“Because if you want a woman to love you, you must be prepared to be vulnerable with her. Call it your first lesson,” she said. “I know what lies beneath it already. But I haven’t seen how it healed.”
“Then you will…assist me?”
“I have not yet decided,” she said. “Naturally, we could not—take any action that would result in an annulment becoming an impossibility. Even if I am not particularly devout, still I would prefer not to be put into the position of lying to a man of God, should I be called to give testimony to the Ecclesiastical Court, you understand.”
“I would not ask it of you.”
“But I would still like to see,” she insisted, her full lips pursing into a little moue, as if his hesitation had annoyed her. “If I am to consider this proposal of yours, I will require this concession of you. You may call it a condition of my consideration, if it so pleases you.”
She wanted his vulnerability in this. Because, in her judgment, he would need to be vulnerable to win a wife who would love him genuinely, and this—this was more than just a lesson. It was a test. Of his will; of hers. Of his sincerity. Of whether or not he was worth the effort she would expend in the fulfilment of the utterly improper request he had made of her. “Have you ever been so vulnerable?” he asked, unable to keep a vague resentment from his tone as he reached behind his head to untie the strings binding the patch to his face.
“Never,” she said without a qualm, without a shade of shame. “The war took things from me, too, Captain. I’d have cut my tender heart out a dozen times over if I had not hardened it of my own accord—and now it is tootough, too gamey and mealy by half for any shred of vulnerability to be found within it. But that has served me well enough in its turn, since no man has been able to make a meal of it, so I count it no great loss.” She stretched her hand out across the desk, which he understood to mean she expected him to surrender the eyepatch into it.
And he did at last, closing his one good eye as he laid the patch into the cup of her palm, unable to bring himself to meet her gaze, to behold her perfect, beautiful,flawlessface—while she beheld his scarred one.
But that only left his ears open, all the more sensitive to any hint of recrimination, even the slightest tone of distaste that might linger in her voice.
“It’s not so bad,” she said, and she sounded almost pleasantly surprised. “My hands were shaking so badly when I did the stitches that I feared I’d done much worse by you. But the wounds have healed well. Better than I could have expected.”
Somehow the words…touched something in him. Like the tiniest part of that ugliness, which had seeped through his scarred skin and straight into his soul, had been rubbed away. Tarnished silver in the earliest stages of a good polish. “It’s not pretty,” he said. He knew well enough what she was seeing; the closed lid bearing evidence of the empty socket beneath it, the ridges and webs of white and pink scars cutting across his face. Ragged lines carved into his flesh, ones which had nearly taken his life.
“Well, no,” she allowed. “War wounds rarely are, but pretty is as pretty does. Truly, it is not so bad as all that.”
With that faintly dismissive tone, she suggested he had wallowed too long in an unearned misery. It might have irked him, if—
If she had not pushed back her chair, the legs of it rubbing over the rug before the desk. If she had not leaned across the desk, settled her soft hands upon either side of his face. If she had not laid her lips gently, sweetly, right upon the closed lid of his missing eye.
“I am sorry you lost it,” she said. “I would have saved it, if it had been possible.”
It hadn’t been. The shrapnel had seen to that.
Carefully she repositioned the eyepatch upon his face, and reached around his head to tie the strings. A subtle floral sweetness filled his nose as she leaned in. Her perfume, he thought. Close enough to smell, almost to taste.
“There,” she said. “Is that as you prefer it? Too tight? Too loose?”
“It’s fine,” he said, and surprised himself with the raw,guttural sound of his own voice. “Have I made myself vulnerable enough for you?”
“For the moment.” Her voice had a light, teasing cadence. “But now you know, don’t you?”
He thought he just might. That if this—his greatest point of sensitivity—was safe within her hands, so too was everything else. Any point of weakness he might reveal to her, that he might discover within himself, would not be at risk of suffering mockery or shame.
But he thought he had learned more than she had intended to teach him. He had learned also that even after sixteen years of self-proclaimed hardheartedness, she could still handle someone else’s heart with the same care and tenderness she had shown to the soldiers whose wounds she had once tended.
Whatever else she had been in the years since they had last met, Charity had been a healer first.
∞∞∞
A drop of ink dripped from the nib of Charity’s pen, ruining the sheet of paper laid out upon the small desk before her. It didn’t matter; she had only managed as much asDear Captain Sharpbefore words had deserted her.
She had yet to give him an answer, had not been certain she would accept his proposition. But she did owe him a proper response to it. There was no particular need for her to accept; though he had offered her payment, she had money enough to afford herself an exceedingly comfortable life. So if she did accept—
If she did accept, it would be because she wanted to, and for no other reason than that. And that was what she had wrestled with these last few days. The part of herself that wanted, against all sound logic, to accept.
She set the pen down across the ruined sheet of paper and leaned back in her chair, considering for once just how very quiet her little flat was, how empty. Oh, she had filled it with things—those trappings of wealth which had pleased her, for all that her last patron, Chris, had often remarked that they made her home look like a brothel. A beautiful upholstered couch with ornately carved and gilded legs. Velvet-covered pillows dripping in gold fringe. Intricately-painted tea cups, not matched into a set but selected piecemeal whenever she had found a pattern she liked. Rich rugs and curtains insumptuous and expensive fabrics; perfumes contained in tiny crystal vials. Gowns that had cost a bloody fortune, and jewels which—well, the jewels hadn’t cost her anything, since they had been purchased largely by former patrons.
She had turned a small, spare flat into a lavish home. It had become everything she had ever wanted, resplendent with every comfort she had collected for herself.
But sometimes, just recently, it felt so very empty.
