Villiers poked with his rapier at another basket, precariously balanced on the sideboard. It toppled, and out fell a cascade of teeth. Human teeth, Villiers thought. He took a step back as the teeth rattled to a halt around his toes.
“I collect things,” Grindel said. His face was a miracle of blandness. Villiers prided himself on maintaining an expressionless face, but he had clearly met his match. “I’d rather Your Grace didn’t overturn more of my things. A man’s home, so they say, is his castle.” His insolence was in the open now. “Even to those who consider themselves above the rest.”
“I’m proud to call myself above collecting the teeth of dead men,” Villiers said. He had poked off the top of another basket with his stick, and found it to hold a small collection of silver teaspoons. It was hard to tell through the muck, but many of them seemed to be engraved with initials or even a ducal crest. “You are planning to return these to their rightful owners, are you not?”
“What’s lost to the river is lost, and that’s the waterman’s law,” Grindel said.
The door at Villiers’s back opened and he moved to the side just in time to avoid being touched. He was already mourning the fact that he had chosen to wear the rose velvet coat again. It would be a miracle if he managed to leave Grindel’s study without touching anything.
“What the devil do you want!” Grindel roared, his eyebrows turning into a solid line across his forehead. Villiers allowed himself a small smile. It seemed that Mr. Grindel was not quite as indifferent as he appeared.
It was a small boy, quite thin. He stamped into the room without showing much fear and said, “Fillibet’s cut his foot so badly that part of it hangs right off. Not the part with the toes, the bottom part.”
“What’s that to me?” demanded Grindel. He turned to Villiers. “I’m friends with all the neighboring boys and they do come to me for advice.” Then he turned back to the boy with a ferocious grin. “There’s nothing I can do about a wound, son. You’ll have to take him to the surgeon.”
The boy looked quickly at Villiers and then back at Grindel. “You said we shouldn’t go to the surgeon anymores, but Juby says if you don’t take Fillibet, he’ll die, and the parish constable will take you up for it.”
“Take me up for it?” Grindel roared.
But the moment he heard the name Juby, Villiers had unsheathed his sword. Now the blade gleamed with a dull cruel brilliance as the tip just nudged Grindel’s grimy Adam’s apple.
“Juby says,” Villiers repeated softly. “It seems you do know of a boy named Juby.”
“Everyone knows Juby,” Grindel said. “I never says as how I didn’t know him. I said I didn’t have a school for boys, and I didn’t have no Juby living in my house.”
“We don’t live with him,” said the boy, eyeing the sword with great interest. “He says we stink. We mostly sleep down by the river or sometimes up in the churchyard. Juby likes it up there.”
Villiers put just a touch of pressure on his sword. “I will ask you one more time,” he said quietly. “Are you acquainted with Mr. Templeton?”
“I might as have met him,” Grindel said. The sword seemed sure to pierce his throat, especially when Grindel swallowed nervously. He added: “He sends me a boy now and then.”
“For what purpose?”
“Nothing debauched! Nothing like that around here. There’s them as has boys for shameful purposes, but I ain’t one of those. I run a clean house and I’ve always said so. You ask the Watch. They don’t—”
“Juby says that the Watch never does a thing to you because you give them coin for it,” the boy said. He was clearly delighted by the unfolding drama.
Villiers looked sideways at the boy. He had a miserable mouselike face, streaked in dirt. “Fetch Juby for me, would you?”
The boy took off promptly.
“I can’t think what you want that boy for,” Grindel said. “It’s shameless, the way that you swells use boys for depraved purposes.”
Villiers smiled, and then exerted just a trifle more pressure. Grindel’s eyes bulged as the tip of the sword bit his skin. “I’m not the depraved one. No more surgeons? And how much money did you accept from Templeton for Juby’s schooling?”
“Naught even a shilling!” Grindel squealed. “I takes boys as a bit of charity work. Because otherwise they’d be in the poorhouse and the parish’d have to pay for them. You can ask any of the parish constables hereabout. They know what work I do. I pay the boys fair and square for what they get too. I might give ’em as much as three pence a day. That’s over a shilling a week.”
Villiers withdrew his sword so suddenly that Grindel nearly lost his balance.
A single drop of blood made its way down his throat, but Grindel didn’t bother to swab it. “I know your kind. You’re having a charitable moment, aren’t you? Thought you’d come out here and rescue a poorhouse boy, make him into a decent citizen. I wish you luck with that. Juby is a born criminal with a mind like a sewer. He’s as corrupt—”
Villiers’s smile seemed, unaccountably, to frighten Grindel into silence. “I would expect no less.”
“Why?” Grindel demanded.
“This poorhouse boy? The born criminal with the mind like a sewer?”
“What of him?”
“The boy you insisted that you knew nothing of? The boy whom you clearly were forcing to work for you under merciless and cruel circumstances?”
“Say what you like.” Grindel’s jaw jutted out again. It resembled the jawbone of a wild animal.
“My son,” Villiers said. He took out a beautifully embroidered handkerchief and delicately wiped the blood off the tip of the blade. With a shudder he dropped the cloth on Grindel’s table. “I expect you can get at least eight pence for this. That’s Belgian lace.”
Grindel didn’t even spare it a glance. “Your son?”
Villiers dropped his sword back into its sheath. “I’m taking him, of course.” Making a lightning-quick decision, he said: “I’ll be taking all the other boys as well.”
“You are a depraved son of a—”
“It’s for your own good,” Villiers said sweetly. “You said yourself that you dislike boys. They’re so messy underfoot. It would do you some good to go rooting in the mud; you might lose that belly of yours. It seems that you, at least, have had plenty to eat.”
Grindel would have lunged from behind his desk, but he was afraid of the sword. Villiers saw it in his eyes, just as he saw the raw hatred trembling in his fingers.
“I might add that Templeton seems to have run off to a rat hole somewhere. If I find him, his next residence will be the Clink. For life, Mr. Grindel. For life.”
“Dear me,” he said, knocking over another basket with one swift kick. Coals rolled across the floor.
“What a mess. I apologize for my clumsiness.” In short order he upended four or five more.
The floor was littered with chunks of coal. They cracked under the feet of the boy who entered.
He was indescribably dirty. And there was a smell. But Villiers took one look at the boy’s nose and his lower lip and knew. The facial details weren’t even important: it was in his walk, and the unyielding tilt of his chin. Juby walked straight over to the desk and cast a cold eye on Grindel.
“You’ll pay for Fillibet to go to the doctor,” he said, “or I’ll have the constables on you, you fat sodding excuse for—”
Definitely his son, albeit with a greater concern for humanity than he had ever managed to summon up.
Villiers just watched for a moment. Juby was so thin that he would give Ashmole a run for his money as the resident vulture. But his shoulders were held back firmly. Villiers could see the wings of them, poking through his ragged shirt.
He cleared his throat.
The boy gave him a look out of thick-lashed eyes. “Where’s your sword stick?” he demanded, by way of greeting. “Toad said that a nob was here and about to cut the throat of this disgusting grubber.”
“Here you, watch who you’re calling names,” Grindel said, glowering at him. His fingers were twitching as if he longed to deliver a blow across the table.
The boy laughed at that—and in his laughter was the final evidence, if Villiers needed it. Grindel actually flinched at the sound.
“You don’t dare strike me again, Grindel, remember?” His face was positively alight with glee. “After what happened last week?”
“Take him,” Grindel said, spitting on the floor. “The city is full of lads who’d be more than glad of my rates and my hospitality, as any of the boys will tell you. I’m known for my fairness, I am.”
“I’m taking all of them,” Villiers said again, speaking for the first time since Juby had entered the room.
“Fetch all his boys,” he said, meeting his son’s eyes.
“Who are you to say so?” the boy asked, jutting out his jaw precisely the way Grindel did.
Grindel barked with laughter. “You got more than you bargained for there!” he said, his voice suddenly buoyant.
The boy slanted another glance at Villiers from under his thick lashes. “What do you want us for?” he demanded.
“Not for that.”
“We’re not good for much. And you don’t look like the type to be looking for an apprentice.”
“Is that what you’d like to be?” Villiers felt as if he were operating outside his own body, watching himself speak to this boy who was a shadow of himself, a weedy, nasty, evil-tempered version of Leopold Dautry, Duke of Villiers. The only real difference being that he himself was muscled rather than skinny.
But the boy wasn’t going to give an inch. “We ain’t got nothing you would want.”
“Stay with me, son,” Grindel said, chuckling like a maniac. “I’ll treat you right. I’ll even pay for Fillibet’s doctor if you ask me pretty-like.”
Villiers found himself in the unusual position of being unsure of what to say.
“I forgot Fillibet,” the boy exclaimed, turning around. He jerked his chin at the smaller lad, who was waiting outside the door. “Fetch all the boys.” The child ran.
Then he turned back to Villiers. “If you’re one of those with a taste for the nasty, you will regret the moment you met me.” His eyes were as cold as a November rainfall. Villiers knew those eyes; he saw them reflected in his glass every morning.
“He don’t want that,” Grindel said, hooting. “Ain’t you gonna tell him, then, Duke?”
Villiers cast him a glance and Grindel shut his mouth.
“You’re my son,” Villiers said. “I’m taking you home. I’ll send the others where they’ll be clean and well-cared for.”
Tobias didn’t say a word. Villiers felt a creeping amusement, and, to his surprise, even a streak of pride. He couldn’t have known what to expect in response to that announcement, but he would have loathed an excited shriek of “Papa!”
Instead, Tobias silently looked at Villiers’s white-streaked hair, then at his rose-colored coat. His eyes lingered on the elaborate embroidery of yellow roses around the buttonholes, slid lower to his perfectly-fitted pantaloons, then to his boots, now slightly scuffed from toppling Grindel’s baskets.
Tobias’s glance might have shown some approval of his sword stick, but it wasn’t hard to read the utter distaste in his eyes for the rest.
“Are you certain of your claim?” he said finally, as proud as if any man would be lucky to claim a filthy, odiferous boy nicknamed Juby as his offspring.
One might not wish for an exuberant display of filial excitement, but rank disappointment wasn’t what Villiers would have envisioned either.
“Don’t be a fool,” Grindel cut in. “You’re the spitting image of the bloody-minded bastard, and it’s bastard you’ll be called from now on, and rightly so.”
“Better the bastard of a duke than a bastard by nature,” Villiers said. He kicked a surfeit of teeth and buttons from under his feet and strode over to the desk. The family reunion was over, and he had one final piece of business to attend to.
Grindel inched back in his greasy chair.
“My son has a bruise under his eye,” Villiers said. For the first time he heard his own voice—its measured—cold tones, and knew it to be a more mature version of that which he’d just heard. He had passed on his most useful trait.
“Could be he got in a tussle with the boys,” Grindel said, slanting an eye toward Tobias. Grindel knew as well as Villiers did that the boy would never tattle about an injury. He wasn’t the type.
Villiers sighed inwardly. His gloves were immaculate, or at least they had been that morning…
Grindel went over in a crash, taking two more baskets with him to the floor. He let out a squeal like a stuck pig from behind his desk. A final basket teetered, then tipped to its side. A torrent of silver spoons poured forth, the fruit of the boys’ labors in the river and sewers.
When he turned about, the door was thronged with boys. Five, maybe six of them, staring silently. They were as dirty as newly-pulled radishes and their thin legs were marked with scars.
Grindel groaned from the floor but didn’t seem disposed to move.
“Someone take that basket and pick up all those spoons,” Villiers said. “There’s another collection of spoons on the floor there.”
“And the silver buttons,” Tobias said, without even the slightest flicker of an eyelash to show appreciation for the blow to Grindel.
“Take them,” Villiers said. “They’ll pay for apprenticeships for you lot,” he told the boys.
They didn’t seem to understand, but Tobias scooped the spoons back into their basket with a few swift movements and thrust them at a boy. “Go!” The other basket of spoons, a box of silver buttons, and a third box with a lid, were out of the room before Grindel managed to lumber to his feet. “Here you!” he roared. “What’s happening to me stuff?”
To Villiers’s satisfaction, Grindel’s right eye was fast swelling shut. “You’re thieving from me! You’re nothing more than a fleagler, duke or no. I’ll have the constables on you!”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Villiers said softly.
“You’ll find some other way to make a living. I’ll be watching, and if I ever hear that a boy has set foot on these premises again, I’ll have it burned down. With or without you,” he added dispassionately.
“I see the resemblance,” Grindel spat.
“You do me an honor,” Villiers said. Then he said, “That last was for my son. This one is for the rest of them.” And his fist smashed into Grindel’s other eye. Over he went, and this time Villiers strode out without pausing.
“Where’s the injured boy?” he asked.
Tobias gestured toward a boy lying on the side of the street. Blood was running sullenly from a dirty cloth wound around his foot.
Villiers jerked his chin at the groom standing by his carriage. “Pick up this boy and carry him to the nearest surgeon. Then get a hackney and take him to Mrs. Jobber, in Whitechapel. The coachman knows the street.”
Then he turned to the five remaining boys. Tobias stood in front of them, shoulders back, chin raised. He had a defiant look in his eye.
Villiers gestured at one of his footmen. “Find a hackney and take this lot to Mrs. Jobber. Get the address from the coachman. Beg my forgiveness, but ask her to wash and clothe them, as best she can. I’ll set Ashmole to finding an appropriate school for them immediately. And give these to Mrs. Jobber.” He gave him a handful of guineas.
“A school,” one of the boys muttered, his eyes bugging out.
Tobias seemed to relax a bit. “We’ll do well there,” he said. Adding, rather reluctantly, “sir.”
“I’m not a sir,” Villiers said. “You may address me as Your Grace.” He sounded like a pompous fool. “And you’re not going to Mrs. Jobber’s house, Tobias. You’re coming with me.”
Tobias’s face didn’t change even a whit. “No. And my name is Juby.”
“Your name is Tobias. You are my son,
and you’re coming home with me.”
“I will live with Mrs. Jobber. I will not live with you.” His lip curled. The boys were watching, slackjawed.
Villiers thought for a moment about the advisability of designating Tobias to his remaining footman. It pained him to think of all that mud—to give it a charitable label—in his coach. But a hackney and a footman didn’t seem right. It would put Tobias in the wrong footing in the household, though he’d be damned if he knew what that footing should be.
“You will enter the carriage now,” he stated.
“No.”
There was nothing for it. His gloves were already a dead loss, and now the rose-colored coat was going the same way. With one economical movement Villiers picked up the boy and slung him over his shoulder.
The footman whipped open the carriage door, and Villiers tossed him in. Then he followed, slamming the door behind him.
The boy pulled himself upright instantly and sat there, uncompromising eyes fixed on Villiers’s face.
Villiers saw no reason to continue the conversation. He sat down opposite and peeled off his ruined gloves.
There were two things going through his mind. One was the wretched realization that he had five children left to find. And the second was that he needed a wife.
Now.
Perhaps a woman would know how to talk to a younger version of himself. He certainly didn’t.
He needed a wife today, or tomorrow at the latest.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Dr. William Withering had a terrible cough. Elijah and Jemma entered his anteroom only to hear, from the inner chamber, the truly distressing sounds of someone gasping and coughing at the same time.
“The doctor is dying,” Jemma cried with some alarm.
Elijah had jumped to the conclusion that a patient was in his last throes, but he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to mention it. Jemma had that still, terrified look about her eyes that only really left her when they were making love.
He himself felt strangely happy. Ever since they’d made love in Apollo’s garden, he was at peace with his future, no matter how short. He escorted Jemma to a chair and then sat down himself.