Chapter Ten #2
She smiled down at him, stroking his hair and cheek.
“The fine lady looked at the baby and saw he was the most beautiful child she’d ever seen and she loved him with her whole heart straightaway.
So she took the baby home and showed him to her handsome, kind husband and asked if she could keep him and look after him forever for the poor woman in rags who couldn’t look after him anymore.
” She turned her head away and coughed discreetly into her handkerchief.
“Go on, Mama,” Gabriel pleaded.
Mama wiped her mouth. “The fine lady’s kind husband said they must try to find the poor woman first, and she could only keep the little baby if they couldn’t find his real mother.
The kind husband looked and looked, and he paid people to look and look, but no one could find sight nor sound of the poor raggedy woman.
So the kind husband said the fine lady could keep the little baby as her own to bring up as a brother to their own little boy. ”
“Was the ragged woman a witch and the baby a prince?” Gabriel asked, eyes wide with awe. Lately Mama had read him a frightening witch story which had stuck in his mind.
Mama shook her head. “No, my love. The poor ragged woman was running from some great fear that was menacing her. She wasn’t a witch but she might have been running from one.
She was a Frenchwoman, for she spoke only in French to the fine lady, which is a foreign tongue that you don’t understand as yet.
So the fine lady knew she was from France. ”
“Where’s France?” Gabriel asked. “Is it where the dragons live?”
Mama smiled. “No dragons in France, my love. But a horrible ogre who might well have been chasing the ragged woman.”
“Did it want to eat her baby?”
Mama shrugged. “Who knows, but the baby was safe with the fine lady and her kind husband from all the ogres in France, and grew up into a handsome boy with hair like spun gold, loved by everyone who knew him.”
She turned over his hand to reveal his wrist. “And the baby had an angel’s kiss on his hand so the fine lady knew he was sent by God.”
Something about the way Mama was looking at him alerted Gabriel, and he considered this story with a frown. “I have an angel’s kiss, don’t I? Am I…am I that baby?”
She nodded. “You are, my lovely boy, my gift from God, my little prince. He put me there on that street so I could save you from the sort of place where you would have grown up hungry and in rags. The Frenchwoman, who gave you to me, saw that I would take you in and love you as my own. She was very wise, although it must have broken her heart to have to give you up, for I’m sure she loved you just as much as I do. ”
This had taken some digesting for a seven-year-old, but Gabriel had lived a secure, much-loved childhood. “So she was my mama too? As well as you?”
Mama nodded. “She was, but she was very poor and she wanted better for you. She wanted to give you what she couldn’t.
So she gave you to me, and I have loved you twice as hard—once for me, and once for your mother who loved you so much she gave you up to me.
” She stroked his face. “But never forget, my little golden angel, that there are people who don’t live like us, people who are so poor they can’t feed their children and who have no shoes to wear when it’s cold. ”
“Was my ragged mama so poor she had no shoes and food?”
Mama nodded. “She was very poor. If he’d found her, your papa would have given her a house to live in and paid for food and clothes for both you and her if we could no longer have kept you. We would never have let you return to being poor.”
The vision dissolved.
“Your mother was a very kind person,” Phoebe said.
Gabriel nodded. “She was. She died less than a month later. Before she went, she told my father what she’d shared with me, I suppose in case it affected my behavior. When she was gone, he took over her role. He’s been a more-than-kind father.”
“Then why don’t you go to him to ask for money for your orphanage?”
He shook his head. “Because I want to do it myself. I don’t want to do it off his back. I don’t want to do it using money I have no right to.”
Phoebe frowned. “I’m not sure stealing is quite doing it by yourself.”
“I only do it to people I’ve asked to donate to my orphanage and who’ve refused.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“No, but I did ask your Aunt Fanny a long time ago, and when she heard it was for poor children from the streets of St Giles, she refused. Some people are of the opinion that the poor are only poor because they’re lazy and won’t work.
That their situation is their own fault.
They think it’s a crime to be poor and that people do it to themselves and should be able to get out of it without any help.
But I’ve been into the St Giles Rookery, and I’ve seen what it’s like for myself.
First hand. I’ve seen the filth, the squalid streets, the tumbledown houses you wouldn’t keep a pig in, the thieves, the prosti—the beggars.
The nearly naked, starving children. You wouldn’t believe…
” He stopped himself, aware that he was close to ranting, his voice rising.
Also that Atkins might be able to overhear him.
But Phoebe was looking up at him as though hanging on his every word. “Don’t stop. Tell me more. You make your case very succinctly.” She then spoiled this by dropping her reticule and almost falling over as she attempted to reach for it.
Gabriel picked it up for her.
She smiled, more than a little red faced, as she took it back.
“I do wish I was less inclined to drop things and trip. Please don’t let me stop you.
I need to know more about this St Giles.
” She gazed up into his eyes. “For a start—how is it you were able to walk the streets there without danger to yourself? Surely you would stand out, in your fine clothes, amongst these people?”
“I go in disguise.” He touched his bruised face. “And looking like this will only make it easier for me.”
Her eyes lit up. “You disguise yourself?”
No doubt she had some romantic notion that going about in disguise made life more exciting. He had half an idea to take her there and show her what it was like. She might not think it romantic once she’d seen it for herself.
Instead, he steered the subject back to the Frenchwoman.
“When my father gave me the description of her—he’d written it down at the time for his hired man to see—I inquired everywhere for her.
But it all came to nothing. I went into the heart of the St Giles rookery, on my own search, and what I saw there that made me want to help the children.
I might have been one of them myself, but for my mother. ”
She nodded. “I think I understand. But perhaps you weren’t working with good information. You never know. I think we should surmise that if the information your mother supplied your father with didn’t work back then, so close to when it happened, then it was perhaps not correct.”
“You think my mother might have lied to him?”
“It’s possible. She sounds as though she really wanted to keep you.” She gave a little, almost secretive smile. “I myself might lie if it meant I could keep something I really wanted.”
“Why, Lady Phoebe, you shock me.”
“Not quite so much as you shock me with your soubriquet and double life.”
“Touché.”
“So, who else might know what your Frenchwoman was like?”
Gabriel’s brow furrowed. “My mother was at her dressmaker’s.
It’s possible that lady saw the meeting, but I don’t know anything about her other than that she had her business in Soho Square over twenty years ago.
And if my mother was out in her carriage, she would have had her maid with her.
And a coachman, and probably a footman too.
She never went out without an entourage suitable for a duchess. ”
Phoebe nodded, her face suffused with triumph. A little soon for that. “Then we must find those servants and question them. Do you know their names?”
Gabriel cast his mind back. “My mother’s personal abigail was Miss Hawkins. She’s now the housekeeper at my father’s house in Grosvenor Square and known as Mrs. Hawkins, although she’s not married. You think she might be able to help?”
Phoebe shrugged. “She might. It would depend both on her memory and on what she actually saw. We can’t know until we ask her.”
“We?”
She frowned. “Well…you. I can hardly call on your stepmother in Grosvenor Square and ask to interview her housekeeper. Surely you’re well positioned to do something like that?
” She paused. “And what about the coachman and footman? Or it might have been a groom if horses were concerned. Where are they now?”
Gabriel tipped his hat back on his head and squinted at the sunless sky. “God alone knows. I might be able to discover their names from my father. I suppose Mrs. Hawkins might be able to tell me herself.”
These were good suggestions. It hadn’t occurred to him before to consider he might be laboring under a misapprehension.
Belief in what his mother had told him had clouded his vision.
Of course she might well have lied to keep him for herself.
But did that make her a bad person? He refused to think about that.
She was long gone, and there was little he could do about it now.
He refused to allow it to spoil his memories of her.
They walked in silence for a couple of minutes, passing couples like themselves with maids in discreet tow, nursemaids with children and babies, several street vendors calling out their edible wares. A normal day, and yet not normal at all.
Phoebe broke in upon his reverie. “Can you take me with you?” Her eyes shone with interest. They were quite beautiful, with little gold flecks amongst the deep brown. “I mean, into the rookery? Can you?”