Wicked Wyckerly (23 page)

25

Fighting to control the high-strung Thoroughbred he’d borrowed, Fitz galloped into Croydon just as the downpour broke. Maybe the physical exercise of restraining the beast aided his thinking, but somewhere along the way, he’d decided that if he had been in Tommy’s shoes, he would have loaded the children on a convenient farm wagon. A wagon was more likely to be headed into the village than to London. That left all of Croydon to search while his friends traversed the byways between here and the city. In the gathering dark and storm.

He had utterly no idea where farm wagons went once they left the farm. Stopping at a sprawling inn where one or two empty carts sat about, he threw the reins to a stableboy, ordered the horse wiped down and fed, and sprinted through the innyard to the tavern.

If the farm was five miles out of town and the children had caught an oxcart that traveled five miles an hour, they would have reached Croydon before the messenger had time to travel ten miles into the city after catching a coach in Croydon, and before Fitz could cross the crowded bridge out of London and travel ten miles. . . . His habit of performing mathematical calculations didn’t calm him as it usually did. As he elbowed his way through the rain-avoiding throng in the inn, he concluded the children could be anywhere by now.

“I’m looking for four young runaway children,” he shouted, leaping on a chair to make himself heard over the hubbub. “They came from the Weatherstons’ place a few miles down the road,” he continued as the men around him fell silent. “They’re on their way to their sister in London. Has anyone seen them?”

“Weatherston was in here a few hours back,” the bar-tender said, producing a mug of ale and handing it up to Fitz. “Madder than a wet hen. Didn’t no one know nothing.”

“Does anyone know of a cart or wagon that might have stopped out that way earlier? Even if it just passed down the road?” Now that he had their attention, Fitz climbed down and drank gratefully of the ale. He flipped a coin to the barkeep to cover his aid as well as the drink.

“My sister’s boy leases their lower acres,” a farmer at the back of the room called. “Don’t know if he was out that way today. I can check when this rain lets up.”

Fitz held up a gold coin remaining from Quentin’s loan. “This if you check now.”

The farmer was out of his chair and heading for the door before he had to say more.

Suddenly, the whole roomful of men was eager to solve the puzzle of who might have traversed the lane that day.

“Hanes been shearing his sheep down yonder!” one man yelled. “He uses the iron railway to send the fleece up to London.”

The railway!
Of course. If Abby was fascinated with the railway, Fitz could only imagine the extent of Tommy’s interest. The boy might even be naive enough to think it could take them all the way to their sister.

He pitched another coin at the man who had offered the suggestion. “Where do I find the railway?”

Three of the younger lads hastened to show him in hopes of earning more of his coins. Little did they know that the noble lord in his fancy coat and frills was down to his last few shillings.

Even though the storm clouds and rain diminished the dying light of a summer evening, Fitz could see that no wagonloads of sheepskin waited at the railway. Wagoners from the nearby brewery, loading kegs of ale, looked up in curiosity as he ran through the mud and drizzle down the side of the rails, calling Tommy’s name.

“If ye’re lookin’ for the childern, they’s scampered when old Hanes caught them in his wagon,” one of the drivers called.

Fitz thought he might fall on his knees in gratitude. At least they hadn’t been delivered up to the depravities of London yet. He handed over another of his shillings and studied the miserable rail yard through the foggy mist. Tommy might have got himself anywhere, but he had three younger ones with him. He couldn’t go far.

“How long ago?” he asked, scanning the brewery, then past to the warehouses and cottages abandoned after the railway was built.

The driver shrugged. “Few hours ago. Before the rain started.”

The lads who had accompanied him looked less interested in getting soaked now that he’d handed his coin to someone who had actually seen the runaways. Without money, Fitz couldn’t ask them to help search their surroundings.

It was slowly dawning on him that earning coins by gambling was an occupation for an idler with no other responsibilities. Abby was absolutely correct. A man wouldn’t have
time
for both gambling and children.

He stalked off alone through the downpour, shouting, “Tommy! Jennie!” in hopes they would trust him enough to come out from wherever they were hiding. Praying they were still hiding.

His boots squelched soggily as he walked. He hadn’t worn a cloak in the humid summer air, and now even his waistcoat was soaked through to his shirt, and his breeches were plastered to his skin. “I must be out of my mind,” he grumbled, knocking at doors of empty warehouses, opening any that were unlocked. “She’ll need her income to feed the brats,” he muttered, scanning still another empty building. “What was I thinking of, asking her to marry when I can’t feed one child, much less four others? Far better that she toddle back to her farm once I wring Tommy’s neck and terrify him so he never does this again.”

He was slogging through a mud puddle, debating whether to bother checking a house so derelict that it appeared the roof would cave in, when he heard a child’s voice—and his pulse accelerated as if he held a winning hand.

“Thomas Merriweather, your sister will catch her death of ague hunting for you, so you’d best come out now before that happens!” As soon as he shouted this angry command, Fitz kicked himself for not promising bribes of food or hugs or whatever appealed to young children, but he was exasperated, worried, and ready to tear down walls with his bare hands.

“In here, sir,” a small voice piped. “Tommy hurt his leg.”

Fitz had spent the worst summer of his life propped in bed with a broken leg. Heart firmly embedded in throat, Fitz searched the blinding mist until he located a small hand waving from the doorway of an abandoned cottage. He waded through the puddles to the rickety steps.

If her watery smile was any indication, little Jennifer was happy to see him. The house was dark and his eyes had to adjust before he could find Tommy propped against a wall, wearing what appeared to be his shirt wrapped around his bare calf. Two toddlers slept on a sheepskin on the floor, thumbs planted in their cherub mouths.

The girl barely older than Penny hiccuped on her sobs and wiped at the tearstains on her cheeks. “Is Abby coming for us?”

Saying nothing, Tommy scowled defiantly, crossing his arms over a skinny chest clothed only in his coat. Their executor might have it right—Tommy needed a man’s hand, but only if that man cared. As Weatherston apparently did not.

“If I know your sister, she has commandeered a carriage and is leading a parade to Croydon right now,” Fitz said cheerfully, not letting them see his terror, which was only starting to subside. He still needed to figure out how to get them back to wherever they belonged.

“We want to go home,” Tommy demanded.

Fitz was pretty certain he didn’t mean home to his guardians. “You’ll be lucky your sister doesn’t tie you to a fence post and lash you within an inch of your life for endangering these little ones,” Fitz countered. He knew nothing of caring for injuries and rather thought Tommy would scream bloody murder should he try to take a look at his leg. He had only one chance to do this right. And he was ruining it by unleashing his anger.

“Mr. Weatherston hates us,” Tommy shouted in frustration. “It’s the twins’ birthday this week, and Abby invited us to visit, and he wouldn’t let us go, so we decided to go ourselves.”

All of Fitz’s aggravation and panic abruptly drained out of him. They were children, helpless to change anything in their world, with no understanding of why they were being treated as they were. “You should have told your sister,” he admonished, more gently this time. “She would have found some way of seeing you. How bad is the leg? Can you walk?”

“I banged it when they chased us.” Suspicious and not totally mollified, Tommy watched for his reaction.

“It bled all over,” Jennifer said. “It looks awful.”

Fitz thought such sisterly concern would not be appreciated by this young boy trying so hard to be a man.

He maintained a stoic expression until he could figure out what to do. If he displayed the children publicly at an inn, the Weatherstons might hear of it before he could send word to Abby.

With an assurance he didn’t feel, he crouched down beside Tommy to check the bleeding and test to see if the leg truly wasn’t broken.

“Can we go home when Abby comes?” Jennifer asked. “The twins cry for her every night.”

Her plea would have
him
weeping. “You will have to ask your sister.” He retied the bandage and met Tommy’s eyes. “It’s chilly and damp here. I can take you over to the inn where there’s a fire and beds and send word to London. I don’t know how soon my message will reach your sister, who is probably on the road right now.”

Tommy’s lips trembled, but Abby’s stubbornness shone brightly in his eyes. “The Weatherstons would find us first. He’d beat us.”

“I won’t let your guardians lay a hand on you,” Fitz vowed. He had to resist the impulse to leave them here, find a card game, and win enough to buy food while waiting for Abby to come tell him what to do. He had only the vaguest notion of what a real parent would do, but if this were Penny in this derelict hut, he’d want her somewhere safe immediately. Decision made. “You will have to trust my word. I can’t leave you here.”

“I don’t have much choice, do I?” Tommy said bitterly.

“Very few people do,” Fitz told him. “The game is to pick the best option offered, and right now, trying to run on a bad leg is a bad choice. And keeping the babies in the cold and damp is not a very good one either.”

Tommy nodded curtly, choking back tears.

Fitz woke the twins by lifting them from their smelly bed. They fussed as much as Penny would have done, but Jennifer and Tommy spoke to them, and they calmed down, laying a golden head on either shoulder and curling up against him. Their simple trust engendered such unaccustomed feelings, he paused a moment to try to sort them out. All he knew was that he understood why Abigail was so distraught at losing them.

“If you can’t walk, I’ll come back for you in a few minutes,” Fitz offered. “I’ll trust your word that you’ll wait until then.”

“It’s not broken,” Tommy insisted, pushing himself up the wall. “It just hurts, is all.”

“I believe your sister would say it ought to make you think twice about trying this foolish stunt again. Do you have bags?”

“The grouchy old man wouldn’t let us keep them,” Jennifer said indignantly, following him without question, while Tommy trailed behind. “I wanted to show Abby my new hairbrush.”

Jennifer’s chatter provided a cover of normalcy as they walked through the fog and lessening rain toward the noisy inn at the end of the road. Fitz thought of iron neck collars and golden chains on delicate parts and listened to the soles of his ruined boots flap loose while the children clung close, trusting him with their safety. He scarcely had the blunt to wager in the lowliest game in the seediest tavern, yet the children would need food and beds.

He was out of his mind to believe he could do this. And he was doing it anyway. Somewhere in the wet and fog, he’d finally turned over his shoddy leaf, and there was no turning back to his old insect ways.

“How far ahead of us will Fitz be?” Abby asked as the carriage rattled down the turnpike.

In the seat beside her, the maid snored lightly.

Abby didn’t care that Mr. Montague was cross from having muddied his boots while pushing the carriage out of the mud pit they’d fallen into twenty minutes ago, or that she’d revealed entirely too much by using the earl’s name instead of his title. Her world had never been more than the children and her home. It was a simple matter to shut out the opinions of others.

“Fitz is a bruising rider, and the Thoroughbred was made for speed. He wouldn’t have had to push a carriage out of mud,” Montague said with barely concealed disgust. “He’s been in Croydon long enough to search it from one end to the other. The real question is where we will find
him.
”

In between imagining all the horrors that could befall young children among strangers, Abby had fretted over that same question. It was nearly dark. She wondered how many inns Croydon had. Surely Fitz would have had to stop at several in his search.

And then she had wondered how he would pay for an inn for the night, and the solution seemed obvious. “I doubt that Danecroft has much money with him, so I suppose we must go to where men gamble,” she said quietly.

Montague cast her a glance. “What makes you say that?”

She twisted her gloved fingers and watched the lights appear in the first houses outside of Croydon. “That is what the earl does, is it not? My father once told me that gambling is for fools—and for those who can keep count of the cards. I don’t believe Danecroft is a fool.”

Montague sat silently for a few minutes. “Your father must have been a very wise man.”

“My father wasn’t an ambitious man, but he spent a great deal of time in London as a youth. I suspect he may have been a bit of a rakehell.”

“Which is how he knew about men who count cards?”

“Yes. He always beat me at whist and tried to explain how it was done, but I never had much interest in learning. Apparently Danecroft knows the trick.”

“I don’t know whether to plant Fitz a facer, or thank him for not bankrupting me,” Montague mused. “Perhaps I shall do both.”

Abby tilted her head to study his saturnine features for the first time that evening. “I said something I shouldn’t have?”

“No, you have merely proved how valuable it is to have wise fathers.”

Montague turned and instructed the driver to stop at the first inn he saw.