Dammit all to hell and back!
It was too late, much too late to fool himself into thinking he didn’t care. He did and it frightened him, all the more so because he suspected that how he cared, and how much, were quite different from the last time, with Julia. All his experience had taught him just how painful caring could be. He wouldn’t go through that again. And, more importantly, he wouldn’t let Henrietta go through it. He couldn’t offer her happiness, that was not in his grasp, but he could make sure he did not make her more unhappy, even if it meant the ultimate sacrifice of giving her up.
For this really was the end. There was nowhere else to go. She had rejected what he could offer—he was not able to offer what she wanted. This was the end. Better a clean break, with the truth once and for all out in the open. He desperately needed her to understand. If he could not have anything else, at least there would be that.
Could he really bear it? Was he really going to tell her all those shameful, unsayable things, so long pent-up, lurking like rats in the dark corners of his mind, gnawing away at him day in, day out—could he? Even thinking about it made his gut wrench. But he had no option. A clean break with nothing left to fester. Perhaps then he could reconcile himself to life without her.
* * *
The ladies were breaking their fast next morning when a loud rap on the front door announced that a visitor had called at Berkeley Square. ‘Really, who on earth can that be at such an ungodly hour?’ Lady Gwendolyn asked, for it was far too early for morning callers.
She did not have to wait long for her curiosity to be satisfied. ‘Lord Pentland is here, my lady, and requests an interview with Miss Markham,’ her butler informed her.
Henrietta’s coffee cup clattered into its delicate saucer, spilling the dregs on to the spotless white-linen cloth.
‘We are not at home,’ Lady Gwendolyn said firmly. ‘Do sit back down, dear, and finish your meal.’
‘But, Aunt Gwendolyn, I forgot to tell you.’
‘Henrietta. I thought we had agreed last night that the subject was closed,’ Lady Gwendolyn said, with a reproving look. ‘Tell Lord Pentland we are most definitely not at home,’ she said firmly to her waiting butler.
‘You may tell me yourself. But then you quite patently are at home. Good morning, Lady Lattisbury-Hythe.’ Rafe stood in the doorway, his hat in one hand, a riding crop in the other. ‘Henrietta.’ He bowed.
‘Rafe! I mean, Lord Pentland. I mean—’
‘What mean you by this unseemly interruption, my lord?’ Lady Gwendolyn said in her haughtiest voice, reaching for her lorgnette.
‘I have come to take your niece for a drive,’ Rafe responded, quite unmoved by the fishy-eyed look he was receiving.
‘My niece has no wish to go for a drive with you. In fact, my niece wishes to have nothing more to do with you under any circumstances.’
‘I am sure you wish it were so,’ Rafe said, pushing his way past the butler and entering the morning room, ‘but the fact is that she has already made the engagement and I can assure you both it will prove most educational.’
‘What arrangement? Henrietta, you would do well to heed my—’
But Henrietta was already pushing her chair back from the table. ‘I am sorry, Aunt, but I must. I cannot—you heard what Rafe—Lord Pentland said. Just this once…’
‘If you are seen in his company in public, just this once may be enough to your sully your reputation for ever, especially after the exhibition you made of yourself at the dance last night,’ Lady Gwendolyn said frankly. ‘Henrietta! For heaven’s sake, girl, if you must talk to the man, do so here in private. At least that way you will be safe from disapproving eyes. But I warn you, my lord,’ she said, turning to Rafe, ‘that the next time you come here uninvited I shall not hesitate to have you summarily shown off the premises, earl or no.’
‘I assure you, my lady,’ Rafe replied, ‘I shall never again come here uninvited. I thank you for the offer of privacy, but I must decline. Henrietta, fetch your hat.’
He was looking quite distraught. Whatever he wanted to show her, it obviously meant a great deal to him. Henrietta planted a brief kiss on her aunt’s cheek and left the room without further ado.
* * *
Seated beside Rafe in the phaeton ten minutes later, she was a mass of nerves. Clasping her hands in their pretty gloves, dyed emerald green to match her promenade dress and three-quarter pelisse, she was so intent on trying to calm herself after a sleepless night spent in fruitless speculation and woeful resolution that she did not register, until they crossed the river at Westminster Bridge, where they were headed.
Rafe drove in silence, a dark frown wreathing his features, giving him a saturnine look, taking a route that led them east of Lambeth towards the docks. Even when they could not see the river, obscured as it was by the huge warehouses that hugged its banks, its presence was mapped by the tall masts of the ships swaying against the gritty skyline. The streets were narrow and jammed full of traffic ferrying goods to and from the warehouses. Stevedores, sailors, draymen and port officials bustled about their business at top speed against a background of constant noise and chatter. The rich tang of spices, cinnamon and pepper, nutmeg and cloves, the ripe sweet smell of hogsheads of tobacco, the scent of perfumed tea from India—all wafted like a top-note on the breeze, overlaying the deeper base notes of muddy river water and dank streets overcrowded with horses and people.
People stared openly at Rafe’s stylish equipage. It took Henrietta some time to notice that they were looking not in wonder, but in recognition. Hats were being tipped. Women were bobbing curtsies. A group of small ragged boys had accumulated behind them, running and jostling each other as they kept up. Beside her, Rafe lifted his whip in acknowledgement, occasionally called out a taciturn greeting. He showed a surprising knowledge of the warren of streets he navigated.
Not far from St Saviour’s dock, itself not far from the notorious stews of Jacob’s Island, which made Petticoat Lane look like Park Lane, he slowed the horses and made a sharp turn through a set of large, wrought-iron gates, the motley crew of urchins close behind them. The place looked like a town house, completely incongruous in its setting and obviously very newly built. With a spacious entrance fronted by four tall pillars, it had two identical wings, each of three stories, each with a set of long windows.
Rafe pulled the horses to a halt in the narrow courtyard and helped Henrietta down. Reaching into his pocket for a handful of pennies, he threw them at their entourage, to loud acclaim. ‘Here, Frankie, take the horses round the back,’ he said to the tallest of the boys.
‘You know him?’ Henrietta asked, wide-eyed.
Rafe shrugged.
‘And you gave them money. You told me at St Paul’s that—’
‘These boys are not members of any gang. Yet.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I know their families.’
He could have laughed at her astonished expression, were he not so tense.
‘St Nicholas’s Lying-In Hospital,’ Henrietta read on the brass plaque. ‘Why on earth have you brought me here?’
‘I wanted you to see it.’
She frowned, chewing on her lip. ‘Are you one of the patrons, is that it? Is that how you came to know so much about those Bermondsey Boys you told me about?’
‘I am one of the patrons. I suppose you could call me the founding member.’
‘You mean you built it yourself?’
‘Not with my own hands,’ Rafe said with one of his enigmatic almost-smiles. ‘And we do now have a growing number of sponsors these days. Not nearly enough, though. Caring for penniless mothers about to give birth to illegitimate children is not yet an acceptable good cause in polite society, as you know full well from your own charitable work,’ he said grimly.
‘The Poor House near our village does not allow illegitimate children to stay with their mothers,’ Henrietta said sadly. ‘They say that the sins of the mother would be visit
ed on the child. It is one of the things that I cannot agree with Mama upon.’
‘Well, here they are encouraged to stay together.’
‘I can’t believe you built this place.’ Henrietta shook her head in utter amazement. ‘It’s so—so beautiful, peaceful, calm, even though it’s surrounded by the bedlam out there.’
‘It’s here because this is where it’s needed most. And it looks like this because we want people to come here. And it’s left unmolested because the people who use it are also the local people, people with connections. They protect their own. Do you want to go in?’
She nodded. ‘If you please.’
Rafe ushered her up to the main door and led her confidently through to a small room. ‘This is Mrs Flowers, who is in charge of the nursing staff,’ he said, introducing her to a sparrow-like woman dressed in grey kerseymere, who greeted Rafe with a beaming smile. ‘You don’t mind if I show Miss Markham round, do you?’
‘Indeed, no, she is very welcome,’ Mrs Flowers said, nodding in a friendly manner to Henrietta. ‘We’ve five or six new arrivals since you were last here, my lord—we’ve been wondering where you’d got to. The new doctor has started and he’s settling in nicely, you’ll be pleased to know.’
‘You have doctors. Goodness, that is unusual.’
‘It is for lying-in, I know,’ Mrs Flowers agreed, ‘and, of course, if the mother prefers a midwife then that is what she has, but sadly our ladies are often ill as well as pregnant. It was my lord’s idea, and a very good one at that. My lord here visits us nigh on every month,’ she informed Henrietta, ‘and always with some new notion for improving things. You’ll see when he shows you round, always asking questions and making suggestions. Off you go, now, and take your time.’
As Henrietta followed Rafe from ward to day room to dining room to nursery, she was astonished by the reception he received. Women—girls, some of them—whether they were in an advanced state of pregnancy or clutching their newborn babes, greeted him not just with deference but with real affection. Rafe seemed quite at ease with them, chatting away about their existing children, enquiring about their husbands—which, to Henrietta’s surprise, most of them seemed to have—and admiring the latest editions to their families. There was not a trace of the aloof and formidable earl. He seemed to have shed all reserve at the front door of the hospital. Here was yet another Rafe she did not recognise and Henrietta was enchanted. But it was the way he held the babies that was almost her undoing. Expertly supporting their wobbly little heads, he gazed into the unfocused blue eyes of each new-born with such an expression of tenderness that Henrietta felt the tears well.
‘He’s got a way with them,’ a woman called Rose whispered to her, as she watched Rafe handing the newest of the babies back to its absurdly young mother. ‘Don’t throw them about like a sack of potatoes, the way my man does. You’ll have nothing to worry about with him, love.’
‘Oh, he’s not my— We are not…’ Henrietta protested.
‘Get off, you’re nuts about him, anyone can see that. Lucky you, he’ll make gorgeous little ones. You just wait and see.’
Shaking her head, frantically sniffing back the tears, Henrietta asked for permission to hold Rose’s daughter. Burying her nose in the delightful scent of the baby’s neck, the notion of a child, her and Rafe’s child, filled her for a brief moment with a surge of such yearning, she failed to see him looking at her, regret and sorrow darkening his eyes. By the time she looked up, he was on his feet, making his farewells, waiting patiently for her to rejoin him.
Back in the book room, taking tea with Mrs Flowers while Rafe attended to some business, Henrietta felt dazed. The woman could not enthuse enough about the support Rafe gave the hospital. ‘He’s a saint, in our eyes,’ she said. ‘It’s not just money he gives, Miss Markham, but his time. He never fails to listen and he never judges. There’s some of these lying-in places won’t take unmarried women, never mind those who—well, let’s say they’re not exactly respectable. But here at St Nicholas’s they know they won’t be turned away. The most important thing is for us to do all we can to keep mother and babe together, no matter what the mother may be. And it works—mostly,’ Mrs Flowers said proudly.
‘Of course we have our failures,’ she continued. ‘Some women just can’t cope. And some—well, some don’t want to, and I don’t just mean the people from round here, either. We might be in the heart of Bermondsey, but it’s not so very far away from Mayfair. Some of the foundlings we find at the back door come swaddled in the finest linen, wrapped in blankets of the softest lamb’s wool. We try to find them proper homes with proper families, our foundlings—his lordship has had several babes adopted by his estate workers. But sometimes we can’t and then we have to send them on to the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury Fields. We don’t like to do that, but—well, there’s only so much you can do,’ Mrs Flowers said sadly.
Henrietta recalled Rafe’s words: there are too many of them. She had thought he was being callous, when he had been speaking from experience. Real experience. Far more real than her own pathetic attempts at making a difference. Touched beyond measure by what she had seen at St Nicholas’s, she finally realised that what she had taken for Rafe’s cynicism that day at St Paul’s was actually simple realism. St Nicholas’s was a ray of hope, but it was a very small one in the midst of a very dark existence.
What an idiot he must have thought her. When she remembered some of the things she’d said, she felt like a complete fool. Recalling her resolve that day in the stews of Petticoat Lane, to do more in future, she realised she could probably do no better than to consult Rafe on the subject. Then she remembered that, after today, she was not likely to see Rafe again.
‘Well, now, I’d best be getting on.’ Mrs Flowers bustled to her feet and shook Henrietta’s hand. ‘It was lovely to meet you, Miss Markham. I hope to see you again. I’ll send his lordship up.’
‘It’s been wonderful. You should be so proud of your hospital, Mrs Flowers. I’ve never seen anything quite so— Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me. If it wasn’t for his lordship there wouldn’t be a hospital. He’s a fine gentleman. One of the finest in England, if I’m any judge. But then you must already know that. Goodbye, Miss Markham.’
Mrs Flowers left in a swish of starched apron, which she had donned over her kerseymere dress. Alone, Henrietta sat on a straight-backed chair staring into space. Questions, as ever, swirled around her head. Why had he brought her here? How on earth was it related to what they had argued about last night? What did he mean, he did not deserve to be happy?
The door opened and Rafe strode in. ‘You had tea?’
‘Yes, thank you. Mrs Flowers was most kind. What Papa would call the salt of the earth.’
He was leaning against the small wooden mantel behind the desk. As ever, he was dressed extremely modishly. Dark blue coat with long tails. His neckcloth was intricately tied, a small diamond pin nestling in its snowy folds. His waistcoat was silver-and-dove-grey stripes. The tight-knit pantaloons which encased his legs were also dove grey. His boots were so glossy she could have seen her face in them if she had dared to look. His hair was blue-black, even glossier than his boots. And his face. His face was as it always was. There was a sheen to him of polished perfection. Yet underneath that sheen, so many flaws, so many contradictions and yet so many admirable qualities.
Who was he? Earl, knight errant, rake or philanthropist? The man she loved. Her heart squeezed painfully. She did love him, there was no doubt of that, despite all. ‘Rafe, what you have done here, it’s—words fail me. I feel so small, thinking of how ineffectual have been my attempts in comparison. You should be proud. I wish I could be part of something so wonderful. Really, truly, it’s an admirable place.’
Rafe looked uncomfortable. ‘You give me too much credit. I did not start St Nicholas’s for philanthropic reasons. I’m not a do-gooder.’
‘Like my parents, you mean? No, I know you’re not. You’
re much more practical. Rafe, I wish—’
‘Henrietta!’
She jumped.
‘Henrietta, you’re not listening. I didn’t do this for altruistic reasons. At least not at first. I did it to atone.’
His fists were clenched. His shoulders were rigid. He was in the grip of some emotion more fearful than she had yet seen. ‘What do you mean, atone?’ she asked.
‘I thought if I helped those women keep their babies, it would make me feel better. Atone in some small way. For the child I did not keep. Did not want.’
She had the awful sensation of standing on the edge of a steep staircase, knowing she was about to be pushed. She didn’t want to know, but she had to ask. ‘What child?’
‘Mine. Mine and Julia’s.’
‘What happened to it?’
He couldn’t say it, yet he had to say it. A clean break so that he could reconcile himself to their parting, he reminded himself. Last night, alone in his bedchamber, suffering from the after-effects of that ballroom confrontation, it had seemed possible, sensible even. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Such a terrible admission—could he really make it? He needed to let her in, in order to let her go, but would the pain of it destroy him?
‘Rafe? Rafe, what happened to it? The child.’
He braced himself. It was now or never. He could not face any more regrets. He took a jagged breath. ‘I killed it.’
Henrietta’s mouth fell open. She must have misheard. Surely she had misheard. ‘You killed it?’ Her voice was nothing more than a whisper.
‘And Julia. I am responsible for her death, also.’
‘You can’t mean—no, Rafe, you would not—I don’t believe you. You are not a murderer’
‘As good as.’
The floor seemed to be moving. There was a whooshing noise like the sea in her ears. Rafe was still talking, but he sounded as if he was far away, behind a wall of glass. Henrietta could see his mouth moving, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. ‘Wait. Stop. I can’t—I’m sorry, I didn’t…’ She clutched her brow and took some deep breaths. This was important. Vitally important. Far too important for her to fall into a faint.
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