Heard you got yourself an ‘usband.”
Charity startled, upsetting her tea cup, which tipped onto its side and splashed tea across the white linen tablecloth.
“Where the devil did you hear that?” she asked, horrified, as her mind reeled with the shock of it cast so bluntly before her.
“A husband?” Phoebe echoed, turning up her cheek to receive a kiss from Chris as he arrived at the table beside them.
“Charity hasn’t got a husband. Has she?”
“Where did you hear it,” Charity ground out between clenched teeth. No longer a question, but a demand. It couldn’t have been Mr. Fortescue; she’d been careful there. And she’d told no one else. No one.
“From the man himself,” Chris said.
“He’s a member of my club, it turns out. Which was damned convenient, because I’d been out searching for the bloke most of the day. Word reached me that he’d been making certain inquiries, and I thought—quite reasonably—that he was seeking a mistress. Thought I’d do you a good turn and disabuse him of that notion.” He snatched up a biscuit from the tea tray upon the table, cramming it into his mouth.
“Turns out he was seeking his wife.”
Phoebe turned wide blue accusing eyes on Charity, her mouth pursed into a little moue of offense.
“You never told me you had a husband.”
“I didn’t know I had one,” Charity said, and her hands trembled as she reached for the teapot to refill her cup.
“At least, I didn’t know I still had one. He was meant to be dead.”
“Meant to be!”
“I thought he was!” Charity said with a gesture of agitation as she plunked a lump of sugar into her fresh cup of tea.
“That is, I thought I had been widowed. It was a very long time ago, and I was very young, and I wasn’t even exactly certain that it was an entirely legal marriage. He was a soldier. I thought he had perished of his injuries in the war.”
“And now,” Chris crowed, and his expression suggested he’d be gnawing upon this little scandal as a source of amusement for some time to come, “he’s a bloody duke.”
“A duke!” Phoebe’s hand flew up to press over her heart.
“You’re a duchess?”
“Quite against my will,” Charity said.
“And only just recently…or so I am given to understand.” And not, God willing, for much longer.
“He wasn’t a duke when we married. He was only a soldier.”
Phoebe’s blond brows knitted for perhaps a fraction of a second. And then she gasped, her hands flying up to smother it.
“No,” she said.
“Not Warrington, surely.”
“Oh, yes,” Chris said.
“Though he prefers Captain Sharp. Haven’t got the faintest idea why.”
“I suppose—I suppose it must be because he wasn’t meant to inherit,” Phoebe said, as she batted Chris’ hand away from the tea tray as he reached for another biscuit.
“Not meant to inherit?” Charity asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You said he was a soldier,” Phoebe said.
“The military is a fine, honorable vocation—for a third son, perhaps even for a second. But the heir? No. The scions of noble houses are to be insulated, protected. Nobody sends heirs off to war.”
“I asked around,” Chris said to Charity.
“He’s a third son. Two older brothers had to die to put him in the place he now occupies.”
Two older brothers—and a father, Charity supposed.
“It was a terrible tragedy,” Phoebe said.
“Only a few months ago now, I think. It was in all the papers. The late Duke of Warrington took his sons—the two elder, at least—out on a boating trip. The weather turned suddenly. Their boat capsized and sank, and all three gentlemen were lost along with it.”
And all at once, in a bizarre twist of fate, Captain Sharp had become a duke. The son who had nearly died at Waterloo had been the only one to survive.
“Is it true he’s missing an eye?” Phoebe asked, turning her attention toward Chris.
“Don’t know. He wears a patch; thought it’d be beyond the pale—even for me—to ask what was beneath it.” Chris briefly reached out his fingers to snatch up another biscuit, caught sight of the dire look his wife slanted him, and wisely crammed his hand into his pocket instead.
“Looked like he wanted to take my head clean off only for comin’ up upon his blind side at the club, though,” he added.
“It is missing,” Charity said, tactfully, though the truth was more that it had been utterly destroyed. She’d assisted in the removal of it, and in the picking bits of shrapnel from the ruin the shards of metal had made of his face, and in the stitching of those wounds thereafter.
By that point, after months working beneath the military surgeon, such wounds had become almost banal. Commonplace, even. One could grow accustomed to nearly anything in such situations, inured to it. One could pack away the horror of it, stuff it deep into a little box at the very back of one’s mind, and ignore it all long enough to get through the next battle, the next war-torn day.
Of course, that had never stopped the terrors of the day from coming out again in the night.
“Well,” Phoebe said.
“I must say, I cannot quite imagine you as a duchess.” She squinted over her tea cup, tilting her head to one side as if she thought achieving a better angle and a different view might allow her to see it more clearly.
“Could you imagine me as a wife any better?” Charity asked.
“Truly. Could you?”
“I suppose I could,” Phoebe ventured, “but it would depend upon the man who was your husband. For a certain sort of man, I imagine you’d be quite a good wife.”
Charity choked upon a sip of tea and coughed to clear her throat.
“I beg your pardon. I don’t want to be the wife of any sort of man.” Much less a damned duke.
“Be that as it may, you are,” Chris said.
“At least for the moment. You’re going to have to do something about that, if you don’t want ‘im.”
“I don’t know him,” Charity said testily, lifting her chin and piercing Chris with a reproving glare.
“How could I want him? It was all such a very long time ago, and then I thought I’d been widowed—” A bad dream. A nightmare, just like the war she’d lived through. Something best relegated to that box which contained all the worst of her experiences, tucked away in its darkened corner within her mind, moldering beneath sixteen years of dust and cobwebs.
Quick as a whip, Chris withdrew his hand from his pocket and snatched up a biscuit before Phoebe could manage a slap to his hand. As he crunched through the thin, crisp wafer, he said, “I think I liked ‘im, your ‘usband. Sour and a bit hostile, perhaps, but I suppose I might be as well, if my face looked like ‘is. Sounded like he might be amenable to putting an end to yer marriage, if you ‘appen to be interested.”
Despite her annoyance, Charity breathed out a sigh.
“Of course I am interested,” she said, daintily patting the corner of her mouth with her napkin.
“But one doesn’t simply call upon a duke.” At least not someone like her.
“’Course one does,” Chris said.
“When she’s ‘is wife.” He finished off his biscuit and shoved his fingers once more within his pocket, fishing out a folded scrap of paper.
“The address,” he said.
“Though I’d recommend waiting until nightfall. Lest you want your business to become everyone’s business, Your Grace.”
Scowling, Charity snatched up the bit of paper with one hand and cast her handkerchief into Chris’ smirking face with the other.
“Phoebe, dearest, leash your husband,” she instructed as she rose to her feet to take her leave.
“Oh, I wouldn’t dare,” Phoebe replied, smiling blithely.
“It’s ever so much more fun when he’s free to cause mischief.”
***
“Warrington.”
Anthony looked up from the desk that had only too recently belonged to his father to see his mother standing in the doorway, her widow’s weeds lending her the air of a spectre straight from the pages of some wretched Gothic novel now released to haunt the house. It would be some eight months before she would be freed of the strict rituals of mourning in the eyes of society, but Anthony—Anthony doubted whether she would ever release herself from them.
“I’d prefer Anthony, Mother,” he said, knowing before he’d even spoken the words that it was a losing battle to do so. He’d asked her the same over and over already, to no avail.
“Nonsense. You are Warrington, now.” By the pinch of her lips, Anthony guessed that the words had tasted sour on her tongue. Her blue eyes glittered with a frosty sheen, her chin firming as if she had recalled that she had come here for a purpose.
“You have a caller,” she said, still in that same icy voice.
“At this hour?” Anthony glanced toward the small clock perched upon the edge of the desk, which revealed the time to be a bit past ten in the evening. Far too late for a visitor.
“Yes. We are not accepting social calls.” Her lips whitened still further with the purse of displeasure that had settled upon them.
“I ought not to need to remind you that we are in mourning.”
She didn’t need to, no, but she’d never missed an opportunity which had presented itself.
“I understand,” he said.
Mother lifted her chin and firmed her shoulders.
“We are not accepting this sort of call, either,” she said.
“It is utterly inappropriate that a woman of ill repute should call upon you here. If you must conduct those sorts of liaisons, they should not ever breach the walls of this house.”
“I beg your pardon, Mother,” Anthony said.
“I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea—” And then, abruptly, he did. So soon? And at this hour of the night? “Miss Nightingale is here?” he inquired.
“Did I not say as much?”
“No, you did not.” But then, she’d attempted to couch her excoriating speech in veiled terms, eschewing the more unsavory ones a lady would necessarily be loath to utter.
“Has Redding turned her away?” he asked as he pushed himself up from his chair.
“No,” Mother said, her voice clipped.
“I asked him to do so, but as she called for you, he would not refuse her without your leave. I came only to request that you tell him as much yourself.”
Only months ago, Mother had been the mistress of this house, and the butler would have taken his orders from her. But now it belonged to Anthony, and Mother had found herself with somewhat less authority than that to which she had long become accustomed. Anthony had not intended to usurp it, exactly, but Mother was now the mistress of the house in name only.
Clearly, she had taken it ill. As she had taken so many other things.
“He’s put her in the drawing room?” Anthony inquired as he rounded the desk and headed for the door.
“With tea,” Mother said resentfully.
“Though God knows why she should want any at this hour of the night. You must tell him to remove her at once.” She trailed along behind him as he strode for the stairs.
“I’ll see her.” His hand clenched upon the banister to steady himself as he began to descend. Slowly. The one eye left to him had also left him with a rather poor perception of depth, making the navigation of stairs a trickier business than it once had been. Even something this simple could be fraught with complications; the sudden onset of dizziness, a queer sensation of vertigo.
“What?” Mother gasped, and he would have sworn he could hear the crackle of her ire rising in the wake of his declaration.
“Warrington—”
“Mother, I am going to see her,” Anthony ground out as he reached the bottom of the stairs, where Redding waited in the foyer. He gave a gesture toward the drawing room as Anthony stalked past him.
Mother made a muted sound of aggravation and her footsteps picked up pace as she followed, the sharp click of her shoes upon the floor rattling through his brain like gunshots.
“Warrington, I really must insist—”
Too late. The commotion—or as much of one as Mother had allowed herself to make—had clearly been audible to his guest. Perhaps she had once been sitting, given that the tea cup that rested upon the small table to the side of the sofa suggested it, but by the time Anthony had made it through the door, she was standing, her hands clasped before her, her shoulders drawn back proudly.
Probably, he thought, this was hardly the first scene that had been made over her presence.
“I am given to understand he prefers Captain Sharp,” she said, with a tiny tilt of her head that sent a loose dark curl tumbling over her shoulder.
“Is that not so?”
Anthony heard Mother draw to a stop just behind him, heard the indignant rustle of her skirts, the hard, offended breath she drew in through her nose. But then, Miss Nightingale had been bound to give offense anyway with her very presence, and now again with the nearly-indecent cut of her gown, the glaring, brilliant red of it. Probably she had not expected an audience.
But she knew what to do with one. She commanded it, with her vibrancy, with her rich, dark beauty. She had to be well into her thirties, but if so much as a single wrinkle had dared lay itself into her smooth, unblemished face, then he could spot no sign of it at this distance.
Her friend, Mr. Moore, had said that she had retired from her career as a courtesan. Retired—which Anthony took to mean she had accumulated a tidy fortune for herself, one which would easily see her through the remainder of her life in comfort. And he could well see how she had done it. A face to launch a thousand ships, and breasts to launch a thousand more. He’d have staked the whole of his fortune on the certainty that whatever lay beneath her gown of shimmering satin was worth at least another thousand. Helen of Troy herself could not have held a candle to her.
All those years ago, he’d never seen her face. But he recalled now that voice, smooth and soft as silk. He knew the feel of her hand cradling his own. He remembered the comfort he had felt in her presence, in the soft stroke of her fingers through his hair.
“Mother,” he said, his voice oddly hoarse.
“May I introduce—”
“No,” Mother gasped out, in tones of increasing horror.
“No, you certainly may not!”
“That’s quite all right,” Charity said, unoffended.
“As it happens, Captain Sharp, I have only come to—to discuss our mutual problem. If I might have a word in private?”
A tactful phrasing, no doubt due to the hostility of their audience.
“No, you may not,” Mother said, and though Anthony had not bothered to glance over his shoulder at her, he could hear the haughty lift of her chin in the icy cadence of her voice.
“In future, madam, any business you might have with Warrington should not be brought to our door. If it’s money you require—”
“I don’t, Your Grace.” Charity smoothed at her vibrant red skirts, a thoroughly bored gesture.
“But I would prefer my private matters to remain exactly that.”
“Then perhaps you ought to have chosen a different vocation.”
“Enough.” Anthony’s voice sliced straight through his mother’s catty jibe. Enough of all of it; the condescension, the spite, the judgment.
“Mother, you were given ample opportunity to leave and to let me handle my own affairs. You have elected not to do so.” He took a breath, prepared for the worst—which Mother, with her acerbic attitude, had well earned—and said, “Charity, may I present my mother, the dowager Duchess of Warrington?”
Mother gave a gasp of offense.
“Dowager,” she hissed. “Dowager!”
“And Mother,” Anthony continued, irrespective of the insult he had given, to have presented her to someone she considered to be so far beneath her.
“This is Charity Nightingale. The current Duchess of Warrington.”