Page 37 of The Secret Word (Twist Upon a Regency Tale #10)

W hen Michael wrote a few days later, he said that Wright had seen him in a downstairs reception room.

Wright told Michael the distant hammering they could hear was from the house next door.

“It wasn’t true, though, Chris,” Michael wrote.

“I sat over a beer in the tavern on the corner of the mews, and saw the builders leaving by the back door. He has builders in, and he is not talking about why.”

It was weird and disturbing. Still, Chris couldn’t see how what Wright did with his townhouse could affect Chris, Clem and the twins three hours ride away in the country.

It was all a storm in a teacup, as Chris discovered during his next trip to London.

He tried to invite himself to dinner, but Wright told him that there had been a leak in the roof, which had been mended, and now the painters were in.

“The place smells, Satterthwaite,” he said.

“I’m staying at an inn, and would be glad to have dinner with you there, and hear more about my grandson. ”

Once Chris got home, he wrote to both Michael and Billy O’Hara to let them know that the builders were there to do repairs, and he told Clem. He’d kept it from her before, not wanting to worry her while she was still recovering.

She was furious.

“How dare you keep me in the dark, Chris? Especially when the topic is my father.”

Her response annoyed Chris. “You have only recently given birth. You are feeding two children and sleeping poorly. Surely, I have a right to protect you?”

“Instead of which, you put me in danger, for if he was planning something that affects us, I needed to be warned. You are not here all the time.”

“I did not want to worry you,” he explained, but she wasn’t having a bar of it.

“Yes, I would have worried, but if I cannot trust you to tell me your concerns, I shall worry the whole time. How would you feel if I said that Will had stopped bleeding, so there was nothing to worry about, if I had not even mentioned he had been hurt?”

Chris, who had been lounging until that moment, sat up straight. “Will has been bleeding?”

“No! But if he ever does, I shall tell you immediately, not when he’s stopped bleeding, and I expect the same from you, Chris. Tell me problems from the start so we can work through them together, not from the end when they are solved.”

He hated to admit it, but she had a point. She hadn’t finished, though.

“As to Father and the roof leak, I do not believe it. What evidence do you have that the builders were there to fix the roof? Father’s word, and we know he lies whenever it suits him, and without a scrap of conscience.”

Which was unfortunately true. “I shall ask Michael to continue to keep an eye on him then,” Chris said, with a sigh. Whatever the man was up to, they would undoubtedly find out, sooner or later.

It was sooner. A week later, Chris received a letter from Billy that asked him to come into London on a matter of importance. An urgent matter.

“What do you think?” he said to Clem. “Should I go? I wonder what he wants?”

“You still don’t trust him,” Clem noted, “but he has been nothing but kind to us.”

“Because it suits him, for some reason,” Chris insisted. “I’d feel better if I knew the reason. Though, to be fair, he does look after his people. He says it is good business, for it ensures loyalty.”

“Which is why you are going, darling,” Clem noted. “You do trust him, deep down. Why else would you have wanted him to be Will’s godfather?”

She was right again. Chris called for his horse, and kissed his wife and his children. “I won’t stay the night,” he said. “Unless this crisis, whatever it is, needs me to do so. I’ll send you a message, if that is the case. Otherwise, expect me before dark.”

“I love you, Chris. Take care. Travel safely.”

“I love you, Clem. Look after our babies, and I shall be home soon.”

*

Clem watched her husband ride away down the carriageway, and felt a sudden sense of panic. Ridiculous. She lived surrounded by people who owed their livelihoods to her and Chris, and who were—as far as she knew—happy to be working for them. What could possibly go wrong?

Nonetheless, she hurried inside and up to see the children, fast asleep in their cradles. All was, of course, well.

Despite that, the sense of dread would not leave her. When a couple of carriages rumbled up the drive an hour after Chris’s departure, she hurried to the window. Her mind told her she was being silly. Her heart was certain that the threatened danger was there, outside her windows.

Carriages, yes. One of them, her father’s. And outriders—burly men with stern faces. She ignored the common sense that told her to wait to see whether her father meant trouble, picked up her skirts, and ran upstairs, telling the footman as she passed, “Delay opening the door. Keep them waiting.”

She hurried through her bedchamber and into the nursery. “Hide the babies,” she ordered. “My father is here, and I am afraid he intends no good.”

The nursemaids stared at her.

Martha had followed her into the room and now she said, “Hurry. Ann, you take Master William. I’ll bring Miss Christabel.

Flora, take the pram out the back door by the stables and run as fast as you can into the woods, then walk along the other side of the lake.

If they catch up with you, say that our lady was worried about the wheels on the rough ground, and you were testing the pram. ”

As she spoke, she was stuffing clouts and other baby supplies into a bag.

Distantly, Clem could hear a cascade of knocks on the front door.

“Hurry,” she repeated, wondering if she was doing the right thing in trusting Martha.

Once again, her common sense and her instincts conflicted. On the one hand, Martha had betrayed her before—though not, to her knowledge, recently. On the other hand, Clem would swear that Martha loved the babies. And there was the matter of her engagement to the footman…

“I am trusting you with my heart,” she told the maid.

“I would never betray you or Mr. Satterthwaite, or the twins,” Martha declared, and Clem believed her.

Downstairs a second cascade of knocks followed the first, louder and more peremptory.

“Go,” Clem said. They went by the servants’ door, which would take them downstairs to the basement. Clem didn’t ask where they were going. She had no practice lying. If she knew and lied about it, her father would see it on her face, and she had no idea what he might do.

She returned downstairs, and nodded to the footman. “Answer the door as soon as I am in the parlor,” she said. “Then send my father to me.”

Father entered the front door ranting about the footman’s tardiness and threatening him with dismissal. She hoped her servant knew it was an empty threat even if he hadn’t been following his mistress’s orders.

More footsteps sounded behind Father’s.

She didn’t hear what the footman said, but she heard Father’s reply. “In the parlor? Good. She can stay there. You two, guard the parlor door. You two, follow me.”

Clem darted out of the connecting door to the dining room and from there peered into the hall. A glance told her that the footman was attempting to forbid Father the stairs, but two of the men with him were forcing him out of the way.

Hurrying down the service passage that connected dining room to kitchen, she told the servants there to arm themselves with brooms or anything else they could reach and to follow her.

“I believe Mr. Wright has come to take away my son,” she said. She could not think of any other reason for this assault.

She sent the boot boy, to the stables for reinforcements, and then she raced up the servants’ stairs, her servants behind her.

They took the door into the main passage through the bedchamber section, fearing that Father would be before her, but the boot falls from the floor above told her that the intruders had continued upstairs to what would normally be the nursery floor.

Thank goodness! That gave them a bit more time. All they would find was the perfectly appointed nursery Father had been shown on his visits, ready for when the babies no longer needed to be fed during the night.

Good. The more time Martha and Ann had to get away, the better.

“Search this floor and then the rest of the house!” Father roared. “I want my grandson!”

“Mary, Gareth, with me,” Clem said, her mind racing. “The rest of you, back to your work. Don’t try to prevent the search. If anyone asks you where the babies are, say you don’t know.”

“We don’t know,” said the cook, either in obedience or because that was the truth.

Before the tramp of feet reached the staircase again, Gareth had taken both cradles down to the storeroom in the basement, and Mary and Clem had hidden the bedding and anything else that looked as if it might belong to a baby under the bed, which had been pushed into a corner, but was now back in the center of the wall, with a dust sheet thrown over it.

At a cursory glance, the room was now unused.

She and Mary left the room by the servants’ door just as Father and the men with him began searching that floor. Clem had one more thought. “Mary, send a groom to go after Mr. Satterthwaite. Tell him that Father has come to try to take Master William away from us.”

That done, Clem settled herself in the parlor, and took out some needlework. Her heart was pounding. Her mind went over and over every step she had taken. What next? The babies would need feeding again within the next two hours. Could she put Father and his men off before then?

Where had Martha taken the children? Would she give them up to Father? The questions were all unanswerable. She could only wait, sitting there calmly with her mind racing frantically while her father rampaged through her house.