“I’m still in mourning. No one would expect my attendance.”
“You must know that men are not bound to the conventions of mourning in the same manner that women are.” Which was monstrously unfair, but then that was the way of the world. Society perpetually carved out exceptions for men which women were fundamentally disallowed. A man might saunter through the strictures of mourning with only a black armband—such as the one he wore now—to show for their sorrows, while women were expected to retreat entirely from society.
That frown deepened into a glower. “If I am invited at all, it is only because they wish to mock me. To stare at me, as if I were a curiosity.”
Poor man; so desperately lonely and unhappy. “And your response is to banish yourself voluntarily? To strike yourself off before you can be struck?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I only mean to say that you have as much right to your amusements as anyone else,” she said. “Probably there are people who say cruel things and think cruel thoughts, but they are none of our concern.” She pulled the stopper from a decanter and poured. “You asked how I did it,” she said. “How I made myself not care. This is it. I refuse to let cruelty force me from a place it is my right to occupy. And what is more: I never let meforce myself out, either.”
“I don’t take your meaning.”
“It is one thing,” Charity said, “to be excluded. It is another—a worsething by far—to exclude yourself. You haven’t even let anyone else convict you. You’ve judged yourself, found yourself wanting, and banished yourself all on your own. Quite efficient, really, when you get down to it. You never have to wonder. You never have to risk anything.”
“Are you calling me a coward?”
“God, no. You’ve braved things that would fell the vast majority of peers. Defensive, I’d say. Cautious. With good cause, no doubt.”
He gave a tight, small nod, which she interpreted as permission to continue.
“You could hide from it all, if you liked,” she said as she sipped the rich amber liquor in her glass, “for the rest of your life. And how very small that life would be. How lonely. How sad. With only yourself for company. Alonewith the very same person who banished you to it.”
He flattened his lips into a firm line, and that scar that bisected them whitened beneath the pressure. “So your advice is to brave the mockery,” he said, his voice flat and unimpressed. “What am I to do for it when it occurs?”
Charity shrugged. “Laugh,” she suggested mildly. “If someone should have the audacity to say something unpleasant of you in your hearing, youlaughat them. Or, if they have been particularly audacious about it, you tell them to go to hell.”
“I can’t tell someone to go to hell.”
“You’re a duke,” she said, with an insouciant lift of her shoulders. “I think you’ll find there are all manner of things you can say and do.” As she crossed the room toward the desk, she extended her free hand. “The invitations, if you please.”
He gave a muffled sigh as he reached for a drawer, which he pulled open to rifle through. “Is that what you do?” he asked as he collected a neat stack of letters. “You tell people to go to hell when they say offensive things of you?”
“On occasion,” she said as he laid the stack of letters into her hand. “I have been known to use coarse language when it suits me to do so. When someone has proved themselves particularly deserving of my scorn. But mostly I ignore them, Captain, for there is little quite so diminishing to the ego as to be entirely disregarded. And do you know, even if it should begin as only the pretense of indifference, I believe you will find that it does, eventually, become the truth.” Quite a few more invitations than she had expected, now that she had them in her hand. And all with seals still intact. “You’ve opened none of them?”
“I wasn’t going to accept them. I didn’t think it would much matter whether or not I had opened them.” He gave a vague, disinterested gesture of one hand as he redirected his gaze to the pages upon the desk before him. “Be my guest.”
As if she were his secretary! With a magnificent flounce, Charity took a seat in the chair nearest the desk and pried up the wax upon the first of them. “I won’t write your responses for you,” she warned as she settled in to read. “That you will have to do on your own.”
“Why? Your penmanship is exquisite.”
“Because I am not your damned secretary,” she said with a sharp flash of her teeth in his direction and a faintly feral inflection that seemed to take him aback for amoment.
“I only meant to say that mine is abysmal,” he said, sheepishly.
“I know. I’ve had the dubious pleasure of attempting to read it.” Charity thrust her hand into her reticule and withdrew a folded sheet of paper, which she spread out upon the desk.
Captain Sharp hunched forward, narrowing his eye into a squint as he attempted to read the paper she’d set upon the desk—upside down, from his perspective. “What is that?”
“A list of my potential replacements,” Charity said as she began to pry up one wax seal after another, organizing the invitations into a tidy stack. “My friends were happy enough to provide me with the names of several ladies they thought would suit. You will attend those events at which one or more of those ladies are likely to be present, and make yourself known to them. An introduction, perhaps a dance—”
“I can’t dance,” he interjected. And then, at her suspicious glare, he added, “That is, Idon’tdance. It’s been twenty years since last I learned, and I’ve had no occasion at all to do so in recent years. I would make a fool of myself if I attempted such a thing in public—and I have played the fool a little too often for comfort just lately.”
“Then I will add dancing to the list of things which you must learn,” she said. A list which was growing longer by the moment. “You are remarkably chatty for a man who has got pressing business to which to attend,” she said, with a flick of her gaze toward the papers he had once again abandoned.
“I suppose I am,” he mused, and at last he pressed his hand down upon the papers and pushed the whole stack aside, abandoning them in truth. “Nobody much talks to me, really. I don’t think I would know what to say to anyone even if they did.” His gaze flicked down, shying away from hers as he admitted, “I suppose I cantalk to you only because you have already seen me at my worst.”
And it had not lessened her opinion of him, which she supposed must have been something of a rarity to him in the ordinary course of his life. It made her sad for him, for the man he should have been, had his life not taken such a tragic turn so early. But that was still there within him. He only had to learn how to find him. “All right,” she said, and pushed aside the invitations as she rose to her feet. “This will wait for an hour or so. First, you are going to learn to dance—and to talk.”
