I won’t have that—that woman in my home!”
Anthony suppressed a sigh as his gaze followed his mother’s rapid pacing across the floor. She had been waiting to ambush him at breakfast, having recovered from last evening’s swoon with no ill effects other than a temperament rather more sour than usual. If he had not already become accustomed to such theatrics, it might well have put him off of his breakfast.
“You will,” he said, and resented that he’d been forced into the same authoritative tone which he had had to employ too many times in the past during his military career.
“And what’s more, you will be polite to her.”
“You court social ruin only by acknowledging her,” Mother said as she wrung her hands in an agony of distress, which Anthony considered more than a trifle overblown.
“She is indecent!”
“By what measure?” he asked, carving off a bite of bacon.
“By every measure which matters!” Mother said, spearing him with a sharp look, the vivid blue of her eyes shimmering with glacial frost.
“Perhaps you have been too long from England’s shores to pay much attention to such things,” she said, “but you cannot remain ignorant of them forever. She has flaunted her liaisons publicly for years, without so much as an ounce of shame when she has earned pounds and pounds of it.”
Anthony wondered that the gentlemen who had been equally culpable in those liaisons had managed to skirt the judgment that Mother would have heaped upon Charity’s shoulders like burning coals. That is not the way the world works, she had told him, and of course he had known it. But still, the injustice of it rankled.
It was so easy for Mother to cast judgment, when she had never known the struggle for survival that was too often a reality for the lower classes. She had gone from her father’s house to her husband’s, trading one life of luxury and ease for another. Anthony had never quite had empty pockets himself, but he had commanded men who had. Men who had risked life and limb for only the meager wages offered by the military, in the service of supporting their families.
Of course, there was a sense of honor in serving one’s country, a nobility even. But one could not eat prestige, nor trade it to pay the rent. Too many men had come home irreparably wounded, their military careers cut short, and often unfit for or unable to find other employment. Too many men had not come home at all, finding eternal rest upon the continent and leaving behind loved ones who would suffer for their absence and support.
“You don’t know anything at all about her, this—this woman you married. Has she got any family?” Mother inquired spitefully, with the curl of a sneer pulling at her lips.
“Has she got anyone at all who would bother to claim her?”
“Her father has recently passed away.” Though whether the man had deserved the title was a matter of some debate, given what he knew—or had once known—of her situation.
“And there is a sister somewhere.” Felicity. He recalled the name, at least. It had been amongst those secrets she had shared with him from time to time as she had sat by the side of his bed. Morsels of her life offered up to keep him tethered to life, to entice him away from death’s door when he had been only inches from knocking upon it.
“A mother?” Mother prompted, though her tone suggested little in the way of genuine interest.
“Who are her people? It is bad enough she is what she is, but she could be anyone.”
“Mother, it doesn’t matter.” There was no reason to spill Charity’s secrets to Mother, who certainly would not be a responsible custodian of them.
“It doesn’t matter who she is, who her people are, where she has been, or what she has done.”
“Of course it matters,” Mother hissed.
“She could have married again! Did you not consider it? That she might have made you a party to bigamy?”
“When one considers that she has got little enough interest in being the duchess she presently is,” Anthony drawled, having grown beyond bored of even the pretense of tolerating Mother’s snit, “I find it unlikely that there might be another marriage to worry over.”
Mother paused in her frantic pacing so abruptly that her skirts swooshed around her feet.
“What do you mean?” she inquired, her gaze sharpening.
“What do you mean, she has little interest in being a duchess?”
“Exactly that. She came here evening last to consider how we might best resolve the issue of our marriage.” He picked at the remnants of his breakfast with the tines of his fork, certain that it would irritate Mother to no end.
“Really, it was remarkably generous of her. You ought to be grateful to her for it.”
“Grateful!” Mother’s shrill voice echoed around the high ceilings.
“To that—that conniving woman!”
“I can see nothing particularly conniving in it. You don’t want her to be my duchess,” Anthony said.
“She doesn’t want to be my duchess. You’re entitled to hold whatever opinion of her you will, but it would be remarkably shortsighted to slight the woman who is doing you the great service of breaking those ties which remain between us quietly, and without a fuss.”
“And what did she require of you in return?” Mother demanded, with a lift of her sharp chin.
“Nothing at all,” Anthony said.
“She has a respectable fortune of her own. I imagine she would prefer to retain ownership of it. She has no need for a title, no need for whatever support a husband might provide.” He lifted his fork and poked the tines in her direction.
“Therefore you will keep a civil tongue in your head and be gracious. It cannot serve our purposes to have public attention be upon us. Might make it more difficult to secure an annulment.”
“An annulment!” Mother choked out a bitter laugh.
“Upon what grounds? No one would believe her to be chaste.”
“Perhaps not,” Anthony allowed, “but the marriage was never consummated, and we have never lived as man and wife. If the Ecclesiastical Court may be so convinced, then seeking a divorce will not be necessary. The marriage will be as if it had never occurred.”
Mother made an inelegant sound through her teeth.
“It ought never to have occurred at all. What in the world were you thinking, to offer marriage to a courtesan?”
“She wasn’t a courtesan then, Mother. She was at Waterloo, working to assist the military surgeon.” Anthony set down his utensils, having lost the appetite for breakfast at last.
“She must have been quite young,” he said.
“Younger even than I was. It was sixteen years ago.”
“What sort of woman goes off to war?” Mother sniffed.
“One who was willing to give more than you ever were in service of your country,” Anthony said. One who had been desperate to escape her home, with precious few resources to do so. One who had a younger sister who would have been left in a precarious position without her, and who had required her own escape.
“The fact is, Mother, that you owe Charity,” he said.
“Because if it had not been for her, I would have died there on the battlefield, and you would be in the position of begging cousin Donald for even the smallest comfort which you now enjoy.” He shoved his chair back, and the legs scraped harshly against the floor as if to punctuate the brutality of his statement.
“You owe her every courtesy,” he cast over his shoulder as he stalked toward the door.
“And I owe her my damned life.”
Though the life that had been left to him had not turned out to be worth much, still he owed all there was of it to her.
***
“Oh, certainly, just drop round whenever you please,” Charity grumbled to herself as she tossed several freshly-baked biscuits onto a plate and assembled an assortment of mismatched tea cups to place upon the tea tray.
“Drink up all of my tea. Eat up all of my biscuits.”
“We can hear you, you know,” Diana said, her voice inflected with well-meaning sarcasm.
“Good,” Charity said as she hefted up the tray and carried it to her small receiving room, which was populated with altogether too many ladies, and plunked it down once again upon the table before the sofa.
“I was hoping you would.”
Lydia selected a tea cup, one with a pretty border of flowers and vines rendered in gold paint.
“You know,” she said, as she reached for the teapot to pour, “if you had a staff, you wouldn’t have to prepare the tea yourself.”
With a sigh of aggravation, Charity sank to the floor in a puff of skirts—since her sofa and every chair she owned had been commandeered—and snatched up a biscuit for herself before they could be set upon by everyone else.
“Where would I put a staff?” she asked.
“My flat has just one bed chamber.”
“But surely a lady’s maid,” Phoebe said, with a little wrinkle of her brow.
“Everyone has got a lady’s maid.”
“I’m perfectly capable of dressing myself,” Charity said.
“And doing my own hair.” The washing and mending—those she was happy enough to have help for, and a laundress came two days a week to collect them.
“Unlike most of you lot, I did not grow up in the lap of luxury, and I have worked too hard to secure my privacy only to surrender it now.”
“Industrious of you,” Emma said as she selected a biscuit of her own and passed over her tea cup to Lydia to fill.
“I don’t know how I would survive without at least a cook—oh, my word,” she mumbled around the biscuit.
“These are delicious.”
Charity leveled a glare at Phoebe, who had been suspiciously quiet, and who had thus far avoided meeting her eyes.
“You wretched little snitch,” she accused, with only a moderate amount of heat.
“Do not think for one moment I did not immediately see through the charade of this visit.”
The lift of Phoebe’s brows was intended to convey her innocence—but she was far less skilled at subterfuge than was her husband, no matter how well he might have tutored her in it.
“I’m certain I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
Her spurious claim to ignorance was somewhat diminished when an avalanche of other questions came pouring out from the rest of them in varying degrees of incredulity.
“Are you truly a duchess?”
“But when did you marry?”
“Why did you never tell us?”
Charity tipped her head back and suppressed a sigh.
“Yes, temporarily,” she said, ticking off the answers on her fingers.
“A very long time ago. Because I was under the—apparently mistaken—impression that I had been widowed, so it did not seem particularly relevant. And,” she added, though anyone else would have determined their questions answered sufficiently already, “most importantly, because it was none of your damned business. So there.”
Phoebe hid a sly grin behind her tea cup.
“May I call you Your Grace?”
“Of course,” Charity replied, summoning up a feral smile.
“If you wish to lose several teeth. Perhaps you could start a new fashion. On that note, if any one of you should breathe a word about any of this to anyone outside this room, I will personally pull your hair out by its roots.” She snapped her teeth through another biscuit and cast the lot of them a hard stare, though perhaps that was a touch excessive.
In truth, while this group of ladies gossiped like mad within their insular little circle, she doubted that they would allow any of it to spread outside of it. In the two years or so of their acquaintance, she had never been given reason to suspect herself anything less than welcome amongst them, nor that they would guard her secrets any less strictly than they would their own.
Nosy and meddlesome they might be—indiscreet they were not.
“Charity,” Diana crooned, her expression softening sympathetically.
“Of course we would never tell.”
“But you must,” Lydia said.
“There is a story there, and we will have it out of you. You know we will, so you might as well save yourself the trouble.”
“It is hardly one worth telling,” Charity ground out between clenched teeth, thrusting her tea cup toward Lydia, who had the teapot once again.
“You said that about your half-sister, Mercy,” Emma pointed out as she plunked a lump of sugar into her tea.
“And I thought it was extraordinarily worth telling.”
Of course Emma would say so. She had a half-brother of her own, who had married Phoebe, one of her closest friends.
“It wasn’t only my secret to tell,” Charity said. Because Mercy had been mostly respectable, and a public association with a notorious courtesan could not have done her reputation any favors. Happily, Mercy had married a baron who had determined they could weather a bit of scandal, and they spent the majority of their time in joyful connubial bliss at their estate in the Kent countryside. If they perhaps received fewer invitations during the Season than they might otherwise have expected, it had not appeared to bother them a great deal.
“What did you mean,” Diana asked, blinking owlishly behind the lenses of her spectacles, “that you are a duchess temporarily? How can one temporarily be a duchess?”
“Naturally, we will secure some sort of dissolution. An annulment or—or, if necessary, a divorce.” Even the word emerged with a cringe upon its heels.
“I wasn’t supposed to be a duchess. I wasn’t even supposed to be a wife.”
“Oh, come now,” Lydia opined, wrinkling her nose in aggravation.
“You cannot say such things and then not elaborate. Excessively.”
Just briefly Charity considered the effort that would be necessary to chuck the lot of them straight out into the street. Certainly she could have taken on one, perhaps even two of them—but four? Unlikely. With an exasperated sigh, she braced her arms behind her and cast back her head.
“I assisted a military surgeon at Waterloo,” she said.
“There was an officer there who had been wounded. I didn’t know he was the son of a duke. I knew him only as Captain Anthony Sharp.”
“And you married him? Voluntarily?” Diana asked, as if she could hardly credit it.
“I was just eighteen, hardly more than a girl. We knew he was going to die. He knew he was going to die. But I had been kind to him, and he—” Charity swallowed hard, tasting once more the sickly sweet of decay at the back of her throat, the astringent tang of gunpowder and smoke.
“He had nothing to offer there, at the end of his life, but for his name.” She hadn’t known, at the time, just how powerful a name it had been. She hadn’t intended even to make use of it.
“He was going to die,” she repeated.
“I saw to no reason to refuse a marriage—to give that small comfort—to a man who would certainly leave me widowed within hours. Days at the very most.” In the grand scheme of her life, it would hardly have mattered. A blink. A breath. Over and done and soon a distant memory.
“But he didn’t die,” Lydia pointed out, rather unnecessarily, in Charity’s estimation.
“No,” Charity said, pressing her fingertips to the bridge of her nose.
“Though I nearly did. I had contracted cholera. My health deteriorated rapidly, and my recovery took months. I had no reason to believe he had survived—and he had no reason to believe I had done the same. I’m given to understand that he has been away from England for quite some time. He only returned because he’d unexpectedly come into the title.” If he had not, perhaps he never would have done. Perhaps she would have lived out the whole of her life in the erroneous certainty of her widowhood. Perhaps he would have done the same.
“And you became a duchess,” Emma said.
“How did you discover it?”
“Entirely by accident. Our paths crossed in a graveyard.”
“A graveyard?” Lydia echoed, leaning forward in acute interest.
“How macabre. And you recognized one another at once? After so many years?”
“No, we—that is to say, I recognized him.” The scars she’d stitched into his skin; the pattern of them more familiar to her still than the lines creasing her own palm. The slickness of blood coating her fingers, the coppery scent, the taste that lingered in the back of her mouth. Gunpowder, sickness, death and decay—
“Charity, are you…are you quite well?” Phoebe inquired gently.
“You’ve grown rather pale.”
Charity sucked in a breath, cognizant of her heart pounding like a drum in her chest, of the rapid flutter of her pulse, the cold and clammy dampness of her palms.
“Yes,” she said, though the word emerged half smothered within the sudden hoarseness of her voice.
“I think so. I don’t like to remember it. Any of it.” Another breath, which she held in her lungs for a long moment and let out slowly.
“It sticks with you. The horror of war. The senselessness of it. Of course I was lucky; I never wielded a weapon, was never in battle. But the consequences of it—I saw them. I saw all of them.” Every evil that could befall a person. Every wound, every illness. She had heard the prayers which had gone unanswered, labored futilely over wounds that were destined to turn septic, striven to save even the lost causes.
She had thought herself made of stronger stuff in the beginning. She had been, at best, overconfident. At worst, immeasurably foolish. But war had killed any tenderness which had lived within her heart. Hardened her and sharpened her to a diamond’s cold, flawless finish. She had become strong. As strong as she had needed to be in the years that had followed.
“And that is the whole of it,” she said.
“A comedy of errors—or a tragedy in this case, as we have both ended up with an undesirable spouse. But not for much longer, God willing.”
A quick, quiet annulment. Surely if anyone might be able to secure one, it would be a duke.