Two older brothers—and a father, Charity supposed.
“It was a terrible tragedy,” Phoebe said. “Only a few months ago now, I think. It was in all the papers. The late Duke of Warrington took his sons—the two elder, at least—out on a boating trip. The weather turned suddenly. Their boat capsized and sank, and all three gentlemen were lost along with it.”
And all at once, in a bizarre twist of fate, Captain Sharp had become a duke. The son who had nearly died at Waterloo had been the only one to survive.
“Is it true he’s missing an eye?” Phoebe asked, turning her attention toward Chris.
“Don’t know. He wears a patch; thought it’d be beyond the pale—even for me—to ask what was beneath it.” Chris briefly reached out his fingers to snatch up another biscuit, caught sight of the dire look his wife slanted him, and wisely crammed his hand into his pocket instead. “Looked like he wanted to take my head clean off only for comin’ up upon his blindside at the club, though,” he added.
“It is missing,” Charity said, tactfully, though the truth was more that it had been utterly destroyed. She’d assisted in the removal of it, and in the picking bits of shrapnel from the ruin the shards of metal had made of his face, and in the stitching of those wounds thereafter.
By that point, after months working beneath the military surgeon, such wounds had become almost banal. Commonplace, even. One could grow accustomed to nearly anything in such situations, inured to it. One could pack away the horror of it, stuff it deep into a little box at the very back of one’s mind, and ignore it all long enough to get through the next battle, the next war-torn day.
Of course, that had never stopped the terrors of the day from coming out again in the night.
“Well,” Phoebe said. “I must say, I cannot quite imagine you as a duchess.” She squinted over her tea cup, tilting her head to one side as if she thought achieving a better angle and a different view might allow her to see it more clearly.
“Could you imagine me as a wife any better?” Charity asked. “Truly. Could you?”
“I suppose I could,” Phoebe ventured, “but it would depend upon the man who was your husband. For a certain sort of man, I imagine you’d be quite a good wife.”
Charity choked upon a sip of tea and coughed to clear her throat. “I beg your pardon. I don’t want to be the wife of anysort of man.” Much less a damnedduke.
“Be that as it may, you are,” Chris said. “At least for the moment. You’re going to have to do something about that, if you don’t want ‘im.”
“I don’tknowhim,” Charity said testily, lifting her chin and piercing Chris with a reproving glare. “How could I want him? It was all such a very long time ago, and then I thought I’d been widowed—” A bad dream. A nightmare, just like the war she’d lived through. Something best relegated to that box which contained all the worst of her experiences, tucked away in its darkened corner within her mind, moldering beneath sixteen years of dust and cobwebs.
Quick as a whip, Chris withdrew his hand from his pocket and snatched up a biscuit before Phoebe could manage a slap to his hand. As he crunched through the thin, crisp wafer, he said, “I think I liked ‘im, your ‘usband. Sour and a bit hostile, perhaps, but I suppose I might be as well, if my face lookedlike ‘is. Sounded like he might be amenable to putting an end to yer marriage, if you ‘appen to be interested.”
Despite her annoyance, Charity breathed out a sigh. “Of course I am interested,” she said, daintily patting the corner of her mouth with her napkin. “But one doesn’t simply call upon a duke.” At least not someone like her.
“’Course one does,” Chris said. “When she’s ‘is wife.” He finished off his biscuit and shoved his fingers once more within his pocket, fishing out a folded scrap of paper. “The address,” he said. “Though I’d recommend waiting until nightfall. Lest you want your business to become everyone’s business,Your Grace.”
Scowling, Charity snatched up the bit of paper with one hand and cast her handkerchief into Chris’ smirking face with the other. “Phoebe, dearest, leash your husband,” she instructed as she rose to her feet to take her leave.
“Oh, I wouldn’t dare,” Phoebe replied, smiling blithely. “It’s ever so much more fun when he’s free to cause mischief.”
∞∞∞
“Warrington.”
Anthony looked up from the desk that had only too recently belonged to his father to see his mother standing in the doorway, her widow’s weeds lending her the air of a spectre straight from the pages of some wretched Gothic novel now released to haunt the house. It would be some eight months before she would be freed of the strict rituals of mourning in the eyes of society, but Anthony—Anthony doubted whether she would ever releaseherselffrom them.
“I’d prefer Anthony, Mother,” he said, knowing before he’d even spoken the words that it was a losing battle to do so. He’d asked her the same over and over already, to no avail.
“Nonsense. You areWarrington, now.” By the pinch of her lips, Anthony guessed that the words had tasted sour on her tongue. Her blue eyes glittered with a frosty sheen, her chin firming as if she had recalled that she had come here for a purpose. “You have a caller,” she said, still in that same icy voice.
“At this hour?” Anthony glanced toward the small clock perched upon the edge of the desk, which revealed the time to be a bit past tenin the evening. Far too late for a visitor.
“Yes. We are not accepting social calls.” Her lips whitened still further with the purse of displeasure that had settled upon them. “I ought not to need to remind you that we are in mourning.”
She didn’t need to, no, but she’d never missed an opportunity which had presented itself. “I understand,” he said.
Mother lifted her chin and firmed her shoulders. “We are not acceptingthissort of call, either,” she said. “It is utterly inappropriate that a woman of ill repute should call upon you here. If you must conduct those sorts of liaisons, they should not ever breach the walls of this house.”
“I beg your pardon, Mother,” Anthony said. “I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea—” And then, abruptly, he did. So soon? And at this hour of the night? “Miss Nightingale is here?” he inquired.
“Did I not say as much?”
