Lady Sparrow

by Barbara Metzger

  Except the puppy was outside, getting the scent of someone who had once kicked him.

  “I would be as far from here as I could get, if I knew those children were safe. You said you knew nothing about them, where I could find them, who was caring for them?”

  “Blast it, what would I know about a parcel of brats?” he snarled.

  So did Merlin, coming around the corner.

  “But you did know of Peregrine Radway, you said,” Mina persisted.

  “I knew of some snivel-nosed beggar who tried to steal money from me.”

  Had he already met Hawk? No, Mina decided, he was still speaking of Perry. “And you do not know where he is now, or anything about hired thugs or burned records or fires?”

  Roderick looked like he might breathe fire himself any minute. His eyes narrowed to slits. “I have no idea what you are speaking about, you interfering jade. If you—”

  “Good,” Mina interrupted. “I would hate to have to go to the authorities with my suspicions.”

  Roderick went for her throat.

  Merlin went for his ankle.

  Lowell went berserk.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “You threatened him!” Lowell shouted at Mina once the company had been dispersed and gossip averted. They had used the dog’s sudden animosity to excuse what looked like a confrontation in the garden. Merrison’s ruffled state was explained as his attempt to control the vicious brute—he meant Roderick, but the dunderheads in the doorway took his scowl for the dog. Roderick’s slight dishevelment was attributed to Merlin also. The dog was relegated in shame to the kitchens, where he was rewarded with a lamb shank.

  The contretemps was smoothed over. Lowell’s temper was not. “How could you be such a ninnyhammer as to say you’d go to the authorities?” he yelled.

  “I refuse to speak to someone who shouts at me,” was all she replied, sipping at her tea, hoping he could not see how her hand was shaking. Her father had been a bellower, shouting orders across his shipyards. Her husband had been another loud, bullish man, even on his sickbed. Mina saw no reason for her to be yelled at any longer, especially not by someone she was paying.

  “I am not shouting, by heaven. I am conversing rationally with a peagoose.”

  “No, Lolly dear,” his ever helpful mother put in from the nearby card table. “You were definitely shouting.”

  Miss Albright had put her cards down and was clutching her vinaigrette, ready to bolt for the door. Lowell supposed he may have been a tad vociferous. “I apologize, ladies. Would you care to step outside with me, Lady Sparrowdale, where we might continue our discussion?”

  Mina might be the fool he took her for, but she was not crazy. One angry gentleman berating her in the bushes was enough for one day. She held up her cup. “I am not finished with my tea.”

  Lowell took a deep breath. Then he sat down beside her on the couch and tried to regulate his voice. “You practically accused that loose fish of arson, by Jupiter, if not worse. Now our job will be that much harder.” He already had men out gathering addresses of orphan asylums, but there must be hundreds of them, thousands if one counted the women who took in a nurseling or two. Finding nameless children, who might not even be in London, was proving an impossible task. Other men were compiling lists of recently retired reverends and who might know their whereabouts. They had to find Perry Radway to find the others—and now they had to do so before Roderick grew more desperate. “Dash it, how do you expect me to do the job you hired me for if you keep meddling in it?”

  “Meddling? My stars, this is my investigation, if you recall. I do not see you locating the children.” Mina knew that was unfair. She knew all about the men he had hired and the informants he had bribed to find out more. She was upset, though, and worried. For one thing, she could not be happy that Her Grace and Cousin Dorcas were teaching George Hawkins to play whist, which, she considered, was not a good idea. Nor was it the best of notions for the boy to earn his betting money by telling Mina’s suitors that he could put in a good word with his new guardian. Something had to be done about the boy, and soon, but Harkness had not returned from the employment agencies with a fitting tutor, nor from the real estate offices with a place of their own. In fact, Harkness seemed to be spending most of his time in pubs, when he was not tweaking his counterpart’s nose. Something had to be done about her butler, too.

  Meanwhile, she was also worried about Perry and the other children. She had seen a look in Roderick’s dark eyes that a badger could have worn, or a rabid rat. He was dangerous, far more so than she had thought. His obsession with the title, the family name, his own position, and the duke’s daughter, all were bordering on the brink of insanity, to say nothing of the rage he flew into at the torn leg of his pantaloons.

  And now she had to worry about the Honorable Lord Lowell Merrison. The dratted man was too honorable. Why, another moment outside, another word out of Roderick’s filthy mouth, and Lowell would have called Sparrowdale out, spectacles and all. Roderick might not be any Corinthian sportsman, but he could see, for heaven’s sake! Thank goodness the gardener had come to chase Merlin from the flower beds, recalling the men to their senses, and reminding them of the interested observers behind the French doors. Roderick wanted no gossip about his closet cousins to reach Westcott’s ears, but neither did he wish the duke to learn of his tinderbox temper, so he had feigned a polite smile. Mina was reminded of a picture she’d once seen of a hyena. She shuddered again, thinking about it.

  She had never hired Lord Lowell to indulge in fisticuffs. She had never thought her investigator’s well-being would particularly matter to her, either, but it did. She looked over at him, where he was frowning, first at her and then at the few macaroons Hawk had left on the plate, and she thought again of how lucky she had been to find his lordship. Without his help . . . Well, she supposed Mr. Sizemore could have found George Hawkins once they heard about the fire, and she could have walked every inch of Kensington herself, but she was certain Lord Lowell was of great assistance.

  “I am sorry,” she said now, “both for belittling your efforts and for entangling you with my skirts so you could not strike Roderick. I also apologize for antagonizing him further, but my actions were not half so outrageous as your mother’s.”

  “You are right. I am surrounded by featherbrained females.”

  The duchess peered over the top of her cards. “I heard that, Lolly. And I would not have had to invite the dastard to the dinner in Minerva’s honor except for your looking thunderclouds at him.”

  He was still looking stormy, Mina thought, except for the macaroon crumb at the corner of his mouth. That was looking—

  “How else was I to show there were no ill feelings between you?” the duchess continued. “Otherwise the tale of the argle-bargle would have spread through the clubs by nightfall, what with every jackanapes in Town there in my drawing room. They would all be wondering why Minerva was not on terms with her relations, and why my son and Sparrowdale were arguing over her like a dog with a bone, to say nothing of the dog and Roderick’s ankle bone.”

  Mina dragged her eyes away from her investigator. “Still, Your Grace, I cannot like the thought of sitting to dinner with such an insect as my husband’s nephew. I do not trust the man.”

  “Of course not. Is it not better, though, to keep the scorpion where you can see him, rather than let him sting when you least expect it?”

  “I agree that a quarrel amid the columbines was unfortunate, Mother,” Lowell said, “and you did well to stem any scandal. But did you have to urge Sparrowdale to attend, once he claimed he was committed to Westcott and his daughter for the evening you chose?”

  “Urge? Pish-tosh. I merely said I would invite them also. Westy is an old friend. He’ll be sure to accept.”

  “So the serpent can fix his interest on the heiress here, instead of elsewhere?”

  His mother shook her head sadly. “How little faith my own child has in me. What, do you think I woul
d leave the duke’s poor motherless daughter to a serpent like Sparrowdale? I will invite Andrew to partner the gel.” She smiled. “You have never seen my youngest son in his uniform, have you, Minerva?”

  How could hiring a tutor be so much of a bother? Mina wondered. The search for one was keeping her from the search for her son, and from Lord Lowell, who was pursuing the inquiry while she was interviewing instructors. She missed his company, and the smiles he had given her. She even missed Hawk, who got to ride along with Lowell, to see if he recognized any likely locations. Sitting in the rear parlor Her Grace had set aside for Mina’s use, reading recommendations and résumés, was not nearly as interesting or exciting as following leads and bribing informants.

  With the long school holidays approaching, most decent, experienced tutors had been snabbled up by all the blue bloods who had no wish to deal with their own children for the summer. Of the others, the ones sent ’round by the agencies, some were too meek to deal with George’s idiosyncracies, for want of a better word. Those quiet young men believed in teaching by example. Others believed in the birch rod. Yet another contingent felt their skills would be wasted on one of such questionable birth, that tutoring a boy from an orphans’ home was beneath them. Their references went beneath the cook’s canary. Some were so far above Hawk’s level of education, in fact, that he would have been at sea, instead of at Lowell’s side, learning to tool a curricle. Some were so ignorant, Mina wondered how they managed to read her advertisement.

  Hawk was magnanimous. He volunteered to go without a tutor. Lowell wrote letters to his college. The dowager wrote letters to her wealthy friends with sons who might have outgrown their tutors, and to her poor friends with sons who might need a position. Mina wrote advertisements for the newspapers. Harkness asked at the pubs. No one had yet answered.

  Mina did not want to send the boy away to school, if she could find one to take him. She doubted a boarding school would keep him, for one thing, and she wanted to get to know him better, for another. What kind of family lived apart? Most of the aristocracy and half of the merchant class, Mina knew. She had been away at an academy for young ladies much of her own life, and she thought George Hawkins deserved a more caring upbringing. She cared. Now she had to find a teacher who would care too.

  Two frustrating days later, the perfect candidate walked into the parlor behind Ochs. The Merrison House butler was, as usual, displeased at being called to the door so often for such unillustrious young persons as this threadbare scholar. Ochs showed his disdain by sniffing the air, as though the dog had been indiscreet. The dog got to go to the park with Hawk while Mina stayed in. She was none too pleased either.

  “Are you coming down with a chill, Ochs?” Mina asked. “My cousin is certain to have a potion to ward off an ague.”

  “Mr. Homer Gilpin,” he announced without answering her. “Here for the advertisement.”

  Mr. Gilpin was a soberly dressed young man of about nineteen years. He wore spectacles like Lord Lowell, but any similarity ended there. Gilpin was dark and slight and wore his thin hair parted in the middle and smoothed down on either side. He wore his glasses low on his nose so he could peer over them when not reading, which gave him a perpetually startled look, with his eyebrows raised. He reminded Mina of an owl, and a bit of her dead husband, because of his unfortunately pocked complexion. She could not hold that against him, she told herself, nor his obvious shyness. He was standing across from her desk, twisting the hat Ochs had not bothered to take.

  The butler was right. Mr. Gilpin would not be staying long, Mina reluctantly decided. George needed a stronger hand on the reins than this diffident scholar. Then she read his references from the dons and her own eyebrows raised. “Brilliant, a natural student, gifted” were some of the encomiums heaped upon Gilpin’s head. And “a capital cricketer, superb oarsman,” which surprised her even more.

  “It seems the university is your natural milieu, Mr. Gilpin, not drumming Latin declensions into recalcitrant schoolboys.”

  “I, um, like children.”

  He had not met George Hawkins yet. “And what of your own studies? I see you hope to become a dean at Oxford yourself someday.”

  “I, ah, hope to go back in the autumn, with the funds I earn. My, um, patron recently succumbed to a fatal illness, so I need to raise the fees myself. The scholarships were already bestowed when he, ah, passed on. I can tutor some of the less advanced students next term, when they return from holidays.”

  “I see. So this would be a temporary position only?”

  “Oh, dear. I, um, never thought you wanted a permanent tutor. I could stay on, I suppose. Or you could decide to send your, um, ward to school. He will be ready after the summer. I swear.”

  What school would be ready for Hawk, who had already won Cousin Dorcas’s pin money at cards, likely by marking the deck? Mina did not dare loose him on the shipyard either, else he might rob the ships of their rudders. She sighed and turned back to the young man who needed the position so badly he looked ready to weep.

  “I am sorry,” she said, wondering how she could offer to pay his tuition, “but you have no background in teaching. I fear my ward needs an older, more experienced tutor, despite your erudition in six ancient languages and”—she referred back to the references—“five modern ones.”

  “But—but I could love him.”

  Mina almost tossed the inkwell at him, starving scholar or not, but then Homer took his spectacles off a prominent proboscis and said, “I could love him like a brother. Or a half brother.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Homer Gilpin. H.G., whose entry date on the list was nineteen years ago, right below M.P., who would be twenty and five, wherever he was. Another of the late earl’s sons was here. Mina could not believe it.

  Neither could Lowell. “Sparrowdale’s son, a scholar?”

  Mina laughed, that enchanting sound Lowell was coming to know and to savor. She should laugh all the time, and smile so brightly. No, then the carriages would be lined up outside his house three deep, instead of single file.

  “I know,” she was saying, “but Homer’s mother was a schoolteacher. Her father, Homer’s grandfather, was an Edinburgh don. I cannot imagine how such an intelligent man came to let his daughter near Sparrowdale, although I suppose the earl was not so ill favored twenty years ago.”

  “And most of those scholars have their heads in their research, not their surroundings, in my experience. Did Sparrowdale offer to marry this one?”

  “He did better, actually going through the ceremony. In Scotland, where he was supposedly off shooting. He was already wed, of course, but he used a different name, to be sure the marriage was invalid.”

  “Why the deuce did he go through such roundaboutation? He could have visited a whor—a house of convenience, like all the other married men.”

  Mina’s cheeks were awash with color, but she gamely answered, “My late husband did not care for, ah, women of that profession. He blamed them for his condition. Soiled doves did not suit him.”

  “Very well, he tricked a gently raised female into a false marriage. What I cannot understand is why, after he purposely ruined a young lady, he would show enough scruples to keep supporting her son?”

  “Homer believes his grandfather brought him as an infant to England, threatening to go to Sparrows Nest unless the earl made provision. He did, finding a family near Oxford to take in the baby. Homer never knew his mother, or his grandfather.”

  “And Sparrowdale kept paying the boy’s way through school?”

  “I know it sounds unreasonable, since no one was blackmailing Sparrowdale over this child. The mother moved to the Colonies, and the grandfather simply did not want him. I have often wondered about it, why the earl kept up his records and his withdrawals. Aside from not wanting his wife or his father-in-law to know, I think he actually liked his sons. When Viscount Sparling was killed, he cried for weeks. And Homer says Sparrowdale visited a few times and was good to him,
taking him for dinner, watching his cricket matches.”

  “I suppose even Beelzebub had one redeeming trait.”

  “And Homer is a fine young man, despite his father’s blood. He has taken George under his wing, impressing him with his hurling if not his scholarship.”

  Both boys were installed in the Merrison nursery now, but they were seldom at home, the owlish scholar taking his brother—and his grateful self—to see the sights of London Town. Mina was going to pay for the rest of Homer’s education, since she would never approach Roderick about the matter. She saw no reason, with his facility with languages and the dowager duchess’s connections, that Homer could not attain a government post someday, an ambassadorship perhaps. Meanwhile, she was already giving him an allowance for watching over George and preparing the younger boy to enter school next term. Homer refused to accept a salary to tutor his own brother, the family he had never had, but the allowance was necessary to get the two boys entry to the Menagerie and the Steam Engine and the Elgin Exhibit. And meals along the way, of course.

  Unknown to Mina, Lowell had also slipped Homer some coins, to keep Hawk away from the house, and away from chousing the stable lads out of their quarterly wages. “I hope Homer has his pockets sewn shut,” he said now. “By the way, I asked our resident linguist if he had ever spoken to Peregrine Radway.”

  So had Mina. Homer had been delighted to learn of yet another brother, and the possibility of more, but he had never heard of Perry. His funds had come through the solicitor’s office, Mr. Sizemore’s partner who had had a heart attack, or directly from Sparrowdale, who had thought it a great joke that he had sired such a somber, sober chap. It was the university bursar who had informed Homer of his father’s death when the obituary was published, and asked his intentions. He intended to apply for a scholarship, or a position as tutor once the tuition fees ran out. He would never have approached Roderick, either, being worldly enough to know the welcome an out-of-wedlock cousin would receive. He was much too embarrassed to come to his father’s lawful widow. Then he’d seen the advertisement for a tutor from Lady Sparrowdale. Now he thanked the Lord, in nine languages.