Chapter 2
“So, you’ve come back from the home of that degenerate dissident, have you?”
Frazer Shelidan, Maria’s father and the Earl of Sunspire, was tall and thin with gray hair, bushy eyebrows, and a hooked nose. When he tilted his head, he looked like a raven, staring down at her from the length of a sharp, stabbing beak.
“I have come home after visiting with the Dowager Countess of Thornwall,” Maria corrected, standing in the doorway of his study.
“That harpy?” he scoffed.
Steeling herself, Maria walked confidently into the room, stopping to pick up two empty wine bottles.
At least, the two that he had consumed in here.
Though judging by his speech, that may have been the limit of his drinking so far.
A cool breeze stirred the curtains where the window had been broken.
Maria’s eyes searched the room for anything amiss, noting quickly the absence of a bronze bust of Shakespeare. That must have been the item her father had hurled through the window. The same bust that cracked the roof of Evelina’s trap.
“A woman who poisoned her husband,” her father said, upending another bottle over his open mouth.
When the last of the red liquid had pattered onto his tongue, he hurled it against a bookcase, showering the leather spines with glittering glass.
“She did no such thing,” Maria said calmly. “Please step away from there before you cut yourself on broken glass.”
“Do you think I care about being cut on glass, girl?” he roared. “You have fatally wounded my honor and my name with your reckless behavior!”
Maria had taken hold of her father’s elbow to steer him towards the door, but this criticism was a needle. Anger and injustice of the remark brewed within her, threatening to boil and spill over. She bit back the sharp retort that was just on the tip of her tongue.
“I could not turn a blind eye to his adultery,” she said, forcing her voice steady. “What damage would that do to our honor? Or to my reputation? I took the only action a woman with any pride could take, Father. The only action I thought you would want me to take.”
“You should have obeyed your father. Before you are wed to a husband, your father is your lord and master. Decreed by God. You defied me! You are wicked!”
“I am hardly wicked, Father.” Maria placated, turning away from him and picking up a book that had been thrown to the floor during a drunken temper tantrum.
“I see now that I was right in my initial judgment. You are too easily influenced, and those witches that gather around the Dowager Countess of Thornwall are the cause of all your most undesirable traits. When I think of the girl you were while your mother was alive…”
“Please, Father, let us not talk of mother,” Maria said wearily. “It only ever seems to agitate you more.”
She wanted to let out her anger at his behavior, vent her frustration.
But she controlled it. To express her fury would do no good; it had never done any good.
From her mother, she had inherited her love of justice and fairness.
From her father, she had inherited a tinder-dry temper that could ignite in a moment.
“What agitates me will no longer be your concern. You will go to Northumberland. For the rest of your damnable life, in fact!” he roared.
Maria was dumbstruck. She stared at her father, gaping. He stood before her, quivering with rage and inebriated infirmity. His eyes were wide, and spit flecked the corners of his mouth.
Maria backed away. “You cannot make me,” she faltered.
“The wheels are in motion. Your belongings were packed while you were away this evening! You leave at first light.”
The man flung himself into an armchair and laughed.
“I did not say you could not plan to make me. I said, you cannot actually make me,” Maria said firmly, pointing a finger at him. “You think I will just abandon my friends and my boy Gilbert and meekly go into exile?”
“Gilbert? The urchin that you fawn over in that damned poorhouse?”
“It is an orphanage, and he is an orphan through no fault of his own. Something I think I would be better off being!” Maria snapped, losing control. She could bear her father’s venom when it was directed toward herself, but the task when infinitely more difficult when it was aimed at someone else.
“You will go, or I will cut you off! I will buy up this wretched orphanage and destroy this cesspool of peasantry that takes up so much of your time. I will buy it and close it!”
An icy fist closed around Maria’s heart.
Her mouth was suddenly dry. The finances of the orphanage were always precarious.
The trustees may well be tempted to sell it to her father, and he was certainly capable of lying to them about his intentions.
But would he leave orphans on the streets of London? Could he be so cruel?
She saw the answer in his face. He could.
“You are drunk, and you are angry,” Maria said, her voice steady despite the turmoil stirring within her. “I understand how disappointed you must be. But there will be other eligible gentlemen for you to marry me off to.”
Speaking those words made Maria shrivel inside.
She had allowed the engagement to Landsdowne to be arranged because he had seemed charming and kind, honorable and noble.
She did not think she could trust like that again, but she needed to placate her father.
There was more at stake than her freedom.
The future of the orphanage hung in the balance.
“This is not a negotiation,” he said. “I have told you what options you have.”
Maria bit the inside of her cheek, desperate to find some escape from the horrible options presented to her.
I cannot believe he would go through with it. Not once he is sober and has calmed himself.
But the doubt remained. Even if the threat was unlikely, she could not risk putting the orphanage in danger.
“Very well. I will do as you ask,” Maria said. “I will go to Northumberland and show that I am obedient to your wishes. You do not need to take out your anger at me on the orphanage.”
Her father slumped down in the chair. The drink he had imbibed was suddenly overtaking him, as though his rage had drained any resistance he might have had to its influence.
She knew this was the beginning of a rapid decline into unconsciousness.
Ever the dutiful daughter, she stoked the fire, helping him into slumber with its warmth.
She then retrieved a woolen blanket from a chest kept in a cupboard. His eyelids were drooping by the time she spread it across his legs.
“You will go, or you will be damned,” he muttered as his eyes closed.
“We shall see,” Maria whispered.
Her eyes went to the portrait of a lady with tumbling brown hair and pale, gray eyes. Her face had the same heart shape as Maria’s. A deep sigh tore from Maria, and her chest ached with longing.
“I am sorry, Mother. He is not the man you married. I could not keep him so, and I cannot stay if it means leaving Gilbert and the other children.”
She left the library, her mind working furiously. If she took the trap and told the staff that she was driving herself to Northumberland, that was the story that would be told to her father when he awoke. He would consider her exile complete, which would give Maria the gift of time.
Time in which I must make sure that the trustees of the orphanage are not tempted to sell to him. That he cannot put his hands on it. When he is sober, he will likely think better of it, but I cannot take the risk that he does not change his mind.
She clung to that hope as she went in search of Elmsworth, the butler, to put her plan in motion.
Then, she was driving away from Sunspire into the night. It took two hours to reach the Willow Street orphanage, south of the Thames and beyond the fringes of Kennington.
She rapped at the tall entrance door, waiting impatiently for the night nurse to open it. She recognized the woman on duty, Rosie Martins, as soon as the door was opened.
“I’m sorry, Lady Maria, but you can’t come in,” she said, London strong in her accent.
“Whyever not, Rosie?” Maria demanded.
“It ain’t safe, your ladyship. Fever’s here. It’s run through the children like a wildfire in summer. Doctor Drayford has said there’s to be no one in or out.”
“How is Gilbert?” Maria asked urgently, feeling guilty for focusing on one child over all the others, but unable to help it.
Mary shook her head. “Bad, my lady. Doctor Drayford don’t give him much time left.”
Sudden desperation gripped Maria. Her world was unraveling, pulled apart a thread at a time by her father’s drunken malice. “Then, you must let me see him! Please, Rosie!” she implored.
Gilbert was her life, someone she could care for and love unconditionally. Someone who would return that love just as unconditionally. To lose him was unacceptable.
“Rosie, I will break in if I have to. I am deadly serious,” she said when Rosie hesitated, looking over her shoulder at someone behind the door.
Maria heard heavy footsteps. Then, the door was pulled wide, and Doctor Alexander Drayford stood there. He was dark-haired and saturnine with a permanently weary expression on his face; his features seemed to hang from his bones.
“It is at your own risk,” he said. “I do not know if this is typhoid, cholera, or influenza. I take no responsibility if you break quarantine.”
“Agreed,” Maria said, stepping into the doorway and forcing the other two to step back or be trampled.
She strode through the antiseptically clean corridors to the dormitory.
The room was dark, and the children asleep, those who weren’t coughing.
Gilbert was one of the latter. Maria’s heart broke at the sight of his flushed, sweating face.
She sat by his bed, taking up a cloth that had been left in a bowl of water beside it, using it to mop his brow.
“There, there. Why are you awake, young man?” she whispered, smiling. “You should be dreaming of lovely days and nice things to eat, eh?”
“I’m hot,” Gilbert spluttered.
“I know, sweetness, but you won’t be for much longer. Doctor Drayford and I are going to make you all better. And Rosie, of course. And all the other ladies.”
She put a hand to his forehead and smiled through the flinch she felt inside at the heat. Maria smiled, keeping her hand on his hand until she felt his head sink back into the damp pillow.
“There, there, little man. You must be ever so sleepy. Will you have some nice dreams and tell me all about them?” Maria whispered.
He nodded, his eyelids beginning to droop.
“Will you stay?” he whispered.
Maria thought about lying in order to comfort him.
No. I will never lie to him. The world he is stepping into is full of liars. I will not be one of them.
“I cannot stay, but I will be back…”
She stopped, realizing that she was about to break her own commandment. She knew she would be back in the morning. Probably the next day, too. But the future was uncertain. She could guarantee nothing because she did not know how far her father’s anger would take her. How long it would last.
“I will be back, and we will have breakfast together,” she said emphatically, determined that this, at least, would be true.
She couldn’t say when, but she was resolute that it would happen. It seemed enough. The little boy’s eyes slid shut, though he was still wracked by occasional coughs and splutters. She hummed a wordless tune to help him off to sleep and stayed by his side until Doctor Drayford came to her.
“If you wish to help, there is something you can do,” he said. “We need supplies urgently. Quinine in particular. If we do not get these supplies, many of these children will certainly die. Gilbert will be among the first.”