Chapter Fifteen
Before the park filled with nannies and children, before the sun got too high in the morning sky, I saw Hyperia home, and to blazes with her brother’s offended sensibilities.
Time spent with Hyperia had steadied and fortified me. She’d given me orders too—retrieve Leander’s effects from Mrs. Danforth’s mews—and I was ever one to obey her commands. That I craved and delighted in her company, irrespective of the manly humors that had gone absent without leave, reassured me.
I yet lacked the courage to inquire into the particulars of her regard for me, but that conversation lay ahead of us.
Mrs. Danforth’s grooms were lounging about, having already tended to morning chores. They inquired politely after the little lad and asked me to remember them to him. I wanted to think well of these humble, hardworking men who’d assisted in the search for Leander. A cranky, unsettled part of me wondered if they’d have been as solicitous of a boy who lacked ties to a ducal household.
My mood was stubbornly suspicious, and that, I knew, was a result of having failed not Arthur, and not even Harry’s memory, but rather, one small child.
I gathered up the sentries yet on duty amid the lavender border, retrieved Leander’s valise, and collected Miss Dujardin’s bundle. Atlas dealt with the awkward burdens philosophically, and we were soon trundling up the alley behind Waltham House.
Breakfast—a proper, leisurely breakfast taken while perusing the morning paper—loomed as a benediction. I’d spend the day half dressed, wearing house slippers, catching up on correspondence, and likely enduring a call from Lady Ophelia.
Godmama was not one to let grass grow under her dainty feet when there were sermons to be delivered and gossip to be collected. If she distracted me from revisiting my earlier exchange with St. Clair, so much the better. I’d look in on the nursery, too, of course.
And some arrangement had to be made for Miss Dujardin.
She was more than a nurserymaid. A governess’s wages, at least, should be offered to her. She knew enough French to start the boy on the rudiments, and in Caldicott fashion, we’d soon have him chattering away in my grandmother’s tongue.
I took the valise and bundled cloak into the garden and set them on the wrought-iron table. A gentleman did not pry into a lady’s personal affairs, but Miss Dujardin might have some artifact of Leander’s origins among her possessions without knowing it. That elaborately embroidered handkerchief might have a twin. An old toy of Harry’s, a book, a curio given to Mrs. Waites…
I was debating whether to snoop through Miss Dujardin’s belongings when the lady herself emerged from the side terrace and scuttled down the path that led to the alley.
“Good morning, miss.”
She froze, then turned slowly. She wore her bonnet and cloak and had her burgundy velvet reticule in her hand.
“I believe I have something of yours.” I held up the bundle, then set it back on the table. “Let’s have a look, shall we?” Where the hell had she been going, and had she informed anybody of her departure? Her furtive air suggested she’d been on the point of a clandestine departure, a thought which tried my already overtaxed patience.
I opened the knot fastening the bundle. If she made a dash for the alley, I’d catch her at the gate. She appeared to resign herself to that truth and came back up the walkway.
“My things,” she said. “You found them.”
“Any good soldier is ready to break camp on a moment’s notice, and you apparently trusted the grooms not to steal from you more than you trusted Mrs. Danforth. Let’s have a seat, shall we?”
I posed the question and waited for Miss Dujardin to make her choice.
She stopped a good two yards away. “Sometimes a clean break is best, my lord.”
“So you said on a previous occasion, and yet, you did not abandon Leander then. Why pike off now?”
She shook her head. “Not your concern.”
“You haven’t a character or references of any sort. Is that why you couldn’t apply to the agencies for a new post?” My imagination, which had been a sluggish and sullen creature since I’d found Leander, stirred to life.
“My lord, what are you talking about?”
“Miss West went to the better employment agencies, hoping to find word of one of the staff who served at Dingle Court all those years ago. She also asked after you and learned nothing. If you sought a new post in London, you did so at the lesser establishments. I would have written you a character sufficient to make the archangel Gabriel jealous of your prospects, but here you are, skulking into the alley at an hour when His Grace and I should still be abed.”
“Nobody will hire me without a character,” Miss Dujardin said slowly. “That is correct.”
So where had she been on that half day? What had compelled her to leave the boy more or less undefended in enemy territory?
I opened the bundle on the table and began setting the contents in full view.
“My lord, this is unnecessary. I did not steal Mrs. Danforth’s silver.”
“She has only plate, I’m guessing.” The tin of lemon soap sat next to the brush and mirror. The lemon hair tonic came next, then the books—stain removal, medicinals for female complaints, The Book of Common Prayer . “You made a clean sweep, gathered up everything except the boy himself.”
She flinched. The reaction was so minute, I might well have missed it had she not been holding as still as a rabbit who hears the hunter’s tread on an upwind path.
A rabbit, prey. Fast but vulnerable. “You meant to steal away with him.” She’d been ready to break camp and had readied Leander for the same exercise. Ready to leave London. “Why?”
“I should be going.”
I could turn up all lordly and imposing, or try to. Arthur was far more accomplished at such theatrics. Instead, I pulled out a chair and attempted sweet reason. If I was tired, she had to be nearly numb with overwrought nerves and harried fears. To steal the boy… no coin, no friends, nowhere to go. A desperate, doomed gambit, and she’d apparently concluded as much.
“Did you know, Miss Dujardin, that I am a bastard?”
Ah, I’d surprised her. She left off staring at the potted morning glories trailing up their lattice and looked at me in some consternation.
“I beg your pardon?”
“One doesn’t use such vocabulary in the presence of a lady, I know, but here I stand, and the term applies. Leander and I will have that in common.”
“I know his situation, my lord.” Stated with an encouraging hint of impatience.
“And now you know mine, yet you still entrust that child to my care. His Grace will soon decamp for the Low Countries and is not expected back until next year. If you walk through that gate, you leave Leander entirely subject to my whim. If you trust me that far, don’t you trust me enough to tell me the truth?”
Never had a woman gazed with more longing at a set of nursery windows. “You will be kind to him. You will keep him safe.”
“I will be the most conscientious guardian a child ever had, but the legalities will be stymied by the fact that I don’t even know the boy’s real name. His Grace wants to give Leander the Caldicott name, but that means going through the deed poll rigamarole, and there again… we don’t know Leander’s true name. I believe you do, and I am humbly asking you to share it with me.”
“Waltham is a duke. He can make up any name for Leander he chooses. Nobody will gainsay him.”
“Leander might. I am a man grown, with every privilege imaginable, abundant blessings, and more reasons for gratitude than you can count, and yet, my own father, whoever he is, has never acknowledged me. That still has the power to wound, Miss Dujardin, to wound deeply. Your abandonment will hurt the child even more deeply. He won’t get over it. He won’t understand someday .”
Mostly to allow her some dignity, I considered the small collection of effects on the table. Soap, hair tonic, a few aging books. She hadn’t taken old Aesop. He was likely in Leander’s valise at this point. The other offerings…
“You are not a nursemaid by trade or training,” I said, picking up the little tome on removing stains. A laundress might have such a book, though she’d have learned its every secret before she turned twelve if her mother and aunties were laundresses. “You were a housekeeper.”
I picked up the hair tonic, uncorked it, and sniffed. The lemon scent was powerful, though it would not clash with the soap in the tin. Why use any hair tonic at all when a lady’s crowning glory was nearly always under a cap or a bonnet, particularly this lady’s?
Even indoors. “You are lightening your hair, and you chose a lemon soap to try to disguise the fact.” Why do that?
“Stop,” she said, plunking her reticule on the table and taking the chair I’d proffered. “Please just stop. I think it best that I leave, and you have no right to paw through my things.”
They were her things, and I had no right, so I ceased. I took the chair next to hers.
“Among Leander’s possessions,” I said, “I found an elaborately embroidered handkerchief that bears my late brother’s initials as well as devices from the Caldicott coat of arms. An intimate item or one a father might want to pass on to his son. Proves nothing, of course, but it does raise questions.”
She began repacking her bundle, so I marched on.
“Your reticule is made of the same fabric from which a handsome little Sunday coat was sewn for Leander, and sewn recently. The coat looks to fit him well, with seams designed to be let out as he grows. The same with the trousers and shirts. Somebody sewed him what amounts to a new wardrobe.”
“Martha was a seamstress. She knew how to ply her needle.”
“Martha was dying. Did she spend her last weeks stitching Leander’s new shirt? I think not. I think you took the last of your good dresses and chemises and fashioned him a wardrobe to take with him into the next phase of his life. Then you hid the results of your hard work lest Mrs. Danforth demand goods in exchange for board.”
Miss Dujardin paused, the hair tonic in her hand. “She would have sold me and Leander both, she’s that angry with life.”
“And probably with the compassionate God she professes to worship, but she is not my concern, and Dujardin is not your name.” The Book of Common Prayer had told me that. I’d thought the article used, but it was old enough to have been owned by Miss Dujardin since childhood. The initials on the inscription, whatever they were, did not include a D. “Perhaps you are not Miss Dujardin, but rather, Lady Harry Caldicott?”
“Will you hush?” she replied, rising. “Will you please, for the sake of my nerves and all that is decent, just hush?” She jammed the last of her possessions back into the bundle, jerked the knot tight, and stood. “Tell Leander I love him and I will write when I can.”
“Tell him yourself.” I rose as well, and I was debating whether a gentleman could physically restrain a lady intent on making some heroic, cork-brained sacrifice, when a small boy launched himself from the house, pelted down the terrace steps, and lashed his arms around Miss Dujardin’s waist.
“You can’t go, miss. I knew you planned to leave me, but you mustn’t go.”
Arthur stood at the top of the steps, holding a tattered stuffed horse and looking very severe, as if that would make any difference to a small boy trying to prevent his world from crashing down on his innocent head.
Leander burst into heartrending sobs, Miss Dujardin took him into her arms and sat with him in her lap, and I breathed a heartfelt sigh of gratitude.
My reinforcements had arrived, and just in the nick of time.
While Leander snuggled in Miss Dujardin’s lap with no more dignity than a puppy, I cleared the table of evidence. Arthur surrendered Dasher to his owner and busied himself finding a footman to order about while Leander regained his composure.
My own composure was none too steady, and yet, Miss Dujardin and I were nowhere near through with our discussion.
“Breakfast al fresco,” Arthur said, joining us at the table. “Just the thing on a fine summer morning. Do you know, I have a horse too? I can’t keep him with me at table, but he’s a grand fellow, and I’m sure he’d enjoy making Leander’s acquaintance after breakfast.”
God bless my dear brother, taking the situation in hand. Whether Arthur had risen to the occasion on the strength of ducal discipline, patriarchal politesse, or the sheer decency of a good man, I did not care. To see that child so upset, so terrified of abandonment by the one person he’d been able to rely on during a short and uncertain life…
God damn Harry. Whatever his reasons and excuses, as I watched Leander sniffle into Miss Dujardin’s handkerchief, I was almost glad Harry was dead. A growing heap of coincidences, hunches, and circumstantial evidence found his lordship guilty of a very poor and irresponsible sort of fatherhood.
I situated Leander in his own seat, using the valise to boost his little backside. He tucked into jam and toast and went into raptures about his hot chocolate, though the idea of enjoying such a beverage in the middle of high summer eluded me.
It hadn’t eluded Arthur, who’d even remembered to have some ground nutmeg brought to the table. Miss Dujardin watched His Grace sprinkling the precious spice atop Leander’s treat, her gaze unreadable.
“Because the occasion is special,” Arthur said, adding a dash to his own chocolate and touching cups with Leander. “The prodigal is safely returned.”
“Will I have to go back to Mrs. Dumbforth’s?”
Arthur became absorbed with garnishing his own chocolate, though his shoulders twitched.
“You will not,” I said. “Not ever. Your home is with us now. His Grace will soon be traveling on the Continent, so you and I will have to rub along as best we can until he gets back.”
“And Miss too. She’ll rub along with us.” Leander regarded Miss Dujardin across the table, a chocolate mustache at variance with the solemnity of his gaze. “She won’t go now, will she?”
“Leander,” Miss Dujardin began very gently. “I know it’s hard—”
I put my hand over hers. “Miss Dujardin was merely thinking ahead,” I said. “She knew Mrs. Danforth was growing testier by the day and that something could happen to anything left in the house. She bundled up everything of value, and then I arrived without an invitation, and you mistakenly took matters into your own busy little hands. I’m sure Miss Dujardin was simply off to retrieve the luggage this morning before Mrs. Danforth could find it.”
Leander wanted to believe me. I could see that in his eyes, so like Harry’s, but so hopelessly innocent.
“Miss? Were you thinking to get the luggage just now? I saw you packing your bundle days ago, when I should have been napping. I wanted Aesop, and you were crying. You wouldn’t leave me, would you?”
The morning acquired the sort of heavy stillness found only in high summer. The very air felt weighted as Leander licked his top lip and waited.
“I was off to snatch our luggage away before you finished your breakfast,” Miss Dujardin said. “Lord Julian has the right of it.”
Two grown men, one boy, a stuffed horse, every eavesdropping servant, and the very birds in the trees breathed a sigh of relief.
“Lord Julian fetched our things,” Leander said. “You don’t have to go back there either, miss. Not ever.”
Arthur took up the chorus. “And thanks be to heaven on behalf of all concerned. Have you finished your chocolate? Well, then, make your bow, and I will introduce you to my horse. Come along.”
To my surprise, that combination of good cheer and authority worked. Leander scrambled down from his perch and collected Dasher from where he’d been grazing on cherry cobbler near the teapot.
Leander stopped two steps down the path. “I forgot to ask to be excused.”
Arthur made a get-on-with-it gesture.
“Miss, may I be excused?”
“You may. Try not to get dirty, and you will wash your hands when you come in from the stable.”
“Yes, miss.” Leander reached for Arthur’s hand, then hesitated. “I don’t know what to call you, sir.”
Arthur looked from the boy to me. I nodded my agreement.
“Uncle Arthur will do, and that’s Uncle Julian. He might be the slightest quarter inch taller than me, for now—I’m not quite done growing—but I am older and wiser. Please do bear that in mind. My horse is named Beowulf, and his friends call him Bey. He’s partial to apples. He should just be finishing his oats by now.”
They departed, Leander kiting along at Arthur’s side.
“You will stay?” I asked. “I’m asking for all of us, not least for Harry.”
Arthur and Leander disappeared through the gate, and Miss Dujardin rose. She walked off along the spent roses and gave me her back. It took me about fifteen seconds and the sound of one discreet sniffle to realize the poor lady was in tears.
I snatched the nearest table napkin and passed it to her. She surprised a year off my life by throwing herself into my arms and weeping as if she’d been denied admittance to heaven. Her tears were all the more upsetting for being muffled against my shoulder, while heat rolled off her, and her grip on my arm became painful.
I could not have stopped this storm if I’d been to Mount Olympus born, nor would I have tried. The woman had every right to cry. She wept on, and I held her, knowing all too well what it was like to wander a hostile landscape, no hope of ever finding a safe haven.
“He’ll hear me,” she whispered when the worst of the cataclysm had passed. “He mustn’t hear me. He saw me crying… Oh, God. He ran away because of me.”
Was she speaking of Leander or Harry? Did it matter? “The child is safe, and right now, he’s under the direct supervision of the man fifty-third in line for the throne. Or maybe forty-seventh. I forget, and it keeps changing. You hardly ate a thing.”
She eased away, dabbing at her eyes. “I’m not used to good meals anymore.”
“Then we must reacquaint you with the habit. Let’s sit, shall we? Beowulf enjoys callers, but Arthur’s patience has limits.”
“He’s a duke.” This was said with some consternation. “I knew that, but the reality is hard to grasp.”
“Waltham finds himself facing the same conundrum and bears up manfully, for the most part. Please assure me you won’t try to leave at the first opportunity.”
We resumed our seats, and I waited for an answer that mattered a very great deal.
“I planned to take Leander with me at first. When I should have been applying to the agencies, I was looking over coaching routes and fares. I even considered taking ship. My French is good, and the Continent is rumored to be very affordable.”
And if Leander hadn’t run away, would he even now be enjoying his first sight of Calais? Informing any passenger on the packet’s deck that he had to wee?
“I want Leander to be safe,” she said quietly.
“I want him to be safe and happy, insofar as life allows us either boon. He was safe and happy in infancy, wasn’t he?” I poured her a cup of tea, the universal restorative. I poured the same for myself as well.
“How do you know that?”
I gestured to her reticule. “You wore velvet. Leander developed a taste for nutmeg. He’s learning to read. You have books. Your library has been whittled down, but that you’d haul those books about… Other women might have tossed them, but to you they were proof of better days. You were Harry’s housekeeper on Dingle Court, weren’t you?”
Those ledger entries hadn’t recorded expenditures on behalf of Monsieur Beaujolais, but rather, Madam Bleeker or Millicent Bleeker, and the ambiguity on Harry’s part had likely been on purpose.
“I was Lord Harry’s housekeeper, and then I was something else entirely. Harry was as surprised by the whole situation as I was. I’m the usual cautionary tale. Raised in a vicarage—Martha and I had that in common—taught to work hard and mind my betters. Then along came Harry Caldicott, and twenty-five years of common sense, regular sermons, and good intentions went right up the bedroom flue. He was a force of nature, and I suddenly understood why smart women do very foolish things. I am comforted to think he was in the grip of something similarly unprecedented.”
She sipped her tea, and I wanted to kick Lord Force of Nature in his cods. “He returned to Spain without marrying you, though.”
“He did not realize Leander was on the way. Neither did I. I got a letter to him, though. He’d let me know how to do that. I was under the impression he had a gambling problem. He said he had enemies—serious, dangerous enemies—and the way he said it… I believed him. Please tell me he wasn’t lying to me for his own convenience.”
“He was telling you the sober, horrid truth about the dangerous-enemies part.” That those enemies could have found him in London, and he’d never breathed a word of the danger, angered me.
“He left in a hurry,” Miss… Mrs. Bleeker said. “He went everywhere in a hurry, which is why when he wasn’t in a hurry…”
“He made quite an impression. Harry was complicated. If he set aside all of those complications to spend time with you, then he was acting on sincere sentiment, and taking a significant risk to do so.” While an affaire de coeur would not have been a matter of first impression with Harry—or second or fifth impression—he’d clearly been smitten.
My words seemed to put something right for Miss Dujardin—or Mrs. Bleeker… Miss Bleeker. Leander’s mother.
She ceased frowning at her tea and took a bite of Leander’s unfinished cherry cobbler.
“Harry regularly sent money,” she said. “More than enough to live on comfortably. I saved what we didn’t need—once a parson’s daughter, always a parson’s daughter—and when the money stopped, I didn’t worry at first. I assumed there had been a problem with the post or something. Martha and I took in mending, we sold a few things, but the money never resumed. Then I learned that Lord Harry Caldicott’s name had appeared on the casualty lists, and I…”
“Martha was your sister?”
“Cousin, and by then, her health was delicate. She’d come to live with us, though she still took in work from the theaters.”
“Hence Miss Hammerschmidt’s scheme to assume maternal honors where Leander was concerned. Martha must have let a few details slip to her old friend over a nip or two of gin.”
Far too many details, apparently.
“Martha was dying. I try not to judge her, and she was the one who came up with casting ourselves on Mrs. Danforth’s charity. Martha had known her ages ago and had run into her outside some millinery shop. We had nowhere else to turn, and Martha was insistent. She did not want to die in the poorhouse, and I could not blame her. She claimed Leander as her son, took on the destitute-widow role, and I was left with the job of nursemaid.”
“A desperate measure indeed. Why not come to us?”
Another pause while a second minuscule bite of cobbler disappeared. She’d learned to ration even so small a pleasure, thanks to my philandering brother.
“Harry said it wasn’t safe for his family to know about Leander. He said you’d be watched, and his enemies would use Leander to get at him.”
“Harry’s worst enemies were in France and Spain.” I put this gently. She’d have no way of knowing where the threats originated, because Harry had misled her, probably telling himself that was for her own safety.
“Not all of his enemies were abroad, my lord. Harry was a trusted officer, I know that, but he had enemies in London too. He managed to see Leander on three occasions. I never knew Harry was coming and didn’t recognize him when he’d show up at our back door. He was a tinker, a rag-and-bone man, a poor émigré, and then he was a ghost.”
“Harry is gone,” I said, “and still you did not come to us.”
“Are Harry’s enemies gone?”
I thought of St. Clair on his lonely hill and of his knowledge that Leander had disappeared. If St. Clair wished the boy harm, he’d had years to achieve that purpose, and St. Clair had a diabolical gift for achieving his purposes.
“The war is over,” I said. “Harry engaged in what is vulgarly termed spying. He was captured by the French, and he went to his grave without divulging Leander’s existence. Those enemies, if they survived, would gain nothing by harming Leander now, and they would rouse a lot of inconvenient ghosts.”
She was silent, finishing her tea and taking the last microscopic bite of cobbler.
I tried to put myself not in her worn and weary boots, but back into my own tattered cloak that miserable, frigid spring when I’d bashed about on the slopes of the Pyrenees. Starving, freezing, more than half mad. I recalled clearly when some shepherd in the lower elevations had sprung up from the bank of a stream, and instead of asking the first human I’d seen in weeks for directions, instead of greeting him, I’d pelted back up the slope and hidden away for another week.
“You were frightened,” I said. “Too many bad things happened in succession, and you came to believe that Harry’s family was not to be trusted either. Harry didn’t trust us. Didn’t even tell us of the boy’s existence. You convinced yourself that we’d either toss you and Leander to the gutter, or keep the lad and send you away, never to see him again.”
She’d been operating on the logic of survival, never assuming a benevolent outcome, never trusting without proof, and not even then. In that state, all luck was bad, nature was vengeful, and society became the handmaiden of injustice.
“It wasn’t safe,” she said softly. “To trust you, to come here, to present myself without evidence, without marriage lines. I have Leander’s baptismal lines, but I did not name Harry on them. He chose the middle name. He gave Leander that horse and named the wretched beast after his first pony, but that’s not enough.”
Leander’s laughter drifted across the garden, so like Harry’s, so bright and sweet.
“You did not stitch Dasher into existence?”
“I did not. The handkerchief is my work. I do well with embroidery, and I could afford the thread then. Harry brought the horse along on his last visit. Leander was only a few months old, too young to play with a stuffed toy, but it was something from his father. Harry created a silly little production out of placing Dasher in Leander’s cradle and making me promise I’d take as good care of the horse as I did of the boy. Leander slept through the whole nonsense.” She blinked several times. “He was such a good baby, and he’s a very good boy.”
“Thanks to you. He’s also a Caldicott, thanks to Harry, and I believe we can prove that, if you are amenable.”
She turned luminous eyes upon me, and in their depths, I saw the thing that had kept Leander safe, the thing that even Harry’s desertion and death and Mrs. Danforth’s cruelty hadn’t been able to extinguish.
I saw hope.
“I am amenable.”