The three of them trudged to Mrs. Warwick’s cottage in silence. Sir Toby had disappeared over the horizon in a disorderly jumble of muddy clothing and bloodied skin.

Mrs. Warwick quietly supplied Mr. Harding with a bucket of cold water to wash himself, and a poultice of herbs to apply to the bruise now beginning to form on his cheekbone.

After performing these offices, she left the room with a discretion that one could only marvel at, leaving Charity and Mr. Harding seated in silence on opposite sides of the battered kitchen table.

For a long while, neither spoke, but eventually it was Mr. Harding who breached the silence.

“Will you tell me why you are here instead of at your father’s house, and why you are dressed the way you are?”

“I turned down a marriage proposal that my father considered to be advantageous,” Charity replied flatly. She felt he did not need to know any information beyond the one comment, and even if she did, it would not have meant that she was inclined to give him more.

She could see something leap behind Mr. Harding’s eyes at her words, and remembered that unfortunate encounter that she had had with Mr. Harding and Mr. Edwards. Clearly, that was why he had stayed away from her for so long.

“And why are you here?” Mr. Harding persisted.

“I do not have anywhere else to go,” Charity said, aware of how hollow her voice sounded and how very distant. “I do not believe that I am welcome in my father’s house.”

She did not intend to say the words; she did not like the way that it must have made her seem so weak. But they simply slipped out of her, as the very sight of Mr. Harding had opened up a part of herself that she had dammed off so carefully.

She could not help but speak the truth to him; if only he felt the same toward her.

She decided that she might as well make further use of her inclination on this day to speak with perfect plainness.

It was as if the spirit of honesty that existed in the grove was recreated between them, but instead of being a spirit of playfulness, there was now a great feeling of tension, even anger between them. Charity felt that she had grown a great deal older just in that short space of time since they had first met.

“Was Mary Warwick your mistress?” she asked.

She did not think that in all her twenty years she had ever expressed herself so plainly, and with so much latent rage contained within her voice. All her life she had forced herself to be calm, quiet, obliging. Well, no more. She would have her answer, and she did not care if she had to destroy the image of herself as a delicate young lady in order to obtain it.

Mr. Harding’s face paled, though she knew not whether it was an alarm that his secret was out, or horror at being accused of such an outlandish deed.

“No… no…” he said, shaking his head and brushed aside the idea, as he could not even bear to engage with it. But Charity was having none of this, no casual denial.

“Look me in the eye,” she commanded, her voice steady. “Look me in the eye and tell me that you had nothing to do with their deaths, that Mary Warwick was not your lover and her child your natural son.”

“Miss Miller,” Mr. Harding said. He raised his eyes to look at her, and she saw a fire there, the likes of which she had not seen in him before, a fire which captivated her, whereas before she had been merely intrigued.

“Miss Miller, I know that we do not know each other well. Certainly, we know each other a thousand times less well than I should like, and would hope to one day know you. But I believe that you have seen enough of my character to know that I am not capable of the things which you have just accused me of. I do not think that I need to answer what you say, because I am certain that the answer lies in your own heart.”

Charity drew in a breath. She felt the air was escaping her and she had no way of catching it. She knew not what to say, what to think, but before she was forced to formulate a further response, Mr. Harding continued.

“Nonetheless, I have too great a respect for you to refuse to answer what you have asked me. The answer is simply this — no. The answer is that Mary was never my mistress, nor was Freddie my son. Nor most significantly of all, did I play even the slightest part in their terrible and tragic deaths.”

At these words, a shadow passed over his face.

“I will own that they were both, in their ways, very dear to me. Far dearer than I knew myself until very recently. But I cannot tell you what relation they were to me, not without sharing a secret that is not my own to share. Therefore I must ask that you have faith in me, even though I know that is a very great thing to ask when I have not had the honor of an opportunity to prove myself to you.”

“A secret,” Charity said flatly, echoing the word that had fallen from his lips and struck her hard. “Are there to be still more secrets between us?”

“Just one, Miss Miller, and I hope that you will see it as a reflection of my honor that I do not share with others that which is not mine to share,” Mr. Harding said earnestly.

Charity hesitated. What he said was true enough, she could not hold it against him that he took the honor of others seriously, and intended to safeguard it wherever he could.

“I want to believe you,” she said slowly, “but there is a part of me that is fearful.”

“Why should you feel any fear?” He leaned forward to capture her gaze with his own.

That question made Charity stop short to consider. The fact that she was afraid had seemed like such an article of faith to her for so long that she barely knew what the cause of her fear was anymore.

“I suppose,” she whispered, “I have nothing to fear at all, for everything that I had feared has already come to pass.

“I feared that I would be left, bereft and without friends, and thanks to the machinations of my father, that has already happened. I feared that I would be left without you, and that has already happened. Truly, Mr. Harding, what else is there for me left to fear?”

“You tell me,” he replied. “My gift of perception cannot rival yours, and therefore I wish to know your account of this situation, rather than presenting you with mine.”

Charity paused for a while. She had played a great many card games in her time — such was the lot of a country parson’s daughter. She was a shrewd player, and usually, she knew better than to show her hand.

But today there was an impulse in her, one that she did not understand and could not account for, that commanded her to lay her heart on the table for Mr. Harding to inspect, although she knew not what the consequences of such a move might be for either of them.

“We do not know each other.” Her voice was shaking. “It is true that you have told yourself a tale about me, and I must admit that I have likewise nurtured certain fancies about you. But it is not based on anything, Mr. Harding. It is not anything real.”

She looked up. She could see that her words had harmed him, yet he did not look in any way dissuaded. When he spoke, it was with a good measure of firmness and resolve.

“You are too unkind, to yourself and to me,” Mr. Harding said softly. “It is true that we are not as intimate at present as I hope that we shall someday grow to be. But it is also true that when I met you in the grove, I saw in you a kindred spirit, the likes of which I have never met before, neither at home nor in all my travels.”

He reached out and took her hand. It was such a natural gesture that neither of them so much as questioned it. They sat there together, their hands joined where they rested on Mrs. Warwick’s battered old kitchen table.

“I looked into your eyes and found my equal in them,” Mr. Harding said. “Perhaps I was too forward, too hasty, in undertaking to accelerate the attachment. Its beginnings were unorthodox, and in such a setting one has very little idea of how to proceed in a seemly fashion.

“Whatever mistakes I have made, they have been mistakes born of my being too eager to know and understand you, and in no way reflect my estimation of your character. Whatever I intend to do with you, I intend to do it honorably.”

“How can you have any intentions toward me when you know nothing about me?”

“Who says that I know nothing about you?”

“Why, I do!” Charity replied. Her eyes flashed in genuine anger. “You presume to speak to me in the language that a lover would use, yet you lack the lover’s knowledge of the beloved’s interior life.”

“Then tell me!” he cried passionately. He softened his voice and looked at her with gentle eyes. He took her hand again and held it as though it were precious beyond measure.

“Tell me,” he said once more. “Tell me about yourself. Tell me what you want from life, what you love, what makes you joyful and what makes you angry. Tell me, and I would love to listen to you.”

Charity stayed very still while he took her hand. If one had been looking at her, they might have thought only her eyes seemed really alive, only they showed a sign that she was moved by the man’s words. They glittered with the hope that he was what she longed for, and with the fear that if she exposed herself, she risked the feeling of having her heart broken, and broken far worse than it had been before.

“What do I want from life?” she replied, her reply inflected softly with the intonation of a question. “Why, how can I answer a question when nobody has ever asked it of me before, and so I have never thought to formulate an answer?”

Mr. Harding leaned forward, capturing her eyes with his with such strong compulsion that she felt it would be impossible to look away.

“You have answers,” he said simply. “You have passions, you have joys and fears, and I wish to know them all.”

Part of Charity wanted to draw her hand away, to tell him that it would not be appropriate for her to answer, that it was unseemly for a gentleman to ask.

Even as the thought crossed her mind, she wondered precisely when it was that she had grown afraid.

When they had spoken before, in the grove, everything had been so simple. It had not occurred to her to not speak her mind.

And she had liked that feeling. Even more than liking it, she had felt freed by it.

“I wish to be at liberty,” she said, at last, speaking simply and as swiftly as the words moved from her heart to her lips. “I know that you were displeased by your father sending you away, and I am certain that it cannot have been easy for you. It is never easy for us to be rejected by those that we love, and upon whom we believed we could depend.

“But if your father turns you out of his house, then you may go wherever you wish. Paris, Rome, Vienna, anything is possible. If my own father turns me away, then I have no better place to go than Mrs. Warwick’s kitchen. Not that I am not grateful to her,” she added. “If there is anyone who I had to turn to in my hour of need, then I am grateful that it should be Mrs. Warwick.”

“But it is not the same,” Mr. Harding said. He was looking at her intently, as though he were drinking up every word.

“It is not the same,” she agreed.

“But I must confess that even I do not know precisely what I mean when I say that I wish for liberty. I am not sure that it is even that I wish to travel to Paris or Rome or Vienna — only that I should like the opportunity to do so. I should like the chance to roam the grove according to my fancy if I should wish to do so. I should like to be able to choose whom I speak to, and the terms on which I speak to them.

"I would wish to be able to walk with my friend or on my own at leisure, without fear of censure, without concern that my smallest movement might be the source of gossip that I will then expend a great deal of time and effort escaping.”

Mr. Harding was listening intently to all that she said. He left a considerable pause before he replied as if to ensure that she had completed the expression of her thoughts.

“But, if I may point it out, I believe that everything that you say — although true, and reasonable, and perhaps the argument of any rational creature — it seems a great pity that the only thing you wish for in life, the only thing that you crave, is to be free from the constraints that you find unpleasant. Do you not wish for anything in itself? Surely there is something else that your heart longs for, beyond the ability to roam freely?”

Charity thought about the question for several moments, bending her head in concentration before she replied.

“I fancy that I should like to write,” she said at last. “Whenever I think of the places that you have traveled to, the things you must have seen, my mind is occupied by considerations of the characters you must have encountered while you were there. I long to take pen-portraits of all the peculiar people and places, and to render them such that they will be preserved for all time, even though what is recorded is over within moments.”

“Ah!” Mr. Harding exclaimed warmly. “So you are a writer! Perhaps I should have suspected it all along!”

Charity colored at his words. She had never thought of herself as being anything much beyond the daughter of a clergyman. The idea that she might be a writer — aspiring or otherwise — brought her such a peculiar mixture of pain and pleasure, that she scarcely knew whether to laugh or weep at his words.

“But you must not confine yourself,” Mr. Harding continued, his voice low and rich with feeling. “I would not have you think that you could only exercise your talents if you were in some place or the other. No, Miss Miller. I have seen your gift of perception. I have heard you speak and marveled at your way with words, the way that they seem to bypass cliche and reach straight for my heart.

“I am very grateful to you for sharing these dreams with me. I fancy that you have never expressed them to anyone before. Is that the case?”

Charity could think of very little beyond the warmth of his hand, the deep amber of his eyes, the way that he looked at her as though he were drinking her in. She nodded.

“Thank you.” He reached a hand across the kitchen table and rising a little from the rough wooden bench where he sat, he leaned forward and placed one large, gentle hand underneath her delicate chin.

“It is a great pleasure to get to know you a little better,” he said, his eyes so close to her, exerting such a gravitational force upon her, that she felt she might simply fall into them and become lost.

“And I expect you to return the compliment,” she replied, her voice so soft that it threaded into a whisper. “I have shown you my heart, now will you show me yours?”

At that, he leaned forward, enveloping her with the warmth in his eyes, and softly kissed her.