“You are not supposed to know anything about Lady Carstair or her diamonds, much less ivory-tuners.”
“How not, when she shouted your name through the Finsters’ ballroom, applauding your efforts? Everyone knows of your odd little profession. I swear it is a good thing you are so handsome and well spoken, else I could never find a woman willing to—”
Lowell pushed his chair back, ready to leave.
Now it was Her Grace’s turn to sigh. “What was it you wished to know about Lady Sparrow?”
Her son resumed his seat, one golden eyebrow arched.
“That’s what they called her, the one time she came to Town, right after her marriage to that loose screw Sparrowdale, if you’ll forgive my language. It was about five years ago, I think. You must have been traveling that Season, after university. A sweet little dab of a thing, she was, flighty as a baby bird. And who could blame her for being anxious, with a husband like that? Her birth might not have been the best, despite good blood on her mother’s side, but she was far too gently bred for that pox-ridden old poltroon.”
“She married him for the title, didn’t she?”
“I recall that it was her father who wanted the connection, not the poor little chit. There was some talk at the time, I cannot remember what, but Malachy Caldwell, of the Caldwell shipyards, never cared. Sparrowdale, of course, needed the gel’s fortune to pull himself out of River Tick.”
“What happened to her after that? I have never seen her in Town, nor heard her name mentioned.”
“She retired to the country to breed, I believe. As far from Sparrowdale and that dirty-dish son of his as she could get, to no one’s surprise. Now that I think on it, her child must have died, too, or Roderick Sparr would not have inherited the earldom. He might not be much, but Roderick seems an improvement over the others.”
“I wonder why she did not go to him with whatever hobble she thinks I might solve.”
“Who cares? Write back to her.”
Lowell folded the note. “I thought you did not approve of my career.”
“No, but I do approve of wealthy young widows.”
“Just remember I am going to work, Your Grace, not a-wooing.”
“A mother can hope, can she not?”
Chapter Four
When the boy who claimed to be Sparrowdale’s son arrived at Sparrows Nest the following week, he looked even more like a ragamuffin, having traveled from London by cart when he could, or on foot when he could not, with nothing but a mud-covered mongrel for companion. Thirteen years of age, the youth had the Sparrowdale nose and the Sparrowdale dark coloring. He also had a black eye, from trying to visit the new Lord Sparrowdale.
The butler would have sent the lad on his way, after boxing his ears for bothering his betters, and using the front entrance to do so besides, except that Lady Sparrowdale herself was coming down the stairs and heard the heated exchange on her doorstep.
Mina did not hear the boy’s foul language or the dog’s growls. She heard him say he was the old earl’s butter stamp, and wanted what he’d been promised. She did not see the filthy child or his ragged clothes or his mangy dog. She saw a son. Not her son, of course, and no legitimate claimant to the Sparrowdale succession, but a son, nevertheless.
“I will see Mr. Radway,” she told her stupefied servant. “In the, ah . . .”
Harkness made a recovery, proper butler that he was. “I suggest the orangery, my lady. The dirt will not be noticeable among the plants.”
“Quite. And you will see that refreshments are brought. Lemonade and bread and butter, to start.” At the boy’s eager nod she added, “To be followed by that meat and cheese we had for nuncheon. And something for the dog.”
“I am certain Cook has some rat poison left.”
“I am sorry, Harkness, I did not hear your reply.”
“I said, Cook must have some rabbit stew left.”
“That will be fine. Now follow me, Mr. Radway, and tell me your mission.”
“What I’m missing is the blunt for my grandmother, what looks after me,” the boy said as he followed her down the long corridor with its thick carpets and silk-hung walls. His head swiveled from the statues in their niches to the portraits in their gilt frames. “But you can call me Peregrine, my lady. Or Perry, like my granny does.”
“And where does your granny live, Perry?” Mina asked when they reached the glass-walled conservatory. She led the boy to the table where she and Cousin Dorcas liked to take breakfast on dreary mornings, so they could be surrounded by greenery. The dog raised his leg on a potted palm tree, and Mina pretended not to notice when Perry’s face turned as red as the roses blooming in the corner.
“We’ve got rooms in Kensington. That’s outside London, ma’am. For however long we can make the rent.”
“I see. And Lord Sparrowdale was in the habit of paying your bills?” She also pretended not to notice her butler’s affronted sniff when he delivered the tray.
“Nah, he just gave us blunt on the quarters,” Perry said around a mouthful of buttered bread once Harkness had left. “Now he’s gone, and Granny’s extra brass, too. She can’t see to sew anymore, and I can’t earn enough on my own to keep us in such prime digs.”
Mina watched as the pile of slices dwindled to a few crumbs. She was going to offer the boy an orange from one of the trees, if Harkness did not arrive back with more substantial fare soon. “What is it you do, Perry, to earn your share?”
“I used to run errands for the governor.”
“The governor?”
“His lordship himself. Lord Sparrowdale. My father.”
Perry’s chin jutted out in the same belligerent way the earl’s had when Mina asked about his gambling debts. This was Sparrowdale’s son, all right. Someone had to make sure he did not follow in his father’s footsteps down the path to perdition. The boy needed a proper education, or an apprenticeship to a trade. He could not be left to make a living on the streets of London. Mina recalled those scenes of abject poverty on the fringes of the ton’s pleasure seeking. One was supposed to ignore them, the same way she ignored the dog’s lapse of good manners, her butler’s forgetting who paid his salary, and the boy’s slipping two slices of bread into his pocket.
“How much did you say his lordship paid your grandmother?” she asked after a footman, not the butler, had brought a tray of meat and cheese and two plates, one for the boy, one for the dog.
“Twenty pounds, on the quarter.”
Mina’s bonnets cost more. She would gladly pay four times that much out of her own funds to see Perry clean and fed, but she still had questions. For one thing, the sum did not begin to cover those missing amounts from the earl’s accounts. For another, why?
Why would the earl, who had less warmth in his heart than one of those marble statues in the hallway, continue to pay for a by-blow’s upkeep?
She must have spoken aloud, for Perry grinned. “Granny says the governor had an icicle where his heart should of been. But he paid on account of the marriage license.”
“The license? Your mother was married to the earl, then? How could that be? His first wife would have been alive still.”
“Oh, it weren’t a proper license. That was his rig, you ken.”
Mina did not understand, not at all. A man did not marry his mistress, and certainly not when he was already wed to another.
“My mum was a decent girl, Granny swears it on her Bible. They worked as seamstresses together, they did. Only Mum caught his lordship’s notice. They did not know he was a flash cove, of course, or they’d never of been taken in. But he married her all right and tight. Only he gave another name. That license wasn’t worth the ink to write it.”
“I still do not comprehend why he went to such lengths. There must be hundreds, nay, thousands of girls in London willing to . . . to pleasure a man, without a marriage.”
“He wanted a virgin, a’ course. Thought it could cure what ailed him. Willing ones that didn’t reek of
the country were as rare as hens’ teeth, unless he had a gold band in his hand.” Perry kept eating, as if the depth of his sire’s depravity was just another fact of life. Mina supposed it was, to him.
“So the marriage contract was invalid,” she said. “Because he gave a false name. Then why did he continue to support your family? It was the proper thing to do, of course, but I cannot see Sparrowdale suffering any compunctions to take the honorable course, not after such scurvy actions.”
“I don’t know about any ’punctions, but he was suffering at the tables, for sure. He was trying to get more money out of his wife’s father, we figure. The governor’s first countess was an heiress, too,” Perry informed Mina, as if she did not know. “But that old man was not forking over another farthing if he got wind of a breach-of-promise suit. Righteous he was, the governor’s father-in-law. So the earl, he paid my mum to keep quiet, and my granny after.”
“After . . . ?”
“After my mother passed on. The dirty dish left her with more’n a full belly.”
“Oh, I am so sorry, Perry.”
Perry shrugged his thin shoulders. “The pox took most of the others that way, too.”
“The others?”
Mina sank back against the cushions of her chair while Perry kept eating. Of course there were others. There was all that money. Heavens. How many others? She was not ready to ask.
She’d known her husband was a loose fish, in the servants’ vernacular, but this? This went beyond the realm of lax morals and straight to wickedness, if not outright evil. “You are saying that Lord Sparrowdale plied his foul machinations on other innocent young women?”
“He plied something, at any rate. It were a game with him, like. He had more’n one dodge he used, and the silly morts believed him, or believed they’d get rich off him when he died.”
“And he paid them not to go to the authorities?”
Perry narrowed his eyes. “I never kept tuppence meant for any of the others.”
“No, no. I never accused you. I am simply trying to understand how he got away with this for so long.”
“He was a swell. Females like my mother knew no one would take their word against a nob, if they could have afforded a lawyer in the first place. It was better to take what he offered. At least they had something then. And he never went near girls what had fathers or brothers to look after them.”
Or Mr. Sizemore to warn them against going to London. “But once his wife died, why did he have to continue with this charade?”
“A’cause then he was looking for another rich cit’s daughter, and he couldn’t do that trailing a passel of bastards, could he? Any nodcock could see that.”
Mina supposed she could not object to being referred to as a nodcock, much less a rich cit’s daughter, not when Peregrine Radway called himself a bastard. A spade was a spade, after all. And even her merchant-mogul father, desperate for a titled son-in-law, would have drawn the line at a bigamist, a perjurer, a despoiler of virgins and begetter of bastards. She hoped.
Once the meat had disappeared, Perry started on the cheese. Between mouthfuls, he explained further. “He would of let the little ones starve most likely, after their mums cocked up their toes, with no one to threaten him with proof except for my granny. She found out about some of the others and made sure he paid up, else she was taking everything to the magistrate. And she made sure the governor knew her papers and such were hidden away, in case she met with ‘an accident.” ’
Sparrowdale would have stooped to murder? After today’s revelations, Mina would put nothing past him. For the first time in her life, she wished she had Cousin Dorcas’s vinaigrette. “Your grandmother is a courageous woman.”
“Who’s too old to be out on the streets, where we’ll be if you don’t pay,” Perry said. “But you seem a right ’un. Wouldn’t let no nippers go hungry, not after feeding my dog and me.”
“Of course I will not let any children starve. But things are not that simple.”
Perry pushed his plate away, even though a wedge of cheese remained, as though her words had stolen his appetite. “They never are, when it comes to you toffs parting with your brass. I should of known. Now that there’s no call to hide the governor’s crimes, with him dead and all, you see no reason to pay his toll.” He stood and whistled the mongrel to heel. “Me’n my dog thank you for the meal. It’s more’n we got from the new earl or your solicitor chap.”
“Oh, sit down. You’ve proved you have enough pride for a nobleman’s son, now show some sense. I did not say I would not help you, but this is a bigger problem than I can solve in a moment’s work. If it were up to me, I would have the children brought here, to be cared for and educated.” Her fingers were itching to wipe the crumbs off the boy’s bellicose chin and see his dark hair cut, his ragged clothes replaced. She wanted to hire him tutors and buy him books and feed him until the bones at his wrists did not show. She could not, of course, do any of those things. Not yet. “But that is a decision for the estate, one the new earl has to make. The same goes for paying out sums of money to support my husband’s, ah, progeny.” She remembered Mr. Sizemore’s warnings. “I need proof, for one thing. How do I know the other children even exist? Who is to say you are not some charlatan who happens to resemble Lord Sparrowdale?”
“I’m no charman. I told you, I run errands, like a footman.”
“A charlatan is a fake, a fraud, an impostor trying to get money out of me. How can I prove to the earl or his solicitor that they have a moral duty to establish guardianship of you and the others?”
“What, become wards? Like in the foundling homes?”
“I do not know all the legal ramifications, but, yes, that’s what it would be, I think. The earl would be—should be—trustee.”
“I wouldn’t trust no blasted earl.”
“And neither he nor his man of affairs would trust the word of a scruffy schoolboy—who has not had enough schooling, it seems—nor entrust him with payments for the other children.”
Perry raised his chin again, crumbs and all. “The governor trusted me.”
“Lord Sparrowdale had no choice. Your grandmother could have seen him embarrassed in the scandal sheets at the very least. If there were any justice, she could have had him imprisoned or transported.”
Perry looked at that last piece of cheese, then down at his dog, who was wagging his short tail. He used his sleeve to swipe at his face. “What kind of proof?”
“Names, dates, places. Copies of those false marriage certificates. The identities of the women themselves if you know them, or of whoever cares for the children. There must be thousands of orphans in the country. Prove to me which ones were fathered by my husband and I swear they will be cared for.”
“I’ll have to ask Granny.”
“Of course. I will give you carriage fare to return home, and whatever cash I have on hand to take with you for now. You will get the rest when your story is proved, even if you decide not to accept Lord Sparrowdale’s guardianship.”
Mina could sense the boy judging her, pricing her lace-trimmed gown and matched pearls. Everything about her bespoke wealth, from her elaborately styled brown curls to her smooth hands to her silk-stockinged feet to the very room they were sitting in; Peregrine Radway had been taught by experience that rich people had no consciences.
“You will simply have to trust my word. After all,” she told him, “I am trusting you with a great deal of money, with no guarantee you will even return.”
Perry thought a minute, then nodded. “Right. I’ll leave my dog here to prove I’m coming back.”
Chapter Five
Mina had the dog bathed and trimmed and fed until his ribs did not stand out, and she trained him not to use the ornamentals as scent posts. Having a dog was not the same as having a boy of her own to raise, but the short-haired white mongrel was good company on walks and on visits to the tenants. When the dog wagged his bushy tail, the farmers and their wives were more friendl
y to her than they had been in the nearly five years of her residency at Sparrows Nest. After they patted the friendly mutt, they would try to guess the silly creature’s ancestry, for once not treating the countess like an interloper in their midst. The village folk, too, stopped to chat when the dog sniffed at their packages or waited for Mina outside the shops.
Perry had refused to take the dog with him, claiming that besides standing as surety off his word, the creature would slow his journey considerably. Most drivers, he said, would not take up a dog to bark at the horses. The boy also refused to accept a ride further than to the nearest coaching house, certainly not all the way to London. He might trust the countess with his dog, it seemed, but not with his grandmother’s address. For the same reason, most likely, he had turned down Lady Sparrowdale’s offer of a servant to accompany him and his now heavy purse.
“Who’s going to ’spect a poor chap like me of having two shillings to rub together?” he had argued, gladly taking the hamper of food instead of the footman.
“Indeed, madam,” Mina’s butler had agreed. “Persons of discernment are more likely to assume Mr. Radway is the cutpurse, not the victim.” Harkness was all for stripping the boy naked to see if any of the Sparrows Nest silverware hid in his pockets.
Unfortunately, Peregrine had left without telling Mina the dog’s name. She decided to call her temporary pet Merlin, because his white beard reminded her of a wizard’s. After all, a merlin was a sparrow hawk, wasn’t it?
More unfortunately, Perry did not return in the sennight he said.
Mina went for walks, avoided her butler’s eye, and wrote letters.
The first response she received was from Mr. Sizemore, who arrived back at Sparrows Nest almost before the ink was dry.
“But if you wish to remove to London, my dear lady, you have only to send word to your husband’s nephew, the earl,” the solicitor said when Mina reiterated her wishes. “Lord Sparrowdale would be more than pleased to have you act as hostess for him, I am certain.”
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