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darling? Do you need me to … should I summon Dr. Pargeter?” Charlotte turned even paler, and just shook her head violently.
    Adelaide stared at her silently. She needed to find out exactly what happened, but not in front of Violetta.
    “Violetta,” she said. She couldn’t even think of a good excuse. “Violetta,” she repeated, looking at her elder daughter over Charlotte’s bent shoulders, “I want you to go to your chamber. No arguments,” she said firmly, heading off Violetta’s protest. “I will visit you in a few minutes and we will discuss all of this. Until then, no one is to know, Violetta, particularly not Alice.” Alice was Violetta’s maid.
    So Violetta walked slowly out of the room, confident that she could pry all the details out of her mama later. Mama, she thought complacently, had always been putty in the hands of a good questioner. Why, she knew all about things she really oughtn’t to, such as what happened between a man and his wife, for example. She bet that Charlotte had never asked mama anything, and so she had no idea. Or perhaps she had? Violetta trailed back to her room, bursting with questions.
    When they were alone, Charlotte drew a shuddering breath and started sobbing and speaking incoherently. “Oh, Mama, I met a man … in the garden. I kissed him. I didn’t think—he kissed me.” Her voice broke on a sob and she bent her forehead against her mother’s shoulder. How could she say it, what really happened? Her mother would be …
    “I went with him, Mama,” she finally said, raising her head and meeting her mother’s eyes painfully. “I went into the garden with him, behind the trees, and he … he took my clothing apart. I’m so, I’m so—I didn’t stop him.”
    Adelaide listened silently, stroking her daughter’s arm. It was both worse and better than she feared. At least Charlotte had not been raped. But she did seem to have abandoned all of the rules of society in an act of such recklessness that Adelaide’s stomach twisted just to hear about it. Behind the trees! Anyone could have seen them!
    “What was his name?” Adelaide asked.
    “I don’t know!”
    “You don’t know,” Adelaide managed, and then, “Charlotte, he wasn’t one of Squire Brentorton’s footmen, was he?”
    Charlotte gulped. “He could have been, Mama.” She began to weep even harder. Details flowed out amid sobs: the ball, silver-black hair, a green domino, the curate, the statue of Narcissus, the lemonade made with poor lemons.
    Adelaide’s hand stopped its soothing motion. Who was this man? Charlotte’s description was none too exact, and there were so many gentlemen in London—if he was a gentleman, Adelaide thought bleakly. He certainly hadn’t acted like one. But Charlotte hadn’t acted like a lady, either.
    Something nudged the back of her memory, something she’d heard about a young man with silver-shot hair, but she couldn’t quite remember what. They would just have to hope. She decided to send someone to Kent immediately to investigate the masked ball.
    Finally Charlotte was cried out, and Adelaide came to a decision. She pushed Charlotte into a sitting position again.
    “Now,” she said firmly. “We simply have to forget that this whole incident happened.” She looked into Charlotte’s eyes with every bit of maternal authority she could summon. “You cannot allow your life to be ruined because you had a momentary indiscretion in a garden, Charlotte.
    “We have all been indiscreet on occasion. Why—” She paused and looked at her daughter’s innocent eyes. Not so innocent anymore, she reminded herself. This was going to be difficult. She had always thought of Charlotte as the daughter untouched by desire. In fact, she’d probably been much sterner with Violetta, given that Violetta was a girl one might picture enjoying a tryst in the garden! But Charlotte …
    “Well, your father and I did exactly what you just did, before we got married. In fact, we