∞∞∞
It had not, in fact, taken any great genius to calculate what had likely occurred in his absence. Charity’s left cheek bore the stark imprint of a slender hand. A tiny streak of blood marred her lower lip, though Anthony didn’t think she was yet aware of it. He stared hard at his mother, watched the flush of ire receding slowly from her cheeks, fading in blotches to an ugly pallor. Her gaze dropped to the floor, no doubt waiting in silence to hear Charity accuse her. To hear Anthony make good on his promise to send her away, as he’d threatened to do not so very long ago.
There was no defense for this. Mother had struck a woman who had had every right to expect cordiality beneath his roof, while under his protection—however nominally. Unforgiveable. He opened his mouth—
“We had a bit of a row,” Charity said lightly, subverting the furious recriminations he’d intended before they could be spoken. “I said some things I ought not to have done. Not because they were untrue,” she added, the sudden slash of her brows in Mother’s direction suggesting she had, indeed, meant every word. “But because it was beneath me to have said them.”
Mother vacillated between a stunned amazement that Charity had not taken the golden opportunity which had been handed to her to be rid of her once and for all and a healthy alarm that still it might mean nothing in the wake of Anthony’s obvious anger. “I—I beg your pardon,” she said to him. “I thought you were still asleep.”
“And that gives you the right to accost my guest?” he charged.
“No, I—I—” Her lower lip quivered. “She is a foul influence upon you. You did not return home until the sun had already risen, and you were so foxed you had to be helped to bed. I could not let it stand!”
“Really?” Charity inquired of him, and her fingers paused in the massaging of her sore cheek. She had sounded utterly delighted, though whether that was due to being judged a foul influence or the news that he’d had a nasty tangle with a surfeit of spirits, he could not be certain.
Knowing Charity, probably it was a bit of both.
“Yes,” he said. “Mother, I was out drinking with—with friends.” Or near enough to it. He still didn’t remember making his way home, though it was clear enough that his companions of the evening—Charity’s friends—had gotten both him and the Venus’s Flytrap safely in his carriage when the time had come for them to part ways. “I drank a little more than I ought to have done, and paid for it accordingly. Istillhave the devil of a headache.” He had, in fact, slept the whole day straight through except for a brief stumble from bed around noon to cast up his accounts and call for a pitcher of waterto clean his mouth of the taste. It had been a struggle only to pull himself out of bed when at last a servant had come to shake him awake to inform him that Charity had arrived.
“Well, it sounds like it was great fun,” Charity said, her voice rife with a sudden surge of merriment.
“It was,” he said, somewhat abashed. “They were your friends, actually.”
A dimple glowed in her cheek. Or perhaps it was just her cheek that glowed, with the lingering redness his mother’s hand had left upon it. “I’m glad,” she said. “They’re good men, all. Well, except for Chris, but he must be forgiven for it. He doesn’t know any better.”
Anthony would bet every last farthing in his accounts that he most certainly did; he simply did notcare. And there was something vaguely comforting in that, something refreshing—that there was at least one man of his acquaintance who would always say exactly what he meant. No toadying and obsequious pageantry whilst whispering behind his back. Chris would have insulted Anthony straight to his face, had he the inclination to do it.
Charity ducked her head, smoothing at her skirts. “Well,” she said. “You’ll forgive me, I’m certain, but I am not feeling quite the thing this evening. And there are more important matters to be dealt with, which are none of my concern.” She cleared her throat to spear his mother with a frigid glare. “That is the only shot at me you will ever receive,” she said, her voice brutally cold and biting. “If you strike me again, I will make you regret it. Is that understood?”
Mother drew back from the lash of her voice, a tremble sliding down her spine. “Yes,” she said, and that tremble made itself known in the weakness of her voice as well.
“Good,” Charity said. “So long as we understand one another.” She made for the door, pausing only long enough to place a kiss upon his cheek, squeeze his shoulder, and whisper warmly, “Talk to your mother, Anthony.”
And then she was gone, and Anthony was left alone with the last person on Earth with whom he would have liked to be. The dull pound of his head had become only more apparent with Charity’s exit, and he pinched the bridge of his nose, heaving out a sigh. He hadn’t the patience to be delicate with her, nor the least inclination toward mercy. But Charity had asked it of him, and so he just—spoke. To clear the air that had been such a miasma of nastiness between them until now.
With a weary sigh, he crossed the room to cast himself down upon the sofa, pressed his fingers to his aching temples, and said, “For God’s sake,Mother. Just tell me what I have done to make you hate me. I can bear it.”
Mother gave a short, keening sob—of grief, of pain. “I simply cannot bear to look upon your face,” she said, her voice trembling.
Anthony waited for the lash of pain that had, not too far distant in the past, always accompanied the pointed barbs of his mother’s words, and for once it did not come. Perhaps he had, as Charity had done, finally stopped placing so much more weight upon someone else’s opinion of himself than upon his own. “That does not surprise,” he heard himself say, in a bland, bored sort of voice. “You’d hardly be the first.”
Mother curled in on herself as if the unaffected tone of his voice had wounded her more than whatever it was that Charity had said to her. “I hate—I hate what that woman has done to you,” she said. “I hate what you have allowed her to do to you!”
“And what has she done, then, Mother?” he asked, rubbing his temples. “Answered disrespect for disrespect? Refused to turn her cheek to you for another slap? Held herself in a higher esteem than that which you believe she deserves?”
“You would have me tolerate her presence in my own home!”
“No, Mother,” he said wearily. “I would have you show her the respect which is due to her inmine.” It was there, on the tip of his tongue, to send her away. To subvert any more nasty scenes before they could manifest. But perhaps if they had spoken earlier—at Charity’s first suggestion of it—this particular scene would never have occurred at all.
“It is because of her that you say such things to me,” Mother wept into a handkerchief she had plucked from the cuff of one of her sleeves. “It is her vulgar influence—”
“It is because of her,” Anthony said, “that I have not immediately bundled you off to the countryside. Because whatever you may think of her, still she has been more generous with you than you could know.”
“Generous!”
“Yes, Mother, generous. Kind, though you have merited no such consideration from her.” Christ, he was so damned tired.
“A woman of her stamp knows well enough how to manipulate a man,” she said with a sniff of contempt. “She has fashioned her career upon such tricks.”
