by Erica Monroe
From his pocket, he pulled out a gold coin and placed it on the table by the door. “Take this.”
“I couldn’t possibly,” Poppy said. “The groceries and the toy are enough, Atlas, I couldn’t accept anything more.”
“It’s one coin of many, Poppy,” Atlas said. “Look, I never had a family growing up. You and Danny and that mad wife of his, you’re the closest thing I got to one.”
In the past few months, she’d grown to think of Atlas as a brother.
“I ran into your companion before she scurried off to tea with your neighbor. She said you’ve been working too much lately. Let me do this for Moira. Put it in her education fund.”
“I couldn’t…” She looked at the coin too wistfully, for it’d be a great addition to the fund.
“Take the damn blunt,” Atlas ordered, his face scrunching up in tyrannical direction.
She understood again why legions of thieves were willing to commit any number of crimes upon his word. He wasn’t a man to anger.
Pocketing the coin, Poppy nodded. “Thank you, then.”
“And Poppy?” Atlas turned, halfway out the door. “Be careful, lass. No good can come from our kind mixing with the Peelers.”
No good indeed.
Sunday was Thaddeus’s least favorite day of the week. Marred not by brutal murders, but instead by the constant disapproval of his family, Sunday breakfast consisted largely of the desire to fling himself head-first into a hole. Being the victim of a gunshot wound or a minor explosion would have been preferable, for they would at least have provided a case to solve—and an excuse to get the hell out of his family’s townhouse.
The Knights were nothing if not consistent. Every Sunday after the family returned from church, Thaddeus took his designated seat toward the end of the long, rectangular table, with Joseph’s wife, Catherine, on one side and an empty chair on the other. It was a barely veiled reminder by his father of Thaddeus’s place in the importance of things, for even those who were not blood relatives of the Knights had more power in the family.
Catherine, Alfred Knight liked to say, at least knew her duty.
Picking at her food delicately, Catherine finally settled on a bite of egg. Her plate was loaded high, though she’d consume a quarter of it and declare that she was too full to eat more. She wasted enough food to feed a family of four on Drury Lane.
“We missed you at church today,” Catherine said, with all the sincerity of a thrice-caught purse-cutter intent on escaping a transportation sentence.
“We miss you at church every Sunday,” his mother corrected.
“I do not believe God is concerned with the manner in which I pay my respects, Mother. He cares solely that I pay them,” Thaddeus replied.
“Nathan has been working on the loveliest set of sermons.” Martha Knight somehow managed to load this statement with equal amounts of pride in her middle son and disparagement at her youngest.
“Of course, he has,” Thaddeus mumbled under his breath. “That is what a rector does.”
He stood at the end of the serpentine front mahogany sideboard, cramming sardines with mustard sauce onto his plate that alone would have been considered an ample dinner to a denizen of the rookeries. The sideboard stretched half the width of the dining room, loaded with oatmeal and sweet cream, fried kippers, cold eel pie, beef tongue served with horseradish sauce, and four different types of rolls. He made his way next to the plum pudding, one ear tuned to the drone of his mother.
Martha was born, raised, and would probably die in London, refusing to relinquish her iron grip on the upper-middle-class community. Seated on the right side of her husband, dressed in a violet day gown trimmed in fine white lace, she appeared as ready to receive the King as she was to superintend an onslaught at Tortuga.
“Thaddeus, do you have any news?” Martha asked.
“Thaddy refused my offer of a job,” Joseph put in, from his place on the other side of their father.
“And it was such a nice offer,” Catherine bemoaned, her thin lips pulled into a sneer. Where her husband was brawn, Catherine was brittle and twiggy. “Joseph worked so hard on getting it for him.”
Thaddeus was thankful that with his back turned to his mother, she couldn’t see him mouthing a number of choice obscenities he’d learned from the East Smithfield market.
“You did what?” Alfred roared.
Thaddeus winced. After twenty-four years of being spoken to in that tone, he should have been used to it, but he wasn’t.
“Joseph wanted me to coddle customers of the bank. That’s not at all anything I’m trained for, or interested in, for that matter.” Thaddeus wished his voice didn’t sound so petulant. He was a grown man, damn it, he didn’t have to explain himself.
He busied himself with scooping out orange marmalade, depositing it on his sweet roll. One scoop followed by another, until there was so much marmalade, he’d get a toothache. But if it kept his back to his family...
“Do sit down,” Martha commanded. “The servants will get you the rest of your food. I don’t know why you insist on serving yourself. It’s horrible manners. You’d think I raised you in one of those wretched tenement houses. Coddlesworth?” She turned a pointed glare toward the footman, lingering on the edge of the room and listening with far too much interest in the family squabble.
Thaddeus mouthed a “No, no,” at Coddlesworth, whose upper lip turned in the barest hint of a smile. At fifty-two years of age, Coddlesworth had been with the family longer than Thaddeus had been alive.
Coddlesworth was also the only member of the household with a lick of sense.
“Sit,” Martha repeated through gritted teeth.
Thaddeus sat.
“Very good,” Martha praised, as though he were the family spaniel.
Proceeding to shove half the slice of plum cake into his mouth, Thaddeus earned himself a moment of silence. Speaking with a mouth full of food was high on his mother’s list of hated affronts. However, this didn’t protect him from his father’s diatribe.
Alfred waved his fork in Thaddeus’s direction, grilled trout dressed in white butter sauce dancing wildly between the prongs with each word. “Thaddeus, you will take this job and you will do it well. Enough gadding about with a billystick, thinking you’re saving the world. You’re not.”
Thaddeus met his father’s gaze. “You know nothing of what I do.”
Damn the tremble in his words. Damn the fact that he still cared what this damn family thought of him. Damn it all.
“You trundle up and down the street in that ill-fitting blue uniform,” Martha complained. “Where everyone can see you. Your grandfather was the second son of an earl, Thaddeus. You have bloodline. Yet does that ever affect how you act? No. You’d think you came from swine. I cannot possibly understand it. A good education at Eton, and you squander it.”
Joseph grinned. “Never fear, Mother, no one you know would ever take the route Thaddy patrols.”
“That doesn’t make it better,” Martha huffed, but she appeared slightly mollified.
Alfred patted his wife’s hand. “When he takes the job with Joseph, none of that will matter.”
It was with great force of will that Thaddeus didn’t scoot his chair back and rush the door. “I’m not taking that job.”
“It would please your father and me,” Martha reminded him.
“You know how I live to do that,” Thaddeus muttered.
His mother ignored him. “At the bank, you could meet a suitable wife, like Joseph did with Catherine.”
Catherine preened.
Thaddeus didn’t want a suitable wife. He wanted to pursue what was going on with Poppy. He wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her with all the fire that had consumed them the night before.
He’d have to prove to her they were worth fighting for. It felt real to him. More real than anything he’d ever experienced before.
No woman had challenged him the way she did.
But she was
Irish, and she worked in a factory. So, he didn’t bring her name up to his family, for if they said she wasn’t worthy of him, he’d not just spring up from the table, he’d hurl the chair toward the bloated sideboard.
Perhaps not. That would be a rash move, and he was a man who prided himself on his cool reasoning. But this woman made him want to be daring, emotional.
The conversation had gone on without him, as it always did. They’d progressed from the idea of him meeting a woman at the bank to a running evaluation of every debutante in their social circle.
“My friend Justine is still on the shelf,” Catherine suggested.
He remembered Justine Balfour, though he couldn’t ascertain why she submitted to Catherine’s company. Justine was reasonably intelligent. He imagined Justine, with her demure manners and her fresh-faced looks, sitting up for him all night while he was off patrolling. Within a year, she’d hate him for putting her through that stress.
“No,” he interrupted.
“No what?” Martha asked. “No, you shall not have Justine or no, you shall not have Hestia?”
He blinked. “Who the devil is Hestia?”
“Your language, Thaddeus.” Martha glared. “She’s quite lovely. The daughter of Lord Hammond.”
“No to both of those possibilities, no to allowing you to select a wife for me, no to that job, no to letting you run my life, Mother, no to—”
“That is quite enough.” Alfred’s growl cut him short. “If you cannot be civil, son, then you may have Coddlesworth see you out.”
Thaddeus pushed his chair out from the table, giving a mournful look to the salmon he had not finished. He snatched up two of the remaining slices of plum cake on his plate, stuffed them in his pockets, and nodded to Coddlesworth. “I know the way out, Father, you needn’t make Coddlesworth treat me as though I were a guest and not a member of this bloody family.”
“This family,” Martha sniffed, “will happily receive you when you can conduct yourself properly.”
As Thaddeus strode out of the townhouse, munching on the cake, he knew it’d be a cold day in hell when he acted properly.
12
The first visitor to her cottage that morning had been a pleasant surprise, but the second knock Poppy couldn’t properly classify. As she ran to the window, Poppy’s stomach twisted with the inexplicable knowledge that somehow, in some way, her life wouldn’t be the same once she opened the door. She went to the window, pulling back the curtain to peep outside.
Thaddeus Knight stood outside her door; his fist raised to knock again.
Her breath hitched high in her throat. Devil take the way his shoulders filled out that double-breasted coat. That thewy expanse of chest she’d run her hands down the night before. Blast it all.
A third knock sounded. Louder this time, as if he’d caught the slight move of the curtain and knew she was home. She held her breath, hand poised on the knob.
The best way to meet any obstacle was head-on.
At that moment, Moira let out a loud cry. “Mama!” She pattered closer to the door.
“Traitor.” Poppy shot her daughter a beleaguered look. “Lord help me when you learn more words.”
Moira smiled.
Poppy opened the door, standing back so that Thaddeus could enter and then closing the door behind him. He remained in the entranceway with his hat held in his hands.
Every retort she’d been about to fire off about how he shouldn’t have come here died when she saw the expression on his face. The smallest of smiles turned up his lips—those blasted beautiful lips that tasted of whisky and lemon—and his dark brown eyes held cautious optimism.
Like he’d expected her to reject him. He’d risked coming anyhow, as if she was so important to him that she was worth it. No one, not even Edward, had looked at her like that before.
And so, she did what every Irishwoman raised in England would have done: she asked him if he wanted some tea.
Relief lit up his face instantly. That slight smile became a full grin, so wide it seemed to stretch from one ear to the other. “I’d like that.”
Before Atlas had left, he’d fetched wood for the fire from the coster’s cart a street down. He’d stacked the wood against the right corner of the fireplace. Poppy gestured toward it. “If you’d start the fire, I’ll ready the kettle. There’s a box of lucifers on the mantel.”
Briefly, he glanced at the portrait above the fireplace of “Robert Corrigan.” Almost as if he was appraising that portrait, evaluating his past competition—when Robert had never existed to begin with.
She sneaked a glance at him as she collected the tin of tea leaves Atlas had brought from the market. His shirt had come untucked from his breeches, edging up his back, revealing the waistline of his breeches. That tantalizing strip of flesh above his buttocks, tempting her with the rounded curves of his bottom. She remembered the feel of his lips on hers, the smell of his body.
He wasn’t for her.
But God, how she wanted him to be.
On the counter, she kept a bucket of water retrieved from the pump at the end of Finch Street. Dipping a cup into the bucket, she poured the water into the kettle. With one hand around the tin of leaves and the other wrapped around the handle of the kettle, Poppy approached the fireplace. He’d worked up the roaring flames and put the grate in front so that Moira would be safe.
That thoughtfulness struck her, more than it should.
She set the kettle in the rack and turned back to face Thaddeus, expecting him to have returned to his earlier place by the door. But he’d taken a seat in the chair next to Moira’s blanket. He leaned forward in the seat, his elbows resting on his knees as he watched Moira play with her toy. She’d placed the clothespin doll from him on top of the sheep and was waving both about.
“Quite a fancy sheep.” His voice reached Poppy’s ears, pitched higher than he usually spoke. The tone she’d always expected her husband to use someday with their children, but one she’d certainly never expected from a Met officer.
“Eep,” Moira agreed solemnly, holding the sheep out for Thaddeus. She kept the clothespin doll, reluctant to be parted from it more than a moment.
Thaddeus had already managed to work his way into Moira’s life, even if the babe wasn’t aware of it. Poppy swallowed down the panic rising within her.
This, this couldn’t last. But damned if she didn’t want to enjoy it while she could.
He took the sheep from Moira with all the gravity of a man receiving a commendation from the King, holding it in his outstretched palm. “This is a special sheep, you know. Why, last week, I received notice that this particular sheep—” He tapped the sheep on the head with his pinkie finger. “This sheep saved a whole hack of people from a very, very evil highway robber. A most odious wolf.”
Poppy stood by the fire, waiting for the water to boil. She wouldn’t be convinced this domestic tableau could ever be real.
“One must be careful of wolves.” She mimicked Thaddeus’s singsong voice for the benefit of Moira when her heart tore another centimeter with every word. “They want to eat the sheep.”
“Your mother has heard all of this sheep’s exploits,” Thaddeus responded. “Outside of the carriage recovery, Mr. Sheep performed a dashing recovery of a lady’s cut purse.”
Moira nodded; her wide eyes focused entirely on Thaddeus. She’d stopped prattling, soothed by his voice.
Poppy watched them both silently, tears brimming at the edge of her eyes. Was she wrong in keeping the truth from him? Had she misjudged? Moira needed someone constant, someone who could be there when she needed him.
Thaddeus couldn’t make that promise. He was a Peeler above all else, and Peelers had short life expectancies in the rookeries, especially when they were as determined to sniff out crime as he was. Inevitably, he’d anger the wrong person and pay with his life. Then what would she tell Moira? It was bad enough to lose one “father.”
Swiftly, she rubbed the back of her hand acros
s her eyes. There was no room in her life for Thaddeus, no matter how tempting he was.
She lifted the kettle from the fire, setting it down on the mantel so that she could place the tea leaves into the strainer.
“How did the lady’s purse get cut, you ask?” Thaddeus asked. His head was down, focused entirely on the child in front of him. “You see, a thief—often a little child, such as yourself, but a bit older—will slide up behind a lady and when her attention is on something else, he shall cut the strings of her pocketbook with a sharp tool. He must run off with the purse, as fast his legs can carry him, for he faces criminal charges if he is caught.”
Poppy plucked the sheep from Thaddeus’s hands, presenting it to Moira. “But people like Mr. Sheep are quite good at their jobs, my girl, and they keep the streets safe.”
Rising from the chair, Thaddeus ran his hands down his breeches to smooth out the wrinkles. “I’m surprised to hear you think that now.” His tone was gentle, almost tentative, as if he expected her to counter him with a diatribe on the evils of Peelers again.
“It is a sheep,” she stated. “Sheep don’t really patrol the streets, Thaddeus.”
But you do, and some day you’ll pay the price for it.
He chuckled. “Nor are there wolves that waylay carriages demanding jewels. But some stories have deeper meaning, don’t you think?”
She shrugged, as if it wasn’t the fate of her own child she worried over, but that of all the random children in London. She was charitable, magnanimous even, caring for those little figments. “Children need stories to believe. That is the most important thing, that they’re able to remain innocent throughout their childhood.”
If it was the last thing Poppy did, she’d make sure Moira got to keep that innocence as long as possible.
“If I could find some way to help them all, I would,” he said earnestly.
She looked up, meeting his intense gaze, and her heart tugged. She felt it deep in her stomach, this ache that wouldn’t leave, sapping her of strength.
While she worried for the fate of her own family, he was concerned with the masses. He carried their problems as though they were his own, and damn it, he’d make things better for them. How could she come between that? Distract him from his fight? These people needed a savior, far more than she needed a lover, a husband.