“For what purpose, Mother?” he sighed. “What reason could she possibly have? She doesn’t want to be a duchess—anymore than I have ever desired to be aduke.”
“Or so she claims,” Mother snapped, and turned to pace the floor, the patter of her feet upon the floor a study in anxiety. “She will change her tune soon enough, so you shall see. Clearly she is canny enough to know that a divorce would be undesirable. But if you give her reason to think you might be swayed from an annulment—”
Anthony barked out a laugh that made his head pound. “Too late for that,” he said. “The Church is considering it already.”
“What?” Mother stopped her frantic pacing so suddenly it was as if she had grown roots. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we have already sat our interviews for the Ecclesiastical Court!” he said, throwing up his hands. “And according to the bishop, she did not—by word or deed—suggest that there was even the least validity to our marriage. She said she did not wish to put our family through the scandal of a public divorce. To protectmyreputation!”
Mother wilted into a chair like a fading flower, her handkerchief clenched in her hand. “I didn’t know,” she said.
“What reason would I have had to tell you? Only to hear further recriminations of my character—and Charity’s?” Anthony scrubbed at his face. “For God’s sake, Mother. Charity has never given me the slightest reason to distrust her. She has never been less than honest with me.”
“How can you say that? You hardly know the woman.”
“I know enough,” he said. “I might just be one of the few people in the whole of the world to know not only who she is, but who shewas.” He sank back in his seat, casting his head back against the sofa. “When I was dying in a medical tent at Waterloo,” he said, “long afteryouhad abandoned me…it was Charity who sat at the side of my bed, tethering me to life. If not for her, I would have died. I wanted to; I was ready to.” There had been so much pain, and he had felt so alone. “But she sat there at my side for hours. Spoke to me until her voice was raw. She told me how she had come to be there, what her life had been like before, anything she thought might hold my interest and keep me from sliding down into that beckoning darkness. And she held my hand all the while.” His fingers flexed in his lap, as if he might grasp hers once again across the distance of years. “She saved my life,” he said simply. “She saved my life.”
And now—and now, she had given him his life back. The one he had squandered in his self-pity, wrapping himself in a mantle of isolation and discontent. There was hope now for him, nestled into the palm of his hand, for a future that did not involve still more misery and loneliness.
“It is so easy for you, Mother, to cast your judgment upon her,” he said. “When you have never had to worry from whence your next meal would come. When you have only moved from your father’s noble household to your husband’s. When you have always had a generous allowance and every creature comfort you enjoy. You have lived such a life of privilege that you cannot even conceive of what it means to come from less.”
“And you can?” Mother said, her voice accusing.
“No,” he said. “But I had only the sale of my commission to support me for years, and I learned how to live within my meager means.” And even then, he had not been entirely without support. Though he had never asked it of them, he had always known that if his circumstances had grown truly dire, his brothers would have sent him funds. A contingency that Charity herself had never had. “But Charity had nothing. Her mother abandoned their family when she was just a girl, and her sister even younger.”
Mother shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Murmured, “She may have said something to that effect.”
“Her father was worse,” he said. “A nightmare of a man, at least after her mother had left.” Because Charity had had the audacity to resemble so closely the woman who had left him. “She left her home at eighteen, stealing off into the night with her fifteen-year-old sister in tow. Because her father had learned that, while he couldn’t beat Charity into submission, he could control her by beating Felicity in her place. She sacrificed much to save her sister, convinced that one day the man would go too far in his perverse sense of discipline and kill her.”
“His own child?” Mother said, horrified.
“Yes, Mother, his own child. You’ll pardon her for her lack of filial piety under such circumstances, I’m certain.” Anthony pinched the bridge of his nose. “Unbeknownst to him, Charity had established a sort of rapport with a local surgeon who was soon to leave for military service. She had prevailed upon the man in the past for treatment after a few particularly severe beatings, paid for his aid by assisting him in his work from time to time. So she was well-acquainted with the application of stitches, and the setting of a broken limb.” Though in retrospect, that would hardly have adequately prepared her for the realities she had encountered in a military campaign. “The girls had nowhere to go when they left,” he said. “But the surgeon had a sort of fatherly fondness for Charity and knew her work to be competently done, and so between what funds Charity had managed to steal from her father’s purse and the surgeon’s generosity, they sent Felicity off to a school in Brighton underan assumed name for her own safety. And Charity went with the surgeon on the campaign, posing as his niece and treating the wounded under his instruction. She wasn’t a camp follower, Mother, nor did she set out to become a courtesan.”
“Of course you would feel pity for her,” Mother said. “You were young, impressionable—”
“I was one and twenty, Mother, three years her senior. I knew well enough what I was doing. I simply had not expected to survive my wounds. No one did. But I was so grateful to her, for her kindness to me. For the long hours she had spent at my bedside only to give a dying man comfort.” A healer first, before she had been anything else. “I had hoped she would be entitled to something after I had died—perhaps a military pension, or the proceeds from the sale of my commission. At worst, I thought she might apply to you and father for some support.”
“One might wonder why she did not,” Mother sniffed.
“Exactly for this reason, as it happens. Because she assumed you would have judged her an opportunist, preying upon a bereaved family. I can see now that she was correct.” Anthony heaved a sigh. “But she did not set out to be a courtesan,” he said. “She was just a girl, alone in the world, striving to protect her sister.”
“Some would say intentions matter less than actions,” Mother said. “It hardly signifies what her intent was, when the result—”
“What would you have done, Mother? Tell me; I want to know. Put yourself in Charity’s place for a moment. You are just eighteen. The war has ended; your services are no longer required. You are recovering from cholera in a foreign country, and the only friend you have in the world has passed away. Your sister’s school fees will soon be due, and without an income of your own, she will have no choice but to starve in the streets or return home to your father. A proper position—assuming you could find one—would pay little more than a pittance. Probably no more than mere subsistence wages, and certainly not enough to send off to your sister’s school. What would you have done? What oughtsheto have done?”
“I would—I would have—” Mother’s jaw worked as she struggled desperately for some defense, some solution which would have put all the responsibility upon Charity for her circumstances rather than to acknowledge that she had been the victim of circumstances not of her own creation. But there was nothing, and they both knew it.
“The difference between us, Mother, is that I do not placejudgment upon Charity for making the best possible choices for herself and for her sister of which she was capable at the time. I know where she has been. I know how she clawed her way up and changed her own fate through sheer determination. And if she has managed to scrape together some satisfaction in life, some happiness for herself in the doing of it? Jolly good for her,” he said. “Neither you nor I have ever lived in such dire circumstances as those. It is beneath you to judge her for choices you will never have to make yourself.”
A splash of hot color washed across Mother’s cheeks, and she seemed to retreat into herself, growing smaller, more fragile, frailer beneath the weight of his reproach. She sank into her chair, a pale wisp of a woman, looking older and feebler than he could ever recall.
He had said enough for one night, he thought, as he rose to his feet. Well—almostenough. “When next Charity comes to visit,” he said, “I will expect you to apologize. She has never deserved your condescension, your vitriol. Should you offer it to her again, Iwillsend you away.”
Mother gave a tiny nod, swiped at her eyes with her fingertips. And he had almost made it through the door when she said, in a small, raspy voice thick with tears, “I don’t hate you. You are my son. I have always loved you.”
Anthony paused in the doorway, a low laugh rumbling in his chest. “You cannot bear to look upon my face,” he said caustically. “If that’s not hatred, it might as well be.”
Mother muffled a wail in the palm of her hand. “I cannot bear to look upon your face—because I cannot bear to see what I didto it.”
