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. Sothere.”
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 willpersonallypull 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. “Ofcourse we would never tell.”
“Butyoumust,” 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 Emmawould 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—butfour? 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.Heknew he was going to die. But I had been kind to him, and he—” Charity swallowed hard, tasting once more the sickly sweetof 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 prayerswhich had gone unanswered, labored futilely over wounds that were destined to turn septic, striven to save even the lost causes.
