“Family members are not always close, my dear. As a solicitor, I have seen many a family rift.”
“Do you not think that abandoned children would be more inclined to appreciate familial relationships?”
At his approving smile, Chastity opened her reticule. “I listed the cost per child, per week, month, and year, for food and clothing. I have added a bit for dolls and— I do not know what little boys play with.”
“Tin horns, toy drums.” He smiled. “Boys are noisy.”
“I—” She almost said she knew—she had learned as much at finding the children in William’s aunt’s cellar. “I imagine so.”
“Your ideals make me fear for your practicality in this matter,” Mr. Sennett said. “You have listed nothing for a caretaker, a housekeeper, nursemaids, tutors.”
“I will do what must be done. The children will help.”
“I haven’t seen a child yet who could run a house. Listen to me in this. If I allow you to have Sunnyledge....”
Chastity thought her heart would leap from her chest.
“On a trial basis,” the solicitor cautioned. “You must hire the necessary help. The caretaker left about a fortnight ago; hire another. As you will no doubt set the house to rights, I will pay you a housekeeper’s wages and give you a monthly allowance for upkeep and maintenance. You will need supplies, though the house should provide much in the way of necessities.
“I cannot believe you would— Are you a philanthropist?”
Mr. Sennett chuckled. “Hardly, my dear, but there is little likelihood that an heir to Sunnyledge will be found at this late date. I must find a worthy charity soon. Who knows? Your children’s home might prove to be the very one. As a boy whose mother drowned in gin, I met the worst and best of men. Helping to fund a children’s home may be the way for me to repay the gentleman who took me in and raised me.”
The solicitor sat forward. “In asylums, in workhouses, everywhere, there is greed, cruelty, evils I will not name; I doubt you know of their existence. But I occasionally come across a person of caring and compassion. The man who raised me was such a man. I believe that you are such a woman.”
He held her gaze. “But you must understand what I want, nay, demand of you, and why.”
“I am listening.”
“You must know, clearly, right from wrong, and teach those precepts to the children. Only in that way can you nurture them properly.”
Chastity considered the workhouse, where children died daily. She knew right from wrong, and leaving Matt, Mark, Luke and Bekah in that workhouse would have been wrong.
“If I find that you have acted in other than a moral, conscientious or lawful manner,” Mr. Sennett had continued. “You will lose Sunnyledge, and I will see that you never open a home for children, anywhere, ever.”
Chastity’s heart had raced as he spoke those words.
It raced now an entire day later, but she buried her guilt and worry. She had acted conscientiously and morally by telling the parish beadle she would raise the children. Taking them would have been legal, but for him, a corrupt church elder who sent them to the workhouse because she would not pay his wicked price.
All would be well, she reassured herself as they continued their trek toward Sunnyledge. No man, save one, knew what she had done, and that man, she would never see, again.
In time, clustered cottages gave way to sprawling farms. Grasslands, divided by dry stone walls, became hilly uplands. Hillocks grew forested; roads narrowed.
By the time the valley before them revealed the jaunty jumble of structures, requisite to bustling village life, dusk streaked the sky with lavender. “This is it,” Chastity said, her sense of destiny so intense, a frisson of alarm stepped on its heels. “Painswick.”
By virtue of the steep cobbled track descending into the village, the children gamboled headlong hand in hand, Luke laughing all the way.
Amid hawkers’ songs and hot, spicy scents, Chastity admired a bonnet placed in a shop window by a barrel-bellied, frock-coated merchant. “Two pounds, three? That’s highway robbery,” she said.
Luke shifted the satchel that contained their clothes and William’s medical bag, and tugged at her sleeve. “I’m gonna buy that for you someday, Kitty.” As she bent to kiss his cheek, he ruffled her hair, freeing the powder she’d used to disguise and drear its chestnut hue.
After buying food and supplies, she bought her giggling band each a ha-penny pie and a peppermint stick for a thruppence. They ate while they watched village children roll misshapen hoops in the wheelwright’s dooryard.
Afterward, Chastity sought directions to Sunnyledge.
“Oh my, no,” said a buxom matron, all agog. “Not that God-forsaken place. It’s haunted, don’t’cha know. Many’s the night they’ve heard her pitiful wail, that lost soul searching for her missing babes. They died with her, some say, but their wee bodies were never buried.” She whispered the last part.
Chastity held Bekah closer. “If you could direct us.”
The matron shook her head. “If you insist.” She pointed. “There it is, top ‘o the hill.”
A honey-gold manse stood guarding the valley, its chimneystacks straight as parade soldiers at full attention. Mullioned windows—as tall as the first floor, and wide as they were tall—reflected the sun, bright as that off the stone itself.
“It’s a bloomin’ castle,” Matt said.
“Magic,” whispered Luke.
Mark snorted. “Where our dreams will come true.”
“It is splendid,” Chastity said. “As if it’s made of gold.”
“That’s the sun on the stone—Painswick stone. The old Earl’s dead. That’s his house. You kin?”
“If you could tell me how to get there.”
“Go left at the yew row and take the hill straight up. Been abandoned for years. Except for a daft caretaker, now and again, most won’t go near the place.”
Chastity gave her thanks and they went on their way, the villager following. “It’s farther than you think. You got a key? Can’t get in, if you don’t have a key.”
Chastity kept walking.
“You’re braver than I,” the tenacious woman called from a distance.
Luke blew the shepherd’s horn Chastity had saved for him. WARRONNK!
Mr. Sennett was right. Boys were noisy. She would never be able to thank the solicitor for giving her the use of Sunnyledge—though if he ever learned that she rescued the children after he set down his rules— Well, just imagining the consequences of her actions made Chastity shudder, even as Rebekah began to wail.
“How old is Bekah?” she asked the boys.
“Three ‘cept we dunno’ when we’re gonna’ be the next number,” Luke said.
“Don’t mind that noise she makes,” Matt said. “She does that lots. Wish she would talk, though.”
“She’s dumb.”
“That will be enough, Mark,” Chastity said, coming to a faltering stop with a shiver.
Sunnyledge may have looked warm and inviting from the vale, but up close, after dark, it looked decidedly bleak, forsaken, and forbidding.
The key was useless. A mere nudge opened the door, the wind taking it the rest of the way. With the children attached to her skirts, Chastity stepped inside, stifling a nervous urge to giggle. “Hello? Is anyone here?”
WARRONNNK!
The sound made Chastity shriek and fall against the door, a hand to her fast-pumping heart. “That will be enough, Luke. Anyone here has expired from fright by now.”
Chastity tried to lock the door, but the keyhole turned with the key, so she pushed a chair against it, cutting off the last sliver of moonlight. “Bother, I am such an idiot. I do not even have a candle.”
“I can see in the dark,” Matt said. “We hid in Aunt Anna’s cellar so long after she died, we never saw the sun.”
“Do you think you can find the kitchen?”
“I’m good at finding things. Be right back.”
Chastity sat on the floor, Bekah, Mark, and Luke, cozy and warm, nesting in her black wool skirts. For once, she was glad William had not seen fit to replace her religious habits during their short marriage. She had, however, removed all symbols of her religious life, so that her gowns looked more like widow’s weeds.
“Found the kitchen, Kitty. And candles,” Matt called.
A short while later, the children ate some of the bread and cheese she’d bought, as exhaustion overtook them, and a sense of destiny, profound and peaceful, enveloped her.
Settled for the night with Zeke, their lame rabbit, on a mattress plumped with Chastity’s aprons and nightshifts, one old habit and one Sunday best, Luke said they hadn’t been so comfy since Mum left.
“I worried,” Matt said with a yawn. “That you wouldn’t come for us at the workhouse, like you promised.”
Mark scoffed and rolled to his side, presenting his rigid back. “We would never have gone to that horrid old place, if you hadn’t turned us in.”
If she failed to breach that barrier Mark kept erected around his heart, Chastity feared it would become as hard as the stone in these Cotswold Hills.
How could he be so angry, yet cuddle his baby sister so lovingly? Perhaps this child, who professed to need no one, needed her even more than his brothers and sister did. One thing was certain; Mark would never forgive her for trying to gain their custody through the proper channels first.
After she arrived on Britain’s shore, she had gone on to William’s Aunt Anna’s as planned. There, she found that his aunt had died, leaving his young cousins, abandoned at her passing, hiding in her cellar to keep from getting separated or going to the workhouse.
Chastity had marched them to the Vicar to say she would take them. The Vicar passed her to the Curate, the Curate to the Beadle.
Chastity shuddered remembering the Beadle’s lustful suggestion as to how she could purchase them. Since she refused to pay his price, however, the Beadle had relegated her children to the parish workhouse with nary a blink.
So much for following the rules, Chastity thought, unable to forget Mr. Sennett’s words, “If I find that you have acted in other than a moral, conscientious or lawful manner, you will lose Sunnyledge, and I will see that you never open a refuge for children anywhere, ever.”
At the workhouse, children younger than hers, died. She thought about the baby girl born the week she worked there, while trying to get hers back. How she’d wanted to take that babe as well. She thought of Matt’s protectiveness, Mark’s anger, Luke’s trust, and Bekah’s cough.
In taking them, she had acted conscientiously and morally. Except for the Beadle’s lust, her guardianship would be lawful as well.
Mr. Sennett said he tried to bring the conditions of asylums and workhouses to the notice of people who could improve them, and their lack of interest angered him.
“Do you never get so incensed,” Chastity had dared to ask, knowing she planned to rescue William’s cousins the next day, “that you wish to take matters into your own hands?”
“We cannot give in to such,” he said. “To have lasting effect, reform must be undertaken in a lawful, orderly manner. There is never an excuse to breach rules.”
Chastity sighed. Having been an orphan, the solicitor lauded her wish to open a home where children without parents would be loved. She only hoped that he would come to understand that taking these few had been necessary.
She bent to them now—warm, safe, unafraid, bellies full—covered a shoulder, stroked a brow, and prayed, for their sakes, that all would be well.
Then found a chair in which to take down her hair, and examined the kitchen, aglow from a fire in the old stone hearth.
Sunnyledge—a haven—someday perhaps, a home.
* * *
The hell of it was, Reed Gilbride thought, rubbing the back of his neck, looking up at Sunnyledge, the house was so damned big, he could search for years and never find the truth of his birth. As for secrets, the place fairly reeked of them.
Even the cryptic note he had received added to Sunnyledge’s aura of mystery—a note that roused an anger, tempered oddly by hope. Such anger, he usually reserved for the people who gave him life and threw him away. And the hope? Well, that just made him madder ... until Sennett killed expectation by saying the note must be a hoax. The solicitor said he’d seen more than one, worded exactly the same way. He also suggested that a Barrington by-blow had no claim, here.
Still, Reed could not give up. As a child, he would have settled for knowing who his parents might have been. Now he bloody well wanted to know why he had not been good enough for them to keep. Who gave a helpless babe to the Gilbrides, of all people?
He led his horse around back to find it shelter.
Why did the woman who raised him—if you could call it that—refuse to talk about Sunnyledge? Why act as if the devil would swallow her whole, if she did? Could this place hold the key to his past? Him, the Earl of Barrington, as the note suggested?
Reed mocked himself with a chuckle, raised his collar against a cold drizzle, settled Stealth in a rickety old stable, returned and picked up his satchel.
He might be a bastard in more ways than one, but with or without Sennett’s approval, he needed to find out.
Now that Boney had been defeated, and he’d retired from the Guards, Reed looked forward to a life of peace and quiet, and the occasional willing woman. But first he must search for his roots, this being the place to start.
“Damn, it’s cold.” As if fate heard, a blast of wind and rain smacked him in the face and opened the door with a flourish—the thunderous crack of it hitting the wall loud enough to wake the Sunnyledge ghost herself.
Reed saluted and stepped inside, a sense of inevitability filling him, as if he had arrived after a thirty-year sojourn, turned an invisible corner, and could not return the way he had come.
What was more, he did not want to.
In the kitchen, Chastity jumped at the thunderous sound, and shot to her feet. After a frozen heart-pounding beat, arms and legs prickling, she located a meat cleaver in a kitchen drawer and closed her trembling fingers around its smooth bone handle.
CHAPTER TWO
As Reed knelt and searched his bag for a candle, the room seemed actually to brighten. He raised his head to see shadows shivering in slow motion. “What the devil?” He rose to his full defensive stance, and the room grew brighter still.
Silhouettes of stags’ heads stretched into grotesque shapes as a phantasm holding a candle appeared from behind the stairs.
Two things became etched on Reed’s brain at once; she had a face so white, she might be a specter, and the knife in her unsteady hand, sparkling off her candle’s flame, was not a figment of his imagination.
Did the mystical goddess, with an artless halo of russet waves, mean to end his journey here and now?
Not bloody likely.
She stopped, keeping between them the breadth of a stately foyer in decay, and she lifted that blade higher, her brazen scrutiny of his person gaining his grudging respect. “Who are you?” she asked—bold demand and stroking whisper in a French accent, her beguiling voice bringing him an unsettling sense of reliving the moment.
That her aspect bore a true netherworld quality, Reed dared not contemplate. “Who are you?” he countered.
“I— It isn’t polite to answer a question with a question.”
Despite her spectral beauty, her trembling response firmly adjoined her to an earthly plane, which moderated Reed’s disquiet and slowed the thumping beat of his heart. “What are you, a governess?”
At his question, the candle in her hand trembled the more, but she conquered her trepidation—he saw the effort it took—and squared her shoulders. “Teaching children is a noble calling,” she said, her voice aquiver. The wind from the open door whipped her cumbrous ebon skirts about her legs, calling for her shiver, and his ... awareness.
Any number of pleasant ways to warm her entered Reed’s a
ddled brain, but he shut the door, instead. “Then you are a governess.”
He took a step in her direction. “No, and you are?”
She raised the knife and halted him in his tracks. “Not a governess either,” he tried, but failed, to charm her. He would more than frown if a stranger invaded his house, though it could not be hers. “You do not look as if you would steal someone’s heritage.”
“What?”
“Not important. My name is Reed Gilbride and I could use some work.” A position in the house would allow him to search—a place in her bed would not come amiss, either. Reed cursed his idiocy, even as his body began to rise to the challenge. “I intended to knock,” he said, to turn his thoughts. “But the wind opened the door before me.” He bent to examine the latch. “The lock is broken.”
“Thank you for the keen observation.”
Tongue as sharp as her blade and just as earth-bound, a tongue he would like to— “You’ll need a hand to repair it,” he said, “especially with a storm gathering just beyond. If you send me out on a night like this, I’m apt to catch my death.”
Reed envied that bite the goddess gave her full bottom lip, as she worried it with perfect white teeth.
“How do I know you are not a madman, escaped after years of grisly confinement?”
His next forward step, or his laugh, rattled her. “Listen,” he said. “If the Gilbrides taught their chil—the people under their roof, anything, it was honesty. I am no criminal.”
“Exactly what a criminal would say.”
“All right, I am a criminal, and all I need is an honest post to reform me. Is this your house?” She dressed too poorly for it to be so, but it should be abandoned, after all.
“I’m ... caring for the house.”
“You seem young for a housekeeper.”
Her chin rose. “I’m new to the position.”
That explained it; the note-sender did not know about the housekeeper, but why? His every turn, of a sudden, mired him in questions. “I need work.” Reed nodded toward the drunken staircase. “This place needs a caretaker.”
Unmistakable Rogue Page 2