Leslie Lafoy (5 page)

“What kind of lessons?”

“Reading and writing, basic arith—”

“What do I need to know how to do that for?”

As he drew a breath to retort, Caroline made another attempt to diffuse the conflict. “Oh, Simone,” she said breezily, “all ladies need to know how to read and write and how to do basic arithmetic. It’s necessary for managing the household accounts and absolutely essential if they ever own a business.”

“Not to mention vital,” Lord Ryland contributed dryly, “to having the ability to carry on a conversation that someone might actually find interesting.”

Caroline clenched her teeth and was promising herself that she wouldn’t lift a finger to help him if Simone went for his throat, when her sister asked, “What if I’m no good at it?”

“Then you won’t eat,” he quickly supplied. “And I’ll take away your shoes.”

Simone sucked a breath through her teeth as she lowered her chin.

Caroline reached out and laid her hand on the girl’s knee. “He’s joking. Badly,” she assured her. “You’ll do fine with the schoolroom lessons. I can tell that you’re a very bright young woman. And we’ll both suffer through the social lessons together.”

Simone gave her nemesis an especially hard look before very deliberately turning her attention to Caroline and saying, “Social?”

“How to walk like a lady, sit like a lady, talk like a lady.”

“How to part the Red Sea,” Lord Ryland muttered.

They both ignored him and Caroline added, “How to dance without stomping a man’s toes to jelly and how to flutter and use a fan without accidentally slitting someone’s throat with it. That sort of thing. Do you know how to embroider or needlepoint?”

“I ain’t got no patience for that lah-dee-dah stuff.”

Oh, dear. But surely she had domestic skills of some sort. She was, after all, fourteen and female. “What do you do with your days and evenings?”

“Mostly larkin’ in the Thames durin’ the late part of the day if the tide’s right.”

“You don’t,” Lord Ryland drawled, even as Caroline easily pictured the girl wading in the river mud, searching for bits of salvage.

“Do, too. Mornin’s I have to spend moppin’ up after Essie and her girls and their customers to pay off what my ma owed Essie. Evenin’s . . . I make myselfscarce so no one gets any ideas ’bout stuffin’ me in a dress and hangin’ a sign ’round my neck. I can shoot dice with the best of them and Jock’s been learnin’ me how to use a knife proper like.”

“I suppose,” he offered, looking away with another of his insufferable sighs, “there’s little hope that Jock is a master chef.”

“He’s a cutpurse. A damn good one, too.”

“Of course. Why am I not surprised?”

“The better question,” Caroline snapped, her patience with him gone, “would be why you’re being such an openly caustic snob, your grace? It isn’t our fault that we weren’t brought up to be ladies of the court. We’ve done the best that we could given the circumstances of our births.
It isn’t our fault that our father found his conscience late in life and only to foist us off on you.”

Simone opened her mouth to say something, but Caroline wasn’t in the mood to let him off the hook by distraction. Her gaze pinned on him, she held up her hand to stay the girl. Simone went silent.

It took a long minute, but eventually he lifted his chin, took a slow deep breath, and turned to face her squarely. “Very true,” he offered tightly. “My sincerest apologies. I will try to be more accepting.”

“Thank you.” She turned to face the girl in the seat beside her. “And my apologies for having to cut you off, Simone. What was it that you were going to say?”

Her head tilted to the side and what might have been the shadow of a smile lifting one corner of her mouth, Simone watched Lord Ryland as she asked, “What does ‘foist’ mean?”

“To force something off onto someone. Usually against their will.”

Nodding, she said, “Carrie’s right. It ain’t our fault. None of it.”

He swallowed and offered them both an obviously forced smile. “As I have agreed.”

“Where’re we goin’?”

“To the country house,” he supplied, looking back out the window. “We will be stopping for the night at an inn along the way. Fiona’s family has agreed to meet us there.”

“You buyin’ her, too?”

“They did not ask for money.”

Caroline blinked, stunned by the reality. “They’re simply giving their child away to a stranger?”

He sighed, gave up looking out the window, and stared at the floor between Caroline’s feet as he explained,
“Apparently Fiona’s mother handed her into the care of her sister when the child was quite young. The mother then disappeared and has not been heard from, or of, since. She’s presumed dead. The aunt and uncle do not want to care for the child any longer. Why, I don’t know.”

“Maybe she eats too much,” Simone guessed.

He looked up to meet his young ward’s gaze. “I suspect that it may be a case of their not being able to feed her at all. My agent reported that they are extremely poor. And yes,” he added, shifting his gaze to Caroline’s, “before you can plant your dainty foot in the backside of my conscience, I intend to offer them a sizable sum for her anyway.”

“Maybe there’s something wrong with her,” Simone theorized. “You know, maybe she got kicked in the head by a horse.”

They both looked at her, but it was Lord Ryland who managed to ask first, “Do you know very many people who have been kicked in the head by a horse?”

“Two. Ada and Sally. Their das sold them to Essie ’cause they couldn’t do nuthin’ else. Ada came from a farm and Sally’s da’s a tinker.”

To be sold into prostitution by your parents. It happened all the time, Caroline knew, but still . . . “How very sad.”

“It’s the way life goes sometimes,” Simone offered with a shrug. “Nuthin’ you can do to change it. Some’s lucky and some’s not.” She paused, shrugged again, and added, “ ’Course what’s luck and what ain’t depends on how you look at it. Ada never had shoes till she came to Essie’s place. For her it was good to be sold off like she was. Sally . . . I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout Sally. She don’t talk.”

“How long have you been there? At Essie’s?” Lord Ryland asked quietly.

“This would be the third winter a-comin’. Ma rented a room from her for a little while. She died a few months after she moved us in there. Essie takes a cut out of those what comes through the door and picks from the parlor, so lots of the girls go out to make extra that Essie don’t know about. Essie said my ma didn’t have no sense about how to choose her customers. One afternoon she went into an alley with the wrong one and . . . ” She lifted her chin and drew a dirt-encrusted finger across her throat. “That was that.”

And that was that.
Caroline couldn’t think of anything to say. The child’s mother had been found dead in an alley, her throat cut, and that was that. How long had it been before Simone had noticed that her mother was missing? Had she been distraught? How long had she had to search until the grim truth had been found? God, what sort of life had she lived that the gruesome murder of her mother was a simple fact of life?

“I’m very sorry,” she heard Lord Ryland say gently. “No one’s end should be so brutal and so unexpected.”

“Not unexpected,” Simone countered. She shrugged again. “Like I said, some’s lucky and some’s not. Some’s smart ’bout people and some just ain’t. Sad to say, but Essie was right ’bout my ma. Wasn’t anythin’ I didn’t know already.”

“Still,” Caroline offered, thinking of her own mother’s passing, “you must miss her terribly.”

“Can’t say that I do.” She sighed, smiled thinly, and turned to look out the window. “How long till we get to the inn?”

“Fairly soon,” Lord Ryland said.

“That’s good. I’m tired a talkin’. It’s makin’ my head hurt.”

No, Caroline thought, it wasn’t her sister’s head that hurt; it was her heart. But in the world in which Simone had grown up, being vulnerable was dangerous. Pretending that you were carved of stone wasn’t an easy way to live, but openly caring and hurting made you easy prey. Better to be stone cold and alive than stone-cold dead.

But, as Simone had said, some were lucky and some weren’t. And to Caroline’s thinking, Simone had to be the most fortunate young woman in all of England. She’d survived long enough to be plucked from the edge of hell. From here on out . . .

Caroline stole a glance at their benefactor, their guardian. He sat looking out the other window of the carriage, his expression pensive, almost sad. Yes, he was pompous and far too arrogant to be tolerable. He could raise her temper faster and more effectively than any man ever had. He decreed, he pronounced, he instructed, he expected everything to go his way, on his schedule.

On the face of all that, he wasn’t the least bit likable. Devilishly handsome, roguishly tempting, yes. But not likeable at first blush. There was more to him than the Great Commander, though. He’d seemed genuinely distressed by the tale of Simone’s mother’s death. The condolences he’d offered her had sounded utterly sincere. And now as they rolled on toward the inn and the collection of Fiona, he seemed preoccupied with worry. She could make several guesses as to what concerned him, but she preferred not to. No, it was much more comforting to wrap herself in the illusion that, down deep, he had a heart.

  Three  

CAROLINE CONSIDERED THE STRUCTURE LOOMING AT THE
end of the gravel drive; to call it an inn did it a great injustice. Built of white stone, two stories tall, and as long as a London block, it was, to her mind, closer to a castle. The sun was setting, bathing the front wall in the softest, peach-tinted light. And the flowers . . . Never in her life had she seen anything as beautiful as the gardens that lined the drive, as the riot of color that spilled out of the carved stone planters that marched up both sides of the wide steps to the massive wooden doors. If Ryland Castle was just half as beautiful, putting up with its master might be worth the effort.

“And what don’t belong here?” Simone asked from the other end of the seat.

Caroline leaned forward so she could see out the other window. A battered, weather-beaten wooden cart had been drawn up to the far side of the inn and parked in the shade of an ancient tree. A gray horse, who looked not one year younger than the tree, stood in the traces, his head hanging. Beside the cart . . . Had they been dressed better, they might have passed for a circus. A man, a woman, three dashing, yipping dogs, and a bounding horde of dark-haired
children raising every bit as much noise as the dogs. Except for one child. A little towheaded thing dressed in what looked like a flour sack and standing as silent and still as a post between the man and the woman. “Oh, dear,” Caroline whispered, knowing in her heart that the little girl was the one they’d come to collect.

“S’pose that’s Fiona they got on that lead rope?”

Rope?
Caroline looked closer as the carriage came a halt. Yes, there was indeed a rope tied around the child’s waist. The other end of it was in the man’s hand. “The poor baby.”

“You will both remain here,” Lord Ryland instructed as he let himself out of their vehicle. “And allow me to deal with these people without interference.”

The instant he closed the door and walked away, Caroline slipped to the other seat and closer to the window.

“He always declarin’ like that?” Simone asked as Caroline saw the little girl look at the stranger advancing toward them and then try to take a step back. The man shortened the rope and held her in place.

“It does seem to be his initial, preferred approach to matters.”

“I don’t like bein’ barked at.”

“No one does,” she replied absently, watching the child hang her head and roll her shoulders forward so that the curtain of stringy, dirty blond hair fell over her face. “He’s going to have to make some adjustments in his manner in the coming days.”

“Well, it oughta be interestin’ watchin’ you two butt heads over it.”

“I don’t know that ‘interesting’ is the word I would choose to describe the contest,” Caroline admitted as Lord Ryland removed his hat and bowed slightly to the
woman and then shook hands with the man. “I’m afraid that it could become a bit explosive. He’s already proven that he can be quite devious in the pursuit of his objectives.”