him that was true? So that was why he had come back — not because he couldn’t stay away from her, or for an illusory snuffbox, but to intercept any correspondence from Medmenham. His mission this morning having failed, he had decided to try a surer way.

Tipping her head back, Charlotte regarded him accusingly. “There never was any snuffbox, was there?”

Before Robert could even open his mouth to respond, a surprisingly heavy tread announced the reappearance of Henrietta’s butler. Having heard Stwyth move as softly as a cat when he felt like it, Charlotte was sure the interruption was quite deliberate.

Stone-faced, Stwyth extended a small, octagonal object covered with panels of painted porcelain. “Your snuffbox, sir.”

“Thank you — Stwyth, is it?” Robert raised an altogether too smug eyebrow in Charlotte’s general direction. “You were saying?”

“Enjoy your snuff,” said Charlotte tartly. She hoped he choked on it.

Tucking the snuffbox neatly away in his waistcoat pocket, he retrieved his hat and gloves from Stwyth. Hat in hand, he smiled ruefully down at Charlotte. “I don’t believe I will. It isn’t really to my taste.”

“Then why take it?”

“Call it penance. Good evening, Charlotte.”

Clapping his hat on his head, Robert turned on his heel. But he paused before he reached the door. Stwyth, who had scurried to open it, hastily pushed it closed again against the arctic air.

Tripping over his own words, he said, “I can’t promise our paths won’t cross. But I won’t come here again if you don’t want me to. You see, what you want is of some consequence after all. At least to me. Good night.”

It took Stwyth a moment to open the door. He studied Robert quite suspiciously before he would consent to do so, as though suspecting him of intending another abortive exit that would require more false openings and closings. But this time, Robert had clearly said all he intended to stay. He all but collided with the door panel in his haste to leave. And Charlotte, perversely, having wished him gone, found herself wanting him to stay.

It wasn’t until Stwyth had triumphantly and with great finality shut the great door behind him that Charlotte realized that Robert had successfully made off with Medmenham’s note.