Page 26 of Miss Beresford and the Beast

“It is a book!” She raced to pick it up.

It was a red, cloth-bound volume Magnus had never seen before. Charlotte held it reverently in her hands.

“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne,” she read aloud. Her eyes found his. There was a flare of excitement in her gaze. “This is my book.”

Magnus’s pulse quickened. “Is it?”

“I think it is.”

“You don’t know it for a fact?”

“Not for certain. It’s only a feeling. And look!” Again she ventured into the razor-sharp brambles. “A basket!” she declared. “And here’s another book with it.” Rising from the shrubbery, she held a broken wicker basket in one hand and an album with half-leather bindings in the other. “Why, it’s a sketchbook!”

Magnus took custody of the basket and the novel, freeing Charlotte’s hands to examine the sketches. He viewed them over her shoulder, his frown deepening with each turn of the page.

The first held a picture of a grand country house. An idyllic Palladian mansion of honey-colored stone, with verdant trees, lush lawns, and a liberal sprinkling of haphazardly placed forget-me-nots.

Her home, perhaps?

A real home. Not one that had been abandoned and neglected. Not one that had been cursed.

The next page revealed a portrait of a young woman. She resembled Charlotte after a fashion, though she was somewhat shorter and plumper, with pronounced freckles and a pair of delicate, round-lensed spectacles perched on her nose. She sat at a writing desk, a pen in her hand.

“Agatha,” Charlotte murmured.

Magnus gave her an alert look. “Is that her name?”

Charlotte nodded slowly. There was a vague flicker of memory in her eyes. “Y-Yes.” Her voice was uncertain. “I think she’s my sister.”

Magnus swallowed hard. “Do you⁠—?”

“I don’t recall anything else. Not yet. But I do remember her face. And her name.”

A pit formed in Magnus’s stomach.

No, she hadn’t remembered everything. But it was a start. The first stone in the avalanche, Magnus suspected, with the rest sure to follow. Another moment and she would recall who she was. She’d recall who Magnus was, too.

Or, more to the point, who he wasn’t.

Something within him dreaded the turn of the next page. It would be her intended, he was sure of it. Either him or the fellow she was meant to have met today by the bridge. A flashpoint to remind her of the sort of man she would really attach herself to. Not an ill-tempered, unpolished brute. It would be a man who was handsome, decent, good.

But when Charlotte at last left off gazing at the image of her sister, when she finally turned to the next sketch, it wasn’t an elegant gentleman drawn upon the page, but an image of a fat tabby cat.

What had begun as a flicker of memory in Charlotte’s eyes leapt into a burning flame. Her features softened with unmistakable affection. “Mr. Aloysius.”

Magnus stared at her. “What?”

“Mr. Aloysius,” she said again. “He’s my cat.”

“Your cat?” Magnus’s prior apprehensions about her returning memory crumbled to dust. If that was the cat’s name, then who in blazes was the little beast hiding under the wardrobe?

And who was the man she was engaged to back in Somerset?

Good God. Perhaps her brains were well and truly scrambled after all. Or perhaps…

“Turner,” Magnus snarled.

Magnus returned Charlotte to the house on the pretext of her having exhausted herself. It wasn’t entirely a ruse. She was visibly unsteady after her trek through the gardens, her face pale and her hands trembling as she clutched at the dubious treasures she’d found strewn among the brambles. The basket, the sketchbook, and the novel. Remnants of the person she’d been before she’d fallen from the wall and struck her head on the stones.