Chapter Eighteen
W hen the carriage drew to a stop, Viv turned her mind from the troubling questions about Lark’s history and connections. Haxton admitted her to the house and confirmed that Neville Pridmore had come and gone. Her ladyship was resting. Haxton’s sober countenance gave Viv little hope that the doctor’s visit had produced good news. She went directly to Lady Melforth’s bedroom.
Her ladyship sat propped up against her pillows with a stack of papers in her lap. Sarah occupied Viv’s usual chair beside her ladyship’s bed, and oddly, she, too, had papers in her lap.
“Now, Sarah—” Lady Melforth broke off. “Ah, Viv, what did you discover? Does the Green Park chapter need any changes?”
“Perhaps a word or two about Buckingham House, but that’s all.”
“Excellent. If you will add those details and give your pages to Sarah, we’ll send everything to Dodsley this afternoon.” Lady Melforth sank deeper against the pillows and waved a hand in Sarah’s direction. “Go, Sarah, you know what to do.”
Sarah rose and collected the papers from her ladyship’s lap and passed Viv with a low murmur but without a glance. Sarah’s manner, furtive and almost ashamed, puzzled Viv. For months they had worked together keeping her ladyship’s spirits up. Sarah’s realm had been Lady Melforth’s clothes and hair, and Viv’s had been her writing and correspondence. Sarah had never looked at the book as far as Viv knew.
Viv remained where she stood. “Ma’am, may I ask how Dr. Pridmore’s visit went? Did he have anything to prescribe for your comfort?”
Lady Melforth turned her head fitfully against the pillows. “The man was quite useless. And conceited. He made me play silly finger games. I had to make my fingers look like his, hardly scientific.”
It didn’t sound scientific, but Viv wondered what Newberry would have to say about the doctor’s approach. “So, the doctor had nothing to recommend?”
“Carriage rides. As if shaking my bones would steady my nerves. I told him a donkey cart might give me a good shaking, if that’s what I need.”
“Did Dr. Newberry say anything?”
“He left me to my fate. Watched that fellow as if the man were a genius.”
“Oh dear.” Viv’s shoulders sagged. She had hoped the new doctor would suggest a way forward. She had no doubt that Lady Melforth’s complaints were in proportion to her dashed hopes at the doctor’s unhelpfulness. “How disappointing!” Viv moved a few steps closer to the bed.
“How useless!”
“But you were able to work after he left?” Viv tried to suggest a ray of hope.
“With Sarah’s help. Now, Viv, you be sure to get your Green Park pages to Sarah today. She has all my instructions for Dodsley.”
“Should I not go?” Viv worked to keep the surprise out of her voice. It made no sense to send Sarah to Dodsley. In the last couple of days her ladyship and Viv had worked together steadily to put the finishing touches on the manuscript. Viv had read key passages aloud and detected no dissatisfaction with her share of the work.
“No.” Her ladyship’s voice was sharp. “It’s all settled. Just do those pages.”
“Of course. Is there anything I may bring you?”
“Nothing. I’m going to rest now.” Lady Melforth closed her eyes.
Viv shut the door as softly as she could. Her throat ached with a sudden sorrow. Somehow, she had lost her best friend. She found Jenny waiting for her in the hall. “Dr. Newberry is in the downstairs drawing room, miss.”
“Oh Jenny, thank you. Could you send tea?”
Jenny nodded, and Viv’s spirits lifted. She trusted Newberry to give her a better picture of the situation and some idea of how to help her ladyship.
In the green drawing room, Newberry stood by the mantel. He turned to her at once.
“Where were you this morning? We could have used your help.”
Viv halted, taken aback by his brusque manner. “She sent me off on an errand. She did not want me present for her meeting with your colleague.”
“Hmmph,” he said, his expression still cold.
She sat, expecting him to do the same, but he remained standing by the mantel.
Jenny appeared with a tea tray and set it on a low table in front of Viv. When Jenny left, Viv nerved herself to ask about the meeting with the specialist. “The meeting did not go well, I take it.”
“She refuses to accept that anything is wrong other than her foot.”
“But your colleague believes otherwise?”
“She didn’t tell you? Pridmore told her she was seriously ill.” Newberry came away from the mantel and sat opposite her. She hoped it was a sign that he was letting go of his anger. “He suspects, as I do, that she has the shaking palsy. A fellow named Parkinson identified it in a paper about twenty years ago. There is a better understanding of the disease now, of course, but no cure.”
Viv’s spirits sank under the dreadful news. For the Traveling Viscountess to be confined, to be unable to move freely in the world was a terrible fate. “Is there nothing that can be done for her?”
“The French have developed ways of relieving some of the symptoms.”
“Like carriage rides?” Viv poured a cup of tea and offered it to him.
He took the tea. “Did she give you her opinion of that idea?”
Viv nodded. “What is the thought behind the rides?”
“Apparently, vibrations can calm the tremors, even for several days. But the disease is progressive and ugly. Over time it takes away the voluntary control of muscles. There’s much more to be studied, including the effects on the brain. ”
Viv took up the teapot, seeing in her mind the spilled chocolate on her ladyship’s dressing gown. “What does she need?”
He put down his cup and answered, his gaze cold and hard. “She needs a great deal of care and compassion and a companion who is present, not gadding about London with her betrothed, if indeed he is your betrothed.”
Viv put down the teapot. “You doubt him?”
“The only E. Larkin I can find in London is an Edmund not an Edward and he’s a married greengrocer in Islington. So, I doubt that your Mr. Larkin is the Duke of Wenlocke’s secretary or book dealer or whatever he claims to be. Whoever he is, what matters is that you’ve had entirely too much freedom to run about with him. I never thought I would side with the Strydes, but since that man arrived, you’ve neglected your duties shamefully. Perhaps you only took employment to find yourself a husband.”
Viv’s anger rose in response to his, but she did not attempt a defense to which he would not listen. He did not understand the writing fellowship that she and Lady Melforth had shared. He did not understand how they had laughed together and how telling stories and finding the right words had been a shared venture. He did not understand how finishing the book was a way of supporting Lady Melforth.
He rose again and returned to the mantel, leaning an elbow on it, staring down at her. In his angry countenance, she hardly recognized the ally she had relied on for months. “I’ve read the introduction to your so-called guide for ladies,” he said. “Apparently, you have no idea of the behavior proper to a lady or of the sphere in which a lady belongs.”
Viv wondered if he understood that he was condemning Lady Melforth as much as he was condemning Viv. It was time to end the conversation. She rose. “The manuscript of the book, written under her ladyship’s direction and with her full approval, goes to the publisher this afternoon. I am now free to attend fully to her ladyship’s other needs. If you have anything to add to her regimen for her comfort, it will be done.”
She turned and moved to the door, looking back only to say, “You’re wrong, you know. Whatever you have come to believe about me, I have met Mr. Larkin’s duke, and there is no doubt that they are bound together by the closest ties.”
By the time she reached her room, Viv shook with suppressed anger. Her world had gone mad. No one was who she thought they were. She had apparently mistaken everyone’s character, even Newberry’s. The doctor was not the friend she had assumed him to be. Lady Melforth was changing before Viv’s eyes perhaps because of her illness. Even Sarah had altered. And Lark remained the biggest mystery of all. She had defended him against Newberry’s attack, but she did not understand how both the rough, bearded man from the darker regions of London, and the lofty Duke of Wenlocke could claim a hold on him. One minute Lark was her easy gentleman companion, the next he was lost in contemplation of the Penitent Woman’s Hospital, which held some meaning for him.
She needed to settle her mind, and finish the last bit of work on the book. She had promised Lady Melforth not an hour earlier that she would get it done today. Now it seemed even more vital that their guide be published. She crossed the room to her desk, and stopped dead.
Her desk had been cleared. The manuscript, which Viv had arranged in neat piles, one for each chapter, and a pile each for the front and back matter of the book, was gone. Not even the chapter on the Green Park, to which she meant to add her notes, remained. There was a scrap of paper with a note in Sarah’s hand. D ON’T WORRY. I ’VE TAKEN IT ALL TO D ODSLEY AS L ADY M ELFORTH WANTED .
*
Wenlocke gave some last order to his coachman and climbed into the carriage beside his wife. Whatever their plans for the evening had been, and Lark had not thought to ask, the duke and duchess had entered fully into the scheme of recreating Lark’s experience of losing his mother. Across the coach from Lark, the duchess made a shadowy female figure. For the memory experiment, she had subdued her radiant beauty, dressing somberly in an old gray gown, blue wool traveling cape, and a black bonnet that obscured her golden hair and pale face. She wore a pair of rings on her right hand.
“Ready?” Wenlocke asked, taking his seat beside his wife, and glancing at Lark.
Lark nodded, a mad hope surging in him that the memories would come at last. He would either go to Viv a gentleman or part from her a thief.
Wenlocke knocked on the roof to signal the coachman, and the carriage rolled into motion. The duchess lay her head against the duke’s shoulder in feigned sleep.
Lark, too, closed his eyes and leaned back against the squabs, letting conscious thought go. Against his closed lids, light flickered from gas lamps. His body rocked with the steady motion of the coach. Street sounds faded in and out of notice. His mind played with snatches of conversation from the long afternoon of talk about their early days together.
Lark had sold his shoes and coat and acquired a rusty knife before he met the gang of boys led by Wenlocke, who was then simply Boy , Robin’s name for him. In those first weeks in the streets, Lark had learned to say little to avoid being marked as soft, as prey, and above all to avoid being collared by bigger, rougher men. He had moved west through the city, seeking familiar streets, away from the docks where he had wakened alone. Wenlocke told him that on the first day he had noted both the quality of Lark’s remaining garment, a pair of wool trousers, and the smell of the docks that lingered in his hair and clothes. The gang had offered him food and showed him how they moved unnoticed on the rooftops of the rookery they called home. Lark had slept warm that night for the first time in weeks. He soon abandoned his search for his past life.
Now memories of those days swirled in Lark’s mind as the coach rolled on. Streets and turnings became indistinct, the well-mapped London of his waking searches became shifting shadows, shafts of light, and spells of darkness. He let his hands fall slack against his thighs, let his head sway to the motion of the coach, emptying his mind, becoming again a drowsy child safe in the company of his parents .
The journey lasted minutes or hours before the coach made a wide turn and slowed to a stop, the horses blowing slightly, harness jingling, leather creaking. Lark opened his eyes to dark figures in motion, low male voices, and the woman being half-lifted from the coach, her body listless. One of her boots caught against the doorframe. She made an incoherent murmur, and the men carrying her lifted her slightly to pass through the door. For an instant the figures blocked the open carriage door, plunging the interior in darkness. When they moved, light broke through, and Lark saw the hospital behind its iron railing.
Somewhere deep in his head a man’s voice spoke. “Don’t drop her, for God’s sake, Sneath.” Another voice replied. “Not this cargo, eh Cap’n. Worth ’er weight in gold she is.”
The words cleared the fog in Lark’s mind. Understanding snapped into place. His mother had been a victim. His father, a captain, had paid a man named Sneath to assist him in locking her up. Lark was in motion before the next thought formed. She could be there yet.
He hurled himself from the coach past the duke and duchess, intent on reaching the hospital entrance and pounding the door down. As he reached the steps, Wenlocke snagged his arm in an iron grip, hauled him back, and pinned him against a stone pillar marking the opening in the railing. Lark tried to shake him off, but could not break Wenlocke’s hold.
“I take it,” said Wenlocke, “that you remembered something.”
Lark’s chest heaved, a muscle throbbed in his jaw. His breath came and went in gusts. He worked to free the words in his head. “You were right. My mother did not go voluntarily.”
“Good man.” Wenlocke did not release him at once.
“What if she is in there?” Lark asked, the words a hoarse whisper from his constricted throat.
“We will get her out.”
For a moment Lark simply stared blindly, as if bricks and stone could be peeled back to reveal his mother. Then his gaze returned to Wenlocke, a man who knew what it was to be a captive. Wenlocke had said we as if they were again rooftop companions.
“Pardon me.” Lark shuddered. “I thought I was prepared for…anything.”
Wenlocke released his hold and stepped back.
They returned to the coach, but Wenlocke gave no signal to drive on. Both he and the duchess regarded Lark somberly. “Can you tell us what you remembered?”
Lark repeated the words that had echoed in his head. Wenlocke congratulated him again.
“We will begin tomorrow. If there are any patients who have remained in care since you were abandoned, we will find them. If your mother is not among them, we will check the hospital’s admittance records for the year you came to us.”
“I don’t know her name,” Lark said.
“You know that your father was a captain. You know he had help from a man named Sneath. We will question any staff from that time who remain. Someone may remember the unusual circumstances of your mother’s admission. I expect that when she recovered her senses, she protested her confinement.” He paused. “If she left the hospital, there will be a record of her leaving.”
“And the authorities will just open their doors and their books to our scrutiny and allow the hospital staff to be questioned?” Lark asked. He still liked the idea of pounding down the door.
The duchess gave him a gentle smile and tucked her hand through her husband’s arm. “He is a duke, you know, and dukes are quite looked up to by heads of institutions that depend on charity. Never underestimate the power of a duke with funds to bestow.”
“If we have no luck tomorrow with our first inquiries,” said Wenlocke, “we’ll find fellows to do more record checking, parish registers, Navy and Army rolls. Do you remember Finch? He’s a clerk in a law office now and knows other clerks who are always hungry for a bit of extra work. And—” His wife checked the rush of her husband’s thoughts by kissing his cheek. “That is,” he finished, “if you want to continue the quest to find your mother and find your people.”
The search for her, for them, had consumed Lark since the great fire. Now he saw that his search had been a selfish one. His only thought had been to prove himself a gentleman. He had never imagined that his mother’s suffering had led to his abandonment.
Wenlocke signaled his driver, and the coach began to move. By the time the coach reached his lodging, Lark knew only that he had to make sure that his mother, if alive, was not confined to that hospital or another. Then, it would be time to decide whether he wanted the whole truth about his past. Before Viv Bradish, he would not have hesitated. Before Viv Bradish, he had wanted the truth to raise him up. Now he needed the truth for his mother’s sake whatever the cost.
Wenlocke stretched a hand across the coach, and Lark took it. “You’re back, man. We’re glad.”
The duchess added her smile. “You are not a lost boy anymore,” she said. “You’re one of the duke’s men, always welcome in our house.”
Lark climbed out of the coach into the night. The coach rumbled off, a brief disturbance in the quiet street. Astonishment kept him standing on the flagstones. Wenlocke’s powerful grandfather had tried repeatedly to deny his grandson’s legitimacy, to erase his very existence, but Wenlocke had refused to be erased. In time, the truth had come to light. Now Wenlocke offered the same chance to Lark, the chance to find out who he truly was. And with that knowledge he would go to Viv.