“No,” Captain Sharp said. “But it was honest.” He stepped over the limp figure of his mother sprawled there across the floor and leaned out of the doorway to shout, “Redding!”
Oh, God. Even more of an audience. At least the butler was of the stoic variety, disinclined to let his feelings—whatever they might have been—show upon his face. But Charity supposed that when one was employed by a duke, one must needs do justice to so prestigious a position.
The butler appeared, but even the sight of the dowager duchess laid out upon the floor failed to evoke so much as the slightest twitch of his bushy brows. “Captain Sharp?” he inquired, his voice studiously even.
“Find my mother’s lady’s maid to help her to her rooms. Are Esther and Helen present this evening?”
“They retired perhaps an hour ago, Captain Sharp, just after dinner.”
“And the children?”
“In the nursery, attended by their nanny. Likely asleep at this time of night.”
“Good,” Captain Sharp said, and his head swiveled back toward Charity. “We will continue this conversation elsewhere. The drawing room is a bit public, don’t you think?”
It was not often that men solicited her opinion. In Charity’s experience, they largely wished only to hear their own opinions repeatedback to them. “Yes,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. Bring your tea, if you’ve the taste for it. I’ll not attract more attention by calling for a fresh pot. Otherwise, there’s brandy in my office.” Like the military officer he once had been and accustomed to giving commands, he strode off, no doubt in the certainty that she would follow along behind.
She did, of course, for there was little other choice, and she offered a polite nod to Redding as she passed. “I hope you will not find it presumptuous of me,” she said as she followed in Captain Sharp’s wake up the stairs, “if I were to ask who Esther and Helen might be?”
“My sisters-in-law,” came the taciturn reply. “That is to say, my brothers’ widows.”
Charity winced, grateful he could not see her face. Of course—he’d lost his father and brothers. “I’m so very sorry for your loss,” she said.
“Be sorry rather for theirs,” he said as he made the landing. “And the children’s. My middle brother, Frederick, left Helen behind with their two daughters who will now grow up without the comfort of a father.” He disappeared round a corner, and Charity scurried to catch up to him.
“At least they will have their uncle,” she said. And truly, they could have done worse. It was regrettably not so very uncommon for a man who had recently come into some manner of inheritance to turn out those relations who had not been well-provided for. Clearly Captain Sharp had not abandoned his responsibilities to them.
“Hardly.” Captain Sharp scoffed as he paused before a door, swinging it open. “They hide from me, both girls. My face sends them into fits of terror. I try to stay as far away from the nursery as possible. The least I can do is to give them one place of peace, safe from me.” He gave a gesture toward the interior of the room. “By all means, after you.”
The office was large, with a stately desk at the back and walls lined with shelves stuffed full of what must have been hundreds of books. Valuable, weighty tomes of the sort a gentleman of means would naturally accumulate over his lifetime. These, she was certain, had been gathered by ancestors past—his father, grandfather, and so on, stretching back as far as his title had been extant. A far cry from her common upbringing, where books had been a luxury in which her father had never cared much to indulge.
Rather than make for the chair set before the desk, which she assumed she had been meant to take, she instead gravitated toward the portrait hung upon the wall near the door. A family one, she suspected, painted in a muchhappier time. Three boys, all dark haired, all smiling, bordered by a younger version of the duchess and a tall, austere gentleman she knew must be the late duke.
Behind her, near the desk, there was the soft pop of a stopper slipping free of the neck of a decanter. “That’s me, there,” Captain Sharp said, and Charity supposed he was speaking of the painting. “The smallest. Little resemblance now, of course.”
He was speaking of his scars, she knew, and his missing eye. But still, she considered the painting, stared at the image of the smallest boy rendered there in extravagant oils, and said, “I’ve seen many a portrait that little resembled its subjects. Besides, it must be—what, thirty years since it was painted? Of course you would bear little resemblance at this point.” She risked a peek over her shoulder, saw the flattening of his mouth into a grim line in profile. Unamused, then, with her willful ignorance.
The slosh of liquid into two glasses. Brandy, which she preferred. “You know what I meant,” he said, in a gritty grumble.
“I do,” she said. “But I cannot see the sense in wallowing.”
“Can you not? You flinched from me in the graveyard.” He issued a low laugh as he turned, held out the glass to her, but made no move to cross the room to deliver it to her. As if he believed that she would not dare risk closing the distance between them. As if he believed that his face would send her fleeing just as it had his nieces.
“I flinched,” she said, as she stalked across the floor and snatched the glass straight from his fingers, “because I certainly did not expect to find my deceased husband lurking in a graveyard, as if he might have clawed his way straight out of the dirt beneath my feet.”
There. She’d said it aloud here in his house, to his face. That detestable word—husband.
And this time, he was the one to flinch.
∞∞∞
Well, at least she was direct. In a strange sort of way, Anthony could almost appreciate it. People had a way of tiptoeing about uncomfortable topics of conversation, or of pretending not to notice things that could by no means be ignored. It had often struck him as bizarre, almostoffensive.
“I do apologize,” he said, “for not being dead. To be honest, I thought the same of you.”
“My apologies, then, for the same.” A wry sort of smile tugged at the corners of her lips as she sipped her brandy. “If it is any consolation, I had taken ill myself, and my recovery was a matter of some months. And the rest of those so afflicted as I was—most of them did not survive. So I suppose I was really quite lucky.”
