Page 4 of Lie Down With a Lyon (The Lyon’s Den)

A n hour later, Blanche calmed herself as her hired coach rounded the corner to Hanover Square and her stepmother’s house. Blanche had always thought of it as precisely that. Doris Delacourt had never given Blanche reason to expand her definition to include such platitudes as home , refuge , sanctuary. Nor could Blanche ever bring herself to think of Doris as her mama , dear and revered. No. Doris Delacourt had been hired by Jonathan Rivers when Blanche was five years old. Blanche remembered the day she was taken from a crowded, loud, dirty building filled with quarreling, scrappy children. In that filthy place, Blanche had slept three to a bed, had eaten gruel and spent most of her days curled into a ball, cold and starving.

How Rivers had found her, he had never told her. But he had imparted the story of her birth. Over the years, he’d given her more and more details. But when she was sixteen, he had sat her down and told her details she’d never forgotten.

They had sat in his office, a nicely appointed room with an old desk and two comfy chairs. That day she had not noticed that his home was a tumbledown wooden monstrosity in the midst of the teeming rookeries. Only in later years—twice, to be exact when she’d come to argue with him—had she noticed the filthy slums. Yet inside his domain there was cleanliness and order. Inside, he and she were safe and sound, with his guards, his bully boys, posted all around them.

He began his tale, his gray eyes looking upon the past. He had met her birth mother when her family carriage overturned one afternoon in Piccadilly.

“With one look, she took my heart. I pulled ’er out of that overturned coach—knocked out, she was. But I caught ’er up and had my men bring round my own carriage. I took ’er home. Aye, home here. To Seven Dials. She di’nt know where she was. What did it matter, eh? She di’nt care. She was safe, she was grateful, and she knew as the time got on that I loved ’er. I cared for ’er.

“Hell, she did not know who she was. Not for weeks. Seven, it were, aye. But I tended ’er, called in good apothecaries and a doctor, fed her, healed her.

“Aye, I was good to ’er. So aye. By the time a li’l idea come to ’er of her name and family, she did not want to leave me.”

Blanche shook her head at that memory. Her father said he had not seduced her mother. Blanche had no reason to believe him. But she did believe the rest of his statement—and she never forgot it.

“Your mother felt obliged to tell her parents she had survived the accident. She decided to write to them to inform them. I could not argue against it. By that time, I’d done me work. I knew she was the only daughter of the Earl of Langley. Aye. A rich man’s diamond, she was. I nearly spit out me guts. To tangle with likes o’ that ain’t me wont. Rich, a big man, ’e sat in Parliament. Oh, aye, he’d tried to clean the rookeries of all their evils. Including me and mine.

“I knew once her family knew where she was and who her companion was, it would not matter that she cared for me. Her family’d keep her. I knew she were lost to me. We were cheese and curd, no good. I got up me gumption and told her to forget me. Go home. Be who you are, I told her.”

Blanche wiped a tear from her cheek at what had happened next. Her mother—Adelaide was her name—had returned home, tearful and afraid of her parents and her future. She had reason to be.

Her father, tyrant as he’d always been to all his children, ordered her banished. Soiled as he proclaimed she was, she was to go to an institution far away from London in Northumbria. The facility was for “wayward girls.” Addy, as she called herself, refused.

But soon after she climbed into the hired hack her father had hired to take her north, she escaped.

She returned to Blanche’s father. She had no address. Only his name. But so many knew him or knew of him that they quickly told her where to find him and scurried away. Horrified as she was at the state of his lodgings, which she had never been permitted to fully see, Addy faced him. The man she loved. The one who had shown her kindness and care. The one who she now knew was the father of her unborn child.

Shocked and delighted at her reappearance, Rivers was aflame to hear her news. He took her to the nearest church and married her. Soon after, he bought a house for them a few streets north of the old meat market at Smithfield—and there Addy and he lived for the next three years. Blanche’s mother birthed her without any challenges. Addy and her father—so he said—were happy.

But Addy’s father, the earl, had hired people skilled in tracking others. One day as Addy visited a bookshop, Blanche asleep in a small carriage beside her, two men snatched up them both.

Unconscious from some kind of drug they forced on her, Addy gave no fight. When she awakened hours later, she was in her father’s small study in his home in Mayfair. He told her he would send her to Northumbria and send her daughter to an orphanage.

That afternoon, with the help of a Langley servant who had always been loyal to Addy, she escaped the house. But baby Blanche had already been sent away. Addy knew not where.

Outside, a thunderous rainstorm bore down on the city. Without coin to pay for a carriage, Addy walked from Mayfair to Seven Dials. Once there, soaked and shivering, she collapsed into her husband’s arms. Three days later, she was dead.

The Earl of Langley, who had discovered his daughter and her husband’s home, sent forth the accusation that the notorious gang leader, Jonathan Rivers, had killed his wife in an act of revenge. What precisely that act was, the earl refused to say. There were other limits to what Langley would tell. Having it known that his daughter was the paramour and wife of the criminal Rivers was damning enough. If he also told the tale publicly that he had taken his own granddaughter to a public orphanage, that would be a greater shame. Rivers told his men to give out the word of Langley’s cruelty to his own daughter and his granddaughter. The whole Langley family suffered the taint.

It took Rivers two years to find Blanche.

“I knew with one look who you were, Blanche. Just as I’d loved yer mother in one glance, I knew you were mine the minute my eyes landed on ye.”

He’d prepared for Blanche’s return to him months after Addy died. He found a lady of strong moral fiber, a former housekeeper to a marquess. He’d found a vicar he could bribe and who would marry them on the stipulation that Doris was to assume the given name of Delacourt. That she was to remain free of any blemish, keep the house he gave her, rear his daughter—once he found her—as her own. That she was to educate Blanche to be a lady, capable of languages, literature, dancing, and fine manners.

Doris Delacourt had kept her promises. The one thing she could not give, nor had it been stated she must, was love.

Blanche had felt the lack. All her life, she’d been grateful for Doris’s companionship, dedication, direction, and guidance. But shows of affection or words of endearment did not come her way.

Only as she grew to adulthood did Blanche look for affection from others. From her school friends she’d learned that some parents and family gave love and guidance, but others did not. If a young lady wanted to marry a man she loved, she might begin by finding one who was kind, educated, and respectful of women.

“So far in my life,” she said to herself as she faced the front door of the house that had been her home for nineteen years, “the only man to fit that definition is Mr. Dillion.”

Who gives me good wishes for my marriage to another man. And nothing else.

So be it.

She wiped tears from her cheeks.

Life, says my infamous father, is what we make it.