“Here,” he said, and began to unbutton it.
“Here?” she asked in alarm, glancing about for some less public place in which to conduct the transaction.
“No, no,” he assured her hastily, belatedly realizing how she must have interpreted his apparent determination to disrobe on the spot. “I only meant—here, take this. You must be cold.”
“Thank you,” she said, apparently much moved by this simple gesture. She slipped her bare arms through the armholes and buttoned the garment closed over her scanty bodice, then drew her arms back inside it to take advantage of what little warmth it offered. “I had a very fine Norwich shawl, but it was stolen from me the very first week,” she recalled sadly.
“Miss Braunton—yes, you may call yourself Cat if you wish, but I know it’s you—what are you doing here? I thought you were to marry Martin Kenney.”
She looked up at him in utter bewilderment. “The Irishman who was imprisoned for debt? What would he have to do with me?”
“You danced with him once,” he reminded her. “You said you liked him.”
She shook her head. “Perhaps, but that was a very long time ago.”
“Only a year,” Pickett protested.
“Has it really been no longer than that?” she marveled. “It seems so much longer. I was a different person then,” she added, as if she were a very old woman recalling the carefree days of her youth, when he knew her to be only nineteen—hardly more than a child herself. And on that subject ...
“You were going to have a child, weren’t you? What happened to it?”
She was silent for such a long moment that Pickett wondered if she was going to answer at all. When she spoke at last, her voice was dull, devoid of all emotion. “I don’t know. They told me it died.” Her voice shook on the last word, and she added briskly, “Look here, I don’t know who you are, or how you know about me, but I don’t walk these streets for the sake of my health. Do you want company, or don’t you?”
“All I want is a roof over my head for the night,” Pickett said, thinking quickly. “If you can give me that, I’ll ask nothing else from you.”
“You mean it?” she asked hopefully, her dark eyes great inky pools in the moonlight.
“I’ll not lay a hand on you,” he promised.
She withdrew one of her hands from his waistcoat, and laid it on his arm with great formality, as if she were still a lady, accepting the escort of a suitor. “In that case, whoever you are, you just won yourself a roof over your head for the night.”
He was obliged to let her lead the way, since she was the only one who knew where they were going, and although he was shocked by the discovery that she, the niece of a duke, now sold her favors on London’s waterfront, he could not deny feeling a sense of relief when she did not lead him back in the direction of Seven Dials. As they walked, he put forward a few delicately worded queries, and she, finding him possessed of a sympathetic ear, allowed herself to be coaxed into divulging the sequence of events that had led to her present situation.
The tale she recounted was not a pretty one. The infant she’d borne had been the product of rape—this much Pickett already knew from his investigation of Sir Reginald Montague’s murder—and her father, in spite of his best efforts, had failed to procure a husband to cover his daughter’s shame. As a last resort, Lord Edwin had confronted her debaucher and insisted that he make some provision for the bastard child he’d sired. When Sir Reginald had refused, Lord Edwin had demanded satisfaction, and the two men had exchanged pistol shots at dawn on Paddington Green. Only one of the two had walked away—and that one had not been Lord Edwin Braunton.
“Could your uncle the duke have done nothing for you?” Pickett asked. “I seem to recall that he was—is—fond of you, having no daughters of his own.”
“He tried,” she said, choosing her words with care. “He did his best to provide me with a dowry that would tempt even the most mercenary of potential husbands. But then Papa was killed in the duel, and there was no hushing up the scandal any longer. Then, too, his second son, my cousin Freddy—we have always been particularly close, Freddy and I, and when Freddy decided it might be his duty to marry me—well, my uncle could not take such a risk, not with his elder son and heir still unmarried and childless. And you can hardly blame him for balking at the possibility of Sir Reginald Montague’s bastard being third in line to inherit the dukedom.”
Pickett could not view the duke’s dilemma in quite so sympathetic a light. “And so he cast you off.”
“He did not mean to be cruel, nor did my aunt, the duchess. In fact, she arranged for me to be taken in by a lady who provides a home for fallen women.”
The last two words were spoken so bitterly that Pickett drew the obvious conclusion. “But you ran away?”
“No, I still live there.”
Comprehension began to dawn, and the explanation that followed confirmed his worst suspicions. “The ‘lady’ turned out to be a bawd, and the ‘home’ she offered was nothing less than a brothel.”
“Can you not write to your uncle?” Pickett asked, appalled. “Surely he would not leave you there if he knew the truth.”
“ ‘Write,’ sir? On what paper? With what ink, or what quill? If Mrs. Bleeker has such things in the house, you may be sure she keeps them well away from her ‘girls.’ ”
“I’ll tell him myself, then, tomorrow morning,” Pickett promised her. “I haven’t any money, but it’s the least I can do, what with you putting me up for the night.”
She stopped abruptly and stared up at him in dismay. “You haven’t any money?”
“No,” Pickett confessed. “It was—stolen.” It was true, in a way. His money had been stolen from him, along with his wife, and his brother, and his house, and everything else he’d once held dear.
Her hand slipped from his arm, and she began to back away. “I’m very sorry, sir, but I can’t—”
“I promise, I’ll not lay a hand on you,” Pickett reiterated frantically in a last-ditch effort to change her mind.
“It isn’t that.” She made a frantic shooing motion with her hands. “I wish I could help you, truly I do. But if I haven’t any coins to give her in the morning, Mrs. Bleeker will— She’s done so once before, you see. A few weeks after the birth, when I’d had a little time to recover—” She broke off, took a deep breath, and began again. “When I realized what was expected of me—I went out with the other girls, but instead of—of approaching men, as they did, I found a place to hide until morning. But then Mrs. Bleeker required us to turn over our—our earnings to her, and I hadn’t any. When she discovered what I’d done—” A shudder shook her, one that had nothing to do with the cold night air. “I’ll not endure that again, even for a man as kind as you are. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll still tell the duke what has happened to you,” Pickett promised. He didn’t ask what punishment the bawd had exacted; he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know. “Only tell me where this woman’s house is located, and I’ll make sure he gets you out of there.”
She shook her head sadly. “And what would he do with me if you did? If he couldn’t secure a husband for a niece who was debauched by a gentleman, what could he possibly find to do with one who has had carnal knowledge of half the longshoremen on the Thames?”
There was nothing he could say to that, nothing at all. There were no good options for young women who found themselves in Miss Braunton’s position, but he’d thought an arranged marriage with the impoverished Irishman Martin Kenney had solved both of their immediate problems, providing her with a husband and Mr. Kenney with the funds he so desperately needed. In fact, Pickett had seen the marriage announcement in an issue of the Morning Post left lying about the Bow Street Public Office. It appeared that this, too, had changed.
“I’m going to your uncle in the morning, nevertheless,” he insisted, wishing he could be confident that the duke would be moved to take some action on his twice-wronged niece’s behalf. “Th
ere is—something else—that I must do first”—he would not allow himself to think of Julia somewhere on the streets of London, forced into the same position as this wretched young woman—“but after I’ve taken care of that, I will see your uncle and tell him what’s happened to you.”
She shook her head. “I’m sure you mean well, but I beg you will not. Let the ton forget the unhappy Catherine Braunton ever existed.” She smiled sadly. “Perhaps it would have been better if she never had.”
“You mustn’t say such a thing,” he protested. And why not? an inner voice challenged. You did, and with far less cause.
And then, in spite of his promises to the contrary, he not only touched her, but drew her gently into his arms and held her close. There was nothing lascivious in the gesture, and after an initial start of surprise, she relaxed into his embrace. For a long moment they stood there together, two lost souls mourning the lives they had once known.
9
In Which a Mother and Son Are Reunited
At last Miss Braunton drew back, citing the need to earn some coin to surrender to Mrs. Bleeker in the morning. Pickett was forced to let her go, although it went sorely against the grain to do so. As her slender form was swallowed up by the darkness, he recalled another young woman, one who had for several years been engaged in the same profession into which the duke’s niece had been forced. Lucy might be willing to put him up, but quite aside from a vague feeling that to seek Lucy out would be tantamount to betraying Julia (he suspected his assurances not to lay a hand on Lucy would not be at all what that determined young woman would want to hear) there was the fact that Lucy lived in Seven Dials. If he went in search of her, he might well be walking back into the arms of the mob eager to turn him in for the price on his head.
No, he decided, he dared not risk it, for more reasons than one. But there was another house in St. Giles, not quite so near to the Butterworth School, where he might try his luck. And while he wasn’t eager to throw himself upon the mercy of his “stepmother,” he need not see her at all; he knew very well how to slip in and out of the house through one of the upper-story windows, having spent his formative years doing exactly that.
Feeling rather better for having decided on a clear course of action, he walked on, keeping an eye out for any familiar landmark by which he might gain his bearings. He eventually found one in the form of a gin house well-known to the Bow Street Foot Patrol, and from this insalubrious location he had no difficulty in making his way to the ramshackle house where he’d once lived with his father and Moll.
He did not approach the front door, but turned into a twisting, narrow alley that gave access to the rear entrance. Here he startled a scrawny feral cat, which arched its back and hissed menacingly at the trespasser.
“Good kitty,” he lied reassuringly, although he made no attempt to stroke its fur, having no fancy to be scratched.
The cat blinked malevolently at him, but showed no inclination to pursue any more active form of combat. Pickett counted doors until he came to the one he wanted, then shinnied up the nearest rainspout, which creaked ominously beneath his weight. He recalled, belatedly, that he was fully ten years older than he had been the last time he had performed this particular maneuver, and the condition of the rainspout—almost certainly the same one that had been there ten years earlier, which had been far from new even then—would not have improved in the interim. But it held firm in spite of its protests, and soon Pickett drew abreast of the window that gave into the room which had been his bedchamber.
The glass had long since been broken out and the gaping hole had been boarded up for as long as he could remember, but one of the boards (as he had discovered years earlier) could be pried up with very little difficulty. He was gratified to discover that this was still the case, although he was considerably less pleased to realize that, while a lanky thirteen-year-old boy might slip through the opening with relative ease, it was quite a different matter for a grown man of five-and-twenty to perform the same maneuver. Consequently, it took some time longer, and produced a great deal more noise, before he was decanted onto the floor of his former bedroom.
He picked himself up and dusted himself off, considering whether he should inform Moll of his presence, or if it might be wiser simply to sleep here for the night and, in the morning, slip out the way he had come, without troubling her at all.
This question was answered for him when the door flew open to reveal Moll, bearing a pewter candlestick in one hand and an iron poker in both hands. The light from the candle danced over her face, revealing an expression of mingled belligerence and fear that changed before Pickett’s eyes to one of surprised pleasure.
“You?” Her grip on the poker slackened, and it slipped out of her hand and hit the uncarpeted floor with a dull thud. With her free hand she patted at her improbably yellow hair, tied in rags for the night in order to coax it into curls come morning. “Well, and what on earth might you be doing here, I wonder?” she purred.
“I’m sorry,” Pickett said, taking an instinctive step toward the window. “I hate to disturb you at so late an hour, but—”
Her face reassumed all its original hostility. Her primping ceased abruptly, and she planted her fisted hand on her hip. “And just who the hell are you?”
“Surely you must know me!” Pickett insisted. He’d feared her amorous interest in her adult “stepson” might prove awkward; now he saw the truth was likely to be a great deal worse.
“Aye, I thought I did at first, though I couldn’t think why you’d be coming to me, and in the middle of the night, what’s more. But now I see it ain’t so—not that I won’t deny you’ve an uncanny look of him about you,” she added, regarding him with narrowed eyes.
“Yes!” cried Pickett, seeing a hope of salvaging something from a hitherto unpromising start. “I’m Jack Pickett’s son. You remember now, don’t you? Your own son lives with me.”
Moll cast a speculative glance at the poker lying on the floor, as if regretting she’d allowed it to escape her grasp. “My son, eh?”
“And my half-brother,” Pickett said, nodding.
“Look here, I don’t care how many lads you’ve got living with you—”
“Only the one: Kit, your son by my father, Jack Pickett.”
To Pickett’s utter astonishment, she began to laugh. “My son with Gentleman Jack Pickett? My son? What the hell would Gentleman Jack be doing with me?”
“Nothing now,” Pickett acknowledged, readily conceding the point. “He’s still on the other side of the world. But—”
“ ‘Other side of the world?’ And just what’s that supposed to mean?”
“As far as I know, he hasn’t returned from Botany Bay.”
“ ‘As far as you know,’ is it? Then you don’t know much,” she informed him bluntly. “Why, I seen him in Denmark Street just yesterday.”
“Denmark—?”
“Aye.” Moll’s scornful expression turned to one of wariness, as if she suspected that her home had been invaded by a madman. “He’s still living in Denmark Street. Him and his wife.”
10
In Which Another Mother and Son Are Reunited
His wife. The words spun ’round and ’round in Pickett’s brain as he trudged in the direction of Denmark Street. His wife. If, as the apple seller’s cryptic conversation seemed to suggest, he was seeing a world in which he did not exist, then it was his existence that had led, eventually, to his father’s transportation. And what of his father’s wife? Had his own birth prevented his father from marrying? Or was it possible that the wife in question was his own mother? If that was the case, then his birth—no, he himself!— had caused his mother to decamp.
The thought caused his steps to flag as he turned into the street where, if Moll were to be believed, his father now lived. Although by no means genteel, Denmark Street was not as disreputable as the notorious rookery that bordered it. The seventeenth-century houses lining both sides had gradually been converted to c
ommercial purposes, with most of its remaining residents living in rooms in the upper stories while shops and ateliers occupied the floors at street level.
Pickett walked slowly down the street, peering through the darkness for the house number Moll had indicated. He found it, and noted that here was one of the few buildings that still reflected its residential beginnings. The paint on its front door was cracked and peeling, but the front stoop had been swept clean, and curtains of cheap lace hung in the windows. In any case, it was a step up from the house where he and his father had lived with Moll. Taking a deep breath, he strode up to the front door and knocked.
To his surprise, it opened almost at once, in spite of the lateness of the hour. A woman stood there holding up a lantern, the better to see the unexpected caller. Or, perhaps, to allow the caller to see her. For the soft yellow glow illuminated a woman clad in a neat but worn dress of blue cotton, a still-attractive woman in her early forties with fine gray eyes and soft waves of brown hair lightly touched at the temples with threads of silver that gleamed in the light.
“So there you are,” she said, smiling warmly at him. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“I—I know you,” he stammered, suddenly assailed by an avalanche of half-remembered impressions: a gentle hand on his forehead, a soft voice singing a lullaby or reading aloud from a book. “I thought I’d forgotten, but I know you.”
“I’m glad,” she said simply. “It’s been a long time, Johnny.”
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