London, England
October 2nd, 1831
It was a lovely day for a funeral. Of course, any day would have been lovely for this particular funeral—but today had turned out particularly fine. Clear, unseasonably warm, and not a cloud in the sky. As if the earth itself celebrated the interment of the miserable bastard presently ensconced within the cheapest and most shoddily-constructed coffin which Charity had been able to find. Only a pine box, unvarnished, unornamented, likely not even sanded, though Charity had not cared to touch it to confirm. But then it had cost only four shillings, and she had thought even that a price beyond what its occupant deserved.
The pallbearers—that was to say, the undertaker and his assistant, for nobody else had come to the funeral to take up that task—labored beneath the weight of the coffin and the cadaver within as they staggered toward the freshly-dug grave with unsteady, awkward gaits. The reverend stammered through his liturgy, his once-lethargic drone tumbling into a rapid patter as the coffin approached the grave at too swift a pace for his liking.
The undertaker’s assistant, a scrawny lad of perhaps eighteen years, faltered just at the end, stumbling in his attempt to move around the grave for a better angle at which to lower the coffin. Instead his knees trembled and bowed, at last collapsing beneath him. Reflexively his grip loosened, slacking upon the coffin as he dropped to the ground.
The undertaker gave a startled squawk as the coffin slid from his own shoulder. Charity watched, brows lifted in sudden interest, as the coffin fell to the earth with a magnificent, ground-shuddering crash, half its bulk balanced precariously at the very edge of the open grave.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Most especially not the dead man.
“I can kick him in if you like,” Charity offered brightly, smoothing the scarlet silk of her skirts.
“It’s no trouble. Really.”
The reverend glowered, but that was hardly surprising. He’d been glowering since she had arrived, dressed head to toe in bright, glaring red. Her most vivid and cheerful clothing, tailored to perfection, designed to catch the eye. When the sunlight hit just right, the gold threads woven within the cloth glowed, and the whole gown shimmered with the capricious passion of flame. Or like hellfire, she supposed the reverend might himself have suggested.
“Madam,” the reverend hissed.
“May I remind you that this is a funeral.”
“I am aware,” Charity returned, meeting that condemning gaze without so much as a flinch.
“I have paid for it, after all.”
“One wonders why you would bear the expense, when you plainly see no need to mark it for the somber occasion it is meant to be.” The thin arches of his brows flattened into grim lines. The beginning of a sneer curled his lip.
“Only,” Charity said, with composed serenity, “because pauper’s graves go frequently unmarked. I should like to know where my father is buried, so that when I’ve a mind to spit upon him, I know precisely where his decaying corpse might be found.”
As if to punctuate the insolent remark, the cheap, thin pine of the coffin groaned, shuddered—and tipped past its point of balance upon the precipice of the open grave, falling into it with a crash that splintered the still air.
Probably the coffin had splintered, too, but Charity could not quite bring herself to care.
“Please,” she said to the reverend.
“Do continue.” Her blithe, cheery tone drew a deepening scowl from the reverend, but then she was no stranger to such disapproving looks, and had long since ceased to let them affect her.
With a dour shake of his head and a muted grumble beneath his breath, the reverend proceeded through the last of the funeral rites in a stilted, rote fashion which left little doubt that his mind was less upon his task than it was upon Charity’s complete lack of filial piety.
There was an awkward moment just at the end, when the reverend lapsed into silence following the conclusion of the rites. As he tucked away his Bible, his gaze fell upon the small bundle of rosemary stalks left beside the grave, meant to be given to mourners to offer to the grave of the deceased in the spirit of remembrance.
There were no mourners here. Charity had thought she had made that point clear enough from the outset, and yet the reverend was still a man—only a man, afflicted with the same blight endemic to their sex which they so often inflicted upon those they considered inferior. Which was to say, of course, women. And so he had assumed that he had known better than she when she had informed him that the wretched old bastard would be neither missed nor mourned by anyone at all.
The reverend drew himself up, lifted his chin, and summoned every bit of patronizing condescension to which he could lay claim. Which, in Charity’s experience of men of the cloth, was rather a lot.
“Madam,” he said, his voice dripping with scorn.
“Will you not show your father the respect he is due?”
For a long, tense moment, Charity met that contemptuous gaze with one of her own. The reverend was the first to flinch, his gaze shying from the directness of hers. At long last, Charity rose from the rickety chair she had all too recently occupied, brushed out her skirts, and made for the grave.
Instead of a sprig of rosemary, Charity thrust her fingers into a mound of displaced dirt, gathering up a handful of it to cast atop the coffin.
“The world is well rid of you, you evil bastard,” she said with poisonous sweetness as she let the dirt fall from her fingers.
“And may God rot your miserable soul.”
“Madam!” the reverend blustered, his jaw hanging open in shock and horror.
“Madam, it is the duty of all children to revere and honor their parents as they rightly deserve.”
“I quite agree,” Charity said, dusting the dirt off her fingers—though thin slivers of it remained caked beneath her nails.
“Rest assured, he has received far more than his due. I gave serious consideration to tipping him into a ditch and leaving him there to rot.” And with that, she left the reverend still gaping in mute astonishment near the open grave as she turned to leave.
Charity tilted her face to the soft autumn sunshine—a rarity for the time of year—and enjoyed the warmth of it upon her cheeks. Once, the predisposition toward freckling had plagued her, but these past two years since she had retired her former profession had freed her from the obligation of maintaining quite so strict a beauty regimen as she had once sustained.
She picked a wandering path through the graveyard, which was mostly deserted. Death, she thought, tended to make people uncomfortable. To be reminded of one’s own mortality with a stroll through the headstones and statuaries marking those who had come and gone before one was not a particularly comfortable experience for most. But she had seen more than her fair share of it all, death and suffering. She had been reminded of her own mortality too many times to find it anything but an inevitable path all would one day walk, rather than a threat lingering forever at the fringes of her mind.
Her hack was waiting for her still, but she was in no particular hurry. The ceremony had taken at most fifteen minutes; the driver would have waited upwards of an hour for what she had paid him. But as she trekked back up the hill behind the parish church where the graveyard was laid toward where the hack awaited her return, a solitary figure came into view, crouched near a weathered headstone some distance away.
Charity’s heart lurched in her chest with a sort of helpless disquiet she hadn’t experienced in years. It wasn’t the man’s presence here in the graveyard, head bowed in solemn contemplation, which disturbed her. It was the labyrinthine mass of scars which cut across the right half of his face. It was the patch that neatly covered the entirety of his right eye, concealing a past injury more severe even than those she could plainly see gouged into his flesh.
Her feet stuttered, stopped, stilled—as if roots had crawled from deep beneath the earth and tied her there. The panicked flutter of her heartbeat pulsed in her ears, drowning out the sound of the breeze rustling through the trees. Drowning out everything but the short, sharp breath she sucked into her lungs. It couldn’t be him. It couldn’t be. She’d seen war wounded men enough to know that scars abounded; that hundreds, perhaps thousands of them had similar scars.
But not, she was desperately afraid, quite so similar as that. She had seen that particular pattern of scars in dreams—in nightmares—for years upon years.
The harsh breath she had taken disturbed the peaceful silence of the graveyard. The man’s head jerked toward her, dark hair ruffled by the slight breeze, a frown already tugging at his mouth. And yes—it was him. It could only be him.
She had stitched that scar which neatly bisected his lower lip herself. With hands that had trembled with exhaustion, fingers that had slipped in the profusion of blood which had poured over them. Slow, delicate stitches, in the futile effort of saving flesh that had been beyond ruined when he’d come to her, as so many others had before him.
Charity fisted her damp palms in the blazing red fabric of her skirts, striving to rub away the slickness of sweat that had come upon them. Her breath whistled shrilly through her teeth. He was meant to be dead. She’d assumed he was. All these years, she had had no reason to suspect otherwise.
His one good eye—the only one left remaining to him—narrowed upon her as he rose to his feet once more.
“You need not stare, Madam. I am well aware of my appearance; I do not require any such horrified theatricality to remind me of it.”
The rebuke was delivered in such a frosty tone that it shook Charity free of the bewildered stupor into which she had so suddenly plunged. Her shoulders snapped straight; her mouth shut with an audible click of her teeth.
“My apologies,” she said, and the words sounded solid and even despite the rapid patter of her heart behind the cage of her ribs.
“It wasn’t my intention—”
“I don’t give a damn for your intentions.”
Her spine straightened to steel rigidity, jaw taut and tense. Her eyes narrowed to a glare to rival his own.
“You surprised me,” she ground out between clenched teeth.
“I have just come from burying my father. I did not expect to cross paths with another. Your face is not of the least concern to me. It is your manner which I find appalling.”
A sneer curled up one corner of his ruined lips.
“I like liars no better than gawkers.”
“For what reason would I lie? To you, a—a stranger to me.”
“You would hardly be the first to do so. Do you think me unaware of what is said of me? How people whisper to one another of the duke with so monstrous a face?” he accused, spitting the words with no small amount of rancor.
“You cannot expect I would so easily swallow such a feeble excuse. What manner of daughter wears such a color to her father’s funeral?”
A bloody duke? “One who is mightily glad to be rid of the miserable old bastard at last,” she said.
“He will not be missed.” Somehow she managed what might have passed for a polite nod—or as polite of one as she could—and snapped, “If you will excuse me.”
He took a swift step back as she charged past him, as if he feared she might bowl him over on her progress. Charity kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, straight upon the carriage waiting for her return. She could feel his gaze upon her as she retreated, and she dared not look back for even a moment.
The driver jumped down and flung open the door as she charged toward it, and her heart did not begin to slow until the door had closed behind her once more and the carriage had begun to roll away.
A duke. A damned duke! Charity pressed her cold hands to her hot face, let her breath escape on a wheezing sigh of devastation.
Somehow, a dead man had resurrected himself. Her long-dead husband had crawled out of the grave she had thought him buried within sixteen years ago. And Charity Nightingale found herself now, against all odds, a most unlikely duchess.
***
Major Neville Rowe had died at Waterloo, and Anthony Sharp had not visited his grave until now. For a great long while—well over a decade now, and closer to two—he’d not been in England to do it. And it had seemed a fruitless thing, besides, given that he’d known that in the inescapable carnage of war, what little there had been left of the man would hardly have been enough to justify a proper burial.
There was a headstone here, weathered with years of rain and sun and snow. But the grave itself, he knew, would likely be empty. Just a plot of land for the man’s bereaved family to come to mourn. A space reserved, but unoccupied.
Weeks it had taken to clear the battlefield of the war dead. Tens of thousands of lives lost. Men whom Anthony had come to know throughout the campaign, come to respect. Men he had mourned, once he’d learned of their fates. Men whose bodies had been carried back to camp on carts. Men who had come back in pieces. And men who had simply gone missing, marked down as dead when the reality had been that there had been little enough left of them to be found to put proof to it.
And Anthony—Anthony had been languishing in a medical tent through most of that last battle which had taken so many lives, the victim of a spate of shrapnel that had shredded his face and taken his right eye. He’d thought himself the most unfortunate, the most miserable, God-abandoned wretched soul. But so many of his brothers in arms had given so much more than had he. Too many had given all.
“God rest you, Major,” he said, placing one hand upon the weathered surface of the headstone. A good man and a better officer.
“I’m sorry it has taken me so long to pay my respects.” But then, he thought—Rowe would have understood. That some things were simply too painful, that years might pass and the pain of it would still feel fresh and raw.
The clatter of carriage wheels on an ill-maintained road sheared through the stillness, disturbing once more the peaceful silence of the graveyard. She was gone then, the woman in scarlet. The one who had looked upon his face with such horror.
It wasn’t an unusual reaction to the severity of his scars. He’d long been intimately acquainted with the instinctive horrified gasps, the widened eyes, the disgust evident in the curl of a lip. Then would come the dropped gazes, perhaps even a hasty retreat or a swift sidestep away from him—as if the ugliness which had been carved into his face had rendered him more beast than man.
It had been bearable, once, when he had still been only a third son. The spare’s spare, not remotely expected to inherit. It had become unendurable when the title had been thrust upon him—when those same people who would have cringed from him had instead begun to attempt to curry favor, making halfhearted efforts to mask their distaste. It had never been convincing. Not once.
Mamas eager to see a beloved daughter become a duchess shoving their little treasures before him, never mind that those daughters had too often gone green and sickly-looking at the mere prospect of an introduction. Not even to be a duchess, one such girl had whispered behind her fan. Not even to be a queen, she had continued, much to the chagrin of her mother.
Anthony had much preferred the honest revulsion to the feigned acceptance. But the stares and the gasps had worn on him over the years, a chorus of shock and dismay that followed him wherever he went. Worse, now that he was back in England at last, and so much on public display.
Slowly he climbed to his feet, wincing at the tug and pull of stiff muscles, remnants of damage sustained in the war which had never quite repaired itself. In the distance, revealed now over the tops of headstones and between the ornamental statues which peppered the rolling lawn of the graveyard, two men labored beside a mound of displaced earth, heaving massive shovelfuls of dirt down into the gaping grave that lay between them.
So she hadn’t lied, then, he supposed. She had come for a funeral. He wondered that there did not seem to be any other mourners present. A miserable old bastard, she’d said. Perhaps that much had been true as well.
A rustle of grass to his right had his head swiveling about, a snarl clenched between his teeth.
“Do not ever,” Anthony said harshly, to the mousy-looking reverend who had leapt back at the sudden attention he had attained, “come up upon my right side.” The side most severely wounded, with the eye he had lost.
“I beg your pardon, Your Grace,” the reverend said, and his knuckles went white upon the binding of the Bible he held in his hands.
“Captain Sharp,” Anthony corrected sourly, though he didn’t expect the man would heed it. Few others seemed to understand his objections to being addressed by a title he had never been meant to inherit.
An audible swallow rolled down the reverend’s throat as he cast his gaze about, seeking a place to settle his gaze other than upon Anthony’s face.
“I only wished to inquire whether you were in need of…counsel.”
And he was undoubtedly now regretting it.
“No,” he said. Not from a man of the cloth, at any rate. Again his gaze flicked toward the open grave.
“That woman,” he said.
“The grave belongs to her father?”
“Yes, Your Grace.” It had come out a hesitant squeak, as if the reverend had feared he had produced the wrong answer.
“A good, pious man he was.”
Anthony snorted. Piety had rarely, in his experience, equated with goodness. He could count any number of people who filled the pews on Sunday mornings only to embody every deadly sin once again before nightfall.
“He deserved a better daughter than that woman,” the reverend continued.
“One wonders how he bore the shame of it, knowing what she had become.”
Anthony guessed that he had been meant to commiserate with the man, perhaps offer agreement. Instead he could offer only a blank stare.
“I’ve not long been in London,” he said.
“I’m afraid I don’t take your meaning.”
The reverend pounced upon the opportunity to deride the woman.
“She’s a whore,” he said, in tones so scathing, so contemptuous, that Anthony could only wonder that venom had not dripped from his tongue alongside it.
“A courtesan. A—A—”
“I’m familiar with the concept,” Anthony drawled.
“But I wonder that a man of the cloth should be so openly scornful. You are in the business of saving souls, are you not?”
The reverend drew himself up to his full height, which was somewhat less than impressive.
“She is well beyond salvation,” he said.
“Without even the slightest capacity for shame. To all accounts, she revels in her sins.”
And why should she not, Anthony wondered idly—what purpose was there in heaping shame upon one’s own shoulders, when there was clearly no lack of people ready and willing to perform that task themselves? “One has to admire the efficiency of it,” he said, allowing a sardonic inflection to color his words.
“To give the shaming over to someone else. Frees up a great deal of her time, I would imagine.”
The reverend gave no indication of awareness that he was being mocked. Instead he lifted his chin, let out a sigh that Anthony supposed he was meant to interpret as exasperation; a sort of saintly suffering in the face of such marked disrespect as the woman in scarlet had shown.
“Honor thy father and mother,” the reverend said.
“Not my words, you understand, Your Grace, but our Lord’s. And yet Miss Nightingale came to her father’s funeral clothed in scarlet silk, like the scarlet woman she is.”
Miss Nightingale. It wasn’t such an uncommon name, he supposed. There had to be hundreds of Nightingales in England—but it was still something of a shock to hear it. Perhaps she was a distant relation. And if her father had been buried here in this parish graveyard, then he had been local to the area. There could be other Nightingales nearby, ones who might know where one of their own had been laid to rest. If even she had been; if her body had made the long journey back to England to be interred upon her native soil.
A grave he ought to have visited long before now, just as with the rest of them.
“Does the rest of the family live nearby?” he asked.
“There was a Nightingale I…knew, once. I’m curious to know if they might be any relation.” Or might at least point him in the right direction, did they happen to know it.
The reverend gave a grave shake of his head.
“Mr. Nightingale was the last of them,” he said.
“The poor man had only two daughters, and neither of any great filial piety. To the best of my knowledge, no one is of much certainty where the younger daughter, Felicity, has gone off to. But the elder daughter, Charity—well, you’ve seen for yourself, Your Grace, just what she’s come to.”
Charity. And not only Charity, but Felicity as well. For daughters of a father so pious and devout as the reverend had claimed, perhaps virtue names would not be so out of the ordinary. But the incredible happenstance of those two names in particular, when there were so very many from which to choose—no. It could not be only a coincidence.
“Mr. Nightingale,” he said, and cast his memory back to the last time he’d heard those names together. To secrets whispered to a dying man, who could not be expected to betray them. To the voice of the girl who had spent so many nights by the side of his bed, soothing a man wracked with pain and fever who had not been expected to survive the severity of his injuries. A memory recalled only in the softness of her voice, in the cool touch of her gentle hands, for, wounded, stitched, and bandaged as he had been, he had never once seen her face.
“That would not be Mr. Reginald Nightingale, would it?”
The reverend blinked, his brows lifting in surprise.
“Yes, Your Grace,” he said.
“You are familiar with the family?”
In a manner of speaking. Anthony glanced over his shoulder, seeing only the settling of disturbed dust in the distance; the last echoes of the carriage that had sped away from the graveyard only too recently.
She had not lied, then. Charity Nightingale had not been horrified to see his face. She had been horrified to see him.
“There is no headstone as yet, Your Grace,” the reverend continued, “but should you like to pay your respects—”
“Not bloody likely.” If half of those admissions she had made to him all those years ago had had so much as a grain of truth within them, then Mr. Nightingale was already rotting in hell.
“Probably he has got exactly the sort of funeral he deserved.” A mockery of mourning for the miserable old bastard.
And Anthony had one fewer grave to visit.
His wife was somewhat less deceased than he had believed.