“Oh, dear heavens. That poor child.”
“Shocked and frightened, he ran away, and got lost in the city. Finley found him. This is my description of his story. His own memories were scattered and often vague. He did not want to speak of seeing his mother’s body, and cried violently when he finally did.”
She pictured that. She saw Nathaniel holding the boy as he had just held her outside Fleur’s chamber. She did not doubt he had done so. He had forged a bond with the boy.
“How long ago did this happen?”
“I calculate he was with Finley at least four years. He thinks his mother’s name was Bella, although as a child he never called her by name. He thinks she called him Harry, so that may be his real name.”
The air between them was as heavy as when they walked away from the house. The sensual tension remained, but a new one had joined it.
“What are you going to do about this?” she asked.
“What do you want me to do?”
She did not know. That was a lie. She did know. She wanted him to kiss her again and forget about Harry. God help her, that was the impulse in her heart. She wanted him to forget he had ever met Harry, because if he did not, she feared this investigation would always stand between them, in all its horrible possibility for shocking discoveries, and kissing him would become a betrayal of her other family, and of her love for little Ambrose.
It was an unworthy reaction. The second in one day. Unworthy and selfish. Normally she acted as a champion for the poor. She supported endeavors to aid them, and she personally worked for some that helped children.
Her reactions to young Harry embarrassed her. It was not the boy but the danger he represented that made her like this. It excited her that he had found a benefactor, that one more child had been saved. She just heartily wished this particular child’s benefactor were not Nathaniel Knightridge, and that Nathaniel had not taken up Harry’s cause for the reasons he did.
Now Nathaniel was asking what he should do. For some reason he was giving her a chance to demand his retreat. She could not fathom why, with these new clues in hand, he would suddenly be willing to do that, let alone at her request. He had to know the risks to her world that hid in Harry’s mystery. To Mardenford and to Ambrose, and maybe even to her. Nathaniel was brilliant, and if she had seen the worst possibilities, he undoubtedly had as well.
She weighed her answer. The words that called a retreat formed in her mind. They tempted her to the point of anguish, but she could not speak them. She could not sacrifice a child to protect her little world, even if her heart cried that she should.
“I do not think you should consider what I want you to do. You must do what you believe is the right thing. There is really no other course for a man of honor, is there?”
A tenseness left him, as if he had feared she would ask him to be other than he was born to be. She knew that she might forever regret not doing just that.
“From his story, I think that I have surmised where this village was situated. The general area of the coast, at least. It was not far from here, actually. The journey to London was not a long one, and his memories of watching the big ships going out to sea were vivid. He spoke of an old woman with whom they lived, probably as boarders.”
“Do you intend to seek out this village, and this old woman?”
“I have considered it. She may be someone who knows more about his family. He is very alone in the world. Even the care of Mr. Avlon and that school cannot fill that hole. If there is a chance he can be reunited with family, it is worth a day or so of my time.”
“Do you expect that family to be Mardenford’s?” She wanted to know what he anticipated. She wanted to know if this would be their last friendly stroll, and if they had just shared their final indiscreet kiss.
“I think that is unlikely. There is a sad predictability to his tale. A poor woman goes to London, hoping to better her life, only to be crushed by the city’s harshness. She despairs and takes her own life. I think that Finley found a boy whose grief had obliterated his memory, and created a history to fill the void.”
She knew Nathaniel very well, she realized. Too well. Their intimacies had stripped him of certain defenses as much as they had deprived her.
Right now, she knew he was appeasing her. She heard the smooth lawyer talking.
“You are implying that the potential for scandal is gone, but you know it is not. You still think there was a reason Finley fixed his sights on Mardenford.”
He sighed. The sound carried a touch of the old exasperation that marked their exchanges. “If there was, Harry did not give that reason to me. I am saying to you that I am not looking for such a connection, but only evidence of this boy’s family. I do not anticipate it will be the one I first suspected.”
“And if it is?”
He did not reply. Which was answer enough. But then, she had already told him to do what he thought was right.
“When do you intend to visit these villages?”
“Soon.”
“If you find that old woman, I want to know what she says.”
“I will report at once. However, if you desire immediate satisfaction, and word-for-word accuracy, you will have to be there to hear it yourself. You have been so vexed about this whole inquiry that I think you should come with me.”
“Do you indeed, sir?”
“Yes, I do, madam.”
She could not deny that she wanted to hear for herself what this old woman said. She did not think Nathaniel would lie to her, but she wanted the finality of being present when Nathaniel’s suspicions were laid to rest.
She wanted to look in his eyes at that moment and see that he accepted he had been wrong, and that this quest for truth and moral justice was now over.
“If you join me, we can bring the petitions,” he said. “We will even hold meetings at the larger towns en route, so you can present your cause to assemblies. It should not take long to arrange a few before we leave.”
“Mr. Knightridge, are you bribing me to accompanying you?”
“I am indicating that such a journey would be useful to you.”
“I admit that there would be some pleasure in seeing you proven wrong about Mardenford.”
“Giving you pleasure is my only goal.” They had reached the terrace, and it was as if the ebbing privacy had altered the mood. He spoke in a low, teasing tone, one flecked with innuendo.
“That sounds as if your intentions in cajoling me to this journey are not entirely honorable, Mr. Knightridge.”
He guided her up the stone steps to the terrace. “Actually, your honor and your reputation are foremost in my mind of late. I intend to scold you at length to be more careful with both.”
“There is no need. Rest assured I will be bringing my abigail on this journey.”
They approached the doors to the drawing room. Inside they could see the family celebrating in the lamplight, laughing with the high spirits that were ending the day.
Nathaniel opened the door. Laclere saw them and glanced a question at Bianca.
“It is not your future behavior that requires scolding, Lady M., but past lapses.” Nathaniel spoke lowly amidst the greetings sent their way.
Laclere approached with two glasses of champagne, trying to hide his curiosity about why they had been out in the dark together.
She held out her hand for her glass. “I cannot imagine to what you refer, Mr. Knightridge,” she whispered. She raised the glass to her lips and sipped.
“Can’t you?” He accepted his own champagne. He turned his head so that his low tone reached only her ears. “I am speaking of your attendance at Lyndale’s party. As I said, we have much to discuss.”
Shock made her gag. Her champagne sprayed, showering Laclere’s coat.
CHAPTER
TEN
The assembly was not going well.
Nathaniel had sensed trouble from the start, when he examined the townspeople as they arrived.
It
was much like interpreting the predispositions of the members of a jury. People usually wore their prejudices on their faces, and some of these faces had come not to listen but to reject whatever Lady Mardenford had to say.
Now he sat in a corner near where Charlotte spoke, and bided his time. This was her performance, not his. She was doing a splendid job. If not for some disruptive listeners, it would have been a success.
He just wanted it to end so that he could get her alone and have a conversation that was long overdue.
He saw Charlotte glance furiously at the man in the first row who taunted her as she finished her speech. This prosperous, plump merchant with sparse hair and a high starched collar had begun shaking his head as soon as she opened her mouth. His none-too-quiet chorus of Goodness me’s and Oh dear’s had now given way to forthright mockery.
“We are a nation of law,” she intoned, aiming her voice above his. She spoke to the packed drawing room that the reform-minded widow Mrs. Darby had made available in New Shoreham. At least fifty people sat shoulder-to-shoulder on sofas and settees and chairs.
“It is past time for the civil government to have the authority in divorces. It is past time for the laws to allow unions to be thoroughly severed when cruelty, adultery, or abandonment is proven, and for women to retain rights to their children when such independence is granted.”
“Cruelty,” her pompous merchant scoffed. “Living the good life off a man’s hard work does not sound like cruelty to me.” He nudged the man to his right and sought agreement. A tittering of giggles snuck through the chamber.
Charlotte’s color rose. Nathaniel hoped she knew better than to engage with this fool.
The man grinned nastily. “I think a better law would be to have the widows of this land forced to marry again. Then Mrs. Darby could not be instigating trouble like this, because there would be a man at the reins.”
“You are a dull-witted fool, George Taylor.” Little, birdlike Mrs. Darby spoke from her chair in the back of the room. “You always were, and your aging mind is not getting any sharper. You know my late husband’s name would have been on that petition before mine.”
“I believe I spoke of a man at the reins, Mrs. Darby,” Mr. Taylor muttered.
The men near him snickered, and his words were carried to other ears. Mouths gaped, but the eyes above them sparkled with the hopes of more theatrics.
“Then again,” he confided to his neighbor, “considering his marital situation, maybe Darby would have signed first.”
A buzz passed the insults to Mrs. Darby. She bolted to her feet. Only the restraining hands of two lady friends kept her from marching forward and visiting her wrath right on Mr. Taylor’s head.
Nathaniel rather wished those friends had been less quick. Taylor was unforgivably rude and was due a thrashing.
Unfortunately, it appeared Charlotte was thinking the same thing. She fingered the handle of her parasol in an alarming manner.
Emboldened by the dissent, a woman spoke from the middle of the group. “Make it easier, and men will be divorcing wives whenever a young chit catches their eyes.”
Mumbles and nods greeted that.
“Not so,” Charlotte countered. “There will still need to be proofs and cause in the civil courts. Only, women will also be able to show their proofs and their cause too.”
“Oh, yes,” her front-row tormentor sighed. “He hasn’t bought me a new bonnet in a year, your honor. He is so cruel.” His voice rose to a squeak as he imitated a whining woman.
The audience loved it.
“He keeps a woman in Lewes and has got two children on her, your honor,” a solid-looking woman of middle years responded, using the same inflections he had. Her glare pierced the back of Mr. Taylor’s head.
“He has the presumption to expect me to warm his bed every six months or so whether I want to or not, your honor,” Mr. Taylor snapped back, with a vicious edge to his high-pitched voice.
The group laughed and waited for more.
Charlotte’s eyes widened. She looked too stunned to enforce order. The horses were breaking down the corral of polite social discourse. After the stampede, nothing she had said would be remembered.
She tried to pretend the bickering did not exist. “All such evidence would be—”
“It should remain with the Church,” a small, tidy man announced. “What the Lord has joined, let no man—”
“Sounds like if the Lord did more joining, old George here wouldn’t be going to Lewes,” another man quipped.
Matters dissolved quickly after that. The polite group of fifty townspeople, a gathering of which Mrs. Darby had been so proud just an hour ago, kept blurting rude, revealing, and sometimes scandalous details about each other.
Nathaniel watched as Charlotte tried without success to herd them back to matters at hand. Unfortunately, they were having such a good gallop that all thoughts of her petition were gone.
George Taylor was in the midst of it all, waxing eloquent and witty. Charlotte’s gaze fixed on him and her eyes narrowed. Her face tightened in a way Nathaniel knew all too well.
He sighed and rose to his feet.
She would probably resent his interference. That was preferable, however, to having her family read in the newspapers that Lady Mardenford had instigated a riot when she pounded George Taylor into the ground with her parasol.
Charlotte watched helplessly as the gathering turned into a rout. She knew this was an emotional topic but she had not expected the assembly to take this turn.
Try as she might, she could not garner their attention. The situation had become hopeless and that idiot George Taylor was in rare form now, raving about women as harpies, leeches, and jezebels.
She had spotted him as trouble from the first, what with his florid, smug face and contented smirk. He had ruined her speech and was now helping to ruin her meeting. If he did not restrain himself soon, by Lucifer, she was of a mind to give him a good—
From the corner of her eye, she saw Nathaniel stand. As soon as he rose to his feet, half the eyes in the room turned to him.
The female ones.
Women young and old, gentry and common, slowly took in his tall, lean form and broad shoulders, his dark golden hair and his classically handsome face. Silly little smiles played on most of the female mouths.
He walked forward and the men noticed him too. He took a position right in front of Mr. Taylor. He gazed down, hard.
There was no mistaking the message he was giving.
The giggling and joking bled away. The room hushed.
Mr. Taylor tried meeting the challenge with expressions of bravado and indignation, but soon he was squirming.
“Do you have a sister of whom you are fond, sir?” Nathaniel asked. The query was conversational, almost gentle, but you could hear it clearly in the suddenly silent room.
He got a nod in response.
“And if this sister were dependent upon her husband for her very bread, and if she did not have a prosperous brother such as yourself to turn to in need, and if this husband beat her, hurt her cruelly, what would your reaction be to her situation?”
Mr. Taylor’s plump face turned very red.
“Would you not want her to have recourse, short of abandoning her children and being forced into an independence that entails poverty and degradation? Would you have her remain in a marriage that means her suffering in a way that you, a man, never have?” He gestured toward Charlotte. “Lady Mardenford has seen much that you have not, sir. She was blessed with a good husband and a secure life, but she knows her blessings are not shared by all. It is not for herself that she takes up this cause, but for the women in bad unions, whose very lives are endangered due to their lack of protection under the law.”
He spoke quietly, but people angled to catch every word. Finally, he turned his attention away from a chagrined Mr. Taylor and began addressing the assembly at large.
He was magnificent. Mesmerizing. The same powers of oration tha
t won his clients the advantage in court now held the attention of her assembly. The commanding presence and magnetic aura that made juries want to lie at his feet now seduced every man and woman to conclude that the petition deserved some consideration.
Charlotte just watched, as impressed as the others. She knew by heart the points that he made. She had just itemized them herself, but they all sounded new and important as they flowed from his mouth.
He finished on a quiet note, not the dramatic flourish she expected. Smiling almost boyishly, as if he did not know how to exit the stage, he gestured toward the petitions and shrugged.
Charlotte was sure she heard several woman audibly sigh.
Bodies began shifting as he retreated to her side.
“You were wonderful,” she said. “Thank you. I believe your oratory gifts saved the day.”
“I merely summed up your excellent speech.” He dismissed her admiration as if it embarrassed him. He checked his pocket watch. “It would be best if you left for a half hour and allowed Mrs. Darby to see to the rest. There will be those who are too timid to approach the table if the widow of a baron attends it.”
She had not thought of that. “I will take a turn and visit the churchyard. Mrs. Darby says it has a lovely garden.”
“I will join you.”
She had thought he would stay to lure some of those sighing women to pen their signatures. She had rather counted on it for reasons that had nothing to do with her petition. Instead he called for her wrap and escorted her into the sun.
They trod the paving stones of the commercial street, heading for the spire down the way. Signs for grocers and haberdashers, for a silversmith and two taverns, swung over their heads. The windowpanes formed colored quilts of shops’ goods.
“Your journey here went well?” he asked.
“It was pleasant and uneventful. We traveled at a leisurely pace.”
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