“Phelps, I think I’ve killed him.” Dain could scarcely move his lips. His entire body was paralyzed. He could not make himself look down…at the corpse.
“Then why’s he breathin’?” Phelps looked up from the boy’s face into his master’s. “He be’nt dead. Only sick, I reckon. Mebbe took a chill comin’ here in the bad weather. Whyn’t you put him down over there on the bed so we can have a look at him?”
Addled, Dain thought. Jessica would say he was addled. Or high-strung. His face burning, he carefully shifted the boy up, carried him to the bed, and gently laid him down.
“He looks a mite feverish,” said Phelps.
Dain cautiously laid his hand over the lad’s grime-encrusted forehead. “He’s—he’s rather overwarm, I think,” said His Lordship.
Phelps’ attention was elsewhere. “Mebbe that be the trouble,” he said, moving to the small fire-place. He took a bottle from the mantel and brought it to Dain. “As I recollect, laudynum didn’t set right with you, neither. Nuss give it to you when your ma run off, ’n you was sick some’at fierce from it.”
Dain, however, had not been half-starved at the time and had not been dragged through a Dartmoor drenching as well. He had been safe in his bed, with servants in attendance, and Nurse there to feed him tea and bathe his sweating body.
…it was better to leave him where he would be safe, and where she was sure he’d be provided for.
Dain had not been loved, but his mother had left him safe enough. He’d been looked after, provided for.
His mother had not taken him with her…where he would surely have died with her, of fever, upon an island on the other side of the world.
This boy’s mother had left him to die.
“Go down and tell them we must have a pot of tea immediately,” he told Phelps. “See that they send up plenty of sugar with it. And a copper tub. And every towel they can find.”
Phelps started for the door.
“And the parcel,” said Dain. “Fetch my lady’s parcel.”
Phelps hurried out.
By the time the tea arrived, Dain had stripped off his son’s sweat-soaked garments and wrapped him in a bed sheet.
Phelps was ordered to build a fire, and set the tub near it. While he worked, his master spooned heavily sweetened tea into the boy, who lay limply against his arm, conscious again—thank heaven—but just barely.
Half a pot of tea later, he seemed to be reviving. His bleary gaze was marginally more alert, and his head had stopped lolling like a rag doll’s. That head, an untidy mass of thick black curls like Dain’s own, was crawling with vermin, His Lordship noticed, not much surprised.
But first things first, he counseled himself.
“Feeling better?” he asked gruffly.
A dazed black gaze rose to meet his. The sticky childish mouth trembled.
“Are you tired?” Dain asked. “Do you want to sleep for a bit? There’s no hurry, you know.”
The boy shook his head.
“Quite. You slept a good deal more than you wished, I daresay. But you’ll be all right. Your mama gave you some medicine that didn’t agree with you, that’s all. Same thing happened to me once. Puked my guts out. Then, in a very short time, I was all better.”
The boy’s gaze dropped and he leaned toward the side of the bed. It took Dain a moment to realize the brat was trying to see his boots.
“There’s no need to look,” he said. “They’re ruined. That’s the second pair in one day.”
“You squashed me,” the child said defensively.
“And I turned you upside down,” Dain agreed. “Bound to unsettle a queasy stomach. But I didn’t know you were sick.
Because Jessica wasn’t here to tell me, Dain added silently.
“Still, since you’ve found your tongue at last,” he went on, “maybe you can find your appetite.”
Another blank, shaky look.
“Are you hungry?” Dain asked patiently. “Does your belly feel empty?”
This won Dain a slow nod.
He sent Phelps down again, this time for bread and a bowl of clear broth. While Phelps was gone, Dain undertook to wash his son’s face. It took rather a while, His Lordship being uncertain how much pressure to exert. But he managed to get most of the grime off without scraping half the skin away as well, and the boy endured it, though he shook like a new-foaled colt the whole time.
Then, after he’d consumed a few pieces of toasted bread and a cup of broth, and had stopped looking like a freshly dug-up corpse, Dain turned his attention to the small copper tub by the fire.
“Her Ladyship sent clean clothes for you,” Dain said, indicating a chair upon which Phelps had heaped the garments. “But you must wash first.”
Dominick’s gaze darted from the clothes to the tub and back again several times. His expression became anguished.
“You must wash first,” Dain said firmly.
The boy let out an unearthly howl that would have done an Irish banshee proud. He tried to struggle up and away. Dain caught hold of him and picked him up off the bed, oblivious to pounding fists, kicking feet, and deafening shrieks.
“Stop that racket!” he said sharply. “Do you want to make yourself sick again? It’s only a bath. You won’t die of it. I bathe every day and I’m not dead yet.”
“No-o-o-o!” With that piteous wail, his son’s louse-infested head sank onto Dain’s shoulder. “No, Papa. Please. No, Papa.”
Papa.
Dain’s throat tightened. He moved his big hand up the lad’s woefully thin back, and patted it gently.
“Dominick, you are crawling with vermin,” he said. “There are only two ways to get rid of them. Either you have a bath in that handsome copper tub…”
His son’s head came up.
“Or you must eat a bowl of turnips.”
Dominick drew back and gazed at his father in blank horror.
“Sorry,” said Dain, suppressing a grin. “It’s the only other remedy.”
The struggling and wails ceased abruptly.
Anything—even certain death—was preferable to turnips.
That was how Dain had felt as a child. If the boy had inherited his reaction to laudanum, one might reasonably deduce that he’d also inherited Dain’s youthful aversion to turnips. Even now, he was not overly fond of them.
“You may have the hot water sent up now, Phelps,” said His Lordship. “My son wishes to bathe.”
The first wash Dain was obliged to handle himself, while Dominick sat rigid with indignation, his mouth set in a martyred line. When that was done, however, he was rewarded with a glimpse of the peepshow, and told he might play with it as soon as he was clean.
Dominick decided to conduct the second wash himself.
While he was making puddles about the tub under Phelps’ watchful eye, Dain ordered dinner.
By the time it arrived, the boy had emerged from the tub, and Dain had towelled him dry, got him into the old-fashioned skeleton suit Jessica had found, and combed his unruly hair.
Then the coveted peepshow was put into Dominick’s hands, and while he played with it, Dain sat down with his coachman to eat.
He took up his knife and his fork and was about to cut into his mutton when he realized he’d taken up his knife and his fork.
He stared at the fork in his left hand for a long moment.
He looked at Phelps, who was slathering butter on an enormous hunk of bread.
“Phelps, my arm works,” said Dain.
“So it do,” the coachman said expressionlessly.
Then Dain realized his arm must have been working for some time now, and he hadn’t noticed. How else had he held his son’s head up while spooning tea into him? How else had he carried him and patted his back at the same time? How else had he moved the boy’s rigid body this way and that while bathing him and washing his hair? How else had he dressed him in that pestilentially impractical suit with its rows and rows of buttons?
“It stopped working
for no known medical reason and now it’s started working for no reason.” Dain frowned at the hand. “Just as though there had never been anything wrong with it.”
“Her Ladyship said ‘tweren’t nothing wrong with it. Said—meanin’ no offense, me lord—’twere all in your head.”
Dain’s eyes narrowed. “Is that what you think? That it was all in my head? That, in other words, I am addled?”
“I only tole you what she said. Me, I reckon there were a silver o’ some’at them sawbones didn’t get. Mebbe it just worked itself out.”
Dain brought his attention back to his plate and commenced cutting the mutton. “Exactly. There was a medical explanation, but the French quack wouldn’t admit he’d made a mistake, and all his friends stuck with him. There was something in there, and it simply worked itself out.”
He was swallowing the first bite when his attention drifted to Dominick, who lay on his belly on the rug before the fire, studying the Battle of Copenhagen.
The problem of cosmic proportions had shrunk to one sick and frightened little boy. And somehow, during that shrinking, something had worked itself out.
As he gazed at his son, Lord Dain understood that the “something” had not been a silver of metal or bone. It had been in his head, or perhaps in his heart. Jessica had aimed left of his heart, hadn’t she? Mayhap a part of that organ had been immobilized…with fear? he wondered.
Se mi lasci mi uccido, he’d told her.
He had been terrified, yes, that she’d leave him.
He realized now that he’d felt that way since the day she’d shot him. He’d feared then that he’d done the unforgivable, that he’d lost her forever. And he had not stopped being afraid. Because the only woman who’d ever cared for him before had abandoned him…because he was a monster, impossible to love.
But Jessica said that wasn’t true.
Dain left the table and walked to the fire. Dominick looked up at his approach. In his son’s dark, warily upturned countenance, Dain saw his own: the black troubled eyes…the hated beak…the sullen mouth. No, the child was not handsome by any stretch of the imagination. His face wasn’t pretty and his body was awkwardly formed—scrawny limbs, overlarge feet and hands, and great bony shoulders.
He did not have a sunny disposition, either. Nor did his filthy vocabulary enhance his appeal. He wasn’t a pretty child and he certainly wasn’t a charming one.
He was just like his father.
And just like his father, he needed someone—anyone—to accept him. Someone to look upon him and touch him with affection.
It was not very much to ask.
“As soon as Phelps and I finish dinner, we’re setting out for Athcourt,” he told Dominick. “Do you feel strong enough to ride?”
The boy gave a slow nod, his eyes never leaving his father’s.
“Good. I will take you up on my horse, and if you promise to be careful, I may let you hold the reins. Will you be careful?”
A quicker nod this time. And then, “Yes, Papa.”
Yes, Papa.
And in Lord Beelzebub’s dark, harsh Dartmoor of a heart, the sweet rain fell and a seedling of love sprouted in the once barren soil.
By the time Lord Dain finished his neglected dinner, Charity Graves should have reached Moretonhampstead. Instead, she was in Tavistock, some twenty miles in the opposite direction.
This was because Charity had collided with Phelps at the back entrance through which she’d planned to escape. He’d told her Lord Dain had come to collect his boy, and if Charity knew what was good for her, she would quietly and quickly disappear. Before Charity could summon up the required maternal tears and wails of grief at giving up her beloved son, Phelps had produced a small parcel.
The parcel had contained one hundred sovereigns, another fourteen hundred pounds in bank notes, and a note from Lady Dain. In the note, Her Ladyship pointed out that fifteen hundred quid was better than nothing and a great deal more agreeable than residence in New South Wales. She suggested that Miss Graves book passage to Paris, where her profession was better tolerated, and where her advanced age—Charity was perilously near the dreaded thirty—would not be considered so great a drawback.
Charity had decided she was not a grieving mother after all. She held her tongue and made herself scarce, just as Phelps recommended.
By the time she’d found her gig, she’d done a simple calculation. Sharing twenty thousand pounds with her lover was an altogether different matter from sharing fifteen hundred. She was fond of Rolly, yes, but not that fond. And so, instead of heading northeast for Moretonhampstead, on the road that would take her to London, Charity had headed southwest. From Tavistock, her next stop would be Plymouth, she decided. There she would find a vessel to take her to France.
Five weeks earlier, Roland Vawtry had tumbled into a pit without realizing it. By now he was aware he was at the bottom of a very deep hole. What he failed to see was that the bottom was made of quicksand.
Instead, what he saw was that he’d betrayed Charity’s trust.
Yes, she’d raced to Postbridge, straight to the inn where she knew Vawtry was staying. Yes, she’d sent for him, instead of discreetly hiring a room of her own. And yes, that meant that the occupants of the Golden Hart knew the tart and he were connected. Still, since Vawtry had used a false name, there had remained a chance Dain wouldn’t discover the truth.
That chance, Vawtry belatedly discovered, had died when he’d panicked and abandoned the brat.
The boy would have heard Charity call him “Rolly,” and worse, would be able to describe him. Dominick had stared at his mama’s “friend” throughout the meal he’d started spewing up minutes after finishing it.
Charity, being so quick-witted, had perceived the problem. She’d told Vawtry to take the boy because that was the safest, wisest thing to do.
He was “worth money,” she’d also said.
Vawtry had considered all this while cowering under a damp pile of hay, undecided which way to run and wondering whether he had a prayer of escaping the innyard unnoticed once he did decide.
But the place had not erupted with men commanded to hunt Roland Vawtry—or anyone else—down. No more satanic roars had issued from Vawtry’s recently abandoned chamber.
Eventually, he had collected his courage and crept from the hay wagon.
No one accosted him. He walked as coolly as he could to the stables and asked for his horse.
It was there he learned of his reprieve.
The Marquess of Dain, he was informed, had all the inn servants—and not a few customers as well—running themselves ragged because his boy was sick.
Then Roland Vawtry saw that Fate had given him a chance to redeem himself in his beloved’s eyes.
It did not take long to figure out how to accomplish that.
After all, he had nothing to lose now.
He was not only five thousand pounds in debt, but facing, he had no doubt, a rapid dismemberment at the Marquess of Dain’s hands. Dain had other things on his mind now, but that wouldn’t last forever. Then he would hunt his former comrade down.
Vawtry had one chance only and he must take it.
He must carry out Charity’s plan…and he must do it all himself.
Chapter 19
Mrs. Ingleby had told Jessica that when Athcourt had been enlarged and remodeled in the sixteenth century, the layout had been similar to that of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. The ground floor had been the service area primarily. The family apartments had occupied the first floor. The second floor, lightest and airiest, thanks to its high ceilings and tall windows, had held the state apartments.
In Dain’s grandfather’s time, the functions of the first and second floors were reversed, except for the Long Gallery, which continued to display the portrait collection.
The nursery, however, as well as the schoolroom and nursemaids’ and governess’s quarters, remained where they’d been since the late fifteen hundreds, at the northeast corner of the
ground floor—the coldest and darkest corner of the main house.
That, Jessica told Mrs. Ingleby, shortly after Dain and Phelps had departed, was not acceptable.
“The child will be distressed enough at being separated from the only family he’s known and brought to a cavernous place filled with strangers,” she said. “I will not exile him to a dark corner two floors away, where he is sure to have nightmares.”
After a consultation, the two women had agreed that the South Tower, just above Jessica’s apartments, would be more suitable. Whatever needed to be moved out of the South Tower rooms could easily be transported across the roof walkway to one of the five other towers. The servants could do the same with items brought in from other storage rooms. That would leave a few very long trips from the present nursery to the new one, but only a few. Most of the room’s furnishings had been put into storage twenty-five years earlier.
Thanks to Athcourt’s grand army of servants, the project made rapid progress.
By the time the sun set, the new nursery was furnished with a bed, a rug, fresh linens, and handsome yellow draperies. The latter were not quite so fresh, but acceptable after a good shaking out in the twilight’s clear air. Jessica had found a child-size rocking chair as well, rather battered but not broken, and a pull-along wooden horse minus half its tail, and most of the set of wooden soldiers Phelps had mentioned.
Mary Murdock, who’d been selected as nursemaid, was sorting through a trunkful of His Lordship’s boyhood belongings for enough garments to see an active child through the days before a wardrobe could be made up for him. Bridget was removing the lace collar from a small nightshirt, because her mistress had told her that no boy of the present generation would be caught dead in that fussy thing.
They were working in the North Tower storage room, which had become the campaign’s head-quarters, for it was to this place the previous marquess had consigned most of the artifacts of his second wife’s brief reign. Jessica had just unearthed a handsome set of picture books. She was piling them onto the windowsill when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of light in the darkness beyond.