Wedding Matilda (Redcakes Book 6)

Also by Heather Hiestand

 

 

 

 

(novella)

 

Wedding Matilda

The Redcakes

Heather Hiestand

LYRICAL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Judy Di Canio, Eilis Flynn, Mary Jo Hiestand, David Hiestand, Delle Jacobs, Abbey MacInnis, and Madeline Pruett for your critique assistance and support. Also, I’d like to thank my editor, Peter Senftleben, production editor, Rebecca Cremonese
,
and the rest of the Kensington team; and my agent, Laurie McLean and the Fuse Literary team, for their support of the Redcakes series.

 

T
he fragile April breeze fluttering through Covent Garden seemed like a distant memory to Ewan Hales as he sat in the dank and moldy law office of Shadrach Norwich. Some of the flower sellers had still been wearing their Easter bonnets from the day before, perhaps thanks to late-night carousing, making for a festive, disheveled air in the market.

He had detoured there for a few minutes on his walk between Redcake’s Tea Shop and Chancery Lane. As the senior member of staff in town, courtesy of the manager’s trip to Scotland, he could do as he liked, a rare thing in his career of secretarial labor. He had toiled for distinguished men, currently Lord Judah Shield, and before that, Sir Bartley Redcake. He liked saying he worked for aristocrats, even if neither man fit the picture suggested by their titles in any precise manner. As a result, he modeled himself after other, more traditional members of the nobility in dress and behavior.

“Ah, Mr. Hales,” said a portly gentleman in a dandruff-bedecked black suit as he entered the room from some inner chamber. He gave Ewan a searching glance.

“Yes, sir.” Ewan stood and shook hands with the solicitor. “I confess I do not know why I was summoned here. What was the purpose of your letter?”

“The matter was too delicate to put into writing.” The man glanced over him again.

Ewan knew his appearance to be impeccable, other than his untamable hair, so that couldn’t be the reason for the man’s curiosity. “I cannot take much time away from my duties, Mr. Norwich. Could you please be brief?”

The other man sat down, seeming to expand to fit his chair, with the air of one who planned a conversation of considerable length. “What do you know about your family?”

Ewan slicked back his hair as he considered this, his tension heightening from the intent of such a question. Was a legacy due to him? Every orphan, even one of twenty-seven years of age, imagined lost relatives out in the world hoping to find him.

He pressed his hands into his thighs and leaned forward. “My mother died young. When I was about four years old. Her name was Hannah Walker Hales. I think she was from Swansea originally. Welsh, you know. I remember her voice.”

Norwich nodded, his underchin wobbling. “And your father?”

“Walter Hales. I was sent to boarding school when I was seven because he went out to Africa. I never saw him again.” He had cried until he’d made himself sick that first day at school, and then promised himself he’d never cry again.

Norwich reached for a brown bottle at the edge of his desk, then moved his hand away. “Did you have any contact with him?”

Ewan scratched his chin. “Letters for a while, until I was eleven or so. He went native, I believe, died a few years after that, in 1877. There was enough money to get me through school, then I went to work when I was sixteen.”

“Nothing else?”

He tapped his fingers against his thighs. “It’s been many years. The solicitor who was in charge of me is long dead.”

“You know your mother was Welsh; what about your father’s origins?” The man settled back further, his coat pressing against the arms of his chair.

Ewan stared at his fingers. Long and extremely flexible, they were perfect for typing. His father’s hands, in fact. He remembered that much. “I don’t think he had any family, but he had a London accent. A rather posh one, in fact.” He’d been careful to mimic his father’s voice at school, not wanting to have his speech coarsened by the other boys, but the years had robbed him of many of the specific memories he’d once had of his parent.

Norwich shook his head and muttered something under his breath. “No family, you say. Why do people run off without explaining their antecedents to their offspring? I have never understood the tendency.”

“I was only seven,” Ewan stated. He had the vague notion that something had broken in his father when his mother had died, as if his father had been a man who laughed before her death, then had never laughed again. Had she been the only part of his father’s life that wasn’t grim?

“Very true. There might have been statements made that you missed, letters that were discarded in your father’s flight from the country.”

He frowned. “Flight?”

Norwich cleared his throat with a phlegmy sound. “He was escaping debtors’ prison.”

Ewan hadn’t known. His hands clutched his thighs, bunching the material of his trousers. He forced himself to relax. “Then where did the money come from to educate me?”

Norwich snorted. “That paltry sum? From your father’s uncle—your great-uncle, that is—Lawrence Douglas. He should have had you educated properly, but he must have thought it would never come to this.”

Ewan felt his pulse quicken.
Come to this?
Why hadn’t this great-uncle helped his father instead of letting him flee? “I do not understand, though I admit the name is familiar to me.”

“As indeed it should be. Lawrence Douglas is the eleventh Earl of Fitzwalter. An old, very distinguished family.”

“The title goes back to sixteen forty or so, I believe,” Ewan agreed. He paid attention to these things because Redcake’s Tea Shop and Emporium was owned by the Marchioness of Hatbrook and had a clientele in fashionable society. Once again, he wondered why the earl would not have helped his own nephew, if indeed this story was true. “You are saying I belong to the family?”

Norwich snorted. “I am saying you are now the earl’s heir. Someday, Mr. Hales, you will be the twelfth earl.”

Ewan coughed in order to hide a peal of laughter. Him, a mere secretary, who had been proud not half an hour before to work for the brother of a marquess? And before that, a mere knight? Why, Sir Bartley hadn’t yet been knighted when he came to work at Redcake’s in 1884. No, he couldn’t be the heir to an earl.
Ludicrous
. He’d seen quite a lot of unusual behavior among their noble patrons over the years, but losing their children? Never.

He pressed his hands against his thighs again. “That is a statement almost too incredible to believe. Are you certain?”

Norwich opened a leather-bound book on his desk and turned it around, revealing a family tree. “Lord Fitzwalter had a brother named Walter. He was the fourth son born and the third to live to adulthood. When he was forty his son, also Walter, was born, himself a second son.”

“That would be my father?”

“Exactly. I don’t imagine the Walters were ever expected to sire sons. Incidentally, your name isn’t really Hales. That was your grandmother’s name. Your father’s full name was Walter Hales Douglas.”

“I see.”

“Your father quarreled with his father and no surprise, because the man was a few slices short of a loaf, or so my father always told me.” Norwich’s soft face creased with embarrassment.

Ewan was too anxious for the information to care about the solicitor’s rude remarks about family he’d never met. “Go on.”

“He went his own way, married outside of aristocratic circles. You were born in 1863, in wedlock. I have the papers.”

“I never had any doubt. How did the family line become so thin?”

“Eccentrics with weak chests, most of your ancestors,” Norwich said, sniffing. “My family has served yours for a hundred years. We’ve watched them come and go. At least you’ve had some tougher stock bred into you.”

He had the unruly dark Welsh hair and eyebrows to prove it. “I must have a title,” he said as his thoughts spun. Was there money attached? Could he leave his position, live more like Redcake’s patrons than its employees?

“I’m afraid not. You are the heir presumptive, not the heir apparent. The late heir was Lord Ritten.”

Ewan blinked. “Lord Ritten died over the winter, correct? In his mistress’s arms, somewhere in the south of France?” He remembered the scandal. There had even been a ballad shouted out by newsboys to sell papers.

Norwich sighed. “Scandalous. Considering what you do know about Lord Ritten’s demise, you can imagine what I managed to cover up.”

Ewan searched his memory. “Not a young man.”

“No, he was the third son, the second to live, Lord Fitzwalter’s brother. I won’t claim there aren’t other relatives branched off from the current earl’s grandfather, but you are the next in line.”

Ewan searched inside himself and found anger. He, who had lived a productive life, was less valuable to his relatives than the notorious late Lord Ritten? “I should have been told. It’s not as if the family would have been surprised the title would come to me, given the age of the man preceding me.”

“The Walters were deeply unpopular,” Norwich said, staring longingly at the unlabeled brown bottle at the edge of his desk. He folded his hands on his desk, possibly to avoid showing a tremble in his extremities.

Ewan suspected the bottle held a patent medicine, which was likely full of alcohol or opiates. “You are in luck, sir. I get along with everyone. It will be a sea change for you and the family.”

Norwich smirked. “I’m sure your father thought the same thing of his relations with the natives, until they boiled and ate him.”

“He died of a fever!”

The solicitor shook his head. “So you think, Mr. Hales, so you think. The Walters were notorious for tone deafness in their relationships with others.” He peered at Ewan, as if expecting him to shout out in a disturbed manner.

Ewan had not been indulged in his life, however, and did not give Norwich the satisfaction of a display. “I was not raised as a ‘Walter.’ ”

Norwich’s expression might have been categorized as a smirk if his fleshy face could fold in such a manner. “Actually, you were christened as a Walter. Your full name”—he paused to pull a sheet of paper from a scattered pile on his desk—“is Walter Ewan Hales Douglas. Here you are.”

He handed Ewan a page, which appeared to be copied from a church registry, as it contained the names of various children baptized. Finding his own, he recognized the birthdate listed. “At least I’m not a year older than I think I am, or something equally monstrous.”

“Naming you Walter is pretty monstrous, considering,” Norwich said, giving in to his lust for his brown bottle and taking a sip.

With that, Ewan suspected the interview was complete. He pushed his chair back.

“I’ll need you to return to my offices tomorrow,” Norwich said over his bottle.

Ewan stood. “Why?”

“Your great-uncle needs to meet with you, of course. Be here at two in the afternoon.”

“I cannot continue to leave my place of business.”

“Surely you do not think to retain your position under these extraordinary circumstances?”

“I must give notice. I am the man in charge at the moment. My manager has taken his wife and their five-month-old son to Edinburgh to introduce the baby to his sister, who lives there.”

“Why do you care?” Norwich said, taking a more generous sip from his bottle. “They are no longer your concern. You are an earl’s heir.”

“My manager is the second son of a marquess.”

Norwich set his glass down. “I wish Lord Fitzwalter had paid for additional research.” He sighed. “You work for a lordling?”

Ewan nodded.

Norwich sighed again, his underchin emphasizing the lowering of his lip. “Don’t leave your position. You might as well enter Society with a spotless reputation, difficult as that will be for any member of the Douglas family.”

“I am not difficult,” Ewan replied.

Norwich snorted without humor. “We will see you tomorrow, Mr. Hales.”

“Is there anything I can take with me, a history of the family or some such?”

Norwich shuddered. “Why would anyone want to spend his time writing that?”

Ewan suspected whatever was in the bottle was taking effect. He could only imagine what the solicitor behaved like by the end of the day. When he left the dank room and returned to the street, the hint of spring had vanished under lumbering clouds. He’d never make it back to his desk before the rain.

He cheered himself with the notion of a hot cup of tea and a scone at his desk. That was the beauty of working at a tea shop, even if he did spend most of his day compiling reports. The office always smelled delicious, and Redcake’s was famous for quality, unadulterated pastries.

On his return walk, his thoughts went to his current project, compiling a manual to be used by the new Redcake’s Tea Shop and Emporium. The marchioness had decided to open a second location in Kensington, and a lot of the details had fallen on Ewan. He didn’t mind, of course. He had expected to be appointed the manager there when Lord Judah returned. Now, his life had turned upside down and he had the feeling that Lord Fitzwalter was going to upend his career plans.

Ewan smiled as he passed the street that turned toward Covent Garden. A flower seller, her bonnet askew and bags under her eyes, stood on the corner, selling violets from a box around her neck. He, usually so careful about money to build his nest egg, purchased a posy and tucked it into his buttonhole. With that simple gesture, he turned himself into a dandy. The twelfth Earl of Fitzwalter, indeed.

 

Matilda Redcake passed through the open iron gates at the corner of Regent and Oxford Streets. The neatly cobbled courtyard exerted the force of gravity on her as she reflected on how much she had once detested this place, the clear and visible sign that her family was engaged in commerce. The Redcakes were nouveau riche to the extreme, so much so that she and her younger sister had been raised in very different fashion compared to their three older siblings. Now, as the heir apparent and current manager of the Redcake’s factories in Bristol, she still winced as she looked at the façade of their flagship tea shop and emporium, because she was here to discuss a problem. She had been requested to meet with the manager here to discuss failures with the factory cakes.

An establishment that prided itself on the best quality goods in London and sold itself to fashionable society in that manner could not afford to have inferior goods.