“I beg your pardon, Your Grace,” the reverend said, and his knuckles went white upon the binding of the Bible he held in his hands.
“Captain Sharp,” Anthony corrected sourly, though he didn’t expect the man would heed it. Few others seemed to understand his objections to being addressed by a title he had never been meant to inherit.
An audible swallow rolled down the reverend’s throat as he cast his gaze about, seeking a place to settle his gaze other than upon Anthony’s face. “I only wished to inquire whether you were in need of…counsel.”
And he was undoubtedly now regretting it. “No,” he said. Not from a man of the cloth, at any rate. Again his gaze flicked toward the open grave. “That woman,” he said. “The grave belongs to her father?”
“Yes, Your Grace.” It had come out a hesitant squeak, as if the reverend had feared he had produced the wrong answer. “A good, pious man he was.”
Anthony snorted. Piety had rarely, in his experience, equated withgoodness. He could count any number of people who filled the pews on Sunday mornings only to embody every deadly sin once again before nightfall.
“He deserved a better daughter than that woman,” the reverend continued. “One wonders how he bore the shame of it, knowing what she had become.”
Anthony guessed that he had been meant to commiserate with the man, perhaps offer agreement. Instead he could offer only a blank stare. “I’ve not long been in London,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t take your meaning.”
The reverend pounced upon the opportunity to deride the woman. “She’s a whore,” he said, in tones so scathing, so contemptuous, that Anthony could only wonder that venom had not dripped from his tongue alongside it. “A courtesan. A—A—”
“I’m familiar with the concept,” Anthony drawled. “But I wonder that a man of the cloth should be so openly scornful. You are in the business of saving souls, are you not?”
The reverend drew himself up to his full height, which was somewhat less than impressive. “She is well beyond salvation,” he said. “Without even the slightest capacity for shame. To all accounts, she revels in her sins.”
And why should she not, Anthony wondered idly—what purpose was there in heaping shame upon one’s own shoulders, when there was clearly no lack of people ready and willing to perform that task themselves? “One has to admire the efficiency of it,” he said, allowing a sardonic inflection to color his words. “To give the shaming over to someone else. Frees up a great deal of her time, I would imagine.”
The reverend gave no indication of awareness that he was being mocked. Instead he lifted his chin, let out a sigh that Anthony supposed he wasmeant to interpret as exasperation; a sort of saintly suffering in the face of such marked disrespect as the woman in scarlet had shown. “Honor thy father and mother,” the reverend said. “Not my words, you understand, Your Grace, but our Lord’s. And yet Miss Nightingale came to her father’s funeral clothed in scarlet silk, like the scarlet woman she is.”
Miss Nightingale. It wasn’t such an uncommon name, he supposed. There had to be hundreds of Nightingales in England—but it was still something of a shock to hear it. Perhaps she was a distant relation. And if her father had been buried here in this parish graveyard, then he had been local to the area. There could be other Nightingales nearby, ones who might know where one of their own had been laid to rest. If even she had been; if her body had made the long journey back to England to be interred upon her native soil.
A grave he ought to have visited long before now, just as with the rest of them.
“Does the rest of the family live nearby?” he asked. “There was a Nightingale I…knew, once. I’m curious to know if they might be any relation.” Or might at least point him in the right direction, did they happen to know it.
The reverend gave a grave shake of his head. “Mr. Nightingale was the last of them,” he said. “The poor man had only two daughters, and neither of any great filial piety. To the best of my knowledge, no one is of much certainty where the younger daughter, Felicity, has gone off to. But the elder daughter, Charity—well, you’ve seen for yourself, Your Grace, just what she’s come to.”
Charity. And not only Charity, butFelicityas well. For daughters of a father so pious and devout as the reverend had claimed, perhaps virtue names would not be so out of the ordinary. But the incredible happenstance of those two names in particular, when there were so very many from which to choose—no. It could not be only a coincidence.
“Mr. Nightingale,” he said, and cast his memory back to the last time he’d heard those names together. To secrets whispered to a dying man, who could not be expected to betray them. To the voice of the girl who had spent so many nights by the side of his bed, soothing a man wracked with pain and fever who had not been expected to survive the severity of his injuries. A memory recalled only in the softness of her voice, in the cool touch of her gentle hands, for, wounded, stitched, and bandaged as he had been, he had never once seen her face. “That would not be Mr.ReginaldNightingale, would it?”
The reverend blinked, his brows lifting in surprise. “Yes, Your Grace,” he said. “You are familiar with the family?”
In a manner of speaking. Anthony glanced over his shoulder, seeing only the settling of disturbed dust in the distance; the last echoes of the carriage that had sped away from the graveyard only too recently.
She had not lied, then. Charity Nightingale had not been horrified to see his face. She had been horrified to seehim.
“There is no headstone as yet, Your Grace,” the reverend continued, “but should you like to pay your respects—”
“Not bloody likely.” If half of those admissions she had made to him all those years ago had had so much as a grain of truth within them, then Mr. Nightingale was already rotting in hell. “Probably he has got exactly the sort of funeral he deserved.” A mockery of mourning for the miserable old bastard.
And Anthony had one fewer grave to visit.
His wife was somewhat less deceased than he hadbelieved.
Chapter Two
Charity sat within her solicitor’s office, waiting for the man to return with the cup of tea he’d promised to settle her frazzled nerves. She’d had the dream—thenightmare—again last night. Had woken with the scent of gunpowder in her nose, and the putrid stench of the dead. The roar of cannons and the last gasps of the dying stuffing her ears.
Her hands had not ceased trembling since.
She startled as Mr. Fortescue returned at last with a tea tray, and settled once more as he poured her a steaming cup, passing it to her upon a saucer. “Thank you,” she said wearily, as the tea cup clattered with the quivering of her hands.
