The poor woman had fainted dead away. Not into a graceful swoon—a performance piece which might be enacted by some lady seeking attention or else to display her delicacy—but in a dramatic puff of black skirts as she collapsed to the floor, her head saved from a harsh strike against the floor only because she had landed upon a plush rug draped across the floor.
“Was that strictly necessary?” Charity groused, entirely disenchanted with having been used as a weapon against the unsuspecting woman, no matter how unpleasant she had been.
“No,” Captain Sharp said.
“But it was honest.” He stepped over the limp figure of his mother sprawled there across the floor and leaned out of the doorway to shout, “Redding!”
Oh, God. Even more of an audience. At least the butler was of the stoic variety, disinclined to let his feelings—whatever they might have been—show upon his face. But Charity supposed that when one was employed by a duke, one must needs do justice to so prestigious a position.
The butler appeared, but even the sight of the dowager duchess laid out upon the floor failed to evoke so much as the slightest twitch of his bushy brows.
“Captain Sharp?” he inquired, his voice studiously even.
“Find my mother’s lady’s maid to help her to her rooms. Are Esther and Helen present this evening?”
“They retired perhaps an hour ago, Captain Sharp, just after dinner.”
“And the children?”
“In the nursery, attended by their nanny. Likely asleep at this time of night.”
“Good,” Captain Sharp said, and his head swiveled back toward Charity.
“We will continue this conversation elsewhere. The drawing room is a bit public, don’t you think?”
It was not often that men solicited her opinion. In Charity’s experience, they largely wished only to hear their own opinions repeated back to them.
“Yes,” she said.
“If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. Bring your tea, if you’ve the taste for it. I’ll not attract more attention by calling for a fresh pot. Otherwise, there’s brandy in my office.” Like the military officer he once had been and accustomed to giving commands, he strode off, no doubt in the certainty that she would follow along behind.
She did, of course, for there was little other choice, and she offered a polite nod to Redding as she passed.
“I hope you will not find it presumptuous of me,” she said as she followed in Captain Sharp’s wake up the stairs, “if I were to ask who Esther and Helen might be?”
“My sisters-in-law,” came the taciturn reply.
“That is to say, my brothers’ widows.”
Charity winced, grateful he could not see her face. Of course—he’d lost his father and brothers.
“I’m so very sorry for your loss,” she said.
“Be sorry rather for theirs,” he said as he made the landing.
“And the children’s. My middle brother, Frederick, left Helen behind with their two daughters who will now grow up without the comfort of a father.” He disappeared round a corner, and Charity scurried to catch up to him.
“At least they will have their uncle,” she said. And truly, they could have done worse. It was regrettably not so very uncommon for a man who had recently come into some manner of inheritance to turn out those relations who had not been well-provided for. Clearly Captain Sharp had not abandoned his responsibilities to them.
“Hardly.” Captain Sharp scoffed as he paused before a door, swinging it open.
“They hide from me, both girls. My face sends them into fits of terror. I try to stay as far away from the nursery as possible. The least I can do is to give them one place of peace, safe from me.” He gave a gesture toward the interior of the room.
“By all means, after you.”
The office was large, with a stately desk at the back and walls lined with shelves stuffed full of what must have been hundreds of books. Valuable, weighty tomes of the sort a gentleman of means would naturally accumulate over his lifetime. These, she was certain, had been gathered by ancestors past—his father, grandfather, and so on, stretching back as far as his title had been extant. A far cry from her common upbringing, where books had been a luxury in which her father had never cared much to indulge.
Rather than make for the chair set before the desk, which she assumed she had been meant to take, she instead gravitated toward the portrait hung upon the wall near the door. A family one, she suspected, painted in a much happier time. Three boys, all dark haired, all smiling, bordered by a younger version of the duchess and a tall, austere gentleman she knew must be the late duke.
Behind her, near the desk, there was the soft pop of a stopper slipping free of the neck of a decanter.
“That’s me, there,” Captain Sharp said, and Charity supposed he was speaking of the painting.
“The smallest. Little resemblance now, of course.”
He was speaking of his scars, she knew, and his missing eye. But still, she considered the painting, stared at the image of the smallest boy rendered there in extravagant oils, and said, “I’ve seen many a portrait that little resembled its subjects. Besides, it must be—what, thirty years since it was painted? Of course you would bear little resemblance at this point.” She risked a peek over her shoulder, saw the flattening of his mouth into a grim line in profile. Unamused, then, with her willful ignorance.
The slosh of liquid into two glasses. Brandy, which she preferred.
“You know what I meant,” he said, in a gritty grumble.
“I do,” she said.
“But I cannot see the sense in wallowing.”
“Can you not? You flinched from me in the graveyard.” He issued a low laugh as he turned, held out the glass to her, but made no move to cross the room to deliver it to her. As if he believed that she would not dare risk closing the distance between them. As if he believed that his face would send her fleeing just as it had his nieces.
“I flinched,” she said, as she stalked across the floor and snatched the glass straight from his fingers, “because I certainly did not expect to find my deceased husband lurking in a graveyard, as if he might have clawed his way straight out of the dirt beneath my feet.”
There. She’d said it aloud here in his house, to his face. That detestable word—husband.
And this time, he was the one to flinch.
***
Well, at least she was direct. In a strange sort of way, Anthony could almost appreciate it. People had a way of tiptoeing about uncomfortable topics of conversation, or of pretending not to notice things that could by no means be ignored. It had often struck him as bizarre, almost offensive.
“I do apologize,” he said, “for not being dead. To be honest, I thought the same of you.”
“My apologies, then, for the same.” A wry sort of smile tugged at the corners of her lips as she sipped her brandy.
“If it is any consolation, I had taken ill myself, and my recovery was a matter of some months. And the rest of those so afflicted as I was—most of them did not survive. So I suppose I was really quite lucky.”
Not so lucky as that. Not so lucky as she might have been, had she bothered to make her survival known to him. To his family.
“Sixteen years,” he said.
“I did search for you. At least, I tried to do so. But there was no one who knew where you might have been taken. The war had long since ended. The surgeon—the one you assisted—”
“Mr. Bell,” she said.
“I am given to understand that he saw me situated at a proper hospital in Brussels. He paid for my care, bless him. But I was very ill, and he had a family waiting for him back in England. He could not stay.”
“I was never able to find him,” he said.
“I did not…return to England. But I made inquiries.”
“He passed away,” she said, and her dark gaze dropped to the floor.
“His heart failed him only a month or so after he’d returned home. He was already gone when I finally recovered. Months gone.”
She sounded truly regretful. Mr. Bell had been a demanding taskmaster, and he knew well enough that she had worked herself to the bone beneath his authoritative supervision. And still, she seemed to genuinely regret his passing.
“My commanding officer passed as well,” he said.
“Worse still, I did not visit his grave until—well, I suppose you know.”
“Too many lost,” she murmured, and shadows swam behind her dark eyes. Probably, he thought, she’d seen every bit as much death and suffering as had he. Perhaps she had never killed a man on the battlefield, but she had watched those in her care die of unrecoverable injuries. Probably she’d held more hands than only his own.
Had they all worshiped her as he had? Longed for her comforting presence in the darkness of the night, when sleep was too distant and pain was a constant companion?
“I thought if you had survived,” he said, “you would have made yourself known to my family. You had every right to do so.”
“What right?” she asked, with a queer little furrow of her brow.
“I was just eighteen, you know, and with no proof of my claim. Every witness to the—the marriage was dead or lost.”
“The chaplain—”
“Dead,” she said.
“Of the same illness I survived.”
“Our marriage lines?”
An uncomfortable little shrug.
“If ever I had possession of them, they did not accompany me to the hospital. It is an easy thing to claim, Captain Sharp, for one to have become a war widow. There were far more of them than only I. But it is a difficult thing to prove. You will forgive me, but I did not fancy testing so tenuous a claim with a family wealthy enough to justify the purchase of a commission for what support of which they might have deemed me worthy.”
He supposed it must have been a daunting prospect to a girl still so young as she had been. And probably Mother—with the disdain she had already shown to Charity—had hardly disabused her of that assumption.
“I have consulted with my solicitor,” she announced, taking another bracing sip of liquor.
“Regrettably, he could give me no reason that the marriage itself might be legally invalid.”
“You have a solicitor?”
“I have had quite a long career,” she said, “and it often involves certain legalities. Naturally I have got a solicitor to negotiate on my behalf, and to ensure that I am not cheated of that which is due to me. Men are often wont to make promises,” she added, “which they do not intend to keep. If I hadn’t a solicitor to protect my interests, I should not have amassed for myself a respectable fortune, which affords me a comfortable living.”
Sensible of her. And to be able to speak of it so plainly evinced a certain strength of character.
“I see,” he said, and bit back a grimace.
“I do apologize for my mother. She was unforgivably rude to you.”
“No more so than I had expected,” Charity said with a blasé shrug.
“I am accustomed, as you might imagine, to those who bestow their judgment upon me. But simply because they would cast it does not mean that I must accept it. I am not ashamed.”
“Still, she ought not have—”
“No, but she is going through quite a difficult time. I suppose you all must be. Given your circumstances, I can make allowances.”
“Would that it were only that. Unfortunately, my mother is simply a difficult woman. She was fond of me, once. But my decision to purchase a commission was the end of that.”
“Oh?” she said.
“It was my understanding that a military career was a perfectly acceptable vocation for a younger son.”
“It should have been,” he said.
“I’d hardly be the first of her family to take up a commission. My uncle—my mother’s elder brother—did the same, and she spoke of him often.” And fondly. So much more fondly than she had spoken to or of him in nearly the last twenty years. It had always sat ill with him that she had been so strenuously against his military career, that it had killed the closeness they had once shared.
“She wanted me to go into the clergy instead.”
“Well, she will certainly enjoy sharing her title with me even less than that,” Charity said.
“And if I might be so blunt, I am utterly ill-equipped to be either wife or duchess. My solicitor says that the marriage itself is legal, but—but I’ll admit I mislead him just a little about who, precisely, was seeking the dissolution of a marriage. A title—especially one so prestigious as yours—might make all the difference.”
“You want a divorce?”
“I would prefer an annulment,” she said swiftly, chewing at her lower lip.
“A divorce would be a scandal of its own. I have had quite enough scandal attached to my name already. I would like to avoid the gathering of more. I do have family, Captain Sharp, and I should like to keep my name, and thus theirs, off of wagging tongues as much as possible.” A little roll of her shoulders.
“Probably your mother and your sisters-in-law would also prefer to avoid the scandal of a divorce. But failing an annulment—I suppose divorce would then be the only option. Parliament would no doubt grant one on grounds of adultery.”
“That’s hardly fair. You had every reason to think you were a widow.” Just as he’d thought himself a widower.
A wry smile, coupled with a glint of dry amusement there in her dark eyes.
“You must know that is not the way the world works,” she said.
“What I believed will never matter half so much as what was true—whether I knew it or not. Vows are meant to be sacred only for women, you see. Adultery on a man’s behalf is merely a matter of course. No one would fault you for betraying your vows, even knowingly, but they will certainly rake me across the coals for the same.”
She was correct, of course. If there had to be a divorce, then he would have to be the one to petition for it. Adultery was grounds enough for a man to seek a divorce, but not for a woman.
“There may be scandal, still, in an annulment,” he said. In fact, there was no particularly easy method to end a marriage which would not lend itself to at least a little infamy.
“Yes,” she allowed, “but less so, I think, than an act of Parliament would entail. Best for all our sakes to keep it as quiet as possible, don’t you think? And an annulment is not, per se, the dissolution of a marriage. It is the complete erasure of one, as if it had never happened at all.” A last sip of her brandy, and she offered her now-empty glass back to him.
“Your mother fainted at the news,” she said.
“It has been quite a difficult time for your family already. I would spare all of us more difficulty, if it is possible.”
Kind of her, given the circumstances—though perhaps every bit as self-serving as it was generous. A mutually beneficial dissolution; at least in her eyes.
“I’ll consult with my solicitor,” he said.
“If you would prefer I keep your name out of it while I do—”
“I would, thank you,” she said. She lifted her gaze to his, and to her credit she did not flinch from his ghastly visage.
“I would not have told your mother. Why did you?”
“My father,” he said, “did not leave my mother in the best of financial straits. Nor had my brothers adequately provided for their wives. Not intentionally, of course. They simply hadn’t planned on such a damned tragedy.” There should have been so much more time to get their affairs in order. Neither William nor Frederick had yet attained the age of forty at their deaths; Father just one and sixty and to all accounts as healthy as a horse for his age. They should all have had so much more time.
“I am the last remaining male, so their protection, their very security falls now to me. If I should die without issue, then the next duke—my insufferable cousin Donald—will no doubt turn my mother and sisters-in-law out. Perhaps they would not be in penury, precisely, but they would certainly have to economize. To grow accustomed to a much-reduced standard of living.”
“Ah,” Charity said.
“She wants to keep the title in your immediate family.”
“Quite so,” he said.
“Nobody wants to be someone else’s poor relation, most especially a duchess. She has been pressing me to marry, and to produce an heir as swiftly as possible.” Mother might not have any particular fondness for him, but she knew well enough that her lifestyle depended upon his continued good health—and failing that, that of whatever son he might manage to produce.
They had all learned, recently, the fragility of life. How swiftly any particular one might come to an end.
“Well, then,” Charity said, “by all means, you must consult with your solicitor as soon as possible. The sooner this fiasco can be resolved, the sooner you may choose a proper duchess and dedicate yourself to the task of producing heirs.”
She sounded so nonchalant about it, as if they shared a secret between the two of them—a private joke, their marriage, one which they might laugh about together at some point in the future. When that marriage had been undone.
Anthony stifled a snort, swallowing down the last of his liquor.
“Easier said than done,” he said.
“There’s a dearth of women willing even to contemplate the thought of it.” Not even to be a duchess.
“What rubbish.” With a dainty tilt of her nose, Charity expressed her patent disbelief.
“Dukes are always in demand. Even those half-senile, gouty, and ancient could expect to land a bride.”
“Yes,” he said.
“But I am none of those things. A woman seeking a title might be willing to tie herself to an undesirable husband—provided he has got one foot in the grave already. But no one is lining up to risk staring at my face across a breakfast table in the faint hope that I will expire sooner rather than later.”
“It truly isn’t as bad as all that,” she said, and it didn’t even reek of the patronizing condescension to which he had long become accustomed from those who did not believe their own words.
“Everyone has got their own scars to bear. But I am sorry for how you acquired yours, and that they trouble you still. I promise you, when you find the right woman, they will not trouble her.”
For the first time in well over a decade, he felt—perhaps a little less monstrously ugly. She had never seen him at his best, in those days of his youth when he had been handsome. When his face had been attractive enough to turn heads toward him rather than away.
“If such a woman exists, she has yet to present herself,” he said, though his tone no doubt conveyed his disbelief. But there was less bitterness within it than he had expected, and it surprised even him. She was easy to talk to, this woman he had married so many years ago. They didn’t know one another, had never really known one another—but she made him feel comfortable in her presence. Made him feel at least a bit more comfortable in his own skin than he had been in recent days. Recent years. Recent decades.
They were discussing the dissolution of their inconvenient marriage, and it was…pleasant. Friendly, even. And to a man with no friends at all who would claim him, even this small amount of camaraderie, this tiny slice of what might have, under different circumstances, passed for idle conversation, was…enjoyable.
“May I rely upon you to make your inquiries and to send word when you have an answer?” she asked.
“So long as you leave your address,” he said.
“I’m afraid your—er, friend would not share it with me.”
“He wouldn’t,” she said, and a dimple appeared in her right cheek alongside a smile.
“But then, Chris does so like to be contrary and aggravating. I will leave it with your butler, then, on my way out. Good evening, Captain Sharp. It has been a pleasure.” She reached out her hand, and on reflex, he took it in his.
Small. Soft. The very same hand that had given so much comfort to a dying man—or one who had thought he was. His fingers molded around hers in that same manner they had so many years ago; like a drowning man would hold fast to a lifeline. At least until he was forced to relinquish them, and to watch her walk out the door.
A pleasure, she had said. Yes, it had been. More of one than he had expected. More of one than that to which he had been entitled. And he was left alone once again, as he so often found himself—but this time, with the lingering warmth of her hand in his.
His wife. The one he had thought was long gone from this world. He had never expected to outlive her when they had married. He’d thought only to do her the kindness of setting her up for a comfortable widowhood, in repayment for the kindness she had shown to him.
All those years ago, she had been a comfort to a man in dire need of it. But now, he thought—perhaps she might be a friend.