Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ernest knew the answer to that. That sword was a tiny piece of his old, satisfied life—a life he longed to have back. The sense of feeling out of place was growing stronger with each passing year. A strange thing, he thought, to feel such a foreigner in the very house one had been born and raised in.
He slid out of bed and pulled on his trousers, tucking his nightshirt into them messily. He lit a candle and made his way out into the hallway. The house was quiet, save for one of the kitchen maid’s soft footsteps in an attic bedroom above his head. Outside the window, he heard the faint coo of an owl.
Ernest made his way past the closed bedroom doors of his mother and father, reaching one of the guest rooms at the end of the passage. He slipped soundlessly inside. This room, the smallest of the four guest chambers, was rarely used, the large oak bed draped with curtains that he was sure had not been drawn in years. A large wardrobe lined one wall. Ernest set the candle down and opened the large wooden doors. The hinges groaned in protest.
This wardrobe, Ernest knew, had become a veritable shrine to him, firstborn son and only surviving child of the Duke and Duchess of Armson. His mother had requested each piece of clothing he had outgrown to be placed in the wardrobe, along with other scraps of his childhood—school books and skittles, a set of faded toy soldiers.
Ernest had always known it to be strange behavior, of course, the way his mother had hoarded away every moment of his childhood. But he supposed he couldn’t blame her. Though the Duke and Duchess had been married more than thirty years, he and his sister, Unity, had been the only children to arrive.
Unity had died in the cradle—had been and gone before his time. She was rarely spoken about within the household. The only reminder that she had ever existed was the small, worn gravestone hidden amongst the resting places of the rest of his family.
Ernest brought the candle close to the rack and pushed aside the clothes. If his fencing sword were anywhere in the house, it would be here. The cupboard smelled musty and neglected, a sudden burst of dust making him sneeze. Had his mother ever once looked at these things, he wondered? Would she notice if he was to give them away?
Behind the clothes, he found an old pair of boxing gloves, along with battledore and shuttlecock rackets. No sword.
He moved to the other side of the wardrobe. More clothing: boy-sized waistcoats and ruffled shirts, a skeleton suit with a tear at the knee. Beneath the clothes sat a small wooden chest. Ernest peered at it curiously.
What is this?
He knelt, running his fingers over the delicate carvings on the lid. He had never seen such a thing before. Had it belonged to his mother? He lifted it from the wardrobe and sat it on the floor beside him. He opened the lid. Inside, a pile of clothes was neatly folded. Ernest reached in and took the garment from the top of the pile. It was a child’s smock, the neckline delicately embroidered with pink and purple flowers and a garland of intertwined leaves. The linen was soft and smelled faintly musty, but he could tell the garment had barely been worn. He sat it down and reached for the next item. A soft, cloth bonnet, its ribbons matched the pink and purple flowers embroidered on the smock.
Girl’s clothing. Unity’s no doubt.
Ernest stopped abruptly, the bonnet hanging from his hand. Unity had lived mere months, or so he had been told. And yet these were not the clothes of a newborn. These were a toddler’s clothes; smocks and gowns and bonnets made for a child to race around the square and play in the manor gardens.
He hesitated. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps these clothes had been his. He dug into the chest and pulled out the remainder of the garments, searching for something that might trigger a faint memory within him. But no. The clothes in the chest were all gowns and bloomers and embroidered smocks. They had clearly belonged to a girl.
Ernest closed the lid of the chest, suddenly feeling an intruder. He slid it back into the wardrobe where he had found it.
His thoughts were racing. Sleep, he knew, would not be forthcoming for many hours yet.
Those clothes in the chest had belonged to someone. And Ernest was determined to find out who.
Chapter 2
Rachel Bell peered around the ballroom, searching for the man whose arm she supposed she ought to leave on. It was well past midnight, and the ball had descended into a noisy, messy affair. Men and women were howling with laughter and cursing like sailors. Most had dispensed with the masquerade hours ago, and now brightly-colored masks were strewn across the floor, flattened by footsteps and endless, drunken gavottes.
Rachel leaned back against the wall. She had not seen her client for at least half an hour. He had disappeared to relieve himself, then vanished into the crowd with a group of men he had seemed to know.
Rachel yawned, tapping her foot impatiently. She’d leave if it weren’t for the fact that the bastard hadn’t yet paid her.
Finally, she caught sight of him ambling across the ballroom, a wide grin on his face and his cheeks flushed. He was wearing his mask—some unimpressive black thing he’d clearly found on his wardrobe floor minutes before he was due to leave—but it sat crookedly across his face and appeared to cover one eye.
He kissed her neck. “My beauty.”
Rachel forced a smile. He stank of sweat and liquor. “My money?”
The man grumbled to himself, but dug into his coin pouch and handed over her fee. Then he slid his arm around her waist and guided her toward the door. Rachel had hoped he might have had a few too many visits to the punch bowl to bother taking full advantage of her services offered, but he was heading to an alleyway across the road with renewed vigor and a gleam in his eye.
Soon they were stumbling into the shadows like dogs.
You might at least have found us a decent room.
Rachel had come across men like him before. Men who liked the allure of the dark alley, the thrill that they might one day be caught. Men who liked to cast off the restraints of their station and become someone else for the night.
This man was all sausage fingers and skin that felt like a wet frog.
She looked away as he grunted and puffed and thrust inside her, fat fingers gripping her shoulder and his breath hot on her neck. Rachel willed herself away. She had become adept at letting her mind exit her body, for a few, blissful moments. She thought about Christmas time. Chocolate cake. Thought about the sea. What a long time it had been since she had seen the sea.
The man finished with an overly-dramatic groan. Rachel rolled her eyes, hiding a yawn. He straightened, tidied himself, then gave her a thin smile. And like that, he was gone.
She let out an enormous sigh, leaning back against the wall to count the money he had paid her. Her mask lay on the cobbles beside her, the feathers muddied and drooping.
She stuffed her coin pouch back into her pocket and made her way out to the street for a cab.
As she always did, Rachel asked the driver to take her to Bishopsgate. From there, it was a good mile’s walk to her tenement in Bethnal Green, but she hated to admit where she lived, even to a stranger. The area was cramped and filthy, waste in the streets and windows patched with rags. In the red silk dress she had worn to the masquerade, Rachel knew she could have passed for a lady. But to admit she lived in the Bethnal Green slums, it would have become clear she was nothing but an escort.
Still, she thought dully, no doubt such a thing was evident from the way she slunk home at this time of night without a husband at her side.
Rachel trudged up the stairs of her tenement and pushed open the door to her single-room apartment. She lit a candle and poured a cup of brandy from the bottle on the shelf. She sank into a chair at the rickety table in the center of the room and took a long sip. She felt the alcohol slide down her throat, easing the tension in her shoulders. The flickering candlelight made shadows dance across the table. Outside, she could hear drunken laughter and the distant barking of a dog. The first birds of the dawn twittered noisily. She could smell the faint waft
of baking bread coming from the bakery at the end of the road. Rachel closed her eyes, exhausted.
One day soon, she told herself, this life would be nothing but a memory. One day soon, she would find a far better way to make her living. She would go to work each morning, and this edge of the night would be a time for sleeping.
She laughed to herself as she took another gulp of brandy. Fine ideas. And yet that far better way of making her living remained an elusive, unreachable thing. She couldn’t sew, and her reading and writing were messy and uncertain. She had no references that might see her hired in one of the grand houses that many of her clients lived in.
Still, plenty of the girls she had worked with had made better lives for themselves. Some had married clients and been swept away into lavish lives of manor houses and motherhood. Ellen Bailey had even scrabbled her way out of the taverns and brothels and masquerade balls and found decent work as a governess.
So, Rachel had hope, however faint and fading. Her parents had had hopes for her too. Her father had been a waterman, with a boat all of his own. He had made enough money to give his wife and daughter a comfortable home, a comfortable life. For a few years, Rachel had even attended the local charity school. She had learned to read and write, to do simple arithmetic. She told her parents she would grow up to become a governess. But then a brutal, unending winter had fallen over the city and turned the Thames into a ribbon of ice. With her father unable to work, their money had disappeared quickly. Within months, their comfortable home had been seized by the bank.
Her family had found lodgings here in Bethnal Green; a sorry, single-roomed apartment in a building that looked as though it would topple over with each breath of wind. There had been no fireplace in the room—not that they’d had money for coal anyway—and the patched windows did little to keep the winter outside. Their water jugs had frozen over, and they had shivered in their beds. Illness had seized her father first, then, less than a month later, her mother. Rachel had been sixteen years old when she had watched her parents’ coffins lowered into the earth.
And so, an escort.
It was not the life either Rachel or her parents had hoped for. But it was far better than frozen water jugs and a room without a fire. The room she had now was a palace compared to the place she had shared with her parents.
She had been living this life for three years. And while it often felt as though it had been far longer, Rachel had not lost that faint glimmer of hope that one day things would improve.
“You’ll be out of this life soon,” she told herself aloud.
She didn’t know how; she only knew she would.
* * *
Ernest awoke early, determined. He had slept little, but despite his heavy eyes and a lingering, port-induced headache, he felt full of energy. There were questions to be asked. Truths to uncover. Something about that box of clothing in the wardrobe was just not right, and he intended to find out what.
There was something strangely pleasant to his determination, something stimulating about having a renewed sense of purpose. With the season upon them, his life of late had been an endless cycle of balls, in which a parade of lacy, feathered, pink and purple potential wives had been thrust upon him. Ernest had danced and chatted and laughed that laugh that didn’t reach his eyes.
He knew, of course, it was high time he married. After the war, he’d told himself. But he’d been back from the war for almost three years. His bachelorhood was a thing he’d become reluctant to dispose of. The women he’d met at the balls had felt like copies of each other, dull and uninspiring. Their conversations had revolved around trivial things like the weather, or so-and-so’s upcoming marriage to the duke of who-cared-where.
No, Ernest had thought, he did not want any of those women as his wife. If he were to marry, it would be to a woman he would be excited to wake up beside. And the more balls and garden parties he attended, he felt that such a woman simply did not exist.
And so, a sense of purpose. Solving the mystery of the clothing in the chest felt far more pressing than finding a wife or entertaining the likes of the Earl of Landon.
Where do I begin?
Though he knew he was treading on painful ground, Ernest had to speak to his mother.
He found the Duchess in her withdrawing room, dressed in a shapeless grey gown. An embroidery sampler lay in her lap, the needle and thread dangling from her listless fingers. She was gazing out the window with faraway eyes.
“Mother,” said Ernest, “may I speak with you?”
The Duchess forced a smile. “Of course.” She gestured to the chair opposite her with a limp hand. Ernest sat.
“It’s about my sister,” he said bluntly, “about Unity.”
The last hint of color drained from the Duchess’ face. “Unity,” she murmured, turning back to the window.
“Yes, Mother. What can you tell me about her?”
The Duchess continued to stare vacantly for a for moments. She glanced down at her lap. Seeming to remember the sampler, she lifted it up and began to stitch. Ernest saw a faint tremor in her hand. “Your sister died as an infant,” she said, her voice low and cracked. “You know that.”
Ernest hummed noncommittally. “How old was she?”
The Duchess paused. “A few weeks. A month, perhaps.”
Strange that she would not remember such a thing.
Surely the date of a child’s death would be imprinted in her mother’s memory.
“A month,” he repeated.
“Yes.” This time there was more certainty in the Duchess’ voice. “A month. That’s right.”
But Ernest knew a lie when he heard one. Ought he press his mother? Tell her he had found the chest of clothing in the wardrobe? Admit he could see through this thin-veiled falsity?
He opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated. Regardless of whether or not his mother was lying, his sister was not in their lives. No doubt such a thing brought the Duchess great pain. He needed to find out more, but his fragile mother was not the person to press on the matter.
He gave her a short nod. “I see.”
Ernest found himself pacing across the parlor, his shoes clicking rhythmically across the floorboards. The conversation with his mother had left him even more certain that there were things he didn’t know about his sister’s death.
What if she is not dead at all?
The possibility swung at him suddenly. Was it completely mad to entertain such a thought? He had visited Unity’s headstone on countless occasions. But was there even a scrap of possibility that there might be no grave beneath?
Yes, Ernest decided. He had to consider that such a thing might be the case. If he was to find out the truth, he had to stay open to all possibilities, however strange.
So perhaps his sister was alive. She would be thirty years old by now, and would have a life of her own. Perhaps a family of her own. Ernest inhaled sharply at the thought. If his sister was really out there, he had to find her. But how? His mother had all but closed down on the issue, and Ernest knew she would be of no help at all.
Where does one begin when he seeks to find a woman within the heaving maze of London?
There was nothing, Ernest realized, to say Unity was even still in the city. Perhaps life had taken her to some far-flung county, or even another land. And then, of course, was the far more reasonable possibility that those clothes had belonged to someone else entirely. Perhaps they had belonged to a child of a servant or a cousin. Perhaps his bored mind was finding mysteries, instead of seeking out the most rational explanation. Perhaps finding his sister was just an intriguing distraction from the drudgery of finding a wife. Ernest heard himself laugh out loud at the bizarre path his thoughts had begun to careen down.
But then he stopped pacing. Unity was alive. He felt strangely sure of it. There was something stirring inside of him, a restlessness he had always been aware of, yet unable to explain. What if his missing, living sister was the cause of it?
He had
to search. Had to know the truth. But, where to begin? Why, in the household itself, of course. There was a seemingly endless parade of scullery maids and grooms, stewards and lady’s maids who had come and gone as Ernest had grown up.
But there were also those who had stayed. Fresh-faced kitchen maids who had become hunched and greying women as the years had passed. Their butler had seen decades of visitors through the duke’s front door. And the groom, Phillips, was the only person the Duke had ever trusted with his family’s horses. Perhaps these faithful servants might have something to offer Ernest about his missing sister.
Mrs. Graham, the housekeeper, had been with the household for as long as Ernest could remember. She would be a fine person to ask.
He made his way down toward the basement kitchen, feeling very much an intruder. He hurried past the laundry and Mrs. Graham’s sleeping quarters, averting his glance in case he should see something not intended for his eyes. As he burst into the kitchen, Mary, their teenaged kitchen chambermaid, snorted a mouthful of porridge in surprise. She leaped to her feet, her spoon clattering against the bowl.
She bobbed a curtsey and used the back of her hand to wipe hurriedly at the milk dribbling off her chin. “Lord Dalton. I was just…I—”
Ernest gave her a warm smile. “It’s all right, Mary. Forgive me. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He looked about the kitchen. He had not been inside since he was a boy, when he and his cousin Thomas had sneaked in looking for sweetmeats. “I’m looking for Mrs. Graham.”
Mary knotted her fingers into her apron. “She’s upstairs, My Lord. Pulling that new housemaid into line. Shall I tell her you wish to speak with her?”
Ernest gave her another reassuring smile. “That’s quite all right. I can find her myself.” He nodded toward the porridge. “Please. Finish your breakfast.”
He found Mrs. Graham and the new housemaid in the parlor, exchanging terse, muttered words. Ernest waited in the doorway. At the sight of him, Mrs. Graham let out a gasp.
Rescued By A Wicked Baron (Steamy Historical Regency) Page 30