Captain Sharp, come and ‘ave drink wiv us!”
Anthony’s head jerked up. And so had several others, the pointed glares of half a dozen other gentlemen presently occupying tables at the club staring in the direction from which the shout had come. Chris waved at him from across the room, from the rear of a table occupied by several other gentlemen whom Anthony did not recognize.
He hadn’t planned for company this afternoon, but at least he knew this particular gentleman, in a manner of speaking. At the very least it would be a welcome distraction from the disorder of his thoughts. His glass was presently empty, besides, and it looked as though Chris’ table had been recently supplied with a bottle of some spirit or other.
With one hand he seized the small potted plant he’d gingerly placed upon his table, pushed back his chair, and crossed the room.
“Your brothers-in-law?” he inquired of Chris as the gentlemen made a place for him there amongst them.
“One of ‘em, at least,” Chris said, with a nod at one of the gentleman; a dark-haired fellow.
“Rafe. My sister’s ‘usband, not my wife’s brother, thank God. And this one ‘ere is Rafe’s brother, Marcus.”
The two men did bear a sort of familial resemblance to one another, Anthony supposed.
“Your brother-in-law’s brother,” Anthony said as he settled into the chair and extended his glass as the man in question lifted the bottle of spirits toward him to pour.
“That’s more or less a brother-in-law, wouldn’t you say?”
“Fuck,” said Chris.
“I s’pose it might as well be,” he said, and hiked his thumb toward the last gentleman.
“Ben’s my sister’s ‘usband’s sister’s ‘usband. What does that make ‘im, then?”
“Confusing,” Anthony said.
In perfect unison, all four men cast back their heads and laughed uproariously, earning another round of glares from the other patrons of the club.
Anthony had not, in point of fact, intended to say anything amusing, but he found it somewhat heartening, for once, to be the originator of a joke instead of the butt of one.
“Ah, Christ,” Chris said, swiping his hand across his eyes.
“Charity said we was to be nice to ye if we ‘appened upon ye in public. But I don’t think it’ll be so ‘ard as I thought it might.”
“Charity told you to be nice to me?”
“Well, just me, really,” Chris said.
“The rest of ‘em—they are nice, more’s the pity. But ye got to ‘ave friends of a sort, don’t ye?”
“Hell, I don’t know.” He’d had them, once, he supposed. In school; in the military. But it had been damned near two decades since then, and his closest friends in the years since had been his brothers, with whom he had regularly corresponded. In recent days, it had been a struggle only to hold the tatters of his family together. He’d had neither the time nor the inclination for friends—even if he might’ve managed to find anyone willing to claim him as such.
“I suppose I must have, eventually.” Or try to, at any rate.
“Well, I’m not exactly the sort a man in yer position should claim,” Chris said.
“But these ones? Ye couldn’t hope fer better.”
“What have you got there?” asked one of the brothers—Marcus, Anthony thought he had been called—with a nod toward the plant still in his hand.
Anthony lifted the pot, set it in the middle of the table.
“Dionaea muscipula,” he said.
“Venus’s Flytrap.”
“You brought a plant to a club?” the other brother asked, with an inquisitive lift of his brows. Strangely, there was no judgment in his voice; only a mild curiosity.
“I’ve only just acquired it,” Anthony said, “and I haven’t been home yet. It seemed imprudent to leave it in the carriage, as it cost a damned fortune.”
“Did it?” Clearly fascinated with the prospect of so small a plant commanding a significant price, Chris leaned closer to get a better look.
“Can’t imagine why,” he said.
“It’s ugly as sin.”
Anthony had thought there was an odd sort of beauty in the clamshell-like leaves, the prongs which stuck out from them like feathery teeth, waiting to trap something within.
“It’s carnivorous,” he said.
“It eats flies and other such insects. It was meant as a gift—”
“Not for Charity, surely,” Chris said, aghast.
“No,” Anthony said.
“No, of course not. But—I’m not certain I wish to give it to its intended recipient.”
“Whyever not?” Ben asked.
“I don’t mind telling you I’d want it out of my sight as swiftly as was possible.”
“Because it’s meant for a woman,” Rafe said, cannily.
“A courting gift?”
“I don’t know that I want it to be,” Anthony said. And at the sum it had cost and the lengths to which he’d gone to track it down, it would have to be. He ought to know by now; he’d been in Lady Cecily’s company often enough. And while he felt a certain affection for her, a friendship of sorts, it wasn’t love.
And he was beginning to believe it never would be.
It was a problem that would not solve itself now. He would have to give it due consideration at some point, he knew, before the plant withered and died of neglect, for he hadn’t the faintest idea of how he was meant to care for it. But at this moment, he had a glass of obscenely fine liquor in his hand and the company of a number of gentlemen who might, however improbable a thing it was, offer him friendship, and it would be foolish to let either go to waste.
***
The staccato clip of shoes upon the floor was warning enough to Charity that some manner of mischief was afoot. Or about to be, at any rate, given the speed at which they hastened toward the front of the house from somewhere within its depths.
Ah, well. She’d considered it something of a miracle that she had made so many visits to the house without the duchess making another nasty scene. It looked as though her luck had finally run out. She settled back in her seat upon the sofa within the drawing room, turning the page of the book she’d filched from the library.
The duchess did not disappoint her expectations. She flew into the drawing room as if she had ridden in upon the very fires of hell, her blue eyes blazing with antipathy. Some incandescent sound of wrath curdled in her throat just before her mouth fell open, and—
“I wouldn’t, were I you,” Charity advised sweetly, turning another page.
The duchess drew in a breath.
“How dare you!” she snarled in response.
“Easily,” Charity said, striving for a bored inflection.
“And with great pleasure. If you have come only to cast your venom at me, Your Grace, pray don’t bother with the effort. I have heard it all before, and from better people.”
The duchess reeled back a step from this new offense. “How—”
“Dare I,” Charity interjected, with a simpering coo.
“We have just had this conversation, Your Grace. You cannot hurt me. You do not frighten me. And I don’t, as a general rule, choose to make war upon sad old women.” Though by the tone of her voice, she let the suggestion linger in the air between them that did the duchess tempt her to make an exception, she most certainly intended to win.
The duchess quivered with rage, her hands fisting at her sides.
“You—you grasping little shrew,” she seethed.
Charity smothered a yawn with her fingers.
“Again, Your Grace, you have said nothing which is unknown to me.”
“So you admit to it!” The duchess notched her chin higher, her lip curled in a sneer.
“You come into my home as if you own it—”
“I do,” Charity said calmly, and closed the book in her hand, setting it aside.
“Need I remind you, Your Grace, a husband and wife are one person under the law? Everything your son owns, so do I. So yes, I own your home. I own the food upon your table and the clothes upon your back.”
The slightest flicker of self-doubt drifted through the duchess’ eyes, and her jaw clenched as she swallowed hard. Perhaps, Charity thought, she had begun to consider the possibility that she had made an error in forcing this confrontation.
Charity bit back a sigh.
“I do not say this to hurt you,” she said.
“I say it because it is true. For however long we are married—”
The duchess summoned forth a scoff, though it sounded considerably weaker than perhaps she had hoped.
“No doubt you have played your part well enough to ensure that there will be no escape from you,” she said.
“A woman of your stamp knows well enough how to turn the mind of a man too na?ve to know better.”
Oh, now that was enough. It was one thing for the duchess to disparage her, when she could not have given less of a care for the woman’s opinion, but it was another thing entirely for her to disparage Anthony.
Charity rose from her seat and drew herself up to her full height, which was still some inches from the duchess’ own statuesque figure, but she fancied the force of her ire made her appear taller to the woman who had shrunk back slightly from her.
“Do you know,” she said, in the sibilant, venomous hiss of the snake the duchess imagined her to be, “my own mother was a flighty, unfaithful bitch of a woman. She abandoned three daughters across two families, ruined lives with her lies, and left nothing but misery and desolation in her wake. My father was an evil bastard, who, if there is indeed a just and merciful God in Heaven, is presently burning in the deepest bowls of Hell. The day he died, I laughed for pure joy, and I gave him the pauper’s burial he deserved with a headstone only to mark his resting place should I have a sudden fancy to spit up his rotting corpse. And still I would take either of them—both of them—rather than suffering a mother like you.”
Those icy blue eyes widened, and the duchess’ cheeks flushed a vibrant red.
“Do not presume to cast judgment upon me,” she said between the clench of her teeth.
“You couldn’t possibly understand.”
“I understand that you have but one son left to you, Your Grace,” Charity returned.
“A good mother would treasure all of her children. But that isn’t you, is it? There is no feeling left within you. Do you even love your son, Your Grace? Did you ever?”
Crack.
The slap surprised both of them, at least for a moment. But the duchess sucked in a breath and shook herself free of her shock.
“Of course I love my son!” she hissed.
“How dare you suggest otherwise? My only desire as a mother is to save him from you!”
Well, that was something, at least, Charity thought as she worked her jaw gingerly. Her cheek stung something dreadful. Probably the duchess had swung hard enough to leave quite a mark. Her left ear had a bit of a ring to it, but that would soon fade. Still, she had managed to wring an admission from the duchess that had seemed promising. She only hoped it would prove to be worth her trouble.
As the ringing in her ear began to subside, the furious pound of boots sounded in the foyer. The duchess’ shoulders stiffened, her face going pale.
And Anthony stormed into the room, no doubt drawn down at last by the noise they had made. His dark gaze settled upon his mother, frigid and forbidding, as he snarled expectantly, “What the hell has happened here?”
***
It had not, in fact, taken any great genius to calculate what had likely occurred in his absence. Charity’s left cheek bore the stark imprint of a slender hand. A tiny streak of blood marred her lower lip, though Anthony didn’t think she was yet aware of it. He stared hard at his mother, watched the flush of ire receding slowly from her cheeks, fading in blotches to an ugly pallor. Her gaze dropped to the floor, no doubt waiting in silence to hear Charity accuse her. To hear Anthony make good on his promise to send her away, as he’d threatened to do not so very long ago.
There was no defense for this. Mother had struck a woman who had had every right to expect cordiality beneath his roof, while under his protection—however nominally. Unforgiveable. He opened his mouth—
“We had a bit of a row,” Charity said lightly, subverting the furious recriminations he’d intended before they could be spoken.
“I said some things I ought not to have done. Not because they were untrue,” she added, the sudden slash of her brows in Mother’s direction suggesting she had, indeed, meant every word.
“But because it was beneath me to have said them.”
Mother vacillated between a stunned amazement that Charity had not taken the golden opportunity which had been handed to her to be rid of her once and for all and a healthy alarm that still it might mean nothing in the wake of Anthony’s obvious anger.
“I—I beg your pardon,” she said to him.
“I thought you were still asleep.”
“And that gives you the right to accost my guest?” he charged.
“No, I—I—” Her lower lip quivered.
“She is a foul influence upon you. You did not return home until the sun had already risen, and you were so foxed you had to be helped to bed. I could not let it stand!”
“Really?” Charity inquired of him, and her fingers paused in the massaging of her sore cheek. She had sounded utterly delighted, though whether that was due to being judged a foul influence or the news that he’d had a nasty tangle with a surfeit of spirits, he could not be certain.
Knowing Charity, probably it was a bit of both.
“Yes,” he said.
“Mother, I was out drinking with—with friends.” Or near enough to it. He still didn’t remember making his way home, though it was clear enough that his companions of the evening—Charity’s friends—had gotten both him and the Venus’s Flytrap safely in his carriage when the time had come for them to part ways.
“I drank a little more than I ought to have done, and paid for it accordingly. I still have the devil of a headache.” He had, in fact, slept the whole day straight through except for a brief stumble from bed around noon to cast up his accounts and call for a pitcher of water to clean his mouth of the taste. It had been a struggle only to pull himself out of bed when at last a servant had come to shake him awake to inform him that Charity had arrived.
“Well, it sounds like it was great fun,” Charity said, her voice rife with a sudden surge of merriment.
“It was,” he said, somewhat abashed.
“They were your friends, actually.”
A dimple glowed in her cheek. Or perhaps it was just her cheek that glowed, with the lingering redness his mother’s hand had left upon it.
“I’m glad,” she said.
“They’re good men, all. Well, except for Chris, but he must be forgiven for it. He doesn’t know any better.”
Anthony would bet every last farthing in his accounts that he most certainly did; he simply did not care. And there was something vaguely comforting in that, something refreshing—that there was at least one man of his acquaintance who would always say exactly what he meant. No toadying and obsequious pageantry whilst whispering behind his back. Chris would have insulted Anthony straight to his face, had he the inclination to do it.
Charity ducked her head, smoothing at her skirts.
“Well,” she said.
“You’ll forgive me, I’m certain, but I am not feeling quite the thing this evening. And there are more important matters to be dealt with, which are none of my concern.” She cleared her throat to spear his mother with a frigid glare.
“That is the only shot at me you will ever receive,” she said, her voice brutally cold and biting.
“If you strike me again, I will make you regret it. Is that understood?”
Mother drew back from the lash of her voice, a tremble sliding down her spine.
“Yes,” she said, and that tremble made itself known in the weakness of her voice as well.
“Good,” Charity said.
“So long as we understand one another.” She made for the door, pausing only long enough to place a kiss upon his cheek, squeeze his shoulder, and whisper warmly, “Talk to your mother, Anthony.”
And then she was gone, and Anthony was left alone with the last person on Earth with whom he would have liked to be. The dull pound of his head had become only more apparent with Charity’s exit, and he pinched the bridge of his nose, heaving out a sigh. He hadn’t the patience to be delicate with her, nor the least inclination toward mercy. But Charity had asked it of him, and so he just—spoke. To clear the air that had been such a miasma of nastiness between them until now.
With a weary sigh, he crossed the room to cast himself down upon the sofa, pressed his fingers to his aching temples, and said, “For God’s sake, Mother. Just tell me what I have done to make you hate me. I can bear it.”
Mother gave a short, keening sob—of grief, of pain.
“I simply cannot bear to look upon your face,” she said, her voice trembling.
Anthony waited for the lash of pain that had, not too far distant in the past, always accompanied the pointed barbs of his mother’s words, and for once it did not come. Perhaps he had, as Charity had done, finally stopped placing so much more weight upon someone else’s opinion of himself than upon his own.
“That does not surprise,” he heard himself say, in a bland, bored sort of voice.
“You’d hardly be the first.”
Mother curled in on herself as if the unaffected tone of his voice had wounded her more than whatever it was that Charity had said to her.
“I hate—I hate what that woman has done to you,” she said.
“I hate what you have allowed her to do to you!”
“And what has she done, then, Mother?” he asked, rubbing his temples.
“Answered disrespect for disrespect? Refused to turn her cheek to you for another slap? Held herself in a higher esteem than that which you believe she deserves?”
“You would have me tolerate her presence in my own home!”
“No, Mother,” he said wearily.
“I would have you show her the respect which is due to her in mine.” It was there, on the tip of his tongue, to send her away. To subvert any more nasty scenes before they could manifest. But perhaps if they had spoken earlier—at Charity’s first suggestion of it—this particular scene would never have occurred at all.
“It is because of her that you say such things to me,” Mother wept into a handkerchief she had plucked from the cuff of one of her sleeves.
“It is her vulgar influence—”
“It is because of her,” Anthony said, “that I have not immediately bundled you off to the countryside. Because whatever you may think of her, still she has been more generous with you than you could know.”
“Generous!”
“Yes, Mother, generous. Kind, though you have merited no such consideration from her.” Christ, he was so damned tired.
“A woman of her stamp knows well enough how to manipulate a man,” she said with a sniff of contempt.
“She has fashioned her career upon such tricks.”
“For what purpose, Mother?” he sighed.
“What reason could she possibly have? She doesn’t want to be a duchess—anymore than I have ever desired to be a duke.”
“Or so she claims,” Mother snapped, and turned to pace the floor, the patter of her feet upon the floor a study in anxiety.
“She will change her tune soon enough, so you shall see. Clearly she is canny enough to know that a divorce would be undesirable. But if you give her reason to think you might be swayed from an annulment—”
Anthony barked out a laugh that made his head pound.
“Too late for that,” he said.
“The Church is considering it already.”
“What?” Mother stopped her frantic pacing so suddenly it was as if she had grown roots.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we have already sat our interviews for the Ecclesiastical Court!” he said, throwing up his hands.
“And according to the bishop, she did not—by word or deed—suggest that there was even the least validity to our marriage. She said she did not wish to put our family through the scandal of a public divorce. To protect my reputation!”
Mother wilted into a chair like a fading flower, her handkerchief clenched in her hand.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“What reason would I have had to tell you? Only to hear further recriminations of my character—and Charity’s?” Anthony scrubbed at his face.
“For God’s sake, Mother. Charity has never given me the slightest reason to distrust her. She has never been less than honest with me.”
“How can you say that? You hardly know the woman.”
“I know enough,” he said.
“I might just be one of the few people in the whole of the world to know not only who she is, but who she was.” He sank back in his seat, casting his head back against the sofa.
“When I was dying in a medical tent at Waterloo,” he said, “long after you had abandoned me…it was Charity who sat at the side of my bed, tethering me to life. If not for her, I would have died. I wanted to; I was ready to.” There had been so much pain, and he had felt so alone.
“But she sat there at my side for hours. Spoke to me until her voice was raw. She told me how she had come to be there, what her life had been like before, anything she thought might hold my interest and keep me from sliding down into that beckoning darkness. And she held my hand all the while.” His fingers flexed in his lap, as if he might grasp hers once again across the distance of years.
“She saved my life,” he said simply.
“She saved my life.”
And now—and now, she had given him his life back. The one he had squandered in his self-pity, wrapping himself in a mantle of isolation and discontent. There was hope now for him, nestled into the palm of his hand, for a future that did not involve still more misery and loneliness.
“It is so easy for you, Mother, to cast your judgment upon her,” he said.
“When you have never had to worry from whence your next meal would come. When you have only moved from your father’s noble household to your husband’s. When you have always had a generous allowance and every creature comfort you enjoy. You have lived such a life of privilege that you cannot even conceive of what it means to come from less.”
“And you can?” Mother said, her voice accusing.
“No,” he said.
“But I had only the sale of my commission to support me for years, and I learned how to live within my meager means.” And even then, he had not been entirely without support. Though he had never asked it of them, he had always known that if his circumstances had grown truly dire, his brothers would have sent him funds. A contingency that Charity herself had never had.
“But Charity had nothing. Her mother abandoned their family when she was just a girl, and her sister even younger.”
Mother shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Murmured, “She may have said something to that effect.”
“Her father was worse,” he said.
“A nightmare of a man, at least after her mother had left.” Because Charity had had the audacity to resemble so closely the woman who had left him.
“She left her home at eighteen, stealing off into the night with her fifteen-year-old sister in tow. Because her father had learned that, while he couldn’t beat Charity into submission, he could control her by beating Felicity in her place. She sacrificed much to save her sister, convinced that one day the man would go too far in his perverse sense of discipline and kill her.”
“His own child?” Mother said, horrified.
“Yes, Mother, his own child. You’ll pardon her for her lack of filial piety under such circumstances, I’m certain.” Anthony pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Unbeknownst to him, Charity had established a sort of rapport with a local surgeon who was soon to leave for military service. She had prevailed upon the man in the past for treatment after a few particularly severe beatings, paid for his aid by assisting him in his work from time to time. So she was well-acquainted with the application of stitches, and the setting of a broken limb.” Though in retrospect, that would hardly have adequately prepared her for the realities she had encountered in a military campaign.
“The girls had nowhere to go when they left,” he said.
“But the surgeon had a sort of fatherly fondness for Charity and knew her work to be competently done, and so between what funds Charity had managed to steal from her father’s purse and the surgeon’s generosity, they sent Felicity off to a school in Brighton under an assumed name for her own safety. And Charity went with the surgeon on the campaign, posing as his niece and treating the wounded under his instruction. She wasn’t a camp follower, Mother, nor did she set out to become a courtesan.”
“Of course you would feel pity for her,” Mother said.
“You were young, impressionable—”
“I was one and twenty, Mother, three years her senior. I knew well enough what I was doing. I simply had not expected to survive my wounds. No one did. But I was so grateful to her, for her kindness to me. For the long hours she had spent at my bedside only to give a dying man comfort.” A healer first, before she had been anything else.
“I had hoped she would be entitled to something after I had died—perhaps a military pension, or the proceeds from the sale of my commission. At worst, I thought she might apply to you and father for some support.”
“One might wonder why she did not,” Mother sniffed.
“Exactly for this reason, as it happens. Because she assumed you would have judged her an opportunist, preying upon a bereaved family. I can see now that she was correct.” Anthony heaved a sigh.
“But she did not set out to be a courtesan,” he said.
“She was just a girl, alone in the world, striving to protect her sister.”
“Some would say intentions matter less than actions,” Mother said.
“It hardly signifies what her intent was, when the result—”
“What would you have done, Mother? Tell me; I want to know. Put yourself in Charity’s place for a moment. You are just eighteen. The war has ended; your services are no longer required. You are recovering from cholera in a foreign country, and the only friend you have in the world has passed away. Your sister’s school fees will soon be due, and without an income of your own, she will have no choice but to starve in the streets or return home to your father. A proper position—assuming you could find one—would pay little more than a pittance. Probably no more than mere subsistence wages, and certainly not enough to send off to your sister’s school. What would you have done? What ought she to have done?”
“I would—I would have—” Mother’s jaw worked as she struggled desperately for some defense, some solution which would have put all the responsibility upon Charity for her circumstances rather than to acknowledge that she had been the victim of circumstances not of her own creation. But there was nothing, and they both knew it.
“The difference between us, Mother, is that I do not place judgment upon Charity for making the best possible choices for herself and for her sister of which she was capable at the time. I know where she has been. I know how she clawed her way up and changed her own fate through sheer determination. And if she has managed to scrape together some satisfaction in life, some happiness for herself in the doing of it? Jolly good for her,” he said.
“Neither you nor I have ever lived in such dire circumstances as those. It is beneath you to judge her for choices you will never have to make yourself.”
A splash of hot color washed across Mother’s cheeks, and she seemed to retreat into herself, growing smaller, more fragile, frailer beneath the weight of his reproach. She sank into her chair, a pale wisp of a woman, looking older and feebler than he could ever recall.
He had said enough for one night, he thought, as he rose to his feet. Well—almost enough.
“When next Charity comes to visit,” he said, “I will expect you to apologize. She has never deserved your condescension, your vitriol. Should you offer it to her again, I will send you away.”
Mother gave a tiny nod, swiped at her eyes with her fingertips. And he had almost made it through the door when she said, in a small, raspy voice thick with tears, “I don’t hate you. You are my son. I have always loved you.”
Anthony paused in the doorway, a low laugh rumbling in his chest.
“You cannot bear to look upon my face,” he said caustically.
“If that’s not hatred, it might as well be.”
Mother muffled a wail in the palm of her hand.
“I cannot bear to look upon your face—because I cannot bear to see what I did to it.”