What Happens in Piccadilly
The Hellion Club, Book Three
by Chasity Bowlin
© Copyright 2020 by Chasity Bowlin
Text by Chasity Bowlin
Cover by Dar Albert
Dragonblade Publishing, Inc. is an imprint of Kathryn Le Veque Novels, Inc.
P.O. Box 7968
La Verne CA 91750
[email protected]
Produced in the United States of America
First Edition May 2020
Kindle Edition
Reproduction of any kind except where it pertains to short quotes in relation to advertising or promotion is strictly prohibited.
All Rights Reserved.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Additional Dragonblade books by Author Chasity Bowlin
The Hellion Club Series
A Rogue to Remember
Barefoot in Hyde Park
What Happens in Piccadilly
Sleepless in Southhampton
When an Earl Loves a Governess
The Duke’s Magnificent Obsession
The Governess Diaries
The Lost Lords Series
The Lost Lord of Castle Black
The Vanishing of Lord Vale
The Missing Marquess of Althorn
The Resurrection of Lady Ramsleigh
The Mystery of Miss Mason
The Awakening of Lord Ambrose
A Midnight Clear (A Novella)
Hyacinth
*** Please visit Dragonblade’s website for a full list of books and authors. Sign up for Dragonblade’s blog for sneak peeks, interviews, and more: ***
www.dragonbladepublishing.com
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Publisher’s Note
Additional Dragonblade books by Author Chasity Bowlin
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
About the Author
Prologue
Number 114 Piccadilly was in a state of uproar. Servants ran to and fro, frantically shouting at one another while managing to get no work done at all. A child sat in the corridor and wept. Another sat dejectedly on the front steps and yet one more appeared to be hanging precariously from an upper floor window. Calliope St. James eyed the chaos before her for just a moment and battled the overwhelming desire to flee from whence she’d come. But the sad-faced little boy on the steps looked up at her then, and all thoughts of running were eradicated. He had the face of an angel. A fallen one, to be sure, but a dirty-faced angel nonetheless.
“There appears to be a bit of a commotion occurring. Would you like to tell me what happened?” she asked as she stopped in front of him.
“Who are you?” the boy asked.
“I was sent here by my employer to interview for the position of governess. I’m fairly certain I won’t do that now, but I can’t help but be curious as to what,” she waved a hand about, encompassing the child who now leaned even further out the window, “this is all about.”
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” the little boy said. “We’ll all be punished.”
“Likely. I’ll tell you what… I’ll walk inside with you, and then you’ll get your sister in from that window, and I think you have another sister somewhere in the madhouse beyond… the three of you will meet me in the drawing room and I will tell you all a story and we’ll try to stay out of the way while all this resolves,” Calliope offered. Looking up once more at the child whom a stiff breeze would knock to the ground from above, she tried to suppress a shiver of fear.
“You won’t punish us?”
“Why would I do that?” Calliope asked.
“Well, you’re a governess… that’s what they do,” the boy said.
“Oh, well, some governesses. Not me. And I’m not your governess, not yet, and likely not ever. But I’ve come all this way and it seems a bit of a waste not to even meet you all,” she said, as if the conversation and the situation were perfectly normal. The whole while, she was watching the little girl dangling above, preparing to throw herself bodily beneath the child should she actually fall.
He looked at her skeptically. “You promise?”
Calliope made an “X” over her heart with the tip of one finger. “Cross my heart. Now, run along inside, get your sisters… get the one off the window ledge first, though. I think perhaps that warrants a bit of urgency, don’t you?”
The little boy looked up, saw his sister and uttered a curse that stunned them both. He looked back at her. “Sorry.”
“I’m not your governess,” she said, and lifted her hands while shrugging elegantly. “Go get your sister and I’ll have the butler show me to the drawing room.”
“He won’t… no butler here no more. He run off with the last governess,” the boy said. “That’s why the whole house is arse over tits.”
Calliope’s mouth formed a slight “O” of surprise. “You really shouldn’t say those words to ladies,” she said softly.
“Arse or tits?” he asked.
“Either,” she replied evenly, softening the admonishment with a smile. “But under the circumstances, I can see where it’s an apt description. Run along, and I’ll let myself into the drawing room.”
The little boy nodded. “I like you. I hope you are our new governess. You’re not all missish and you don’t seem like a crier. Not like the las
t one. She cried all the bloody time.”
Calliope blinked as a child’s shoe landed in the flower bed just left of the steps. “No. No, I’m not much of one for tears. Your sister, sir. It’s growing increasingly more urgent I think.”
He glanced up once more, cursed again, and then loped into the house, leaving the door open wide. After a moment, the dangling child vanished from sight, back into the house, and Calliope followed at a more sedate pace. Entering the house, she found that there was, indeed, no butler. The footmen all appeared to be in a complete uproar, none of them knowing what to do as they no longer had a butler to direct them. Well, all but two of them. Those two seemed ready to come to blows over who was better suited to step into the position of butler now that their predecessor had apparently fled into the night, or in this case, the early afternoon, with the runaway governess.
From her vantage point inside the front door, she could see the drawing room. Without further ado, she moved toward it. Once there, she settled into a chair near the fireplace, though it was dark and no fires were necessary given the warmth of the day. In fact, she even removed her pelisse. Since no servants seemed to be willing to make the effort to take it for her, or were in fact even aware of her presence, she simply draped it over the back of her chair and waited. After a few minutes, the little boy reappeared. His sister, much smaller than she’d appeared from the ground, and also much dirtier, stood next to him. She clutched a doll in the crook of her arm. As she looked at Calliope with pure malicious challenge in her eyes, she shoved a thumb into her mouth.
Right on their heels came the third sibling, the oldest, a girl who had also clearly been weeping. She appeared to be around eleven or so, and was wearing a dress suited to a much younger girl. It was inches too short and also impossibly tight, stretched at the seams to the point it couldn’t possibly be comfortable.
“Hello. I’m Miss Calliope,” she offered. “I thought, if you’d like, I could tell you a story. Won’t you sit down?”
“Is this a trick?”
The word came out “twick” as the little girl had asked it around her thumb. Calliope bit back a smile. “No, it isn’t a trick. It seems to me that your house is in a bit of disorder and disorder is not very good for children, I find. So I will sit with you here and we will stay out of the way of all that’s happening out there and I will tell you a story until your father returns home.”
“He’s not our father. He’s our uncle. Our father is dead. So is our mother,” the little boy from the porch said.
It was said so matter of factly that it took Callie aback. “Oh. I’m very sorry.”
“Are your parents alive?” the oldest girl asked, a challenge in her voice.
“I don’t know,” Calliope replied with complete honesty. “I never knew my parents.”
The little girl popped her thumb out of her mouth. “That’s the story I want to hear.”
Calliope considered the request for a moment. It would need to be a somewhat edited version, but she saw no harm in it. “Very well. That is the story you shall have.” After taking a moment to collect her thoughts, Calliope began, “Once upon a time—”
“I thought we were getting your story. Not some blimey fairy tale,” the boy said, clearly disgusted.
“You shouldn’t use that word either… the one that began with a b,” she corrected him.
“Can’t spell, can I?”
“You can’t spell?” Calliope asked. “Can any of you? Spell, read, write?”
“I can a little,” the oldest girl said.
“But you all should have been reading and writing years ago! Why not?”
“Well, our first governess was more interested in Papa than in us. Of course, Papa was more interested in her than he was us, too,” the littlest one replied. “Mama and Papa fought about it all the time, then Mama sacked her. What’s that mean? To sack someone?”
“It means that you end that person’s employment and they do not get to work for you anymore,” Calliope said. “But go on, you were saying?”
“After that, Papa yelled and Mama cried and he said he was bringing the lot of us back to England. So we got on a ship. Then Papa died and then Mama, and we came here,” the little girl explained, then promptly popped her thumb right back into her mouth.
The oldest one spoke up, “And our last governess, the one our uncle hired, was only interested in the butler. I don’t think we’ve had a single lesson since we’ve arrived.”
Oh, dear heavens. She’d wandered into bedlam. “I see. Well, enough about your governesses and their apparently numerous failings. I am telling you the story of why I don’t know who my parents are, but I am telling it as a fairy tale. So, no more interruptions. All right?”
All the children nodded their agreement and Calliope began again. “Once upon a time, there was a place called the St. James Workhouse, which still stands today. And in eighteen hundred and four, a little girl was left on the doorstep there. Her name was Calliope. But Calliope was too small to work, and too small to care for herself, and the workhouse was only for people who could do so. But the vicar of a nearby church arranged for a childless couple to take in the little girl and care for her. And they did so, until the little girl was eight years old. In eighteen hundred and twelve, the little girl’s foster father went away to war. He was very brave but, alas, he died in battle. Then her foster mother became very sick and died. The vicar, now a widower, couldn’t take her in himself as it would not have been seemly to do so… instead, he sent her back to the workhouse where first he’d found her. And that is where her true guardian angel found her… Miss Euphemia Darrow.”
“Sounds like a governess’ name,” the oldest girl said.
Calliope bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. “It is a governess’ name, but not simply any governess. Miss Euphemia Darrow is the ultimate governess. She trains young girls who have no other way to make their way in the world in how to be excellent governesses so that they might be able to fend for themselves in life.”
“Is that what she did for you?” the smallest child asked.
Calliope did smile then. “Indeed, Miss Euphemia Darrow plucked my young self from the workhouse and took me to her school which is not very from here. And there, she taught me to read and write, speak multiple languages, do arithmetic, sew, paint, play the pianoforte and comport myself with all the dignity and propriety that is deemed necessary by society. She taught me those things, among others, so that I might be able to pass them on to my charges.”
“It sounds boring,” the boy scoffed.
“Some of it can be,” Calliope admitted. “So, to make it less of a burden, Miss Darrow gave us prizes. We would earn sweets or get to stay up late or get to sleep later in the morning. There were all sorts of little things and freedoms that we were given if we did what was asked of us all and did it well.”
“Our old governesses didn’t do that,” the oldest girl said. “They’d tell us to do something and if we didn’t, they’d wallop us.”
Calliope blinked at that pronouncement. Certainly, she was not unfamiliar with such practices. But it never failed to leave her stunned when a child spoke so matter of factly about being beaten. “Well, walloping did not occur at Miss Darrow’s school.”
“Would you wallop us if you was our governess?” the boy asked with narrowed eyes.
“I don’t believe so. You’d have to do something very terrible indeed to warrant any real punishment, I think. Even then, I would likely not do so myself but speak to your uncle about whatever infraction had been committed and let him determine a suitable consequence,” Calliope answered. But it would never be walloping.
“You’ll be our governess,” the little girl said firmly. “We’ve decided.”
Calliope grinned at the small child’s dirty face and tangled hair, all of it outshone by her beatific smile. “But I haven’t decided yet, my dear. And I must have a say, as well.”
“Well, what sort of say?” the boy dem
anded of her.
“I must speak with your uncle first. We must see if we can come to agreeable terms before I can commit to anything… and perhaps he will not like me and then he would not wish for me to be your governess!”
“He don’t care,” the boy scoffed once more. “Don’t care one whit. Wants to be shed of us all, I think.”
“I think that’s quite enough from you, William.”
Calliope looked up to see a man standing in the doorway. He wore a simple but elegantly fitted coat and a pair of snug riding breeches. His boots were dusty, his gold-streaked, brown hair disheveled and wind-blown. And he was, quite possibly, the most handsome man she’d ever seen. From his broad, high forehead, patrician nose and perfectly sculpted jaw line and cleft chin, he was simply perfection. His undeniable masculine beauty was coupled with a tall and imposing frame, broad shoulders and lean hips. If this man was the Earl of Montgomery, she could never work for him. Not in a million years.
Chapter One
The scene spread out before Lord Winn Hamilton, Earl of Montgomery, was unlike anything he’d witnessed in all of the madness that had become his life since the children first appeared on his doorstep. Ignoring the chaos in the hall and the servants who ran willy-nilly in hysterics, his gaze was glued to the dirty, bedraggled and yet shockingly well-behaved children seated in a circle at the feet of a woman who could only be an angel. Her nut brown hair was swept back into a low chignon, her simple morning dress of a rather faded lavender hugged a lush and generous figure that reminded him very keenly that his own needs had been ignored since his brother’s children had been unceremoniously deposited in his care. Her features were soft and pretty, her eyes framed by long lashes, and her lips were a perfect bow, the bottom lip turning out ever so slightly in a soft, provocative and perpetual pout. In short, she was the least governess-like governess he’d ever seen. Excepting, of course, the one who’d just fled his house with his butler and a large quantity of the silver.
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