Chapter Five #2
He liked to think she was. Otherwise what was he doing sitting here in the middle of the night and baring his soul to her?
She’d picked up a shawl from the back of the chair, and now she drew it around her shoulders, her face expectant.
The darkness and candlelight rendered her face ethereally beautiful, almost ghostlike, and, despite the pain, Gabriel felt his heart lurch.
This was a very different young lady from the mouse of the ball.
Not that he’d believed her to be the mouse she’d looked for even a minute.
This was a young lady capable of dealing a felling blow to an intruder, of taking in her stride the fact that a strange man, or a not so strange one, had invaded her bedroom.
And still she remained calm and collected and in charge of the situation. A young lady to be admired.
For the second time in only a few minutes he found himself thinking that she was his sort of young lady.
He cleared his throat. “I’m not sure where to begin.”
“Try the beginning.” Her tone was dry.
His turn to bite his lip. Where exactly was the beginning? Back where he didn’t want to go. Perhaps he could begin with how he’d begun to notice the children. “I was at Eton when I first noticed how poor some people were.”
Her eyebrows rose as though this admission were unexpected.
“Living at Wentworth Castle, I had what you might call a sheltered upbringing. As I assume you have also had. We are not privy to how the majority of other people live. It’s kept away from us.
Our upbringing is curated by our parents and nursemaids.
We grow up ignorant and blind, and no one cares that we don’t know things that we should. ”
She inclined her head. “If you mean that I was the daughter of an earl with everything that entails, then you are correct. But losing my mother when I was twelve and then my father four years later does not make me feel as though I’ve always been sheltered.”
How typical of a young lady of her class. They had no idea how the other half lived. She thought she’d suffered because she’d lost her parents. But she’d gone to her aunt, and continued living that same rarefied existence that all the members of the ton did. Blind.
“Have you never looked out of your carriage window and seen ordinary people?”
She huffed. “Of course I have. My servants are ordinary people. My maid is an ordinary woman.”
He sighed, wishing his head wasn’t throbbing so badly. It was hard to think coherently. “No. People far below them. The ones you’re talking about are living lives those at the very bottom can only dream of.”
Her eyes widened. “Those at the bottom? What bottom?”
He shifted position, easing his arm, and suppressed a wince.
He was going to have to get someone to take a look at it, and soon.
“Yes. The bottom of society that you’ve never seen.
Those you might catch a glimpse of down a back alley, the ragged child selling matches, the barefoot urchin trying to pick the pockets of a gentleman, the desperate people who inhabit the rookeries. ”
“The rookeries?”
“Those parts of London where no one like you would ever dare set foot.”
He watched her expression change as she digested this information. “Tell me about them.”
He sighed. Now was not really the time to get into a discussion about the poorest people of London, but he needed to get her on his side, persuade her of the right of his behavior.
Otherwise how could he prevent her from calling for help?
It was the middle of the night, granted, but once she screamed, someone would hear, and it was a long way back down to the front door with a head hammering like his was and a broken arm the pain of which was still making him want to cast up his accounts.
He took a deep breath. “The rookeries are in the parts of London where no one else wants to live. The houses—no, the buildings, for you could never call them houses, are owned by absentee landlords who let them room by room. Each small, filthy room might have to house a whole family, possibly more. Some have scraped out cellars beneath the buildings, and in those the walls run with damp and often flood. Open sewers run along the streets and even through some of the cellars. Deep mud, and filth of all kinds has to be walked in every day by people who cannot buy shoes for their children or blankets to keep them warm.”
Her hand went to her mouth.
He kept going, determined to fight off the rising nausea. “They live like burrowing animals, most of them unable to make money other than by nefarious means. Many of their children die before they even learn to walk, crime is rampant, prostitution a way of life for many of the women—children too.”
“Stop.” She held up a trembling hand. “I’ve heard enough. This is true? You’ve seen it?” He could see she believed him, despite the question.
“Yes.”
“But what has that to do with you trying to steal my pearls?”
He ran his good hand through his hair, then wished he hadn’t for it set off new stabbing pains in his head. “I do it so I can help them.”
Her hands clenched into fists in her lap. “To help them? How? Do you give them money like a modern Robin Hood? Do you rob the rich to give to the poor?”
He shook his head. “Nice as that idea is, it wouldn’t work.
If I were to give money directly to most of the men there, they would spend it on gin.
Many of the women too. They are desperate people who need to drown their sorrows in the bottle.
Many of them would not know how to help themselves, and are so lost the only thing they know is that life. ”
“So what do you do?”
He sighed again. She needed shocking. “There are so many who need help, but the most vulnerable are the children. Those are the ones I try to help. The orphans with nowhere to sleep at night but a dark and filthy corner, afraid that they’ll be robbed or murdered…
or worse. The children who might turn to prostitution if no one helps them, or be forced to work for crime bosses in return for food.
There are men who profit from gangs of small pickpockets, sending them out to sneak between crowds and relieve the unsuspecting of their purses, watches, and handkerchiefs.
Men who send out little girls to offer themselves to men—some of them the very same gentlemen you’ll see at fine balls.
In return they offer a sort of security to their gangs of starving children.
A place to sleep safely, regular food in their stomachs.
” He paused, conscious he was in danger of speech making.
“I wish to help these children to a better life—away from the crime of the rookeries.”
She was watching him intently, her delicate brows knit.
“But why? What prompted you to such altruism? I’m not saying it’s wrong, but you are the son of a duke, one of the most exalted positions in the land, and you’re young, not some do-gooding old widowed woman or man of religion.
I don’t quite understand what’s driven you to this, for driven you must be to risk robbing houses as secure as this one. ”
He frowned. “You mean I’m not the sort of person, the sort of class of person, you think should concern themselves with the poor?”
She shifted. “Well, if you want me to be honest, yes.”
He eyed her for a long moment, wondering if he’d been wrong and she didn’t believe him, and if so, what he was going to do about it if she suddenly set up the loud screaming she’d threatened.
He wasn’t in a fit state to stop her. He was going to have to tell her the truth.
The truth he’d never told anyone. Not even Ambrose, and he was his brother.
“I’m not really a duke’s son. I’m from the sort of place from which I want to rescue the children.”
She sat up a bit straighter. “You’re… How? That’s impossible. I know who your father is and he’s from Dorset, not from what you call a rookery. And he’s definitely a duke. You were born in a castle. You’re a duke’s son.”
“I’m not, and I wasn’t.”
Outside a couple of late-returning drunks shouted insults at each other, but otherwise total silence reigned.
“You weren’t?” Her voice had dropped even lower. “I don’t understand.”
Gabriel tried to sit up a bit straighter as well, but failed because it made his arm hurt all the more. “I was a foundling.”
She bit her lower lip again. “A foundling?”
“An abandoned child.”
She shook her head. “But your father is a duke. I know he is. Aunt Fanny could talk about nothing else all the way home from the ball. I longed to close my ears but couldn’t.”
“He is my adoptive father only.”
A series of emotions flitted across her face: surprise foremost, followed by guilt, possibly at having damaged him, then curiosity, and finally something that might have been sympathy.
“Good heavens,” she said. “And I fear I’ve broken your arm.
Before you go on, you must let me fetch something to make a sling for it.
I know how to do that because my cousin Tobias broke his arm twice as a child—once falling from a horse and once when he managed to tumble off the edge of the terrace at Coakham. He can be nearly as clumsy as me.”
She got up, the shawl hugged close about her shoulders, and rummaged in a drawer before returning with a square scarf. “Let me knot it behind your neck, and then we can put your arm in it. I’m rather wishing I hadn’t hit you so hard.”
He was too.
He sat still while she tied the knot, breathing in the delicious scent of her warm body and the perfume she’d been wearing at the ball. A heady mixture that threatened to make his head spin all over again. He needed to control himself but it was difficult.
She stepped back. “Shall I put your arm in the sling or will you?”
He did it himself, an action that caused sweat to spring out on his forehead. Once it was done, though, and his arm supported, he felt a little better.
She nodded in satisfaction. “And now perhaps you can tell me more about how you came to be the adopted son of a duke.”