And his daughter lived here.
His specially appointed carriage had deposited him on the pavement before Wright & Co. Confectionery. The narrow shop was fronted by a many-paned window backed by tiny shelves that displayed enticing treats. Each time the door opened, the sound of a tinkling shop bell was accompanied by the scent of sugar and spice.
Sir William’s stomach turned. It hadn’t been easy to persuade Annie to reveal the address where their daughter lived. He’d had to promise to let her guide the introduction. Even more, he’d had to mean it.
And he did mean it. He wanted to do right by the girl, and he could admit that he no longer knew what that was. But Anne did, he thought. She certainly knew more than he did.
At precisely their appointed meeting time—one could judge by the toll of the bells at a nearby church—Anne appeared around the corner. She strode along on foot as if she’d been dropped from the sky. Garbed all in black, she looked just as she had when she’d called at Sir William’s house.
She drew up before Sir William. “You still want to do this?”
He wasn’t sure. “Of course I do.”
Her lips pursed; she gave a curt nod. “Don’t speak unless I indicate you should. I won’t have you ruining anything for our girl.” Her voice lowered. “She’s the Wrights’ girl. That’s all she knows.”
Sir William opened his mouth, recalled her instruction about not speaking, then lifted a hand.
“God. What is it?”
“What’s her name?”
Anne softened. “Mariah. Yes, I know. Like your late wife. They picked the name. I thought Anne had a nice sound to it myself.”
She opened the shop door for Sir William, who navigated his chair with a tilt of wheels and heave of his arms over the shallow step into the little store. When he’d rolled inside and made room for Anne, he looked about with greedy interest.
Golden wood floors were washed by dappled light from the sweet-filled front window. A counter separated the open space, which contained a few tables for customers, from a set of shelves displaying baked goods and sweetmeats. A few people were sitting with cakes and tea, and a smiling man of perhaps forty years stood behind the counter.
“Aunt Annie!” called the proprietor. “Welcome to you.”
That was right. Anne was godmother to this girl, Mariah, who believed the Wrights to be her parents by birth.
As they chatted lightly, Anne shooting Sir William the occasional warning glance, he kept his silence and looked about for a girl. There! Coming from a back room, tying on an apron. She looked about thirteen, coltish and lanky, with dark brown hair falling down her back.
God. She was a dark-haired version of his daughter Hannah at the same age, stubborn chin and freckles and all.
The proprietor was asking Sir William now what he wanted to buy. Almost at random, Sir William selected a few cakes, knowing he wouldn’t permit himself to eat them. He handed over an amount of money without looking at or counting it.
“Sir, your change,” said the man at the counter.
“Keep it.”
“But the cakes only cost—”
“It’s all right. Keep it.” The girl was here. His daughter. She looked like Hannah and moved like Anne, and yet somehow she was her own person. Mariah Wright.
His daughter, but not his daughter. This friendly freckled girl now pouring tea for the seated customers was the daughter of the confectioner. The man who handed Sir William a parcel of sweets wrapped in silver paper, who spoke polite words of thanks, then chatted with Anne some more.
When he turned to deal with a new arrival, Anne bent to whisper to Sir William, “Good job keeping shut.”
He held the parcel of whatever he’d bought as gingerly as one might a robin’s egg. “They love her? They care for her?” he asked in a low voice.
“They do.”
He squinted, drinking in the sight of the child, then set his hands to the rims of his wheelchair and turned it away. “Then she is well-off. Happy, as she is.”
“Yes.”
“Let us go, then.”
Anne leaned closer, perhaps wondering if she’d misheard. “You wouldn’t like to talk to her a little?”
“No, I don’t think so. I would do no more than say hello before I had to tell her good-bye again.”
They’d completed the transaction. They could leave now. They should.
So he exited the shop, Anne following a few seconds behind. The door jingled shut, closing them out onto the pavement. Sir William tucked the silver parcel into a pocket of his coat, then looked wistfully back. “If I were selfish now, I’d make a place for myself in her life. But she’d be the worse for it, wouldn’t she?”
“I don’t know what she’d be,” Anne said slowly. “I don’t know her as well as I’d like to.”
They locked eyes, understanding each other. “And that’s the way it’ll remain,” she added, and Sir William agreed.
He thought he’d set aside some money for her. To serve as a dowry eventually, or a trust for her own use if she chose not to marry. Yes. She should have what his other two daughters had had.
“Thank you for meeting me here, Annie. For letting me see her. And…and I’m sorry. For so much.” He realized too late that he’d called her by the old nickname, but she allowed it.
She accompanied him to his waiting carriage, declining the offer of a ride back to her academy. “I have other business along the way. I’m glad ours went satisfactorily.”
He halted at the carriage door, looking up at her. “Will you keep me informed about how the girl goes on? About anything she or her parents”—he stumbled over the word—“might need?”
“I will,” she granted. “I’ll write to you once a quarter.”
“Every month.”
She muttered something that was probably a Welsh profanity, but she didn’t look angry. “Every six weeks, maybe.”
“Fine.”
For the first and only time since he had left Spain on a stretcher, he saw Anne Jones’s beautiful smile. The happy one.
Once she walked off to whatever her next errand might be, he hoisted himself into his carriage. The old coachman stowed his wheelchair in the adapted space within the vehicle. “Drive home slowly,” Sir William told him.
He was grateful for the solitary journey back to Queen Anne Street. The empty space in his heart was his penance to bear.
It didn’t feel right, but it was.
***
Irene kept reading the letters, again and again, though the worn lines no longer held surprises.
Their contents were ordinary—words of love, observations on politics, naughty jokes—but what they represented was not.
Her father. Was. A. Prince.
The letters were from Prince William Henry, the Duke of Clarence and St. Andrews. The profligate bachelor was known to have a longstanding alliance—and several children—with the actress Dorothea Jordan. But some years ago, before Irene was born, a printmaker had drawn him in the arms of a black woman.
Free as the forest birds will pair together
without rememb’ring who our fathers were
and in soft murmurs interchange our souls.
Irene understood now why her mother had kept the print: It was a picture of herself and Irene’s father. Their affair had evidently lasted several years, ending when Susanna fell pregnant. To legitimize her unborn child, she had married—or thought she had married—Victor Baird. The royal duke took up instead with the actress Dorothea Jordan.
Irene had been reading and rereading the letters for a day now, and thank the Lord term was over and there were no classes to teach. Her brain was full, her heart was full.
There was so much more in the letters than the heartbreak and disappointment she’d first assumed. There was love there too, forbidden and passionate and sweet. Her father was a prince, descended from a long line of royalty. Her mother was a commoner, a daughter of commoners, a descendant of slaves. There was no futur
e for them, so they’d drunk deeply of the present.
But Irene’s inheritance from her mother wasn’t just these letters. It was her life, created in love. Her stubbornness and determination. The shape of her eyes, the line of her brows, the sound of her laugh. Susanna had given her all that, had made herself a seamstress and cared for her children and, yes, rescued rubbish from the mud of the street.
She was someone all on her own. And Irene was too, wasn’t she? She’d inherited qualities from all of them. She had her mother’s compassion, her adoptive father’s daring, her brother’s curiosity. And yet, in her, they were all different. They were her own way to be.
She didn’t express these qualities the same way they did. But that was all right. They could live their lives, and she could live hers. They didn’t have to be the way Irene wanted.
And they didn’t get to determine the way she lived either. She didn’t have to solve or fix or help or protect. She just had to be.
And if that was all she had to do, then the helping and protecting could be her choice. A privilege, not a burden. Acts of love, not of duty.
There would always be people who needed help, and helping them was worthy. But she’d become a shell, not by giving up her work, as she’d once feared, but by becoming nothing other than one who lived for others.
She’d paid some of the debts at Barrow-on-Wye because she could, and because it was right, and because it was a way for her to pull back a bit of the power Victor had taken away. But they had free choice, the people of Barrow-on-Wye. Maybe there was a way they could get their power back themselves.
She’d have to think about that.
And she’d think about where she wanted to be. She’d always had to find her own place in the world figuratively. Now she’d do it literally.
Irene had expected Susanna to come to the academy, and she did so as soon as her workday at Madame Chalfont’s was over. The footmen, chastened since Mrs. Brodie had scolded them for admitting Victor without checking with Irene, confirmed that Irene did indeed want to see her caller.
The few students and the teachers were beginning to sit at the long refectory table for dinner, so Irene guided her mother to the teachers’ parlor. Each step was slow, mindful of Susanna’s painful ankle.
Her mother looked pretty and proud, cropped hair wrapped in a jewel-toned scarf. “I wanted to see where you were living. Where our little Eli is.”
“Eli still likes wearing trousers, but she has deigned to work in the kitchen here.” Irene nudged her mother. “That’s not really why you came, is it? You want to talk about the letters.”
In the otherwise empty parlor, Irene settled Susanna into the best chair by the fire. It was the same chair Victor had taken for himself. The ass! How dare he ask her for a favor for her old dad, knowing he was no one of the sort? How brazen he was.
Susanna took a deep breath. “Now you know the truth of your birth. What do you think?”
Irene bent over and hugged her mother. Tightly, tightly, breathing in the peppermint of her hair and the soap of her lovely clothing. “That’s what I think.”
When she drew back, Susanna looked visibly relieved. Irene wasn’t, though. Not yet. She knelt at her mother’s feet, folding herself to the carpet. “I have to tell you something too.” If she let the blow fall gently, it might be bearable.
She told her mother what Victor Baird had revealed about his early marriage, his abandonment of that first wife, his bigamy, Irene’s illegitimacy. She told it to Susanna as her mother’s eyes grew wide, then narrow. As her shoulders sank under the blow, then steeled again.
Irene finished, and Susanna thought in silence. “He told you all that,” she said at last. “Is it true?”
Always a fair question when Victor was involved. “I saw the marriage lines. And the timing makes sense, doesn’t it? He held on to the secret for so long because he thought it would hurt him. He told me the truth when he thought it would help him instead.”
Slowly, Susanna drummed her fingers on her knees. “So you’re a bastard, and Laurie is too. What will this mean for Harton?”
“Does anyone else have to know? Does Laurie have to know?”
“What if Victor tells them?”
Victor, Victor. Irene sighed. “You can’t change him, Mama. I don’t even know if he can change himself. He would have to care about how other people feel, instead of doing what he wants and trusting others will fall in line.”
“Then you and I will have to talk about it,” Susanna decided. “We’ll have to tell people the truth. Actually, let me tell people the truth. You don’t have to bear this alone. Not anymore.” She stretched out a hand, stroking Irene’s hair.
“What about your work?” Irene asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that. Even before today, I’ve been thinking of it. Sir William offered to fund a shop for me.”
“Just like that. He offered to fund a shop.” Irene laughed. “It’s good to be a baronet.”
“It’s good to be rich,” Susanna agreed. “And it’s good to be…good. He asked me what I want, and I told him I’d like a shop of my own where I can design gowns and sew much less. He seemed not to think it a problem that I am a black English seamstress instead of a white Frenchwoman. And that made me think—where would it not matter that I wasn’t a white Frenchwoman? Where would who I am be an advantage, even?”
“Shoreditch,” Irene understood. “Spitalfields. The parts of London you know and love best.”
“Exactly. I don’t have to make dresses for the ton. I can make dresses for all the women like us, working women who make a bit of money and want pretty clothes. Remember that dressing gown I made for you in cheaper fabric rather than silk?”
The one Irene and Jonah had all but ruined by making love on it? Irene’s cheeks heated. “I do recall it, yes.”
“I can do that for all my designs.” Susanna’s smile grew. “I’d love to do it. To bring beauty and fashion into the lives of all sorts of women, not only the wealthy. And with a shop of my own, I could live at home again.”
“Fleet Street. Near Aunt Mellie and your other siblings.” She blinked back a sudden rush of tears. “I think it sounds lovely, Mama. I'm sorry I ever persuaded you to move.”
“Reenie. It was my choice. It was the reasonable choice for the time,” Susanna said. “I’m a grown woman, you know. You couldn’t make me move lodgings if I didn’t agree it was wise. Just as you can’t get me to toss out my collection before I’m ready.”
“Are you ready now?” Irene held up a hand. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. It’s your collection, and you’re the one who must decide what to do with it.”
“Exactly.” Susanna captured Irene’s hand, gave it a squeeze. “I think…I might not need so much when I move again. With so many of my loved ones around. People are better than things. I’ve always known that, but things are better than nothing at all.” She looked at Irene shrewdly. “I wonder, what’s most important to you?”
She asked as if she thought she knew the answer.
Finally, Irene thought she knew it herself. At some point, she had begun seeing to the well-being of others at the expense of her own. And when one’s heart was linked to another’s, as hers was to Jonah’s, then that other person was hurt too.
“While you’re deciding”—Susanna eased to her feet—“maybe you’ll want to go to Newmarket. Just for something to occupy you between terms.”
“Mm-hmm.” Irene couldn’t help but smile. “Thanks for the hint.”
She saw her mother off then, walking her to the front door where the Chandlers’ landau awaited. Next, she found Mrs. Brodie as the headmistress was coming from the refectory. “How is Mademoiselle Gagne today?”
“Both she and Miss Carpenter are well,” reported Mrs. Brodie, “though mademoiselle’s shoulder received a strain. She’ll be deadly bored while she recovers between terms.”
“I know a butler who might like accent-modification lessons,” Irene said, thinking
of Bright. “Or he might simply like meeting mademoiselle.”
“Indeed? You can let her know.” Birdlike, the headmistress tilted her head and studied Irene. “It’s quite a good thing you took that mission, though officially you didn’t take that mission.”
“Officially,” Irene replied, “I thought I wasn’t going to take any more.”
“And now you are?”
“I don’t know. I suppose that’s up to you.”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Brodie. “It’s up to you, Mrs. Chalmers-turned-Chandler. Now, if you’re looking for a mission, I do have one in mind. And you’d be the perfect person to carry it out.” She smiled. “After all, you are an exceptional young lady. And your sisters will always watch out for you, as you have for all of us.”
***
“Mrs. Baird.” As Susanna entered the Queen Anne Street house, Sir William was just leaving the dining room. He met her in the foyer. “How are you? You missed dinner, but the cook can give you a plate.”
“Best not call me Mrs. Baird anymore,” she told him. “I’m not married.”
He halted his wheelchair before her. “How did you accomplish that?”
Briefly, she explained the circumstances of Victor’s bigamy. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Betrayed, of course, and angry. Disbelieving, naturally, and hurt. They’d made a son together. They’d lived together as man and wife for decades. Oh, she knew he hadn’t been faithful to her, and she knew he wasn’t to be relied on, but still, she’d been fond of him and had chosen him to give her unborn daughter legitimacy.
And he hadn’t even done that.
So maybe, after all this time, part of her was relieved too. Relieved to be able to cut ties with him for good and all. What she didn’t feel was heartbreak. If Victor had ever had her heart, he’d have broken it a long time before.
“That’s quite a secret he held all this time,” Sir William said. “Understatement, of course.”
“There’s no way to overstate it. Yes, quite a secret. And how was your day?”
She meant it as a quip, but he took the question seriously. “I don’t know. I met my daughter today, and I probably won’t ever meet her again.”
His Wayward Bride (Romance of the Turf Book 3) Page 23