by Jude Knight
Eleanor seemed unaffected, focused on whatever bad news she had to give him. “You are aware, I am sure, of the history of your niece Sarah’s ward?”
“Her son?” James queried. He had assumed Eleanor knew. She was a confidante of his sister-in-law.
“Indeed. What you may not know—what I have just found out—is that Society is making that assumption and spreading the story.”
James shook his head. “I guessed the gossips and busybodies would reach that conclusion, but without proof or confirmation, and with the family firmly behind her, the rumours will die.”
“True, if that was all. But James, you may not know—Sarah may not know—that her little boy’s father is back in England and, if my sources are accurate, seeking a bride.”
James stiffened. “The coward has returned?”
“As to that,” Eleanor said, “Grace always suspected that Sutton and Winshire had something to do with his disappearance, and it is being whispered that his father has recently bought him out of the navy, where he had worked his way up to being a surgeon.”
“And your sources are associating Sarah and her child with this man?”
Eleanor shook her head. “Not yet. The two rumours are separate. But if the two of them meet, people may make connections. Especially if the child resembles his father.” She shrugged, even that small elegant movement unusually casual for the duchess. “It is all very manageable, James, but you needed to know.”
“I appreciate it, Eleanor.” He sighed. “English Society is more of a snake pit than the court of the Shah of Shahs or that of the Ottoman Sultan Khan. Tell me, what is going on between my niece Charlotte and your son Aldridge?”
Eleanor’s answer was hasty, but her eyes slid away from his. “Nothing. There can be nothing between Charlotte and Aldridge.”
7
By the second week of the house party, Sarah had discounted all three of her possible suitors, and hadn't added anyone to her list. None of them improved on closer acquaintance. Or perhaps it was just that she couldn't move forward now that Nate had come back into her life. She had to hear him out, as her sister had urged her. Then, when he had told her whatever lies he'd dreamt up to explain his sudden disappearance just when she needed him most, she would be able to put him firmly back in the past, where he belonged.
Elias wasn’t enjoying the party, either. He asked several times when they could go home, and his nursemaid reported the kind of subtle bullying that is hard for adults to counter because every edged remark, every shove or poke, could be explained away as innocent or accidental.
When Sarah received Charlotte’s letter about a missing protégé, she was relieved. "Please make my apologies to Lady de Witt," Charlotte had written. Sarah looked for her hostess and explained that her sister Charlotte was dealing with a small family emergency. "I regret that I will need to return to London immediately," she added.
“In the morning, surely,” Lady de Witt suggested. “You won’t want to travel in the dark, and if you leave at daybreak tomorrow, you will still be back in London for lunch.”
Having once entertained the thought of leaving the party early, Sarah couldn’t bear to delay. Drew agreed with an alacrity that hinted he’d had his own difficulties with the other guests. They would stop at the inn that marked the halfway point, and be on their way again as soon after dawn as they could manage. Sarah, Drew, Elias, and their servants left Lady de Witt’s manor within the hour, Drew riding escort while Sarah and Elias shared the first carriage and the servants took the second.
They rode in silence at first. Elias knelt on the seat so he could look out the window, but Sarah could tell he was thinking deeply. They were still a few miles from the inn when Elias spoke.
"Is what they said true, my lady?" he asked. "Am I a by-blow? What is a by-blow?"
Sarah couldn't think what to say. This was Nate's fault. If he hadn't burst back into her life, she would have left Elias in London, safe in his own schoolroom, surrounded by people who loved him.
"Mr Wilson said I was a nobleman's cuckoo," Elias added, quoting the man in charge of the workhouse to which Elias had been taken after his foster parents died. "What does that mean, my lady? I don't understand."
Sarah had known she would have to explain to Elias one day, but not yet. Not when the child was only six years old. Not when they were still so new to one another.
"Now, then, Master Elias," the nursemaid interrupted. "Don't thee be bothering Lady Sarah with thy questions. She's taken thee in and it is grateful thee should be, think on."
Elias's fallen face was enough to break Sarah out of her paralysis. "Thank you, Morris, but Master Elias is welcome to talk to me about anything that bothers him. Elias, darling, ‘by-blow’ is a very rude word. It means a child born to two people who made a mistake, but you are not your parents, Elias. You are not the mistake they made, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. You are a dear and precious person, and I love you."
Elias accepted the hug that Sarah could not resist giving, his usual hesitancy a momentary thing before he returned the embrace. "I love you, too, Lady Sarah."
Sarah threw caution to the wind. The ton would think the worst anyway, and Uncle James and her sister would stand by her whatever other people said. "Would you… Do you think you might wish to call me 'Mama', darling?" Perhaps it was time to follow her first plan, and retire to the country under another name.
Elias drew back without letting her go, meeting Sarah's gaze. His eyes brimmed with tears. "May I?"
Sarah nodded, her own eyes overflowing. Elias burrowed in again, muffling his next question. But Sarah heard it well enough. "Who were my real mother and father, Mama? Do you know?"
* * *
A collapsing wall brought a flood of injuries into the clinic just as the sky began to lighten, and it was well after dawn before Nate had time to check again on the boy Tony. He was sleeping, but he was breathing easily and showed no sign of fever.
Nate went to take his leave of Blythe, who thanked him for all his hard work. “You hit a busy night, Beauclair, and you proved your worth. I hope you’ll stick to it. We need doctors, and few are willing to give up their time to those who can’t pay.”
Nate decided the Winshire mansion—townhouse was too unpretentious a word—was not far out of his way on his drive home, so gave that address to the driver of the hire carriage he found a few doors from the clinic. No fashionable lady would be up at such a time, but he could leave a note to be given to her with her morning cup of chocolate, or whatever she ordered when she woke up.
But when the carriage stopped outside of the main doors to the mansion, several horses and riders waited in the street. He recognised Lady Charlotte by the steps, talking to—arguing with, by the looks of it—a fair-haired man. “Wait here for me,” he told the driver. “I’ll want to go to Fairview Square after this.”
The three men with the horses were Winshire’s fearsome foreign guard, who watched him as he strode towards the lady. Their faces were impassive, but he had no doubt that any untoward move on his part would be terminally unwise.
The man Lady Charlotte was talking to, though, put a hitch in his step—the Marquis of Aldridge, who was the son and heir of the Duke of Haverford. The marquis had been pointed out to him by Libby one evening, and she had favoured him with a brief summary of the aristocrat’s career as a rake and his impending elevation to one of the highest titles in the land, given the approaching death of his father.
She had also speculated whether the feud between the Haverfords and the Winshires would continue for another generation. Given the warmth in Aldridge’s eyes as he observed Lady Charlotte watching Nate approach, Nate rather thought he could answer that question.
“You are early, Lord Bentham,” she greeted him. “My sister is still away.”
“I came to see you this morning, my lady. Or at least to leave you a message. I expected to be told you were not available to visitors.”
“I have been out early
,” Charlotte agreed, “and I fear that we must go out again directly. Aldridge, have you meet Bentham, Lechton’s heir?”
Nate nodded at Aldridge, heir to heir, but spoke to Lady Charlotte. “I have a message from a boy named Tony.”
Everyone stilled, even the retainers. “Tony? You have seen him?”
“I treated him. He will recover.” Always start with the most reassuring news. “He fell and broke a leg. Bruised ribs. A few bangs and cuts. He is safe and in the Ashbury Clinic in Brightwell Lane just off Wintermount Street.”
“Ruth’s clinic?”
Nate didn’t know who Ruth was, so ignored Lady Charlotte’s interpolation. “He said to tell you he did not run. He was taken from the garden.”
“There, Aldridge,” Charlotte said to the marquis. “I told you. Thank you, Lord Bentham. Yahzak, can we go now?”
“Is he awake, Bentham?” Aldridge asked, and when Nate shook his head, he said, “Breakfast first, now that we know he is safe, my lady. I am sure your men are hungry, and I know I am. Why don’t you invite Bentham to join us? He can tell us how Tony came to be at the clinic.”
“I will dispatch a man to stand guard,” the man addressed as Yahzak suggested, and at his nod another leapt on one of their magnificent horses and cantered away down the street.
“Dismiss your carriage, Bentham,” Lady Charlotte suggested. “We’ll see that you get home.”
Over a lavish breakfast, Lady Charlotte quizzed Nate about Tony’s condition. It soon became clear that she didn’t want to leave him at the clinic. “Not if he can be safely moved, Lord Bentham.”
“The kidnapper will try again,” the Marquis of Aldridge warned, and Lady Charlotte’s foreign-looking guard captain agreed. “He is in danger, and so are all at the clinic. Lady Ruth would not be pleased.”
“Who is Lady Ruth?” Nate wondered aloud.
“My cousin Ruth is Lady Ashbury, the founder of the clinic,” Lady Charlotte explained. Blythe had been full of stories about the foreign-trained female doctor who headed the establishment, but he’d never mentioned a title. Nate pulled his attention back to Lady Charlotte, who was asking a question. “Can Tony be moved, Lord Bentham?”
“I would prefer not, but it can be done if you are serious about the danger.”
For a few minutes, they discussed logistics, and soon Nate was committed to going back to the clinic and escorting Tony home, making sure the boy was settled before seeking his own pillow.
“You can leave us to fetch the boy,” Aldridge told Lady Charlotte. “You should rest, my lady.”
Nate wondered what was between Lady Charlotte and Aldridge. The Merry Marquis, Society called him. Libby had appeared more enthralled than scandalised by the relatively mild anecdotes she’d shared, but Nate assumed the reality was far more unfit for a lady’s ears, and Lady Charlotte did not appear to him to be a woman who would ignore those darker truths.
Nonetheless, the pair of them bickered for the rest of the meal like old adversaries—or lovers. Aldridge insisted the lady would not be safe travelling to and from the clinic escorted only by Nate and three of the fearsome warriors. Lady Charlotte told him he was being ridiculous. Which was true, and had Nate wondering all the more about their relationship.
Aldridge continued to urge that she stay home. “You must be tired,” he pointed out. “You have been up all night.”
“We have all been up all night,” she responded. “And you have had a more active night than I, Lord Aldridge, and started earlier.”
Aldridge opened his mouth to respond, looked at Nate, and swallowed whatever he was going to say. After a moment, he changed tack. “I have a family interest in the boy,” he argued.
Nate thought that was the leveller, but he was wrong. Lady Charlotte didn’t answer for several minutes, and then she adopted the appeal to authority tactic. “Of course, as the boy’s uncle or father or brother, you must meet with Tony and ask your questions, but you will hardly be able to do so while he is in great pain, or unconscious. It shall be up to Lord Bentham, as his physician, to decide when he is well enough for visitors.”
* * *
The inn was pleasant, and the beds comfortable in the suite given over to Sarah, Elias, her maid, and his nurse. Nonetheless, Sarah had been awake for hours, thinking about Elias and his question. He had accepted her response—that she would tell him about his mother and father when he was older. The task would have been easier if Nathaniel Beauclair had stayed away, no more than an unhealing wound in her memory.
Where on earth had he been? And why? At least he is alive! She should be relieved, but all the grief she had buried over the past seven years had turned to anger that he’d deliberately left her. Or, if not chosen to leave her—and he said not—he had deliberately stayed away.
Every time she began to drift off, her mind began to replay memories of the summer she turned sixteen; the summer she spent falling in love with Nate. And she would jerk herself back to full wakefulness, forcing her thoughts into a different channel.
It was worse when her tiredness finally submerged her into a disturbed sleep, when she relived in dreams the loss of her beloved, the duke’s attempt to marry her to one of her father’s friends, the discovery of her pregnancy and all that followed.
It was not full light when Elias woke before his nurse and came looking for her, waking her from a horrifying replay of her second loss, the theft of her son, by shaping her face with a curious finger.
Her heart still pounding, Sarah cupped his hand and held it against her face. “Elias, darling.”
“Good morning, Mama. Mama, why are you crying?”
Was she? Ah, yes. Tears were running down her cheeks. “I was having a bad dream, Elias. I am so glad you woke me.”
She sat up, and invited Elias to sit beside her, taking his hands to help him up onto the bed. The nurse found them chatting when she stumbled through half an hour later, full of apologies to Sarah and scolds for Elias. “You know you are not to go to Lady Sarah unless she sends for you.”
“Not at all, Morris.” Sarah squeezed the hand she had around Elias’s shoulders, hugging him to her. “Elias must not wander around Winshire House, or any other big mansion, without you or some other adult with him. But at home in Oxfordshire, where the house is much smaller, and at times like this, when we are both in the same suite, he can reach my bedchamber safely. He may come to his mama at any time, but here, he does not need someone to bring him.”
She dropped a kiss on his hair. When he had first come to live with her, he had stiffened at every touch, flinched even, and withdrawn from caresses as quickly as he could. Now, six months later, he leaned into her trustingly. She had lost six years of his life. Before long, by all she’d heard, he would consider himself too old for physical expressions of affection. She would make the most of the remainder of his childhood.
It was full light outside now, with enough light creeping in to see that Sarah’s maid was awake, sitting up on the pallet near the door. “It seems we will be ready for an early start,” Sarah commented, smiling at her across the room.
“I shall get dressed and fetch your washing water, my lady.”
“Thank you. And see if Lord Andrew’s manservant is up, will you? Ask him to let Drew know we are awake and eager for our breakfast.” Drew was generally up with the dawn, even when he had been out all night doing whatever it was he did. Somehow, she couldn’t see him wasting his time gambling and whoring. Although he was no older than she and Charlotte, he seemed much more mature than the young cubs of the same age who were dragged reluctantly by their mothers to the Season’s more respectable events.
Sure enough, he was awake, and had already secured a private parlour for their breakfast. Within an hour, they were on their way, a fresh team of horses eating up the miles between them and London.
They were home at Winshire House by mid-morning. Elias and his nanny disappeared up the stairs to the nursery. Sarah paused at the bottom of the steps to watch him eagerly
leading the way.
“He has come a long way in the last six months,” Drew observed.
She turned to him with a smile. “He is naturally a sunny-natured fellow, I think, Drew. That helps.”
“You know,” Drew said, “marriage is for a very long time, cousin. If you cannot find Elias a father who also suits you, he does have a number of uncles who will be proud to love him and support him.”
Sarah swallowed a lump in her throat. “I appreciate that more than I can say.”
Drew gave her a quick one-armed hug and turned to the butler to change the subject. “Has my father returned, Grosvenor?”
“No, my lord, and we have no word to expect him today.”
Drew nodded. “Thank you.” He put one foot on the first stair and then turned back to Sarah. “I’m going to change and then eat. Will you join me for a second breakfast, cousin?”
“For a cup of tea, at least. Is my sister up, Grosvenor?”
“Lady Charlotte has not yet returned from the Ashbury Clinic, my lady, though we expect her shortly.” An infinitesimal relaxation in his stiff demeanour preceded an explanation that, for Grosvenor, was decidedly chatty. “The boy she had staying with her was kidnapped, escaped and was then injured. She has gone to fetch him. The, er, female persons she sent to us have been accommodated in the minor guest bedrooms.”
Sarah exchanged a questioning glance with Drew. Female persons? But the butler had taken a step closer to the front door. “Ah! That may be them, now!”
8
In the end, Aldridge had accepted his dismissal and gone home, while Nate and Lady Charlotte took a Winshire barouche, with plenty of room for a stretcher, to the clinic. Half-a-dozen horsemen escorted them, which suggested to Nate the danger to Lady Charlotte was not just in Aldridge’s imagination.
At the clinic, all was quiet, today not being a public clinic day. Nate introduced himself to the orderly who bustled out when the bell on the door jangled. “I am Dr Beauclair, a new volunteer here. I was on duty last night, with Dr Blythe, and I have returned to collect the patient we brought in, a boy called Tony. This lady is his employer.”