Page 33 of Cloaked in Deception (Spencer & Reid Mysteries #4)

“After Constance was born,” Stanley began, after clearing his throat and adjusting his loose tie, “there were…complications. Doctor Reeves told us that Melanie, my wife, would never be able to conceive again.”

“But that can’t be true,” Constance cut in. “I remember Mama with child. I was ten years old when George was born.”

Stanley nodded, though it seemed to pain him to remember. “Yes, you remember correctly that she was with child. And your mother nearly carried to term. But when she went into labor, it was too early. The babe was stillborn.”

Leo lowered her head, feeling deep sympathy for Melanie Hayes for the loss of a much wanted second child. And for Constance, as tears welled in her eyes once again. Lord Hayes paced toward the hearth, his palm scrubbing his cheek and chin as he shook his head.

“I remember now,” he recalled. “You sent Aunt Melanie to Beechwood for her confinement, and Constance came to stay with us.” The viscount would have been thirteen or fourteen at the time, Leo calculated. “Are you saying she had already lost the child at that point?”

Stanley’s answer was in the guilty bowing of his head.

“You cannot have any idea how distraught my wife was. She was delusional with grief, threatening to harm herself.” He squeezed his eyes shut as if the memory still pained him.

“She needed time before facing her friends with the truth. I was protecting her and her reputation by sending her away.”

“But that wasn’t the only reason you sent your wife out of the public’s eye,” Leo interjected. “You’d already come up with a way to fix the problem, thanks to your connection to the orphanage. How did you know there was an infant there?”

He peered at her as if she was a bothersome gnat that he’d have liked to silence with a swat of his hand. But he’d already started to confess, and there could be no diverting from the truth now.

“Melanie and I toured the home earlier that month. She was still weeks away from her confinement at that time, and she insisted on accompanying me. She has a bleeding heart, always has, and was the one who convinced me to support the fund in the first place.” He drained his glass and, finished with it, set it on the table that held the three framed photographs. His eyes lingered on the one of George.

“He was so small. So delicate. The nurse said he was malnourished, but Melanie was utterly enchanted with him. She held him for nearly an hour before I finally insisted that we had to move along.”

So, when his wife lost their own baby a month later, Stanley Hayes thought of the one in Twickenham. He must have hurried to conceal that his own child had been stillborn, sent his wife to the country, and then arranged for the adoption.

Leo laid out the supposition for him, and he nodded.

“Melanie understood that this was the only chance we had at having another child,” he said.

“Admitting to the adoption was out of the question. George would be ridiculed, and we would be judged. There were also legal ramifications; he might not be entitled to his inheritance. No, the easiest thing was to say he was our son.”

“Your staff must have known the truth,” Leo pointed out. “Both here and in Hampshire.”

“A few did, yes,” he replied. “But they are loyal, Miss Spencer. They all adore my wife. And for that, I rewarded them with my loyalty in return.”

She wondered if that meant an increase in their wages but thought it might be rude to pry.

While some of the staff knew the truth when Mr. and Mrs. Hayes returned to London with a baby, their friends and acquaintances—even their own daughter—were none the wiser.

Leo looked at the framed photographs again.

It was quite apparent that George looked nothing like the other members of his family. Had he noticed it? Had anyone else?

“Let’s return to the argument you had with your wife on the night of the benefit dinner,” Leo said.

“How is that going to help us find my brother?” Constance demanded, her eyes swollen and shimmering.

“I don’t know yet,” she replied honestly. “However, I do know that lies never help. They only hinder.”

“Constance, let your father answer the bloody questions,” the viscount snapped, though his anger was clearly directed toward Stanley, not his cousin. “I need to know every facet of this scandal if I’m to help mitigate it.”

Constance threw a glowering stare toward him before settling back into the cushions of the settee and sealing her lips tightly.

“What lie was your wife referring to?” Leo asked bluntly.

Mr. Hayes shifted as though he wanted to stand but ended up looking too defeated to do so. “I’d learned Martha Seabright would be at the benefit dinner. I could not risk my wife and her meeting.”

“Why not?” Lord Hayes interjected.

Stanley’s throat worked as he swallowed nervously. “Because I had told Melanie that George’s mother died after he’d been admitted to the orphanage. She believed all this time that our son was well and truly an orphan.”

The viscount swore more oaths under his breath, and Constance shook her head, staring at her father as if she did not know him.

“I was protecting her from whatever misplaced feelings of guilt she might have felt, taking in a baby whose mother was still alive,” he said, the excuse weak and grasping.

“Protecting Aunt Melanie?” Lord Hayes barked. “Or protecting yourself? You took a child that was not your own and passed him off as if he was. If anyone finds out what you’ve done, the stain upon the Hayes name may be permanent.”

His uncle weathered the viscount’s rebuke with a stiff chin. “I don’t regret it, not for a moment. Martha did not want him. She was a vulture and would have sold him off to anyone. At least we were able to give him a stable home, a family. Love .”

He seemed to believe that what he had done hadn’t been wrong, and while Leo did not agree with his methods, perhaps it was true that he’d given Edward a better life and home than what the boy would have otherwise had.

Martha might have thought so too. If so, Leo wondered why Stanley had worried she might say something to Melanie Hayes at the dinner.

He’d called Martha by her given name and accused her of being a vulture.

“Did she contact you throughout the years?” Leo asked as a suspicion grew. “Did she ask for more money?”

At his long, slow blink, she understood: Martha Seabright had been blackmailing him.

“I would hear from her every few years,” he said after several beats passed.

“It would be ten pounds or so, whatever she claimed to need at the time. She made it clear that, should I refuse, she would make it known publicly that George was her son. She had letters, she said, from the orphanage, detailing the conditions of the exchange. And over the years, she demanded portraits of George to know what he looked like.”

“And you told Mrs. Hayes about these letters and photographs that night?” Leo asked.

When he nodded, she understood what his wife had been looking for inside Martha’s home.

“How did Aunt Melanie know where this woman lived?” Lord Hayes asked.

“I had gone there previously to meet and pay Martha. I must have mentioned the address during our argument. I never thought she would go there.”

But Mrs. Hayes had been worried that some evidence had been left behind regarding the adoption. And with Martha Seabright’s murder, she must have also worried suspicion could fall upon her husband. Or herself. The woman had been blackmailing them, after all.

“Now you have it all, Miss Spencer,” he went on. “However, I fail to see how it is going to bloody well help me find my son!”

Leo passed Stanley Hayes in his chair and went toward the windows, needing to move, needing to think.

“Do you think it’s possible George overheard your argument?” Oliver Hayes asked his uncle after a moment. “He would have been at home.”

Stanley rubbed his forehead. “I didn’t think we were shouting that loudly, but if the servants heard, I suppose it is possible that he did as well.”

“If he found out he was adopted, he might have decided to run away,” Constance said.

“If that is the case, he could have gone somewhere he is familiar with,” Lord Hayes replied. “Perhaps he is making his way to Beechwood.”

Their discussion over where George might have gone gave Leo time to think about the letter in Martha’s handbag.

It had been signed NCR. And at the benefit dinner, Martha had asked the chief coroner about Nurse Radcliff.

The letter N might have stood for Nurse rather than a given name.

And, as she’d already theorized with a doubtful Jasper, only a nurse at the orphanage would have been able to pronounce the Seabright baby dead.

“Mr. Hayes did Nurse Radcliff facilitate the adoption of George?” she asked, cutting into something the viscount had been saying about taking the next scheduled train to Hampshire.

Stanley sat a little taller in his chair. “Yes. At the time, it was Radcliff,” he answered. “Caroline Radcliff.”

Nurse Caroline Radcliff. NCR. Her letter to Martha had been about Edward Seabright’s adoption after all. It was central to everything that had taken place since the night of Martha’s murder. But then, Leo peered at Mr. Hayes.

“What do you mean by her name being Radcliff at the time ?”