Page 15 of To Defend a Damaged Duke (Regency Rossingley #2)

Few people were about at this time of the morning, either toiling elsewhere, trying to scavenge enough blunt to put food on the table, or in their cots sleeping off the excesses of the night before.

If the clacking wheels of the hoity-toity carriage hadn’t roused them from their pits and set window drapes twitching, the earl’s costume, a headache-inducing lavender, certainly would.

Though capable in a fight, Tommy’s preferred tactic was to avoid them altogether.

Given there were plenty to be had in these parts, and he’d been embroiled in enough to last several lifetimes, he’d had the foresight to bring burly Sidney along.

Up above them on the driver’s bench, Tommy heard him pointing out what was left of the ruined White Hart to the earl’s groom.

Rossingley gave Tommy’s hand another squeeze. “Are we using the element of surprise? Is our devious plan to creep up on them?”

Full of enthusiasm—and possibly one barley sugar too many—he’d chattered non-stop since they’d set off. No wonder his long-suffering valet usually demanded to sit up top with the groom. Nonetheless, Tommy had been grateful for the distraction.

“Hardly,” he answered. “A crested coach and four rather trumpets one’s arrival in these parts.”

“Goodness gracious, darling. Are you telling me there are alternative modes of transport available?”

“And, believe it or not, less dazzling waistcoats too.”

As Rossingley smoothed down his pristine coat, Tommy smothered a grin. His nerves were brittle twigs, ready to snap; bringing the earl along had been a good idea.

“Tell me, which part am I to play? Dick Turpin or Black Bess?”

“Neither, Lordy. We’re searching for answers, that’s all. And as I’m sure your horribly exclusive education taught you, the most straightforward way to obtain them is to ask nicely.”

The earl tapped his lips. “Hmm. Very dull though. How about you begin, all affable and mannered, and then I march in looking tough and rough, demanding their money or their lives?”

Tommy shook his head at his ridiculous, dearest friend. “Lordy, you are dressed in a lavender coat and gold tasselled Hessians. And I am on a quest for neither money nor lives.”

“Yes, but they don’t know that, do they?”

The groom opened the carriage door, and Tommy alighted, then busily adjusted his hat to disguise the tremor in his hands.

The earl fairly flew down the steps, nimbly skipping around a pile of horse dung. “Lay on, Macduff!”

“I said no fighting, Lordy! Your role is to stand behind me and look suitably grave. And allow me to do the talking. You have very little experience, I’d wager, in communicating with individuals not of your class.”

“I assure you,” contradicted the earl, “I discuss my diary with my valet and my first footman in great detail every day. I’m a very much down-to-earth sort of fellow.”

Tommy sighed. “Yes, but not this earth. I meant speak with them as my equals and friends.”

Rossingley’s lip curled in disapproval, and Tommy saw a flash of the steel usually kept hidden behind the fey facade.

The earl wrapped soothing fingers around Tommy’s arm.

“My dear,” he said. “When you resided here, no one was your equal. And the bed bugs were better friends to you than this woman and her son.”

*

THE SMELL IS what did for Tommy. A bilious collision of stale sweat and cheap scent wafted down the steep staircase as a skinny lad still awaiting his first whiskers led them into a dingy parlour.

A familiar but no less unpleasant bouquet of fried onion and cabbage took over.

Cold fear snaked along Tommy’s spine. He gave an involuntary shudder.

“You don’t have to do this,” murmured the earl, his comforting palm resting at the small of Tommy’s back. “I’m perfectly capable. You could wait in the carriage.”

“I know. But I’m fine.” Tommy swallowed. “We shall only be a few minutes.”

As they waited for the mistress of the house, a raucous squeal sounded above their heads, followed by a heavy tread.

Bed springs squeaked, and a door slammed.

Light feet ran up a staircase. Familiar noises all of them, curdled into nothing, blending into the background like the ticking of a clock.

Nonetheless, they plunged Tommy back in time.

For an instant, he imagined himself up there amongst them, forced to his knees, on all fours, or pinned against a wall.

Feeling like a passenger in his own body, he swallowed again, digging his nails into his palms. A few minutes might be all he could stand.

Ma Duggan hobbled into the parlour on the boy’s arm, a desiccated ruin of her former self. Pickling herself in sufficient quantities of laudanum to fell an ox had left their indelible stains on her. As had the ravages of time. And still, Tommy had a dreadful feeling he might faint.

She eased into a sagging armchair, her breathless exhale echoing around the room.

“He’s a pretty one, Tommy,” she observed as if resuming a conversation broken off only minutes before, not ten years. She squinted up at the earl’s incongruent costume. Rossingley coolly examined her back.

“You always did have a taste for the upper orders, mind. Ain’t you learned anything?”

As the lad slipped out noiselessly, low murmurings—too hushed to make out the words—came from the hallway outside. Ma Duggan’s ferret-like eyes drifted over to the door, then back to Tommy. She took her time looking him up and down.

“Always had ideas above your station too. You might fool the nobs in that fancy coat, Tommy. But I’ll always know what you are. And how you got there on your knees, one cock at a time.”

Such derision in so few words. With such capacity to wound.

“Tommy has always fended for himself. He gave up waiting for crumbs to fall from anyone else’s table a long time ago.”

Rossingley’s words dripped like icicles. In a leisurely fashion, he examined his lowly surroundings with the dismissive air members of the aristocracy seemed to glean from their mother’s breast milk. “It appears you have very few crumbs left to offer.”

She lifted a shoulder with contempt. “A hog in a silk waistcoat is still a hog. And a whore is still a whore.”

Like a storm rising from his belly, Tommy’s hatred for this woman grappled with his fear.

He counted to ten very slowly, fists itching to join the conversation.

But fisticuffs wouldn’t forward his cause.

And though the noise outside the door had stopped, he wouldn’t make the mistake of assuming the hallway was empty.

“Your accounts of the comings and goings at the Hart,” he demanded. “Back in 1813, when it was raided. Were they burned in the fire?”

The woman’s dead eyes closed in a slow blink. “Now, Tommy lad, why would you come sniffing all the way over here asking me about an old thing like that?”

“It’s a simple query, that’s all. A polite yes or no would suffice.”

She tilted her head to one side. “What’s in it for me?”

“Blunt. The exact amount depends on what information is on offer.”

Money conversed in a broken, impoverished language; Tommy and Ma Duggan spoke it fluently. She moistened a cracked sore on her lower lip with her tongue while her busy brain weighed up the odds.

“They burned, all right. Along with everything except the clothes I was stood up in.” She tapped her head twice. “But this in here wasn’t so smoke-addled.”

“And you’ve recently shared that information with someone else,” Tommy stated.

“Mebbe I have,” she countered with another shrug. “Visitors are the sort of thing that slips out the mind ever so easy-like.” Making the universal sign of rubbing her knobbly forefinger against her thumb, she said sharply, “My memory needs to see the colour of your coin first.”

“And it shall,” interjected Rossingley. “You have my word.”

The air was stifling in the cramped room as if the unhappy spirits of those less fortunate than Tommy loitered in its dim and dusty corners.

He reached for his purse and extracted five sovereigns. “A taste of what’s on offer. Perhaps that might poke it.”

In a blink, the coins disappeared into the folds of the woman’s dress.

“A gentleman came calling, fishing about. Too much of a nob to be a runner. He pretended to be a madge.”

“And?” Tommy prompted, his pulse quickening.

“And so we came to an agreement. All respectful-like. He gave me some dough, and I gave him what he wanted.”

“Which was?”

“Not any of my young sodomites. Not even you flashing your arse would have tempted him.”

Her poor joke landed flat. Tommy waited, and after a beat, she added, “He wanted a list of who was here the night of the raid.”

Whilst Tommy digested this piece of information, Rossingley paced towards her, stopping a couple of feet away.

“Humour me, Mrs Duggan,” he said, hands clasped behind his back. “And you shall be even more handsomely rewarded. Would you be a dear pet and run down all the names on that list?”

His long fingers tapped on his wallet.

“He was on it, of course.” She cocked her head in Tommy’s direction. “And his pal, Sidney. Don’t know if he ever got out of Newgate. I’d be surprised after what they did to him. Bloody heathen he was anyhow. Good riddance, I say.”

Tommy congratulated himself on leaving Sidney to guard the carriage. Otherwise, Ma Duggan might well have uttered her last words ever, and Tommy would be none closer to discovering the identity of their mystery blackmailer.

Rossingley smiled at her, baring his teeth. “Do go on, pet.”

“Then there were the two Jimmy’s. ‘Sally’ was what we called one of them so we could tell them part.

Both dead now. One the pox, the other starved in the workhouse.

Young Will Thompson—I think he’s pushing up daisies too.

And my own boy Dickie. He’s still going strong. Thick as a barn door but strong.”

“Very good.” As Rossingley rustled the folds of his wallet, she was almost salivating. “And now the names of the paying customers, if you will?”