Cora wrapped her arms around Charlotte as her daughter pressed her body to hers and buried her face in Cora's neck. Charlotte did not speak, and she did not seem to be crying—at least, Cora felt no wetness on her skin—but she was shaking, her body trembling against Cora's.

Cora felt her own hands tremble with her fury—how dare this man go near her baby—and she forced them to be still as she stroked Charlotte's loosened hair. It was, she realized quickly, a tangled mess—a result, perhaps, of her struggle with her attacker.

"Darling," Cora whispered, her voice catching on the word, "are you sure you're not hurt?"

"No," Charlotte murmured, her voice muffled. "I'm not hurt."

"It sounds as though you were very brave—you and your sister both."

She felt Charlotte's grip on her tighten, and she kissed the top of her daughter's head, suspecting it was all very near to pouring out. "I was so scared," Charlotte said after a moment, her voice strained. "He just…I…I didn't…"

She could hear her forcing down a sob between each utterance, and she gently shushed her. "Shh, darling. Just let go."

Had it not been for her accident, Cora imagined she would long ago have adopted the traditional stiff upper lip of the English aristocracy and raised her girls the same way. But somewhere in the midst of the tears of pain and frustration and grief that she'd shed so often as a young woman—all while Robert told her he'd never known anyone so strong—she had given up the idea that holding back emotion had any correlation with strength, and she did not encourage Charlotte and Eleanor to restrain their tears any more than she had restrained hers.

And finally, at Cora's soft coaxing, they came, harsh and loud and unyielding, Charlotte shaking in her arms as Cora held her and kissed her and promised her that she was quite safe now. When her storm of weeping had passed, Charlotte pulled back to look at her mother, her eyes red and swollen in a way that made Cora's chest ache. Cora was reaching up to dry her tears with her thumb—she wished she could get up and fetch a handkerchief from her dressing table—when Charlotte said the last words she'd been expecting to hear.

"Mama?" she asked softly. "Are you angry with me?"

"No! No, of course I'm not angry! None of this was your fault, darling—you know that!" Did Charlotte know that? Cora's heart broke a second time at the thought that Charlotte was berating herself for her terror tonight.

Charlotte shook her head, and a dry sob escaped from her throat. "I flirted with him—you saw me flirt with him—I–I gave him the impression that—"

"Shh." Cora laid her finger on her daughter's lips. "You've done nothing wrong. Nothing many young girls wouldn't do when a handsome stranger appears. None of it gave him the right to show up in your bedroom. Nothing would have given him the right to force himself on you."

"But am I…am I ruined anyway, Mama?"

The suggestion made Cora's stomach turn over, but she forced herself to consider the question. The awful, unfair truth of it was that if the story were out, then yes, Charlotte was quite ruined, but…

"No," she said slowly. "No, you won't be ruined. Nothing has happened, and none of it will ever leave this house. Carson will make that very clear to the staff involved."

Charlotte was silent for a few minutes as Cora continued running her fingers through her hair. "Can I stay with you?" she asked at last. "Papa said he would sleep in his dressing room."

Cora nodded, musing, not for the first time, how odd it was to think that both her daughters found some sense of safety in the presence of a woman who could not even stand, and how happy it had always made her. "Of course you can, darling." Charlotte sat up and moved to extinguish the lamp, but Cora reached for her arm. "Let me brush your hair before you lie back down. It'll be a rat's nest in the morning otherwise."

Charlotte gave her a bemused smile and retrieved a hairbrush and a ribbon from the dressing table, then helped Cora into a seated position, propping her against the pillows before sitting down on the bed herself.

As a young mother, Cora had become very fond of brushing her little girls' hair—a duty, along with many others, that would have fallen to the nanny or governess had Cora's lessened social obligations not given her so much more time for motherhood—and had been sad to see them grow old enough to require the services of a housemaid to dress. She welcomed any chance to look after either of them again, and Charlotte, who had closed her eyes as her mother worked, did not seem to mind it either.

Charlotte had long, full, thick blonde hair with a natural bounce to it that took easily to the curls Anna sometimes added, and Cora suspected that it was the envy of many of the young women in Yorkshire. She savored its silky feel against her hands, wondering, as she often did, where Charlotte had gotten it. Both of her daughters were beautiful, with, of course, no resemblance to her or to each other, and she often wondered who their natural mothers had been and what they might have looked like. She could not bring herself to judge either woman for what she assumed must have been out-of-wedlock pregnancies, or for leaving their babies at the Foundling Home; rather, she could not have been more grateful to them for what they had given her, and she had grieved for them both and for what circumstances had forced them to give up.

"I'm not sure it much matters if I'm ruined," Charlotte said suddenly. "I don't think I'm likely to marry."

It was, of course, what Cora privately feared, and she considered her answer a moment before answering. "Why do you say that?" she asked, keeping her voice neutral.

Charlotte shrugged. "Who would marry me?"

"I would think that—"

"Mama, I have no bloodline. I'm not really an earl's daughter, not in any way that matters to the world. I can't imagine anyone is dying for their son to marry a foundling."

Her heart ached sharply to hear her daughter call herself that. "Charlotte, you're not—"

"I know, Mama. I know you're my mother and Papa is my father; I don't feel otherwise. But no other great family cares how much you love me or what papers you've had drawn up."

Cora could not deny it, and she had the sense that Charlotte had given this all just as much thought as she had. "Do you wish to marry?" she asked.

"I'm not sure it really matters to me," Charlotte said after a moment's silence. "I don't need a husband—I'll have a house and a fortune. And there's no one who…that is, if I fell in love with someone, I suppose I might feel differently, but…no, I don't know that I wish to marry."

The answer did not surprise her: Charlotte was not Eleanor, who had fallen for every man who had crossed her path. She might flirt briefly, as she had with Pamuk, but Cora had never known her to take any serious interest in a man. It didn't help the situation, in Cora's opinion: if Charlotte would look twice at a younger son, perhaps he might fall for her and be willing to marry her in spite of her birth. And while Charlotte was correct that she didn't need a husband for economic reasons, Cora was not sure she was prepared for a life alone, with no social position at all after the deaths of her parents.

"Do you wish to be alone, then?" Cora asked gently.

"No, but…I'm not sure I really think of it that way. I'd like to take in a child, the way you did."

"That would be lovely, but you can't adopt if you're not married."

"I could take a ward, though, couldn't I?"

"You could," Cora said slowly, "although I imagine it might be rather difficult as a single woman. And I would think that people would…talk. It would be easier if you were married."

"I didn't say it wouldn't be," Charlotte said, irritation creeping into her voice. "And I didn't say it wouldn't be preferable. I just said I wouldn't mind if I didn't have a husband, and that I can't imagine how I would."

"I know, darling," Cora soothed. She held her breath for a moment and then decided that there would be no better time. "What about…Matthew?"

"Cousin Matthew? Matthew Crawley?"

Cora winced at the disbelief in her daughter's tone. "Yes, him." He had seemed perfect for Charlotte since she'd first heard his name. As the son of a middle-class doctor, he had no business turning up his nose at an earl's acknowledged daughter, regardless of her birth, and they would be as well-matched as she and Robert had been: he would provide Charlotte with a title; she would provide him with an estate and a fortune. And he had seemed kind and decent and hard-working, the sort of man she wanted for her daughter, and the sort who would love his wife.

Yet Charlotte seemed determined to despise him.

"Surely you're not serious. I could never marry him."

"I'm quite serious. Whatever do you imagine is wrong with him? You haven't liked him since he arrived, and your father and I have seen nothing objectionable in him."

"He's so…arrogant. Very full of himself."

"I've never felt that about him—"

"That's because you've never heard the way he speaks in private."

"I'm sorry?"

"He…never mind."

"What did you overhear him saying, darling?" Cora pressed, not sure whether to think Charlotte had misunderstood through eavesdropping or whether there was more to Matthew than met the eye.

"Nothing important, Mama. I just…don't think he's as lovely as you do."

Cora wanted to tell her to promise to think on it, but she held her tongue, believing that Charlotte did not need to be lectured tonight. "There we are," she said, tying off the finished braid and passing her daughter the brush.

Charlotte helped her lie back down with a kiss, returned the brush to the dressing table, and extinguished the lamp.