Mother’s cheeks hollowed. “What can you possibly have to say to that woman that cannot be said through your solicitor?”
“Again, that is my business alone.” Somehow, once he’d made the decision not to accept Mother’s reprimands, it was easier to set aside his own irritation in favor of unaffected calm. “I enjoy her company,” he said. “She is kind to me. Pleasant. Companionable.”
“A mistress must be those things,” Mother ground out, a spark of indignation glowing behind her eyes. “Her damned career depends upon them.”
“Do you know,” Anthony said, only moderately surprised that Mother had uttered a coarse word, “I don’t think the career had anything to do with them. Probably those qualities have aided her, but I think that is simply the way she is.” The way he remembered her. Holding his hand in the darkness long after she ought to have been to bed herself. Speaking softly to him until her voice had gone hoarse and rough to pull his mind away from the pain that was his only other companion, save for her.
“She’s like all of her contemporaries. Cunning. Avaricious. Cold.”
“I never said she had a heart of gold,” Anthony said. Avariciousness had saved her from the poorhouse, supported herself and her sister. Cunning had got them both free from beneath their father’s rule. Coldness had aided her to make difficult decisions for more futures than only her own. “It is so easy for you to judge another person’s life, which you yourself have never experienced.”
Mother’s black crepe skirts rustled as she drew herself up, notching her chin higher. “I am thinking of this family’s good name,” she said. “I am thinking of your reputation. God knows someonehas got to.”
“Then you should mind your tongue and manners both,” Anthony said. “Charity has been very generous to this family, given the circumstances. She’s even offered to help me find a suitable woman to take her place.”
“And how in the world does she mean to do that? She is not welcome in polite society.”
“No,” Anthony acknowledged, “but she is friendly with a few ladies who are.” He searched his memory for those references she had listed off to him before she had left upon their last meeting. “The Beaumonts,” he said. “And Mrs. Moore, who I believe is the daughter of a viscount.” The woman who had,inexplicably, married the gentleman who had confronted him at his club.
“Mrs. Moore married a common criminal. And the Beaumonts!” A scathing sound erupted from the back of her throat. “I’ll grant you that two are titled, but nobody would be fool enough to call themGood Ton.”
Really? Jolly good for them. They sounded delightful.
“They cannot possibly find you a good match. None of them have got the slightest idea of what it means to be the Duchess of Warrington.” Mother’s fingers had begun to flex at her sides as if the thought of throttling someone—most likely him—was becoming more appealing by the moment. “You cannot trust them to act in your interests, Warrington.”
Perhaps not. But he trusted Charity to do it, and Charity trusted them, so—if they had suggestions for him, he would take them under advisement. “Do you know, Mother, if you had shown me even a fraction of the warmth and kindness my long-lost wife has, I might have trustedyouto do so instead.”
Mother recoiled as if he had slapped her, her pale face whitening still further. And he didn’t understand it. She had made no particular secret of her distaste for her youngest son, eschewing his presence whenever possible. Approaching him only when she had some complaint to make known to him.
She had been fond of him, once. God, it hurt to remember that now, when she could not even bear to look upon his face for longer than a moment. Shehad, once, been fond of him. Had spent hours at his side in the nursery when he had been just a boy, playing at pretend military campaigns waged with a set of old, battered tin soldiers that had once belonged to her brother. A treasured family heirloom which she had passed down to him, in those distant days when she had loved him.
Anthony pulled open the drawer of the desk and slapped Charity’s letter down within it. “I am so damned tired, Mother, of this constant battle. Tell me now that you will mind your tongue in Charity’s presence—because sheispresently my wife, and for that alone she deserves your respect—or I will have the carriage readied at once for your journey to Cornwall.”
“I will!” Mother squeaked, and her fingers clenched in the folds of her skirts, knuckles whitening. “I will, for God’s sake. Anthony—”
“Inform Esther and Helen of the same,” he snapped as he rose from his chair, tugging at the cuffs of his sleeves as he rounded the desk. “I won’t have her insulted in this house. For any reason.” Mother pulled away from him as he crossed to the door, just as she always did. “You will allbe civil, or you will answer to me.”
He left her there, standing waifish and alone, before the desk that had once been his father’s. And it did not occur to him for several hours afterward that she had called him, at last, by his name.
∞∞∞
“I like your butler,” Charity said as she sashayed into Captain Sharp’s study late in the evening. “Thrice now he’s admitted me without so much as a blink. It’s rather refreshing, you know, not to be glared at.”
“Redding?” Captain Sharp asked from his seat at his desk, glancing up briefly from the stack of documents laid out before him. “I should hope he doesn’t glare. Unseemly in a butler, I think.”
“They doglare, though.” Not that she had ever paid it much mind.
“Redding’s been with the family since I was a child. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him evince an emotion that might even remotely be called mild surprise. If he ever attempted a glare, his face might split straight down the middle.” He scraped the fingers of one hand through his hair, ruffling the dark strands. “My apologies,” he said. “There’s a great deal of business that goes along with inheriting a title. I had hoped to be finished with this before you arrived.”
“That’s quite all right,” she said as she meandered to the right side of the room, pausing before the stuffed bookshelves to scan the titles contained therein. “I’m well aware that noblemen often have a great many responsibilities to which to attend.”
“It’s not the responsibilities which plague me,” he muttered absently, riffling through pages still left to peruse. “It’s ascertaining the precise nature of them. The minutia of it all.”
“Ah.” He had not been raised to the role, of course. Probably his elder brother had, to one degree or another, been given some manner of education in the properties that would one day be his, and thus would have had a far simpler time stepping into the role when the time came. But Captain Sharp—well, he was discovering it all now, as he went along. “While you are at it, then, would you mind terribly if I looked through your social invitations?”
“Invitations?” His dark head popped up once more, brow furrowed. “Whatever for?”
“So that I might determine which you are to accept,” she saidas she wandered toward the sideboard and selected a glass for a drink. That forbidding expression he leveled in her direction was delicious, but she had not met the man yet who could make her cower. “Of course you will accept them. A few of them, at least. Not to worry; I shall be selective with my choices.”
