Good God. He had eschewed all manner of simple pleasures on habit alone. Probably he had done for years and years, now. Charity set down her fork, reached across the expanse of the desk, and touched his sleeve. “This is not substandard,” she said. “And you are no longer at war. It is permissible—even expected—for you toenjoy your meals.”
He startled at the pressure of her fingers there upon his sleeve, his gaze dropping to them as if he could not quite believe she had dared to touch him, and she wondered how long it had been since someone,anyone, had done so. Of course, it was not done for one to place one’s hands upon an aristocrat, most especially a duke, without having been invited.
But the duke bit had been a relatively recent development.
“How is it,” he asked, his voice toneless, carefully stripped of inflection, “that you can look upon me without flinching? That you can touch me without recoiling?”
“Because there is nothing from which I ought to flinch. Nor anything from which anyone else ought to flinch, either.” But they had. Monstrous, he had called himself, upon their first meeting. Not his words, but those of others spoken too near him. Possibly not deliberately so—only the most careless of theTonwould risk so insulting a duke to his face—but still those cruel words had reached his ears.
“But Iamugly,” he said, and this time his voice came with a thread of steel within it, as if daring her to deny it.
“I’ll allow you are not handsome,” she said, and gestured with the tines of her fork to the portrait hanging upon the far wall. “Not so handsome as that boy in the picture would certainly have grown to be.” She had never known that boy, nor the man who must have been classically handsome once. If their paths had crossed on the campaign before he’d been injured, she had never known or marked it. “Lacking a pretty face is not the same as being ugly. I have seen ugliness, Captain Sharp, and too often it lurks behind a beautiful visage. I have also seen plain features clothing the loveliest hearts. So I set little stock in beauty—or its lack—as a measure of worth, for I have long learned otherwise.”
“Quite an easy thing to say, when one is pretty.”
Charity snickered over a bite of salad. “My prettiness comes at its own costs, Captain. It is an impossible standard to maintain as one ages, and I assure you, I have aged considerably past the bloom of youth already. A woman’s worth—as defined by a man, mind you—declines year over year. A courtesan’s worth declines faster still. My days of being in high demand will soon be behind me, and I should be in dire straits had I not planned for my retirement accordingly.” And then, because it was perversely delightful to return question for question, she inquired, “You might have cast judgment upon me, as did your mother, for my vocation. Why did you not?”
He was silent a moment, frowning over his plate as he considered thequestion, and Charity was gratified to see that he had, in the flow of conversation, slowed his bites, as if in some concession to her. Perhaps he was not enjoyinghis meal in the same way that she was, per se, but he was not tearing through it as if it were a chore to be stricken off a list any longer. “I suppose,” he said, “because I know what it is to be judged.”
“Ah,” she said. “But you are judged for things beyond your control, Captain, whereas I am judged for the choices I have made.”
“Were they choices?” he asked. “I’ll allow that you made those you were permitted to make—butwerethey choices, in any true sense of the word? Had you, for example, the ability to attend university? Could you have studied beneath a barrister or a physician, or enlisted in the military as an officer? Would even a position as a governess, assuming you could have found one, have afforded you any reasonable amount of financial security?”
“No,” she said. “You know it would not have done.” Of course her opportunities had been necessarily limited, so much lesser than a man’s—anyman’s. “I might have been a shop girl or a laundress,” she said. “A seamstress, perhaps.” But even those vocations, which might have been judged respectable enough for a woman of her station, paid a pittance at best. “A choice is still a choice,” she said. “Even if my options were limited, I made the choice which would benefit myself and my sister best.” And she had never regretted it.
“Felicity,” he said, and she jerked in surprise.
“You remember her name?”
“I remember every word you ever spoke to me. There was a time when I had nothing but that. Your words, your voice in the darkness tethering me, however tenuously, to life. You saved me,” he said, “more than anything else ever did. Just occasionally I resent you for it, when I am feeling brought particularly low. When it occurs to me in my weaker moments that perhaps it would have been for the best if you hadn’t. But I do not resent you for surviving however you had to. For carving out a measure of happiness from a world too bleak and brittle to give it freely. In fact, I—I would like to solicit your assistance.”
“I beg your pardon,” Charity said. “Myassistance?”
“Yes,” he said. “Once our marriage is annulled—”
“Will it be?” she blurted out. “That is to say,canit be?”
“There is little precedent for a situation such as ours,” he said. “However, my solicitor thinks there is a chance, possibly even a good one. He’ll conduct some discreet inquiries with the Ecclesiastical Court andreport back. We may be called to give evidence. Testimony, as it were, to the fact that our marriage was never a true one. But he seems to think it likely that it can be done quietly—if not, necessarily, quickly.”
Charity blew out a breath of relief. “Thank God,” she said, and winced. “I mean no offense, Captain. It is not you in particular to whom I object; it is the institution of marriage itself. I am far too set in my ways to make anyone a good wife, much less a duke.” Too opinionated, too accustomed to her freedom, and too scandalous by half, besides.
The shadow of a smile curled his lip. “But I will need a wife,” he said. “Once your position is vacant, I mean to say. I haven’t the faintest idea how to go about finding one. Much less the woman you have assured me exists who will not mind my scars.”
Charity hesitated. “I am not much accepted within polite society,” she said, “but I do have…friends, of a sort, upon whom I might prevail for such advice. Ladies who know who is suitable and who is not, and who might have some opinion to offer there.”
That smile turned wry and faintly self-deprecating. “I fear finding her will be the least of my troubles,” he said. “There are…certain rituals of courtship of which I am largely ignorant. Certain things that I must learn if I am to find a woman, win her hand, and keep her. May I be frank?”
“I wish you would,” Charity said, still every bit as befuddled and feeling more so with each passing second. “I am not particularly adept at riddles.”
“I would like for you to teach me,” he said, “how to woo the woman who will become my wife, how to make such a woman fall in love with me—and, most of all, how to pleasure her.”
Chapter Seven
Ibeg your pardon?”
Anthony comforted himself that she did not appear to be offended by the suggestion. Only stunned, her dark eyes wide and wondering, as if he had made the proposition in a language she did not speak. “I would pay you for your services, of course,” he added.
“Of course you would. I’d hardly render such services out of charitable inclination. Might I have that drink after all? I feel a sudden urge for one.” And then, as he reached for the decanter and poured into an empty glass, she asked, “Have you had sex before?”
