Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Kendrick found the boy preparing to slip out Fernside’s back door with just the clothes on his back and a wholly inadequate coat.
“Fletcher!” Genevieve exclaimed in a voice full of surprise and hurt. “Where are you going?”
It was clear where the boy was going. He had a cap pulled low over his head and a cloth of indeterminate origin wrapped around his neck as a scarf. To top it off, he clenched his jaw to still the quivering of his chin.
“It’s night and raining still,” Genevieve continued, confused and upset. “And what about Wulfric? Were you going to leave him?”
“A man doesn’t sneak off without a word. He bids his friends adieu when he takes his leave,” Kendrick said.
“Ain’t no reason for me to stay among reavers,” the boy said, jutting his chin out.
“Fletcher, are you calling my word into question?” Kendrick asked mildly.
To his credit, the boy’s eyes widened in surprise. “No, guv.”
“Good, because I might have to challenge you to a duel.”
“Kendrick!” Genevieve exclaimed.
“Coo!” Fletcher burst out. “You off your head, guv?”
“No, Fletcher, I’m very serious.” Kendrick opened the door to the butler’s pantry and gestured. “Let’s discuss it together, shall we?” He set a calming hand on Genevieve’s arm when she would have opened her mouth to protest. Trust me, he said with his eyes.
Even though her expression was drawn and worried, Genevieve bit her lip and nodded.
It was as if the floorboards under him had shifted, throwing him off-balance. His wife was willing to put her trust in him. Kendrick swallowed, determined to prove himself worthy of it.
Genevieve wanted the boy safe. But safety was not what Fletcher wanted most. So they would have to meet him where he was.
To Fletcher, Kendrick said, “If you want to have this conversation in front of the kitchen staff, we can, but I thought you’d want a bit of privacy.”
Fletcher stuck out his chin and stalked into the room.
Kendrick and Genevieve followed him in. Shutting the door, Kendrick took a seat in one of the threadbare armchairs and set his hands on his knees.
“Tell us why you want to leave,” he said simply, watching the boy’s pride war with a yearning he likely had no name for.
“I’m better, and the tykes have their mum back. There ain’t no reason for me to stick around, guv,” Fletcher declared. His voice was firm and full of cockney bluster, but he wouldn’t meet their eyes.
“Our invitation isn’t enough?” Genevieve asked, clasping her hands together in her lap. Her knuckles were very white.
“Ain’t taking charity, mum.”
“You need to earn your keep? Pull your weight?” Kendrick asked. “What if I told you I had a reason for you to stay?”
Genevieve turned a confused gaze on him.
“Like what?” Fletcher said, grudgingly curious.
“We need you.”
“Nobody never needed me, guv,” the boy said in tones of deep scorn. “Most tried to get me to scarper double quick.”
“To their own detriment,” Kendrick said seriously. “For you are a clever, loyal lad. But it is true. I suspect we need you.”
“What do you mean?” Genevieve asked, looking from Kendrick to Fletcher.
Kendrick leaned back in the chair and said to her, “I think we need a connection to humanity more than we admit to ourselves. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that episodes of madness have occurred in younger and younger vampires confined to the Ossuary, but I have maintained my equilibrium.”
“I lived in the Ossuary and never had a problem,” Genevieve said, working through his thoughts.
“But you could get out…and you had the children and Fletcher.”
Genevieve’s eyes lit up in understanding.
“If we lose the tether to humanity, we lose everything. One of the ways to do that is to maintain connections to the human world—and human people.” Kendrick turned to the boy, who had followed his exchange with a frown. “Fletcher, we need you. You helped Genevieve stay sane these last few years.”
“I ain’t saying I won’t visit,” Fletcher offered uneasily. “But these houses ain’t for the likes of me. I’m no toff.”
Genevieve leaned forward, the lines of her body tense. “Fletcher, do you think they’re for me?”
“’Course.”
“I grew up in a far humbler home than Carmine House. And for the last few years, I walked into the East End to mind children and wore a badly dyed dress twenty years out of style because I could not afford a new one—you know that,” Genevieve urged.
“I lived in a hole underground with nothing but what I kept in my pockets to my name. We are not all that different. If our house is not for you, then it can’t be for me. ”
“Don’t be fooled by a grand facade,” Kendrick said. “The truth is that for years, the house that is now mine was an unwholesome pit of despair. It is the thing that is unworthy of my wife and of you, Fletcher. But we are in the midst of a great work to mend what is now in ruins.”
Fletcher shook his head, his gaze darting around the room. “Still—”
Kendrick pressed, “But if I tell you that beyond our need, beyond any apparent worthiness, that we want you to stay with us—”
“You don’t want me, guv!” Fletcher blurted out.
Kendrick saw the tremble in Fletcher’s lower lip that he tried so hard to stiffen. The bravado had cracked. Just a little, but enough.
“Fletcher,” Genevieve said, her voice anguished. “Yes, we do! We do!”
He reddened but stiffened his shoulders. “You do, but he don’t! I ain’t his son.”
There it is, Kendrick thought. He propped his chin on his fist, staring at Fletcher intently. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“You—you don’t want a cove who ain’t your blood—who don’t even know who his people are—”
“Don’t tell me what I want,” Kendrick said flatly.
“You think you’re unworthy because you’re not our blood?
Are only sons of the blood allowed to lodge with us?
If so, Genevieve and I will have a very empty house.
Didn’t I make you promises, Fletcher? Didn’t I swear to lodge and protect you?
Perhaps I imagined you accepting my hospitality in return. ”
Fletcher swallowed hard, his shoulders hunched. “You only did that ’cause she asked.”
“Be very careful,” Kendrick said, leaning forward. “You come perilously close to calling me a liar, Fletcher. A man’s honor and reputation are the most important things he possesses. Tell me what I have done, in word or deed, that led you to believe I don’t want you.”
Fletcher’s mouth opened and closed, finally at a loss for words.
“You think I don’t want a superfluous child underfoot, perhaps taking Genevieve’s attention?
Let me tell you something, Fletcher. In days long ago, a lord would send his son to be fostered, raised by a tenant or another lord, and would take in another man’s son and raise him in order to strengthen the bond of kinship and alliances between them.
Families are not forged by bonds of blood alone. ”
“Are you having me on?” Fletcher demanded.
“My father wrote about it in his book The Banished,” Genevieve said. Her eyes were shining with emotion.
“I’ll show you when we get home tonight if you are still calling my honor into question.” Kendrick sharpened his eyes on Fletcher and waited.
It did not take long. Fletcher’s chin trembled. “You don’t know what I done,” Fletcher burst out. “I nicked from costermongers. I stood lookout for cracksmen. I told off mutton shunters, picked pockets, piked off—”
“You walked Genevieve back from the East End for months in the dark. You looked out for children who weren’t as canny as you when you were only a little older than they were.
You survived hell on your own. But you don’t have to anymore.
Don’t you know you’re our boy? We want you to stay with us, Fletcher.
If pride demands you be useful, fine. But we want to be your home. ”
A gamut of emotions passed over Fletcher’s face as he blinked hard, fiercely trying to keep tears away.
Kendrick stood and gentled his voice. “You’ll always be able to choose, but a hard-hearted man it is who turns his back on a warm hearth to walk back out into a storm. Come inside, Fletcher.”
Fletcher swallowed. “You’re not witching me? You really want me to stay?”
“I’ll never lie to you, Fletcher, and if I were ‘witching’ you, you’d be in front of the fire with a cup for wassail already,” Kendrick said dryly.
The last of Fletcher’s defenses broke. With a sob, he threw himself at Kendrick.
He wrapped his arms around the small scrap of vital humanity and held him tightly.
Genevieve had had to hold herself back as Kendrick had spoken to Fletcher.
Her mind had been thrown into a spiral at the idea of the boy going back to his itinerant and uncertain existence.
Fletcher couldn’t go, he just couldn’t. It had been different when she had had to leave him to return to her own precarious and dangerous existence.
But she had a home now. A safe place to land. A guarantee from Kendrick that vampire households would be protected and safeguarded. How could Fletcher want to go back? And to leave his dog?
It was fear, she realized halfway through the conversation with herself. Fletcher was just as afraid as she was. But she was afraid of losing him. He was afraid to hope.
She knew all about that sort of fear.
So she knew that she could not hold tight to him to keep him from leaving. Fletcher had to decide to stay of his own free will.
So she had let Kendrick talk.
That was his gift, after all.
And hadn’t he been the one to free her from her own fear?
When Fletcher broke and threw his arms around Kendrick, Genevieve could not hold back her own tears. She opened her arms and wrapped them around them both, the human boy who had stuck to her like a shadow and the man who had given her back her hope.
“Thank you,” Genevieve breathed, pressing her head against his shoulder.
Kendrick’s arm wrapped around her tightly. He had heard.
“Cor, you’re like to squish me to death. Let a body breathe,” Fletcher complained. “Blimey, missus, is that blood leakin’ out your eyes?”
Genevieve sniffed and dabbed at her cheeks.
“Don’t be alarmed. I’m just a little teary.
” She brushed Fletcher’s hair out of his face.
It was too long and managed to get into the most ridiculous tangles now that the grime was no longer weighing down the thick waves.
“Let’s go home, shall we? We’ll have to get you your own room,” she said with a trembling laugh.
“Once we have the furniture. Oh, I didn’t think I could be happier tonight.
” She shared a glowing look with Kendrick, who smiled.
“Gonna have to hire a cook if I’m to stay with you, missus, or send out to a chophouse. Meals ain’t your strong point,” Fletcher said with a quick grin. “It’s been soup, soup, soup.”
Unable to resist, Genevieve brushed a hand over his hair again. “That’s because you were sick.”
“But nobody at your house eats.”
“That’s true. We will need a cook for you—but we’ll need other people as well.
” If Kendrick was indeed right that vampires held on to their sanity and maintained an even equilibrium for far longer when they interacted with humans, it would make sense to set up a household similar to Fernside, with humans for staff to handle the daylight business.
“Perhaps a housekeeper, a footman, and a maid for the daytime, though I think we would have willing staff for the evenings…”
Fletcher tilted his head. “What about Sally?”
Genevieve sighed. “I’ve been meaning to go back and explain that I can’t look after the children anymore…”
Fletcher shook his head. “Naw. I mean, for that housekeeping job.”
Genevieve’s gaze shot to Kendrick as the idea blossomed in her mind. “Fletcher. You are brilliant. What would we do without you?”
Just then, a commotion at the front door carried down into the kitchens.
Fletcher’s eyes widened. “Maybe they have news about the bad cove.”
Hand in hand, the three of them hurried towards the din. As they reached the upper hallways, the occupants of the parlor also spilled out into the hall.
The searchers entered Fernside, much grime-covered and annoyed, and recounted the events for all assembled.
When they had reached the terrace house in Chelsea, they’d found it abandoned.
Further, parts of it had been sabotaged to collapse and had collapsed, leading to their bedraggled state.
Thankfully, no one had been harmed beyond what vampirism could repair.
Joseph accepted Genevieve’s offered handkerchief and wiped his face. “Laurent must have realized that Elspeth had bypassed his control over her and fled ahead of us.”
Genevieve’s shoulders slumped in discouragement. “So what do we do?”
“We keep looking,” Kendrick said grimly.
Etienne, looking as mad as a wet cat, pulled off his pince-nez as his blond hair dripped down his nose. “How? The rain continues. We will not find a trace of him easily, if at all.”
“He can’t hide forever,” Kendrick growled.
“Why don’t we do what the humans do?” Joseph suggested.
Etienne and Genevieve stared at him blankly, but his meaning dawned on Kendrick. He nodded slowly.
“Offer a reward.”