“You must see for yourself,” Mercy returned, her voice pitched to a cheery sing-song inflection. “Come now, you’ve moped long enough, haven’t you?”
“I would mope a bit longer if it is all the same to you,” Charity returned sullenly.
Mercy appeared first in the doorway, and she turned to call over her shoulder. “Will you hurry? You have a visitor.”
“Surely you’re joking. What sort of visitor could I possibly have at this hour?” Charity arrived at last, a pout pulling at her lips as she reached the doorway. She drew to a halt as her gaze landed upon him, throwing out one hand to brace herself against the door frame as if she thought she might fall without the support of it. “Anthony,” she whispered.
And whatever doubts he had had of his reception before he had set outthis morning, they vanished in an instant. In this one unguarded moment, when he had surprised her with his presence, everything she felt was just…there. A sort of vulnerability he doubted she was even aware of, one he was certain she had not experienced in years. The new and painful softness of her heart scrawled across her lovely face so clearly it might as well have been writ in ink.
Mercy continued into the room, bending to take Flora from his arms. “You see?” she said, as she positioned her daughter once more up against her shoulder, and patted the baby’s back. “She’s far too young to be frightened of anything so silly as a few scars.”
Anything so silly as a few scars. The words nearly drew a laugh from him. Perhaps if he had had these people in his life years and years ago, he, too, might have learned better. Might never have lent them more weight, more credence to them than they had deserved. “I’m sorry to have doubted you,” he said.
“Yes, and so you should be,” Mercy informed him. “I really—”
“Mercy,” Charity interrupted in a tight little voice that suggested her patience was swiftly wearing thin. She released her grip upon the door frame and took another step into the room.
Mercy turned to glance over her shoulder. “Hmm?”
“Get out.”
“Well!” Mercy tilted her nose in the air and produced an offended sniff.
“Kindlyget out,” Charity corrected. “And do be good enough to close the door behind you.”
“Oh, fine,” Mercy said with a petulant sigh, as she turned to go. She paused just at the threshold, lingering to add, “You are welcome to stay the night, Captain Sharp. I am certain Charity can help you find a room. But youshouldfind one before dawn, if you take my meaning. Thomas’ mother rises early and often takes tea in the drawing room. She will not be amused to have unexpected company.”
“Mercy.”
“Yes, yes, I’m going!” Mercy chirped. And she ducked her head to coo nonsense to her daughter as she passed Charity on her way out the door, which she closed behind her with a soft click.
Charity risked another step, from the shadows at the edge of the room where she had lingered into the full light of the lamp set upon the table between them. And now Anthony could see the details which those shadows had softened. The tangle of her hair, as if she’d not botheredto so much as run a brush through it, much less to affect one of the artful styles of which she was so fond. The wrinkles pressed into the skirt of her gown, which she ought not to have been wearing at such an hour, suggesting she hadn’t been able to summon even the will to change into a nightgown but had instead simply cast herself into bed fully-clothed to wait out the night. A sort of unkemptness which he had never before seen from her. The dispirited droop of her shoulders. Her eyes red-rimmed, as if she had recently spent time crying.
“Why…” Her voice cracked upon the word. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Why have you come? Surely you must have received the same letter I did. We’re not married.”
“We never were, according to the Church,” he said. “I also received your letter. I came because of your fee. I can’t pay it.”
She blinked, startled by the assertion. “Are you mad? I’ll have you know it was really quite generous of me, and I am not often inclined toward such generosity.”
She was, though, he thought. Her own version of it. In the expense of her time, her attention. In her surprisingly delicate handling of awkward and uncomfortable situations. Anyone might casually toss a sum of money at a problem with the expectation that someone else would then resolve it, but Charity—Charity solved problems in her own way.
“I could have asked for a fortune,” she said testily. “Or property and estates. Priceless jewels.”
And instead she had cut out her own heart only to give him what she had thought he wanted. “Those I could have satisfied,” he said, and he rose to his feet. “But that’s not what you asked of me. You asked for my happiness, and that is not something I can find in London.”
“Why not?” she asked, in a queer little croak of a voice, swiping at her eyes with one hand. “Why not?”
“Because you left it,” Anthony said. “Because every hope I have for happiness is right here. With you.”
For a moment, she stared at him in mute disbelief. And then, with a terrible little sound wrenched from deep in her throat, she flew across the room straight into his arms.
Chapter Twenty Three
Charity’s fingers trembled as she plucked at the buttons of Anthony’s coat, fighting both the clutch of his arms and the taut pull of the wool as she struggled to free him from it. But she required his cooperation to remove it from his body, and with his arms wrapped around her, relieving him of the garment was an impossibility. The right sleeve caught upon his shoulder, pulled tight. Too tight to strip off of his arm.
He issued a muffled laugh, his lips crushed beneath the frantic press of hers. “Charity,” he mumbled. “We really ought to talk.”
Talk?Talk? “Are you mad? No!”
