To think he thought her refreshingly different than the ladies in Society.
Victor may now lust after the woman he had married but hope of trust was now gone.
Had she intentionally played him the fool? Did she have no respect for him?
No wonder she had been nervous since his arrival. She had been hiding much more than being a governess or investing in a textile mill.
However, if he stormed into her chamber now, with his anger fresh and raw, he may not receive the answers he wanted. Instead, he walked to the sideboard, poured a glass of brandy, then settled behind the desk to study the ledgers to make better sense of them. Then he would confront his wife.
Chapter 20
Charlotteglancedup,expectingto see Callie enter, though she didn’t understand what was taking the maid so long. Except, it wasn’t Callie but Victor.
“Charlotte, there is much to discuss, you and I.”
He was holding her ledger. Not the one for household accounts, but her personal ledger. Her future.
Why hadn’t Callie simply brought it to her? Why had she asked Victor?
Charlotte closed her eyes. She should have just waited and then Victor would have never learned, but because she was bored and stuck in her bed, she thought this was a grand time to update her accounting. Now everything she had worked for and planned had been discovered.
He settled in the chair beside her bed and Charlotte realized that he was going to learn the whole truth of what she’d been doing. She just needed to make him understand that it was for her…for them…for her.
“I was impressed by the amounts you spent on the household. Your frugalness.”
“I see no need to spend unnecessarily,” she answered slowly.
“Yes, which I do appreciate.”
Charlotte bit the corner of her lip as her stomach churned. She had no excuses for what she had done other than the truth. Charlotte just hoped that he didn’t hate her.
“I have a few questions, if you do not mind indulging me.”
“Do I have a choice?” she asked quietly.
“No.” He opened the book. “I had not realized that your father had provided you with separate funds after we married.”
It had surprised her as well, but Charlotte hadn’t turned it down, nor had she mentioned it to Victor at the time because no matter how kind he had been, he was still a stranger. “He said that he had given your family enough, but your father had proven how poor he was at money management that he couldn’t trust that you didn’t suffer from the same flaws.”
“Your dowry was twenty thousand pounds.” Victor was more astonished than angry.
It was a lot, but her father already had more money than he could spend in a lifetime. “Yes.”
“I am surprised that your father, that unpleasant man, entrusted you with so many funds. It is usually left in the control of a husband, saved to support the wife in the event of his demise.”
“I may have been a disappointment to him, but he also taught me well about investments, savings and how to increase wealth. He made certain that I could support my family if it turned out that my husband was unable to manage funds. When it came to money matters, it was the only area in which I was not a disappointment.”
“A husband still owns what his wife brings to a marriage,” Victor noted, and Charlotte wondered if that was his intention.
“There is a clause in the marriage contract that states that you cannot have access to those funds without my permission. Nor are you allowed access to any earnings added to those funds.”
Victor frowned. “I barely read them, if I am to be honest.” He pushed his fingers through his hair. “I wasn’t in the best frame of mind at the time.”
“One must never let emotion rule when reading and signing contracts,” she quoted her father. That may have been her very first lesson. Not that Charlotte’s signature on any contract was binding given she was a woman.
He stared at her for a moment and Charlotte realized that her tone and words may have been censoring, which had not been her intention.
“The next matter of note is that very little of the pin money that I had allotted you these past four years has been spent but was accumulated.”
