by Edith Layton
His widowed mama and her companion dwelt in the ancestral mansion when they were in town. Not for reasons of status, for his mama didn’t care a fig for such nonsense, but because she decided someone ought to inhabit the old place, and someone also had to be hostess at the formal dinner parties the new earl obviously could not give in what she considered to be his more rakish private bachelor quarters.
It would have disappointed his mama almost as much as it would have disillusioned such a dissimilar female as Mrs. Rogers, had they known it, but the earl had passed the last week in unremarkable fashion in his less-than-raffish quarters, doing nothing more shocking then reading a few racy books, and nothing more scandalous than having a few old army cronies over to reminisce with sottishly, a few nights past. Warm, saucy, yielding female companionship, the earl brooded as he settled down in his chair in his study on the fifth night of the less-than-hilarious week he’d just endured, was the last thing he’d exert himself for just now, though it was undoubtedly the foremost thing upon his mind.
She’d looked at the money as though it were manna, by God, he thought again; she’d scarcely looked anywhere else through the whole interview. Except into his eyes. He shifted uncomfortably and reminded himself yet again that despite her refusal, it was obvious that the chit was no better than she should be. For she was, as he continued to remind himself defensively, the unlikeliest-looking governess he’d ever seen, so she couldn’t possibly have actually been one. Plus there was the incontrovertible evidence that she’d either no morals at all or extremely flexible ones, since if she hadn’t designs on Theo herself, it was clear she’d been callous enough to take the boy’s money for writing out a love letter she ought to have been ashamed to know he was sending to an even more experienced tart than herself. She never belonged in that low slum, he thought moodily, and never mind she kissed like an innocent, she’d never stopped him when he’d begun his offer, and a stone-deaf woman would have known what he was about by then. Probably, he thought self-righteously once again, she’d gone through the whole pantomime for spite, and turned him down only because she’d had a better offer. He’d gotten through three pages of his book on Roman history, and a few dozen explicit fantasies of his own on quite a different subject, when the clock struck two chimes into a new day, and he heard his cousin Theo attempting to steal into the house. As the butler had come to the door and greeted him loudly, as instructed, and a footman was quick to inform him that his lordship awaited the pleasure of his company in the library, Lord Malverne wore a sulky expression as he came in to greet his cousin, having been, his cousin judged wisely, thwarted in more than his obvious attempt to get to his guestroom unnoticed.
“Is it cards, dice, horse- or womanflesh you’ve been unlucky with tonight, Theo?” the earl asked, barely raising his eyes to the young man who slouched into the room and settled sullenly into an adjacent chair.
“Sometimes,” the young gentleman said unhappily, “nothing goes right.”
“Too true,” his cousin commented sagely, reaching into the pockets of his dressing gown and withdrawing a clutch of papers, “which is why I assumed you’ve avoided me so assiduously this past week. So I made a few inquiries, and can you guess what I discovered? All these, just imagine! Theo, my love, your revels now are ended.”
“Now…but, Cole,” Lord Malverne protested, wincing at the sight of all his unpaid chits from bootmakers, bookmakers, and tailors, come to haunt him in the night, “I get my quarterly in a matter of days. I’ll make it up, I vow I will.”
“True, true,” the earl agreed, “but you’ll not add to them any longer, either. I’m sorry, Theo, I said I’d look after you, but I’m no chaperon. I look foolish in crepe, for one thing, and I can’t abide sitting by the wall while all the rest of you dance, for another. No, I can’t forcibly keep you from your favorite haunts, and obviously I can’t trust your word either. So it’s off to Bath to your proud mama, my boy. I’m tossing you back to your family.”
“Ah, Cole, beat me, stab me, but don’t exile me, for love of God. I’m devilish sorry, I’ll reform, promise,” his cousin babbled in his dismay.
“Nothing so drastic. A few cups of the waters and a few weeks in the countryside until school begins will do you a world of good. No, Theo,” he said, his voice and face suddenly cold and serious, and thus effectively cutting off the young man’s pleas, “it’s to be done, and there’s no hope for it. I’ll allow you to make your own excuses to them, but that’s the extent of my charity.
“By the by, Theo,” the earl commented without seeming to look up from his book as his cousin began to creep, utterly dejected, from the room, causing the young man to look up with some sudden hope, “as I haven’t seen you in a spell, only tell me one thing. I’ve been attempting to clear up that unfortunate business with Miss Dawkins. The governess,” he said testily to his youthful relative’s blank stare. “Ah yes, I see you remember now that you forgot to remember to settle that score as well. All I should like to know, to complete the business, is how much you paid her to write out that ridiculous love poem to the devine LaPoire for you.”
“Money?” Theo said foolishly.
“I understand you don’t recall faces, lad, but sums, I should think you’d be more careful of…how much did you pay her for the favor? I hardly think she’d risk copying out cloying love poems to an expensive harlot for an underage nobleman solely out of consideration for your big blue eyes, no matter what your doting mama claims.”
The young gentleman paused, obviously thinking feverishly. He’d gotten a bit confused himself. He’d told Mama it was a debutante he’d had the governess write the poem out for; he’d told Cole it was for the heavenly LaPoire, which was only true, he thought indignantly; and he’d told the governess…yes, now he remembered.
“Well, ah, you see, Cole,” Theo began in a tone of voice which made the earl sit up straight with a terrible sense of dark foreboding, which showed upon his face and made his cousin stammer the more, until the earl said, “Out with it,” in such clear cold accents that his cousin’s blood chilled enough to cool his overheated face, and he said, when he was able:
“I didn’t precisely pay her, Cole, for she didn’t know what she was doing, you see. It was more in the line of a favor to me. I never actually told her about LaPoire, as I told you, now you mention it, why, how could I? She was very ladylike, Cole,” he added censoriously, much affronted at his relative’s opinion of his ethics, “and a governess, to boot. So instead I told her,” he said, avoiding his cousin’s dark black stare, “that it was for a very young French girl I’d just met, a true lady, born in France, and young and innocent, but French too, that is to say…” His voice trailed off in the silence which greeted his statement.
Lord Malverne noted, even in the yellow glow of dancing gaslight his cousin had just installed, that the earl’s face was grim, and for such a dark-complexioned fellow, oddly white.
“Ah, Theo,” the earl closed his eyes and said, whispering each word like the shivers they sent up his listener’s spine, “I think I shall beat you after all, and stab you too. For I begin to think exile’s far too kind a fate for either you, or,” he added so quietly his cousin was sure later it was only a low echo of the moan of the late-night wind outside that he’d heard, “me.”
4
“Yer hair,” the young boy said knowingly, “too tight. Much too tight. You’d scare crows.”
The young woman spun around and faced toward where her critic sat, legs swinging, upon the kitchen table. He missed not one bite from the apple he was untidily devouring as she made a face at him.
“Alfie,” Victoria then said patiently, “a governess or a companion is not an opera dancer or a woman of the streets. I’m supposed to look competent. Respectable. Worthy.”
“Aye,” Alfie said as best he could around a very large portion of apple that he’d bitten off in one piece, “but I never heard that respectable is the same as ugly. And no one,” he added wisely after he’d someho
w miraculously managed to completely swallow down the mouthful of fruit, “wants a nasty bit of goods littering up their house, no matter how ‘worthy.’” He mimicked the word in the precise accents the young woman had used. “’Cause,” he went on imperturbably in the more usual accents he affected, “there’s no law as says a good woman has got to be an ’orrful-looking one, is there? Now,” he added generously, “I ain’t saying you’d be quick to be hired if you was to grab the eye the minute you walked in the door. But I am saying there’s no harm, and only a good bit of good, in looking yyuman. Pleasant-like,” he explained ruminatively, in response to Miss Dawkins’ thoughtful expression.
“Oh yes, Miss Victoria,” the little blond girl beside her said. “Oh yes, just so, oh it’s much better,” she sighed as Victoria loosened some of her heavy hair from its tightly bound knot so that it bloused out in freedom, in soft swelling waves around the sides of her face, “but wouldn’t it be nice if you could go looking like a princess, with your hair hanging loose altogether, all about your shoulders like it ort…‘awt’ to do,” the child corrected herself quickly, looking up to Miss Dawkins for approval.
It was Alfie who nodded his pleasure at his sister’s correct diction, and he grinned back at Victoria conspiratorially after she’d smiled fondly at the girl. Alfie had a remarkable gift, an uncanny ability to reproduce any sort of speech he heard, so that he spoke in the cant of the neighborhood when he wished, and could ape the best-bred boy in London when it suited him. But he recognized that his siblings did not have such a talent. And so, as he told Victoria that very first night, after they’d cleared the table of the crumbs of their meal, one of the best reasons for their friendship was precisely that it was clear she was used to better than slum brats, for then she could teach Bobby and Sally, and maybe even eventually Baby, respectable ways to speak and act.
That was the reason he hadn’t been in the least offended when, in her initial shock at the sight of the bounty laid out for their dining pleasure, she’d accused him of having stolen half the meal he’d provided her. Similarly, he’d simply beamed when she’d been staggered at his proud claim that every last bit of it had been thieved. For, as she discovered later, the entire evening had been set up as a bizarre sort of interview. The proper young lady next door’s repugnance for dining on contraband, her horror at the insanitary conditions that prevailed in the room, and her wincing at every mispronunciation the children used was precisely what Alfie had been looking for in a confederate.
“Now, miss,” he’d said, resting his elbows on the table beside her as she finished up the meal she was at least flexible enough to realize ought not to be wasted, however gotten, since it couldn’t be returned anyhow, “what it is, is that Mum’s been sick, still is sick, and the children needs seeing to bad, they need some grown-up caring for them, they needs schooling best of all. I can see to the food in their bellies, and I can scrag anyone’s got dirty plans for them, y’see. But if they’s got education, they can get good posts when they’re able, so they ought to speak good and look good and use all the right words and cutlery, if you get my meaning. And though I can copy, mind, I can’t know everything, for there ain’t too many of the Quality comes here I can learn too much good manners from. They don’t exactly come down here,” he said wryly, “to use their best bibs and tuckers, if you follow.”
As Victoria sat and listened and wondered at the child who spoke so confidently and knowingly about “the children” he wished her to instruct, Alfie went on to outline his master plan. He’d provide the food, and see to the ready for her rent, if she would take up her duties with them. The argument that ensued lasted until near dawn, growing both more heated and more hushed as the night progressed, in consideration of the other children, so that they could creep off to their beds when they wearied of watching the two combatants with wide and wondering eyes.
In the end, as all wise adversaries will, they reached a workable compromise. Victoria would provide the instruction for the children. Alfie would provide food and the blunt for the rent. But the stealing would stop, because Victoria had brought up the pithy point that no matter how clever a dipping cove, as Alfie bragged he was, an Alfie in Newgate could provide for no one at all. And she’d won the point entirely by stopping his protests of excellence with the observation that aptitude had nothing to do with luck. She tossed away examples from the Good Book, which she realized wasn’t the sort of literature Alfie was impressed with, bucolic vineyards and rural shepherds being worlds removed from the grim realities of the slums of London town. Putting it bluntly and in terms he could see the logic in, she pointed out the fact that luck had an evil way of running out, or else there wouldn’t be so many clever men hanged, or stupid runners with pearl pins to fasten cravats, instead of ropes, about their own fat necks.
Sally would continue to peddle flowers and ribands and anything else that could be gotten cheap and sold high on the street, Bobby would continue to assist Mr. Mercer, the greengrocer, in his stall at the weekly market, and Mrs. Gibbs, the laundress, in her rooms, every day. And Alfie would forage and deal and trade, as he did best, in order to bring in some money. For her part, Victoria insisted, she would also give whatever lessons local inhabitants wanted, at an hourly rate. But she would continue to look for a steady position with a good family, for if she secured one, she could contribute far more to their partnership.
And partnership it would still be, she insisted, overriding all of Alfie’s protests at her not having to continue their association if she could find a prime place again, as he wasn’t the sort of layabout such as thrived in the neighborhood, the kind of fellow who would live on a female’s earnings and do nothing in return. He didn’t use terminology quite that polite, but Victoria didn’t chastise him for it; his emotions about the matter were too painful and sincere for that. But she won her way for two reasons. The one they both acknowledged aloud was her claim that she considered Alfie and his siblings to already be family, which she needed, since she had so little family of her own left now, and sorely missed them. The other, remaining unspoken, was moot, since neither of them knew how she’d ever get a decent position without a letter of good character to recommend her, anyway.
But now, more than a week after Miss Dawkins had received her second unorthodox job opportunity, that one refused as it was proffered by the Earl of Clune, she was dressing to go out for an interview for another post, this one again offered by the Earl of Clune. This one, she hoped, was a respectable offer. But in any case, there was, she thought, gazing into the looking glass Alfie had somehow procured for her, no help for it. She must go and find out.
Without theft, the new association between the Johnson children and the governess next door was proving to be an unprofitable venture. In fact, it was rapidly going into bankruptcy. No one in Tothill Fields had any use for lessons in deportment, elocution, watercolors, or pianoforte. Not one of them had the slightest interest in history, unless they knew some rich cove would pay if they promised to keep it under their hat. Since all life here was negotiated down to the ha’penny, mathematics was too fine an art in the streets for it to need to be taught, English itself was enough of a foreign language for most of the residents to get their tongues around, literature that rose above caricature was too deep to even contemplate. And dancing was the Lord’s own gift to the poor; it would be pure madness to pay for the teaching of it. Besides, little resembling the art of the dance as Miss Dawkins recognized it was practiced in her new surroundings.
There was no work to be had governessing for Miss Dawkins, aside from her hire from Alfie. He, in turn, found as so many others, adult and child, had done before him, and exactly as he’d tried to explain to Miss Dawkins it would be, that hereabouts, honest employment never paid enough for an honest living.
The children did their tasks, Miss Dawkins took her daily constitutional to the employment bureau, but their evening meal, their main repast, grew smaller every day.
Victoria knew it wouldn’t be lo
ng until the other major shareholder in her newly incorporated trust began secretly plying his trade again. She couldn’t bear the thought of Alfie in irons, Alfie in captivity, or Alfie transported or hanged for his sin of providing for his family’s hunger in the way he knew best. The law of the land was as harsh as the deprivations which caused such crimes, for malefactors of any age. It had also become absolutely true that Victoria now felt herself a member of the little clan, and loved her newfound family as profoundly as though she’d known them from the cradle onward. Now she felt the full weight of her responsibility for them, even it were a self-imposed duty. She gazed at herself in the glass and heaved a heartfelt sigh that turned to a cough, for the task before her. “You didn’t drink up all the lemon and honey,” Alfie accused, stung by her carelessness into completely disregarding the last of his apple. Both Sally and Bobby looked up at her in horror at that, for they both knew only too well the terrible fate that could befall a person who began to cough and couldn’t stop it.
“No, no,” Victoria assured them, “I finished every last drop of it, and I feel quite the thing this morning. Heavens,” she said, staring down into all the little white faces filled with concern, “can’t a person clear her throat without all of you playing nursemaid?”
They chuckled at that, but it was true that they had helped her when she’d been ill earlier in the week, as they’d helped her, it seemed, since the hour she’d met up with them. For she’d gotten a streaming cold, and seeing that, they’d hurried to concoct and urge her to drink hot mulled wine, and donated heaps of blankets for her to pile over her bed to “sweat ’er all out,” as Sally had inelegantly put it as she’d bustled about her room filled with importance, like a miniature ministering angel. And it would have worked, too, and she’d have been cured in a trice, Victoria admitted, if it weren’t for her inexperience with life as she found it, and her own missishness.
