Mud and Gold (83 page)

‘Let your hair down and loosen your stays,’
Lizzie instructed, closing the heavy drapes so that the room grew
dim. ‘I’ll make sure the children don’t make any noise and disturb
you. You just try and forget about everything except having a nice
lie-down. See if you can go to sleep.’

‘I can’t stay long, Lizzie.’

‘You’ll stay as long as I tell you. Don’t
worry, I’ll get you home in time to make His Lordship’s dinner.’
She gave Amy a peck on the cheek and left the room, carrying one of
Frank’s belts.

*

Mickey was nowhere to be seen when Lizzie
came back into the kitchen.

‘I’ve never seen that kid move so fast,’
said Frank. ‘He wouldn’t do it for me, that’s for sure. Put that
belt down, eh Lizzie, you’ll make me nervous waving it around like
that. I tried giving Danny some bread and milk like you said, but
he wouldn’t eat it.’

Lizzie laid the belt across the back of a
chair and sat down. ‘Give him here.’ She held out her arms, and
Frank passed Danny over. ‘Did you warm the milk?’

‘Oh. Was I meant to?’

‘Honestly, Frank! You can’t expect a little
fellow like him to drink cold milk.’ She unbuttoned her bodice and
guided Danny’s mouth on to one of her nipples. ‘Never mind, mine
comes out warm.’

‘How’s Amy?’ Frank asked. ‘She looked like
she’d been pretty upset.’

‘She was in an awful state, poor thing.
She’s quieter now, she might drop off to sleep with a bit of luck.
I wish I could do something for her, though.’

‘You’re doing your best.’

‘Oh, I can give her a bit of a rest, and
I’ll send her home with pudding and some vegetables so she’ll only
have to do the meat for their dinner—remind me to give her some of
my baking, too, she didn’t get her own done today. That’s all very
well, but I don’t know how she’s ever going to be easy in her mind
again with this worry about what happened to her baby.’

‘No, it’s pretty hard, all right,’ Frank
said. ‘I don’t suppose… oh, I don’t know.’

‘What?’ Lizzie prompted.

‘Well, do you think you could find out what
happened to it—her, I should say, it was a girl, wasn’t it? I mean,
couldn’t she write to the woman or something?’

‘She doesn’t know anything about her. She
keeps saying she gave her baby to a woman she didn’t know a thing
about, and now she thinks this woman’s done away with the baby.
I’ve got to do something, Frank—Amy’s going to hate herself if I
don’t. What can I do?’

The sight of Lizzie in distress always
roused Frank to his greatest efforts. ‘I reckon we could do it,
Lizzie. We could figure out who this woman was and write to
her.’

‘How?’

‘Well, Amy must know something about her, at
least her name and where she came from. You try and get as much as
you can out of her, then we’ll see what we can sort out. We’ll
think of something.’

Lizzie’s sudden smile was reward enough.
‘You really think we’ll be able to find out what happened to the
baby?’

‘We’ll have a darned good try, anyway.’
Frank hated to cloud Lizzie’s relief, but he had to prepare her for
the worst. ‘You know, we might find out Amy’s right. Maybe the
little girl died. What’ll you do if that happens?’

It took Lizzie no more than a moment to
consider. ‘I’ll lie to her,’ she said simply. ‘I’ll tell her I
couldn’t find out anything about the woman. Bad enough that she
should
think
she gave her baby away to a murderer—if she
knew
it I think it’d kill her.’

The next book in the series,
Settling the
Account
, is available at Smashwords:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1905