“She’s awake,” Charlotte said. “Please excuse me.” She walked to the nursery and picked up Anne.
Sally followed her. “It’s all right if you do. I just want to know how things are between you.”
Charlotte lifted Anne into her arms. “There is someone here for you to meet, Miss Anne.”
“Isn’t she a gorgeous thing. And so much grown since I seen her last.”
“Yes.” Charlotte stroked Anne’s cheek. Then she sighed and placed Anne into Sally’s arms. “I will miss Thomas and he will miss me, but that is the end of it.”
“But I saw the way he looked at you.”
Charlotte smiled gently at her friend. “And I saw the way he looked at you. Something tells me he will not be missing me for long.”
Unlike Mrs. Taylor, young Anne was slower to hand over her loyalties. She wouldn’t nurse from Sally that first night and cried and reached for Charlotte. Charlotte sat in the rocking chair with her, nursing her and soothing her—and herself. She knew she ought to refuse and let off nursing all at once, but she felt unable to do so, unable to withstand Anne’s pitiful tears.
Finally, when Anne awoke at dawn, crying to be fed, Charlotte laid her in bed at Sally’s side. While nurse and child were both only half awake, hunger won over and Anne nursed. Sally’s sleepy eyes filled with tears as she looked at Charlotte in silent understanding.
Richard Kendall stood before the writing desk in the study that served as Daniel’s office.
“Have you no objections, then, were I to offer her some ... situation?” Daniel stared at the man, wanting very much to throttle him.
Instead he said in controlled tones, “You will offend her.”
“Quite possibly. Beyond that risk, have you no objections?” When Daniel made no answer, Richard continued. “You said yourself she has few options. That the man who should have made some recompense, should be providing for her, has failed to do so. You are not in a position to do so, but I am.”
“Yet you do not offer marriage.”
Kendall frowned and sighed. “No. I am afraid not. Not at this point. We are not so well acquainted.”
“But acquainted enough to ask her to become your mistress?”
“Well.” He cleared his throat. “The particulars are yet to be agreed upon, of course, and will be strictly between Miss Lamb and myself. You can be assured of my discretion.”
“She will refuse you.”
“I am aware of that possibility.”
“I would ask that you dispense with this line of thinking altogether. But I have no authority to stop you.”
“No, being merely her former employer ...” He nodded thoughtfully. “Though I am beginning to understand why you chose not to tell Mrs. Taylor about yourpastregard for Miss Lamb.”
Richard Kendall found Charlotte Lamb strolling along the path parallel to the sea, swinging a stick of driftwood in her hand. He fell into step beside her.
“Where will you go now, Miss Lamb?”
“To Crawley. I have a great-aunt there.”
He nodded. “A pleasant prospect, then?”
She shrugged. “Pleasant enough.”
She seemed pensive, her eyes far away on the grey water, the distant gulls and beyond. “If I could go anywhere I liked, I suppose I would return to Doddington. Though I am no longer welcome in my own home. Still, I would steal back to that dear place if I could. I was just imagining that very thing: strolling through the village and up the lane, past the churchyard and into my mother’s garden.”
“Your family would not approve of such a visit?”
She shook her head. “My father would not likely see me, spending so much time in his library as he does. Beatrice, my sister, is so often at her pianoforte, or lost in the pages of a book, that the world outside the vicarage windows holds little appeal and she would not likely see me either.”
“What would you do there?”
