Chapter Thirty-One #2
“No, dear,” Mrs. Keyes said, amused. “I am the housekeeper of Foxcourt House. Celine is our cook. The boys are our footmen,
and Felicity is a maid. It’s not about keeping up appearances for you but for everyone else.”
“We all perform different roles,” Mrs. Silver added, “sometimes in service of the kingdom, and sometimes only in service of
each other and our home.”
Hugh ran a hand back through his hair, and Mrs. Keyes patted his arm fondly, in a purely maternal gesture.
What a dark, strange, but deeply interesting life Hugh had lived. Nothing at all like the staid, politely torturous upbringing
so many of his rank had. There would always be some new layer of soul to pull back, some hidden corner of his life to discover.
Mrs. Silver held out the rag to Hugh. “Come help your wife, mon chou.”
“No, really . . .” I began, but Hugh was already taking her place, accepting the bloodied rag from her.
“I’ll fetch her a new night rail and open one of the rooms upstairs,” she continued. “Perhaps the peach one? Horrid color,
but no windows.”
After a moment’s hesitation, in which he seemed to draw in a long, soft breath, Hugh took my hand lightly in his, turning
the palm up toward him. The sensation of his calloused fingers sent a now familiar curl of warm sensation up my arm.
Damn him. I’d nearly been carried off and had watched an assassin posing as a housekeeper kill a man with a needle no longer than my
finger, and my body still reacted to his nearness.
I started to pull back, only to stop when I noticed that the rigid lines of his face were relaxing as he dabbed at the blood
coating my fingers. The whole of his formidable attention was fixed on my upturned hand, on his careful, delicate work.
“Don’t tell me Fleming is an old pirate or world-renowned thief,” I said lightly.
“No, dear,” Mrs. Keyes said. “He’s a butler with a nervous complaint who only knows a more pleasant shading of the truth where
our pasts are concerned. Mrs. Silver and I found each other in the war and came here to start again. Felicity wanted to seek
out life in town. The boys were merely orphans Lord Foxcourt took a liking to.”
I took her meaning at once: I was not to tell him anything different. Not because they didn’t trust him, but because they
didn’t wish to distress him.
“Cartwell is one of my uncle’s former spies,” Hugh added. “Now retired. Mostly.”
“This is a house that keeps its secrets,” Mrs. Keyes continued, “and holds them without judgment.”
I shrank back into the silence, trying desperately not to look at the body sprawled on the floor. I knew Hugh felt the tremor
work its way through me as he stroked the damp cloth over my palm. His voice was deceptively calm as he asked again, “Who
was that man?”
“I don’t know.”
His hand stilled.
That suffocating feeling of panic returned. The truth had been buried in me for so long, it was a moment before I could find
the words to unearth it.
You are safe here, I told myself. And even if he despises you for it . . . it will only be another reason to sever this.
“I don’t know,” I repeated. “I only know that he and the men who tried to take me at Briarwood Palace were Stone Sloggers.”
Whatever Hugh had been expecting, it clearly hadn’t been that. Even Mrs. Keyes edged closer, looking as startled as she was
likely capable of.
“Stone Sloggers?” Hugh said. “I wouldn’t have expected Glenmoor to hire them—”
“He didn’t,” I interrupted. “They came here on my father’s orders.”
There.
There it was.
I felt no freer, no lighter, for having said it. There was no relief in the truth, not with the ghastly look of surprise on
Hugh’s face or the way his hands slowly retreated from mine.
“Your father is Michael Lockwood,” he said faintly.
“That was the man my mother married,” I told him. “She named him as my father in the parish records, but the ceremony occurred
after my birth.”
Mrs. Keyes didn’t look surprised so much as concerned. “How in the Devil’s name did your mother become entangled with Robert
Greystone?”
“It happened before he became—” I paused, folding my hands together tightly in my lap. “It happened before he became the Robert Greystone. When she met him, he was a solicitor for Charles Walsh, who was only just making a name for himself as a
smuggler and the leader of a fencing syndicate. They fell in love, but she spurned him when he suggested they elope against
her father’s wishes.” I bit my lip. “She told me she’d rejected him because she’d sensed a sort of . . . growing darkness
in him. He accused her of not wanting him because he wasn’t wealthy or powerful enough.”
“And so, he killed Walsh and seized his fledgling underworld organization to prove her wrong,” Mrs. Keyes finished, looking
faintly impressed. “Expanding to gambling, protection rackets, extortion, murder for hire, and brothels. Ambitious, to be
sure.”
“My mother discovered she was pregnant around that time,” I continued weakly. “But she wouldn’t go to him, not after what
he’d done—well, I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on that.”
There had been all-out war within the ranks of Walsh’s old gang as the old man’s second- and third-in-command had fought Greystone for control of the group. Blood had run in the streets for months.
“She was afraid Greystone might try to use me in some way or take me from her—to punish her for her rejection, I suppose,”
I said. “So, she disappeared into Riverside, and she was able to support herself for a time at a workhouse there . . . and
then she met Michael Lockwood.”
“I see,” Hugh said after a moment.
I shook my head. “You don’t. Not entirely.”
Standing on trembling legs, I made my way back to the washstand, where I had dropped the letter. The pool of blood was spreading
ever toward it. For a moment, I was tempted to let it consume the old parchment and devour its secrets.
Instead, I retrieved the commonplace book and brought both over to him. “This slipped out from the pages.”