Chapter Three
Earlier that morning
“Lady Charlotte. Lady Charlotte. Please, you must wake up.”
Charlotte groaned as she was shaken forcefully from her sleep. When she opened her eyes, she was met with the darkness of her room, illuminated only by a single flickering candle. Why, in God’s name, was someone in her bedchambers?
“Please wake up. You have to help Freddie.”
At her baby brother’s name, she bolted upright, panic replacing the grogginess.
“Why? What has happened to Freddie?” Charlotte looked frantically around the room until her eyes fixed on Rowley Calthorpe, her brother’s best friend.
“You’d better come see for yourself, my lady.”
Rowley stood and held the candle aloft so she could find her wrapper and slippers. She followed him through the familiar halls of her family’s London townhouse.
Their only house. It hardly needed a locational qualifier when all the other family holdings had long gone up in proverbial smoke.
And even this house was teetering perilously close to alternative ownership.
It scarcely even resembled the home it once was, with all its trappings of elegance stripped away in the hopes of fetching a passable price.
In the last two years, since their father, the eighth Earl of Elford’s passing, their country estate had been forfeited, their extensive stables auctioned off, and every memento of their family’s past brilliance pawned; and still, there was no money.
Charlotte managed to make ends meet, but just barely.
She had ensured that the solicitors, before they had to be dismissed, secured a stipend to provide for her youngest siblings’ tuition at Eton.
She did not want Marcus and Henry to be left with no resources in the world, and as she knew, education was worth all their former properties put together.
In the first year, she had managed to economise the household well enough.
There had always been enough food, and she was able to retain a few of the core staff.
Now, however, they were down to nothing.
No butler, no cook, and the single maid-turned-housekeeper, turned beast-of-burden, had quit three months ago.
In the last year, things had gone from pinched to dire at an eye-watering speed.
She had sold everything of value they owned and tried to take in mending, though her own skills with a needle and thread made such an endeavour completely unproductive.
She had taken to pretending not to be in residence so that her old friends and acquaintances could not realise the depths to which the Aston family had fallen.
Finally, she’d applied for a job at the newspaper. She’d paid the last of her week’s grocery budget to a young actor to go to the paper and act as her stand-in, presenting her writing samples as his own and promising to submit timely editorials as long as he could do so by post.
Blessedly, the newspaper had desperately needed fresh new writers, and Charlotte was paid a modest sum for each weekly editorial she submitted.
While not extravagant, the steady flow of income allowed her to keep food in their bellies and a roof over their heads.
She thought she had come up with the path to their salvation and that nothing could endanger them again.
She had been mistaken.
She knew that now, standing over the prone figure of her brother, Frederick, the current Earl of Elford. He was sleeping, sprawled on the bare carpet of the drawing room floor.
She had stood like this, watching him sleep so often as a young girl.
Her mother had died when she was young, and her father had remarried a kind but rather flighty woman four years later.
When Freddie was born, Charlotte thought he was the most angelic creature she had ever laid eyes on.
He had their father’s light colouring with lovely starry blue eyes and soft, delicious cheeks. She could stare at him for hours.
The young man lying before her was a ghost of that darling boy.
He had stretched out and become gangly but not very tall—a product of his lifestyle, she was sure.
Their father had been a tall and imposing man.
Looking at him now, it was like looking upon a stranger.
Freddie already had the paunch of a much older man past the bloom of youth, and his face was gaunt and sallow, no doubt from the countless nights of revelry and the excess of drink.
He smelled foul, and his clothes were in tatters—though they were far too new and fine for their modest budget.
Charlotte had to close her eyes briefly to curb her anger at his careless excess.
It had been this reckless behaviour that had gotten them into this mess to begin with, and they had quarrelled abominably about it many times.
But as the Earl of Elford, Freddie held the purse strings, however unjustly, and he did not take kindly to his elder sister’s waspish attempts to control him or his birthright.
“What happened to him?” She spoke to the room at large, though only one of the other inhabitants had the power of speech at the moment.
“He had a bit too much to drink.” Rowley cringed an apology and fidgeted beside her.
Rowley Calthorpe had always been a kind boy and stood to inherit a sizable marquisate in the near-to-distant future. Still, despite his wealth and influence, he was a timid and malleable creature that could be counted upon to support Freddie’s foolish schemes.
“I can see that. But why would this concern me?” She did not look up from Freddie’s washed-out face.
A beat of silence followed. “He challenged someone to a duel.”
“He what?” Charlotte nearly shouted into the dark room.
Rowley did not meet her eye.
“Who did he challenge? When is it to be?” Charlotte held up her hand before Rowley could explain. “And before you start, I do not wish to know why. For any reason you could give is too foolish for words.”
“He challenged Mr. Benjamin Scarsdale. And the duel is tomorrow. Today. In a few hours, actually.”
Charlotte felt as if the floor had shifted under her, and for a moment, the entire room seemed to tilt on its axis.
“Benjamin Scarsdale? The gaming hell owner?”
She had heard of him. She still clearly remembered the first time she heard that name.
“’E was one of us once.” Claire, the washing woman, saw Charlotte’s interest pique as two boys chased by, one threatening the other with some nebulous justice to be meted out by an omnipotent Scarsdale.
Charlotte’s pencil suspended above her notepad as the curious image settled in her mind.
“Rough-like. ‘E rose up from the streets. No family to speak of. Mean fighter, easy thief. But ‘e also knows it all. Everyone’s secrets. No one knows how. ‘E just sees you and knows. And if ‘e ‘as your secrets, ‘e ‘as your soul.”
The woman, really no more than a girl, spoke with her voice lowered, her words getting lost in the steam that bubbled out of the cauldron where she stirred her morning’s laundry. Her tired grey eyes alight with something more—reverence, fear, awe.
Charlotte had seen enough of the streets by then to know the power of a folk hero.
A figure steeped in legend and myth—and no small amount of danger—gave the people something to hope for, something to whisper about to pull through the dreary days and rough winters.
It did not much matter how real the character truly was—it was about the story.
“I saw ‘im once.” The girl’s tone pulled Charlotte closer.
“Thought I was dreamin’. It was when I first started.
Slept right here in the courtyard under the eaves.
It is wondrously warm. Steam does not cool until after dawn, if you can believe.
But it was nearly dark still—not even time for the new girls to start the fires up.
And I seen him. Thought it was a spectre, the shape coming out of the fog.
But then ‘e was real—solid. I didn’ touch him, so I can’t tell y’ ‘ow I know—but I was sure. There is somethin’ so solid about ‘im. And done up in fine clothes. The finest I’d ever seen.
But there was blood on ‘im. I closed my eyes then. Pretended I was still asleep.”
Charlotte’s breath was high in her chest, and her pencil was still suspended above the pad. Something about the girl’s voice told her this was not the kind of thing she should write down.
“I did not want ‘im to know I had seen ‘im. ‘E’d use my secrets against me. Not that I ‘ave so many. But still, they’re mine. Benjamin Scarsdale is not the kind I want takin’ note of me. Master o’ London’s Secrets, they call ‘im.” Despite her words, there was respect in her tone.
Charlotte knew not to prod further. The residents of St Giles were loyal to this man—whoever he was.
And she was not fool enough to involve herself with such a figure.
Rowley had the decency to look even guiltier than he already did. “Scarsdale. The very one. Though I do not know if it is proper for a gently bred lady to know so much of him.”
“I would imagine it is not proper for a gently bred lady to know much of what I know, Lord Calthorpe.” She took a steadying breath.
“It is lucky that my brother saw fit to drink himself into a stupor. You will have to call off this foolish duel, for it is clear he cannot attend, let alone stand upright and point a pistol at someone.”
For some reason, her mind did not conjure a picture of this man lying before her on a duelling pitch.
Instead, she saw in her mind’s eye the cherub-faced boy of his youth, brandishing a toy pistol above his head as if he were playing highwayman with the indulgent stable hands at their father’s country estate. The image made her want to cry.
“It is funny,” she said bitterly, “for once, Freddie’s drinking will save his neck.”
Rowley somehow looked more chagrined, and he danced back and forth from one foot to the next, as if he were standing on a bed of hot coals. At that moment, it looked as if he might indeed prefer to be standing on hot coals.
“Rowley, what aren’t you telling me?”
The poor boy looked as if he would cast up his accounts on the carpet beside her stinking brother. “You see… I already met with his second. And… And…” He could not get the words out.
“And what?” Charlotte could not stand another moment in suspense.
“And he also made a wager. With another young buck at our vingt-et-un table. He said that Freddie was too in his cups to make it to the duelling field. And Freddie bet him he was wrong.”
The tragically comical picture of Frederick as a little boy evaporated, and an icy calm overtook Charlotte.
“How much did he wager?”
“Three hundred pounds.” Rowley named the sum, looking down at his shoes.
Charlotte felt herself sit hard on the settee.
It should have been reupholstered at least a year ago.
The signs of age and wear were showing, and bits of frayed red thread poked out at the seams. For some reason, that was all she could think of—how dismal this little settee looked in the flickering light of a too-expensive candle.
Three hundred pounds would destroy them.
She would have to take the boys out of school.
They would need to sell the house. Perhaps she could get them a modest flat if she doubled her editorial work.
But she was not na?ve enough to believe there were no other debts of her brother hovering just out of sight, ready to be called in when it became clear their house of cards had truly fallen.
There was only one thing to do.
Charlotte stood. “I will go in his place.”