Page 82 of Charity Nightingale Heals Her Husband

“Eventually,” Charity said, thumbing through another few letters. One was an invitation to a house party later in the year that promised to be particularly salacious. That one she would set aside for Anthony. It wasn’t quite a Cyprians’ ball, but it was at least adjacent enough to be worthy of consideration. “For now, we are simply enjoying being married.”

“Oh, are you?” Phoebe asked, and Charity marveled that she had managed to restrain herself to only the barest of sardonic inflections.

“Yes,” she snipped back. “And I intend to be every bit as intolerable about it as you lot have been.”

“Intolerable!” Diana said, choking on a laugh.

“You know well enough you have been,” Charity said. “And now it is my turn.” To have her own perfect slice of paradise, and the sort of love she could not have conceived of only months ago. The sort that made getting out of bed in the morning a chore. The sort that made returning to it each evening the most anticipated part of her day. The sort that made her toes curl and created an effervescent feeling in her throat, as if she were always just on the verge of a giddy giggle.

“Lord,” Phoebe moaned. “She is going to beworse.”

Charity cast the remaining stack of unopened letters at Phoebe’s head, though the attack was somewhat less effective than she had hoped, since the bulk of them careened wildly through the air and fluttered toward the ground.

“We are trying to pare down this mess, not to create a new one,” Lydia said on a laugh as she plucked a letter from where it had become stuck in Phoebe’s bodice and handed it back to Charity.

“Oh, very well.” Charity snatched the letter from Lydia’s fingers and settled in once more. The letter had been folded into a square, its creases imperfect, as if the writer had thrown the letter together hastily, under some manner of strain or stress.

It bore Felicity’s name in the upper corner, rendered in a spiky scrawl, a far cry from her regular, elegant script. An odd, unsettled feeling curdled in the pit of Charity’s stomach as she pried up the pleats, unfolding the letter.

It was dated weeks ago, only days after she had fled London for Mercy’s estate in the countryside. “Oh, no,” she whispered, her heart leaping into her throat. “Oh,no.”

Dearest Charity, the letter read, in a hurried scratch that seemed to devolve further with every word.By the time you receive this letter, I will be married. For the love of God, please help me.