A nod rather too small to be particularly encouraging, but at least the child had let her legs dangle once again, no longer quite so wound up to flee. Still her fingers tugged at the end of her plait, but as Captain Sharp turned once more and progressed slowly across the floor toward them, she did not cower.
Captain Sharp paused before them and tugged at the ties of his armband, pulling it free of where it rested against his upper arm. When it came loose at last, Charity held out her own arm, and Captain Sharp went to his knees before them to tie it in place for her.
“There,” Charity said. “Will this do, Hattie?” She lifted her arm for the child’s inspection and received a grave nod in reply. “How very kind of your uncle to lend his to me, don’t you think?”
“Yes.” It was just a whisper, and Hattie shifted in her seat, her small hand groping for Charity’s. “Thank you, Your Grace,” she said as she seized Charity’s fingers in her own.
Charity winced as Captain Sharp’s head snapped toward the child. It was, in point of fact, his title. Probably the girl had overheard it, or else someone had told her to use it. A title that had once been her grandfather’s, and which had skipped over the only uncle she had ever known in addition to her own father to fall to Captain Sharp instead.
“Uncle Anthony,” he said, his voice tinged with some nameless longing. For a family, Charity thought. The one he ought to always have had. “I would prefer that, Hattie. If you don’t mind.”
“Uncle Anthony,” Hattie repeated. Her heels thumped against the sofa. With her free hand she reached out hesitantly—and touched the tips of her small fingers to one of the largest scars upon Captain Sharp’s face, tracing the whitened contours of it from where it began near his temple to where it ended near his jaw. “Does it hurt?” she asked, wide-eyed, worrying her lower lip between her teeth.
“Not anymore, poppet.” He cleared his throat of its tellinghoarseness, but his eye glistened with a suspicious moisture. And he held very still as his niece traced the other lines marring his flesh, first tentatively, and then with innocent curiosity. “They don’t hurt any longer,” he said. “But I am sorry they frighten you.”
Hattie’s fingers touched the cloth edge of the eyepatch. “Can I see?” she asked, and Charity gave her fingers a reassuring squeeze.
It was a rather large request to make of him, though the little girl couldn’t know it. “It’s…not pretty,” Captain Sharp said. “It doesn’t hurt, but I lost the eye, and there’s quite a lot of scarring beneath the patch. Will you be frightened?”
“I can be brave,” Hattie said, almost to herself as she shifted in her seat. “I can be brave.”
Captain Sharp untied the strings of the eyepatch and let Hattie pry up the cloth shielding his eye herself. She traced the closed lid, the healed slice that ran vertically through it—the evidence of the shrapnel which had taken his eye, left behind a profusion of scarring, and sheared off a sliver of his brow and lashes both. “Is it just a hole?” she asked.
“Not quite a hole,” he said. “Not in the way you might be thinking. But the socket is empty. I can’t see as much with one eye as you can with two, so if you were to come up upon my right side, you might startle me.”
“I know,” Hattie said. “I heard you shout at Mama once. You were very angry. I thought—I thought you were mean.”
“Did you?” Now he was startled, but for a different reason. Charity saw a frown tug at the corners of his mouth, a slight furrow in his brow. “That was not well done of me. Probably I should apologize. It scares me,” he said, “when people come upon me where I can’t see them. When I was a soldier, I had to have a very good sense of what—and who—was around me. It’s a difficult habit to break. More so with only one good eye with which to see.”
“Will you shout at me?”
“I will try very hard not to,” he said solemnly. “But I have my faults, the same as anyone else. Still, I would like to be a good uncle to you. I know you must miss your papa very much.”
Hattie’s lower lip trembled. “And Uncle William. And Grandpapa. Do you miss them, too?”
“Very much,” he rasped, his voice thick. “When I was on the journey back to England, I cried every day. Sometimes I still do.”
“Mama says”—Hattie hiccoughed, her voice catching in her throat—“Mama says that you can send us away whenever you like. We don’t evenhave our own house anymore.”
Captain Sharp winced. “There’s quite a lot of business I must still sort out,” he admitted. “Your papa’s house in London was only a rented one. But I am not ever going to send any of you away. This is your home, for as long as you want it.” He caught her small hand in his, pulling her fingers away from his face to clasp them in his own. “Your papa should have had so much more time,” he said. “And it is true that many of the things that ought to have been his have now fallen to me. But I will do everything I can to care for you, since your papa cannot. The house you and your sister were born at, the one in the countryside—”
“Northall House,” Hattie said.
“Yes; that’s the one. It belongs to me at present, but it is not entailed. I can give it to your mama, so that you will always have a home of your own. Would you like that?”
Hattie swiped at her eyes, firmed her chin, and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Uncle Anthony.”
Something unbearably fragile passed through his eye, and Captain Sharp cleared his throat. “Now,” he said. “I think it is well past time for you to be in bed. How did you come to be down here at this time of night?”
“Nanny was giving Evie her bath,” Hattie said, and she braced her arms and shoved herself off the sofa. “She said I must be quiet and put on my nightgown, but I—” Hattie ducked her head. “I wanted to go look at Papa’s portrait in the gallery before bed. Just for a few minutes.”
Captain Sharp made a rough sound in his throat, as if to clear it of some wretched lump of emotion.
“And then I saw Miss—Miss—”
“Charity,” Captain Sharp supplied, which was just as well, since children were not known to be particularly capable keepers of secrets, and the less her surname was bandied about, the better.
“I saw her going toward the library, so I followed her. She’s very pretty.”
