Chapter Ten
The park thronged with people. Most were out in all their finery taking advantage of a rare dry day to promenade where they knew they could be seen and remarked upon.
Gabriel had been there enough times as a small boy with his adoptive mother, although that had been when he’d thought her his real mother.
Since then he’d been brought back by a succession of governesses.
More recently, as an adult, he’d been avoiding it.
Since setting up the orphanage he’d found the ostentatious splendor of the world he’d been brought up in more and more distasteful.
In the distance, gentlemen were driving their curricles to show off to one another how splendid, and expensive, their cattle and vehicles were, and to demonstrate their manly prowess to the strolling ladies, of course. His lip curled in scorn.
Phoebe giving his good arm a tug brought him back into the moment. “Well, if you wish me to help you, then I think you should tell me a lot more about yourself.”
Startled out of his reverie, his eyes widened. “There’s really very little to tell.”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t mean things like where you went to school and your favorite dessert.
I don’t need to know any of that. Although, while we are on the subject, my favorite is ice cream.
I haven’t had it here in London, at Aunt Fanny’s, but Papa had Cook make it all the time for me at Coakham.
” Her voice fell as though she hadn’t wanted to think about Coakham and her papa.
A polite person would distract her from her memories, even if so doing meant he had to delve into his own. “What do you want to know then?”
She seemed to pull herself together. “While I’m interested in what you are doing with your orphanages, there’s one thing that interests me more.
I think I’d like to know more about this Frenchwoman who gave her baby to a stranger and then was never seen again.
I feel she’s quite a mystery. And I’ve always fancied myself good at solving mysteries.
Although my experience so far is purely literary. ”
They were walking under the lime trees now, all of them sadly bereft of leaves. He recalled being disappointed by them as a child, as he’d expected them to bear actual limes, a fruit he’d come across growing in Wentworth’s hothouses.
She squeezed his arm. “Have you not wanted to find out more about her yourself? To discover your true origins? As they seem to have been the catalyst that’s inclined you to philanthropy.”
He pursed his lips for a long moment before turning to look at her. Their pace slowed. A few couples passed them and, behind, Atkins politely slowed as well. An admirably tactful maid.
“Of course I would like to know more about her, and I’ve tried from time to time, but I’ve been unable to discover anything.
” He paused. “I had hoped that if I became more au fait with the world of the rookeries it might lead me to clues about the French émigrés who settled there, but I’ve discovered nothing useful, as yet.
It’s as though she never existed. Or that she just vanished back from whence she’d come and was lost forever. ”
Phoebe nodded, perhaps glad to be able to pursue this topic.
“I suppose we must allow for the fact that she could be dead by now. We have to remember that. But the fact that she is supposed to have been a Frenchwoman makes me think she might be easier to find than an ordinary denizen of your rookeries. Although she might not be from there at all, of course, and also if she was there back then, she might not be there now. That might be why you can’t find her.
My old governess, Madame Dupont, herself fled France at the time of the Terror.
She told me there are societies that reconnect French émigrés with each other even now. Have you tried one of those?”
He nodded. “I have, with no success. They tend to cater for the aristos, not the working classes.” He paused.
“She might as well be dead indeed, for all the clues I’ve never found about her.
” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice.
Records of deaths within the rookeries were notoriously badly kept, as he’d found to his shock.
“Well, to begin with, how do you know she was from the rookeries?”
He frowned. “Because I was told she was, I suppose. I’m not sure how my mother knew…” For the first time he considered that what he’d been told might not have been accurate.
Phoebe’s eyes narrowed. “You said your mother thought you were a gift from God?”
He nodded.
“Has it ever occurred to you that she might not have wanted your real mother found? That it was in your adoptive mother’s interests to make sure that didn’t happen? She might have paid her off, for example, bought you, really. Or she might not have instigated a thorough search.”
It seemed Phoebe was thinking along those lines as well.
“Do you have any kind of description of her?”
He nodded. “From my father, not my mother. I was only seven when she died. And I was in shock that the woman I’d loved all my life was not only dying but also wasn’t my real mother. I didn’t even think to ask her.”
“What about your father? Did he see her?”
Gabriel shook his head. “He wasn’t with her. She’d been to her dressmaker’s in Soho Square, which is very close to Denmark Street and St Giles. It was he who set up the search for her.”
“Then he must have had a description to work with.”
“He did. I’m not such a fool that I didn’t ask him when I decided to look for her myself. He said she was short, with graying hair and a sullen expression. He told me she was ugly.”
Phoebe’s eyes widened. “And she produced a son that looks like you?”
He felt himself blushing.
She went on. “Tall and, I must say it I’m afraid, handsome.”
“Well…” For some unaccountable reason, this line of questioning was making him feel very awkward at the same time as glad that Phoebe saw him as handsome.
“So perhaps she was your grandmother,” Phoebe said, with a note of triumph. “Rather than your mother.”
“It’s possible, I suppose.”
She nodded. “We should treat it as an option.”
This had also never occurred to Gabriel. He began to think that it was a good idea to get fresh eyes on the problem. Phoebe was clearly a very intelligent young lady with an eye for clues. Very much his sort of young lady. A warm glow started somewhere in his chest and spread through his body.
But he had no chance to enjoy it. Phoebe had moved on. “Does it make you angry that she never came back for you?”
He stared across the grass towards where the Serpentine lay, as yet invisible and only marked by the crowds along its banks.
“I don’t know. I suppose I must be at least a little bit angry.
I loved my adoptive mother dearly. She was a wonderful woman, but she died when I was only a little boy. So, in a way, I’ve lost two mothers.”
“Quite remiss of you.”
He frowned, a little annoyed by her lightness of tone. “I don’t find it a laughing matter.”
“Neither do I. But neither losses were your fault. You talk as though their loss lies at your door. Tell me. What exactly did your adoptive mother say to you before she died? I know it was a long time ago, but word for word if you can do it. That in itself might be a clue.”
She seemed to want to solve the mystery of his existence very much.
He couldn’t deny that the thought of someone else sharing his search pleased him.
Especially her. He quite overlooked the fact that she was the only one who even knew about his search.
Unless you counted his father, who probably suspected.
He shrugged. “I was only a child, remember, and she was dying. It’s hard for me to recall exactly.
” He paused. “I didn’t even know what it was that that was killing her, not then, but she was ill for at least a year, growing steadily weaker.
I found out much later that it was a tumor that was eating away at her insides.
” He paused, an image materializing before his eyes.
“My clearest memory is of her lying on the pink chaise longue in her bedroom reading me stories, with the sun streaming in through the window onto us.”
Phoebe, seemingly unmoved by the touching vision he’d conjured, nodded. “Go on. Think. What did she say to you?”
Gabriel frowned as he thought back. Ambrose, being so much older, had already been away at school, and only he, Gabriel, had been at home.
Of course his father, no, his adoptive father, had also been at Sherborne.
He’d not left to go anywhere at all throughout Mama’s illness, but he’d often had estate business to attend to, so the long hours after luncheon had been Gabriel’s alone. His special time with Mama.
He could see her now, her hair a cloud about her beautiful, drawn face.
He saw the pain in her eyes, and the sharp grimace on her lips whenever she tried to move, the blood on her handkerchief when she coughed.
He was sitting beside her on the chaise longue, the book she’d been reading to him finished, when she’d asked him if he’d like her to tell him a story herself.
Of course he’d agreed. What small boy wouldn’t? He loved stories and she could tell such good ones about giants and dragons and magic.
It was raining outside and in his head he could still see the raindrops racing down the windowpanes, as though the sky itself were crying for Mama.
She hugged him close, her body warm and strongly scented with roses, but the smell of sickness was still there, behind the sweetness. He snuggled against her, used to the smell as an integral part of the mama he loved.
“Once upon a time,” she began, “a long time ago, a fine lady was outside her dressmaker’s house when a poor woman in rags came running up to her with a little baby clutched in her arms, wrapped in a shawl.
When the poor woman saw the fine lady’s kind face, she knew her baby would be safe with her, so she gave the fine lady the baby and asked her to look after it. ”