Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
Friday Morning
“It is four o’clock in the morning,” Basil replied, still attempting to insert his arm into the sleeve of his dressing gown. “What could be so bloody important?”
“I have a clock of my own, Basil, I know the time.” He was used to his valet’s cheek, which would have certainly gotten him sacked had he been employed in any other household. “I need to be on the road to Surrey by the time the sun rises.”
Basil mumbled some inaudible complaint and closed the door.
Hugh descended into the kitchen where the fire in the grate had long since gone out overnight.
Mrs. Peets would arrive just past five to begin breakfast and prepare a dinner that Basil could easily heat in the stove that evening.
Employing a live-in cook wasn’t necessary for a bachelor, and neither was having a live-in maid.
Greta came three days a week to tidy. Basil contained himself to the wash, which was a point of pride for him.
Far more useful was the scrappy and smelly Sir.
The boy had proved himself to be incredibly valuable, and not just for running messages and carrying out simple tasks.
Sir had an eye for detail and a hawk-like instinct, and he always knew when he could be of use.
After he'd nearly been killed last autumn, stabbed and left for dead while out on a task, Hugh worried Sir’s mother would no longer allow him to come around.
Instead, the opposite happened: Mrs. Givens had come to Hugh and asked if Sir—or rather, Davy—could spend more time on Bedford Street, assisting him.
The work was good for him, she said, and it kept him out of the house.
It wasn’t always safe there, she added, hesitantly.
“You saw the bruises,” she’d whispered. Hugh had.
The boy’s body had been riddled with old and new marks, compliments of Sir’s drunken brute of a father.
There wasn’t much Hugh could do to curb the man’s temper; he held no authority when it came to another man’s wife and children.
However, he could offer Sir a refuge, and so that’s what he did.
He brought his fist down upon the door to a small room off the kitchen.
It was little more than a broom closet, but even getting Sir to accept that had been a trial.
When Hugh had told Sir that he was ordering him to either move into Bedford Street or find other employment, the lad had reacted just as Hugh had anticipated: he’d hollered and griped and threatened to find another Bow Street officer to assist before storming off.
The next day, he’d shown up at the kitchen door with a single sack in his hand and a scowl on his lips.
“I ain’t sharing no room with Baz.”
“Basil would rather lick clean his tin of boot black before sharing a room with you,” Hugh replied, suppressing a grin of victory.
“I come and go as I please,” Sir had said next.
“Do I look like your nanny?” Hugh had shot back. Then held up his pointer finger. “You don’t touch my liquor. Not one drop, do you hear me?”
He didn’t for a moment think that Sir would touch the liquor in the house, but he couldn’t appear to be too accommodating.
“The stuff tastes like shite anyhow,” Sir scoffed, sauntering into the kitchen, and immediately throwing open the door to the broom closet. It was mostly empty, excepting a few spider webs. “I’ll take this spot.”
Hugh told him to drag down the bed from the guest room upstairs and to stay out of the pudding Mrs. Peets had made for that night’s dinner. He’d left Sir to his own devices, suspecting the boy had been thinking about claiming that broom closet as a room for some time.
Now, the door swung open on its creaky hinges and Sir, fully dressed, stood at attention. “What’s the disaster, Mister Hugh?”
He peered at Sir. “How long have you been awake?”
“Since you was bellowing at Baz upstairs to hire a chaise.”
He hadn’t realized the floors were so thin. “We’re going to Chatham Park in Surrey. Have something to eat, and we’ll be on our way.”
Hugh turned to leave to make sure Basil had not gone back to sleep.
“This have to do with the lady who showed up yesterday?” Sir asked.
His soles dragged to a stop on the kitchen’s stone floor. “Yes,” he answered tersely. “Be ready.”
Sir wouldn’t press for more, and Hugh was grateful for it.
Within the hour, the chaise was delivered, and Basil had kitted Hugh out in something not only appropriate for a meeting with a knight, but also warm enough to withstand the cold while traveling.
The chaise had three sides and a roof to block some of the weather, but he and Sir would still need to be bundled.
Sir Robert Barlow lived about two hours west of London on an estate known as Chatham Park.
It was a relatively small piece of land, though Eloisa had said the knight took great pride in it and lived there year-round, hardly coming up to London at all.
As Hugh and Sir made their way into the sprawling countryside, the four wheels of the chaise slowed by the crunchy ice and mud on the road, Hugh fought the agitated itch that had plagued him all night, ever since Eloisa’s departure.
April Barlow. The name darted around his mind, clashing with another name: Catherine Marsden. His mother.
Catherine was a woman he could put a face to.
Memories as well, nearly twenty years of them.
At the age of two and thirty, she had been a spinster when she and Viscount Neatham had an affair.
Hugh had been the result of their dalliance, but the viscount had not treated Hugh or Catherine with any sort of disdain.
Much to the viscountess’s displeasure, certainly.
No doubt she’d been humiliated by the situation.
It wasn’t as though he were the only man in the ton to have illegitimate offspring and to take responsibility financially for the mother and child; but he had been more assertive about the care he showed Hugh and Catherine.
Some would say too public and bold. Shameless.
Yesterday, Eloisa had confirmed what Hugh already knew: that the late viscountess had been bitterly against Hugh’s presence in the household.
She’d hated him and Catherine, but more so, she’d hated that her husband had not thrown them both out.
It had crippled their marriage, and when the viscountess had died at the relatively young age of six and thirty after a long illness, Barty had placed the blame on Hugh and his mother.
These things all made sense to Hugh. Having grown up within the Neatham household, moving between their homes in London and Surrey, he’d felt the brunt of the viscountess’s displeasure and Barty’s envy.
Thomas and Eloisa, being a few years younger than he and Barty, had simply fallen in line with their elder brother’s edicts.
What didn’t make an ounce of sense were the things Eloisa told him regarding April Barlow.
“I heard Poppa and Mother speaking of Miss Barlow. Arguing, really,” she’d explained when Hugh asked why she would think this woman was his mother.
“Mother acted as if his affair with Nanny Catherine had been a farce. That she had agreed to raise you because she’d always wanted a child but had never married, but that Miss Barlow was in fact the true mother. ”
It was preposterous. Utterly impossible. “Whatever you overheard was wrong. You misinterpreted their words, I’m sure. My mother is Catherine Marsden.”
“I’m sorry, I know this cannot be easy to hear,” Eloisa said, looking as though she were indeed regretful. Clasping her hands and leaning forward in her chair, she’d looked at Hugh with a pity he didn’t want.
“It’s not difficult to hear, because I know it isn’t true. You were ten years old when your mother died,” Hugh said. “That means you were even younger than that when you overheard this argument. Children don’t always hear correctly, and so much time has passed—”
“No. I know what I heard, Hugh. It’s clear as daylight, even now. You didn’t hear her, shouting about it, screaming that all would be lost. Mother was absolutely terrified that someone would learn about April Barlow. It is not something I would ever forget.”
Eloisa held his stare, impressing that she held no doubt at all about what she was saying. Reluctantly, he indulged her.
“Why would she be terrified?”
“I don’t entirely know, but I have learned that Miss Barlow is the daughter of a knight.”
“Learned how? When?”
Eloisa stiffened her shoulders. “I can’t tell you everything, for it will reveal things I need to keep secret. But if you find Miss Barlow, we might be able to ruin Bartholomew and Thomas.”
Hunger for their undoing leaped like two wild flames in her eyes. It only made Hugh more curious. So, she wanted to ruin her brothers. After their actions six years ago, Hugh could understand why.
“Where will I find her?”
She pressed her lips thin. “That is why I’ve come. She is missing.”
“How do you know this?”
Again, she retreated, shutters closing over her eagerness. “I can’t say how.”
“Then I can’t help you.” He was growing not just weary of this ridiculous claim, but angry. How dare she come here after so many years absent and tell him this? It was disrespectful, both to him and to his mother.
“Please,” Eloisa pleaded, “just pay Sir Robert Barlow of Chatham Park a visit. You will see that I am in earnest. I can’t go there myself. Coming here is enough of a risk. I’m not supposed to be in London—” She broke off, her voice warbling.
“Barty has ordered you to stay away, out of society. Forever?”
Eloisa hadn’t answered him. She’d merely stood up, taken a pound note from her reticule, and tried to place it on Hugh’s desk. He’d stopped her, telling her he didn’t want her money. With a sob lodged in her throat, she’d nodded and fled his home.