Chapter Ten #3
Gabriel looked surprised. “You will come with us, of course. You said you needed to do some shopping.”
“Yes, I suppose so…but what about Jim?”
“He will come, too. I expect he would love a trip to London. And Nicky will have a companion for the long journey.”
“But do we know his father has indeed passed on? We cannot just pick a child up like a stray puppy and transport him out of the parish.”
He looked thoughtful. “You are right. I shall investigate the matter more fully.”
He turned to Callie. “Princess, can I interest you in a game of cards? And Ethan, perhaps Miss Tibthorpe would offer you a game of chess. I noticed last night she seemed more than a little acquainted with the game.”
A few moments later Callie found herself frowning over a hand of cards, trying to recall the rules of bezique. With no apparent effort he had everyone sorted: Tibby’s employment, Callie’s future, her son’s education, Jim’s, too, and their entertainment for the evening.
“Why would you concern yourself with the education of a chance-met orphaned fisher boy?” she asked him, playing a card at random.
He glanced at the portrait of his great-aunt.
“It’s Great-aunt Gert’s legacy. She was a great one for taking in stray, unwanted boys.
I suppose that’s how Mrs. Barrow ended up working for her—they were kindred spirits from opposite ends of the social scale.
Great-aunt Gert took me in and Mrs. Barrow took in Harry.
” He played a card. “Great-aunt Gert shaped our futures and Mrs. Barrow mothered us.”
“But I thought Harry was your brother.”
“My half brother,” he corrected her. “Born on the wrong side of the blanket. We had the same father, but Harry’s mother was a maidservant. When she found herself increasing, my father paid the village smith to marry her.”
“Oh,” she said, then didn’t know what to say, because she could hardly ask him whether he was born on the wrong side of the blanket, too. She put another card down.
“My mother was married to my father,” he told her. “But they’d been having tremendous rows at the time, and both of them had been unfaithful, so when she told him I was not his true son, he believed her.”
“But that’s dreadful!” she exclaimed. “How could she do that to him? And to you?”
He shrugged. “I believe their marriage was famously tempestuous. Or should that be infamously?”
“What do you mean, you believe? Didn’t you know?”
“No, they reconciled when I was three, and again when I was six, but my father would never allow my mother to bring me home on any of these occasions. I was kept in London. He refused to tolerate the sight of me, even though she insisted I really was his son.” He shrugged. “He never believed her.”
“But that’s terrible.”
“Not really. He had no reason to trust her word; her infidelities were almost as legendary as his.”
Callie frowned. “Then how—” she began, then stopped. She’d been about to ask the most impertinent question. She bit her lip.
“How do I know I really am my father’s son?” he supplied. “And I warned you about that lip-biting—you’re doing it all wrong. D’you want me to show you again?”
Callie felt her face flame. “Stop that!” she hissed. “Not in front of other people!”
He heaved a sigh. “You are hard on a man, you know. Now where were we? Oh yes, you were wondering how I know I wasn’t really a by-blow,” he reminded her, and before she could inform him she was wondering no such ill-bred thing, he continued, “Harry and I are a few months apart in age, but the resemblance between us is noticeable. Does that explain it?”
It did. Obviously, with two different mothers, the resemblance must come from his father.
But it didn’t explain why he and Harry had grown up together, and why Great-aunt Gert had raised him, and why Harry had been a wild child.
She had no difficulty understanding why he’d described himself as a needy child.
Any child would, in such an appalling situation.
“You said you and Harry had grown up together.”
“Yes, Great-aunt Gert took us both under her wing.” He jerked his head toward the severe woman in the painting. “My father’s spinster aunt, a bold tartar of a woman who most people were frightened to death of.”
Looking at that portrait, Callie could well imagine it.
“She descended on my mother’s London residence one day, marched up to the nursery, and simply confiscated me.
Told my mother she wasn’t fit to raise any child, let alone a Renfrew boy, and that she, Great-aunt Gert, would do it from now on.
She picked me up—literally, I was about seven, I think—handed me to her footman like a parcel, and swept us off in her carriage. ”
Callie was shocked. “But didn’t your mother fight her?”
He shook his head slightly. “Mama didn’t say a word. It was probably a relief to her to have me out of the way.”
Callie couldn’t believe the lighthearted way he spoke of it. “I would kill anyone who tried to take my son from me.”
He smiled. “I can believe it. But Great-aunt Gert was not a woman to be gainsaid. Most people were terrified of her.”
“And no wonder, if that’s how she behaved. Poor little boy. You must have been terrified.”
He trumped her card. “I was at first, but it wasn’t long before I learned that under that Attila-the-Hen exterior, Great-aunt Gert had a heart of the purest gold.
She was, quite simply, a darling.” He glanced at the portrait and raised his brandy glass in a toast. “To Great-aunt Gert, who made me the man I am today.” He drank.
Callie watched the movement of the strong column of his throat as he drank. Great-aunt Gert had much to be proud of.
“And Harry the wild child?” she asked, after a moment.
He set his glass aside. “Harry was a lot like Jim when I first met him—a wild little ragamuffin. But Great-aunt Gert had him educated—educated both of us together and sent us to our father’s school, much to Father’s fury.
He had us removed in the end, so Great-aunt Gert sent us to Harrow instead, which angered him nearly as much. ”
He grinned reminiscently. “Great-aunt Gert was a radical with no opinion of the airs and graces of the aristocracy. She was also a crushing snob who considered a Renfrew—even a bastard Renfrew—superior to any other being. She left me her fortune, but she left a legacy for Harry, too, and my share has a dozen stipulations. Miss Tibthorpe’s employment will fulfill one of them.
It would have delighted her to have a fisher child educated with a royal prince.
And she would have liked your boy a lot.
Great-aunt Gert admired courage above all else. ”
They were to leave for London immediately after breakfast. Callie and Tibby had packed their meager belongings and their cases were waiting in the hall.
Kitty-cat yowled angrily from a strong wicker basket, one ginger paw swiping furiously at anyone rash enough to pass close enough.
Juno sat nearby, sniffing occasionally at the basket and watching interestedly as the ginger paw swatted at her in vain.
Breakfast was a quiet affair. Mrs. Barrow had done them proud, with mounds of bacon, eggs, deviled kidneys, and smoked kippers, lashings of toast, and hot, fragrant coffee, but nobody seemed to have much of an appetite except for Gabriel.
“Mr. Gabe!” Mrs. Barrow burst into the room. “Sir Walter Tinknell is coming down the front drive with a couple of his men, and there’s other soldiers with them—half a dozen—foreigners, I reckon, and all on horseback.”
They all hurried to the window to look. Sure enough, a small cavalcade was coming down the driveway.
Two men rode at the head. One was red-faced, elderly, and fat, dressed in a tight blue coat with large gold buttons and riding a smart bay hunter.
The other was beautiful, blond, and elegant: a picture of masculine perfection.
Slender, lithe, yet with a sleek power, he rode a magnificent black stallion as if born on horseback.
A thin golden mustache lined his upper lip.
His uniform set off his fair good looks, being black and heavily frogged in gold.
He wore a bell-topped shako with a gold coat of arms and a curled feather.
Callie felt her insides freeze. “It’s Count Anton!”