1807, Somerset
“Mathematics is truth,” the girl told Aldridge, her thin face glowing with passion. “It is beauty. The world is patterns of logic and shapes, and the task of mathematicians is to understand those patterns, Lord Aldridge.”
Aldridge was drunk, but not so much that he didn’t know he was in dangerous territory. He should not be trespassing on the wrong side of the pond that marked the boundary of the estate he was visiting. He should not be alone in this quiet folly with a girl who was both younger and better born than he had at first assumed. He should not be listening, enraptured, to her explanation about why she was beguiling her convalescence from an embarrassing childhood illness by solving puzzles.
Richport’s house was hidden from their sight by a small tree-covered hill that rose on the other side of the pond. It was filled, as Richport’s houses tended to be, with lustful women, good liquor, wagers of all kinds, and countless inducements to forget the sins, follies and betrayals that haunted him.
Yet he had been here for nearly an hour, in peaceful conversation—intellectual conversation—with a chit not yet out of the schoolroom, and he was already planning to return tomorrow.
“You know my name, my lady. May I know yours?”
She blushed, then, and cast her eyes around as if a suggestion might be written up in the rafters of the folly. “I am called Charrie.”
He looked up to the tree that shaded the little building and then down at the basket that held cherry pits, all that was left of the fruit they had been sharing, and raised one eyebrow.
“Not Cherry,” she told him. “Charrie.”
“Cherry suits you better,” he told her, though he was by no means drunk enough to explain why. An errant memory surfaced. Didn’t Elfingham refer to his twin sisters as Charrie and Sarrie? And didn’t Elfingham’s grandfather have an estate somewhere in this area?
She was Lady Charlotte Winderfield, then, and the granddaughter of the Duke of Winshire. Highly eligible. Still too young, but she would be marriageable in a year or two.
And if he was thinking such foolish thoughts, it was high time he found another drink. He had not been sober for more than a month, and he had no intention of starting now. He stood.
“I must take my leave, Cherry, but I will visit tomorrow, if you will admit me. I shall present my card at the door.” He gestured to the open side of the structure.
She giggled at his fooling, but said, “If we are to be friends, and if you are to call me Cherry”—the blush deepened—“then I shall call you Anthony. That is your name, is it not?”
Hardly. It was one of a string of names that had been bestowed on him at baptism, but no one had ever addressed him by anything but his title. He was Aldridge even to his closest relatives, and would remain so until his father died and he became Haverford. If she called him Anthony, he would look around to see who was being addressed.
Still, fair was fair. If he insisted on calling her by a name he had selected, she had every right to choose what to call him.
“Then we shall be Anthony and Cherry. Friend.”
