Chapter Six
M
atilda never wanted to see Ewan again. He’d been more practical than she could tolerate in his inquiries, his a mind with no hint of feminine sensitivity. She might have appreciated that under ordinary circumstances, but not when she was frantic with grief.
She held out her hand so that Mrs. Miller could help her up. “Do you know what happened to the fender?”
Mrs. Miller clucked when she saw the fire was open to the room. “That Daisy. She’s a bit overwhelmed. I’ll find it and have it returned to its proper position,” she promised.
Matilda nodded. “Have we heard anything from Greggory about the White Horse tavern?”
“No word yet, but news came from Sussex. The family is in the parlor waiting for you.”
Alys
. She’d probably had the baby, been delivered of the Marquess of Hatbrook’s perfect male heir, while her sister was prostrate with grief and loss. Just how their lives had turned out.
She swallowed hard, refusing to give in to self-pity. She patted her housekeeper on her sleeve. “I’m sorry you lost your daughter.”
“It was a long time ago,” the housekeeper said absently, straightening a table covered with pencils and paper. “None of my children lived.”
“I’m sorry,” Matilda repeated, then went downstairs, holding tightly to the railing. She was still dizzy and didn’t trust herself. How she hoped she wouldn’t soon have something so tragic in common with her housekeeper. The thought of having a child no longer living was beyond her capacity to understand, now that she was a mother herself. Yes, children died, but not
her
child.
Arthur had died, but at twenty. He’d had a life, even though it had been a short one. Gawain had nearly died, but he’d lived, was married with a child of his own now. His wife, Ann, had lost her first child, a stillbirth just after her first husband had died. But her mother and Ann never spoke of their lost ones. Perhaps the sadness was too much to share.
If she lost Jacob, though, how could she never speak of him again? But she’d have nothing to share: no new tales of achievements or funny little stories. Every memory would be encased in amber, a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. Soon all her stories would be told and no one but her would care to hear them again.
She had to write it all down. Swaying on the steps, she grabbed for the railing again and slid down along the wall, digging into her pocket for a pencil. That first time Jacob had felt sand against his bare toes last summer. The first Christmas present he’d opened last year, just old enough to understand it was a secret only to be opened by him. The way he chortled when he chased his puppy, Sir Barks, who he had named himself.
Where was Sir Barks? Matilda blinked. She hadn’t remembered the puppy. Too much else going on with kisses and disappearances and upset servants and family bounding around the place. And the bloody flour issue.
Gawain appeared on the stairs, quite from nowhere. “What are you doing? You need to come.”
“I don’t. It’s just about Alys’s baby.”
“It’s a boy. He’s a courtesy earl. Not sure of what. I had no idea Hatbrook had multiple titles. I should have thought of that.”
“I expected he’d be a viscount if he was a boy.” How jealous Theodore Bliven would be. Back when they were courting, he’d told her he’d be an earl by fifty, when the old unmarried men ahead of him were dead. But then one had married a twenty-year-old girl, and she’d produced an heir within a year.
“Yes, well . . . look, Matilda, you need to pull yourself together.” He squinted, which made the scars under his bad eye more pronounced. “There’s a note just come for you.”
“Where is Sir Barks?” Matilda asked, not really hearing Gawain’s words.
“Who?”
“Jacob’s puppy.”
“He’s downstairs,” Gawain said, rubbing at the scar under his eye. He still had headaches sometimes, though he’d regained enough vision to stop wearing his old pirate patch.
“The puppy?”
“Yes. A boy brought it. He had a note tucked into his collar.”
She shifted, pressing her back to the wall. “Where did the boy find him?”
“Running around the park where Izabela was meant to take Jacob.”
“It’s been two days.” She rubbed her forehead, willing her brain to function.
“Yes. They must have taken the dog with them.”
“In the rain?”
No
. That wasn’t right.
“It was deliberate, Matilda, obviously. Izabela took Jacob and the dog out on a rainy day quite deliberately. No one was watching out their windows for kidnappers.”
“How is it Friday already? How is it that I have a kidnapped son?” She reached out, grabbed Gawain’s sleeve. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Gawain shook his head and plucked her hand from his sleeve, then held it between his large hands. “You’re too cold, Matilda; you need a good cup of tea.”
“You would say that, being a tea merchant.” She vaguely noticed his smile, though she hadn’t meant to be funny. She didn’t mean much of anything. Jacob had been kidnapped.
Someone spoke down below. She didn’t really hear the words, but Gawain yelled down, “Order a tea tray, would you, Mother? I’m bringing her down.”
Gawain reached underneath her. Matilda thought she shrieked at the unexpected arms under her knees, around her back, but he hefted her without so much as a creaky joint and slowly walked downstairs, steady despite his damaged hip.
She didn’t demur. What was the point? In a few minutes, Gawain had her deposited on the sofa in the parlor. Her father silently wrapped a plaid blanket around her.
“This room is for guests,” Matilda said. “I don’t spend time in here. Where did this old raggedy blanket come from?”
“It was in a chest in the room we are staying in,” her mother said. “I remember it.”
“Alys used to use it as a picnic blanket. She’d read under that apple tree in the garden on Sundays,” Gawain said. “I remember because Arthur hit her in the face with a ball once when we were playing catch around her. She screamed like a banshee.”
“Arthur,” Matilda said. “Mother, you never speak about him. Why not?”
Her mother stared at her blankly. “I suppose there is so much else to speak about when we see you, dear. It is not like I see any of you often, except Rose, and she is about to move to Liverpool.”
“Alys isn’t so far away. You aren’t abandoned,” Matilda said.
“No, dear, of course not.” Ellen’s arms crossed her body and her hands clutched at her flowing sleeves. “But, dear, Arthur has been gone over a decade now. I do think of him every day, of course, when I say my prayers.”
“Do you pray to him, or about him?”
“Matilda.” Her father spoke sharply, as if she’d blasphemed, but her mother smiled.
“A little of both,” her mother said with a soft smile.
Her father frowned.
Gawain had left the room. Now he came back just behind Daisy, who carried a silver tea service on a large tray. He held the brown-and-white–spotted puppy, distinguishable instantly from any other by the octagonal white patch around his left eye. Matilda wasn’t sure quite what breed he was, given that his sire was unknown, but she would always recognize him.
Gawain dumped the puppy onto Matilda’s blanketed lap and then held out a scrunched, rolled-up piece of cheap paper. “It was in his collar.”
Matilda ran her hand along the puppy’s back. “He’s damp.”
“Raining again,” Daisy said. “Shall I pour, Miss Redcake?”
“I’ll do it,” Ellen said. “Go about your business, Daisy.”
The maid curtseyed and trotted out of the room.
“Read the note,” Gawain said.
Matilda unrolled the paper, her hands seeming to work separately from the rest of her body. She couldn’t make the words resolve at first. There was only a vague impression of thick black marks against the white.
“Focus,” Gawain ordered.
She blinked three times, then, slowly, the marks began to form words. “i am rite you want yer baby. You goin to pay for the littl one. 5000 pounds.”
The writing was all but illiterate, the spelling horrendous. The money demand offensive.
“There’s no proof of anything,” her father said.
“They had the dog,” Gawain pointed out. “Though I admit a lad finding him in the park, rather than the kidnappers sending him to the door, is a bit odd.”
“Could be an opportunist,” her father suggested.
“They don’t even say where to take the money, or when,” her mother said, pouring tea. She sighed as she added milk and sugar, then held the cup and saucer out to Matilda. “It’s cool enough. Drink it right away.”
“I don’t think I can,” Matilda said, squeezing her eyes shut. She hugged the puppy tightly, until it beat its tail against her arm and she had to soften her grip. He might have been the last creature Jacob hugged.
“You need to keep your strength up,” Gawain said. “And warm yourself.” He took the cup and saucer in one hand, reached under the puppy with his other, and traded the damp animal for the warm cup.
Her hand shook as she lifted it to her lips, but she managed to swallow the first sip of the sugary fluid. In all these years her mother had yet to doctor a cup of tea to her satisfaction. When she was younger, Mother never added sugar to a girl’s tea because she needed to protect her figure. Now, it seemed Mother had given up on her ever finding a husband. And no surprise.
Her father glanced at his pocket watch. “I can get you the money by Monday afternoon. I’ll go down to London to my bank, then bring it back. If we’ve heard something more by then we’ll be ready.”
“I think I should storm the Gipsy camp,” Gawain said. “That rabble is not likely to give an ex-soldier a fight.”
Tea slopped as Matilda forgot her cup. “Don’t you dare, Gawain. Jacob could be killed!”
Gawain’s gaze turned on her with no hint of sympathy. She knew he must think Jacob already dead. Her stomach lurched at the thought, but no, she mustn’t think such things about her child, her baby. Gawain wouldn’t think them about his own son if the situation were reversed. He wouldn’t admit the truth until he held Noel’s tiny body in his own arms. And she wouldn’t either.
“It doesn’t matter for now, until we find out where it is.”
“You will not go near that camp,” Matilda told him, using her most emphatic voice. She didn’t use it often because she mostly employed Greggory to give orders, knowing the men in her employ would take direction better from him directly. So often the men she met with refused to even look her in the eye, their gazes hovering somewhere around her bosom.
Gawain shrugged. “We’ll do what makes sense at the time.”
“We don’t even know the Gipsies have Jacob, not yet,” her father said.
“Or why,” her mother chimed in. “That Izabela may be as much a victim as our boy.”
“I still think Mr. Bliven is behind this,” Matilda mused. Could he have charmed Izabela into helping him? She stared into her murky tea. She wondered what her fortune would reveal if she took her teacup into the Gipsy camp and asked one of the women to read it. Doom, perhaps?
But it was an idea. A woman, a tourist really, could probably enter a camp, claiming to look for a fortune-teller. She’d have to be accompanied. Mrs. Miller might go.
“I assure you, he is not,” Gawain said.
“How do you know that?”
“Let’s go to London tomorrow,” he suggested. “I know where he is. You can talk to him.”
“He wanted his son quite desperately, once.”
“I know,” Gawain growled.
“He sent Jacob a wooden train for his birthday and a matching boat for Christmas. He hasn’t forgotten his son.”
“Did you give them to him?” her mother asked.
Matilda nodded. “As long as he isn’t present in our lives, I don’t mind Jacob receiving the gifts. I’ll have to explain the situation someday. I hope by then I can explain it.”
“I agree that he might be involved,” her father said. “His behavior was not that of a sane man in the past.”
“Yet you wanted me to marry him.”
Her father frowned. “You can understand why, Matilda. Jacob’s prospects would be much improved. But I wouldn’t want my daughter tied to such a man.”
“I can’t leave Bristol right now. If—I mean
when
—Jacob is found, he needs his mother.” As if the thought gave her strength, she took a sip of the tea.
“I think it is important that you see Theo as soon as possible,” Gawain said.
“Can you bring him here?” She drank again.
“No, I cannot,” he said in a monotone.
Matilda stared at her brother as she considered.
“I think we should bring in the police,” her mother said. “Now that money is involved.”
“No,” Matilda said. “They might react as Gawain has, and want to storm the Gipsy camp. I can think of no way better to lose Jacob forever.” As she said it, she knew she had decided. “Will you stay here while Gawain and I take the train to London to see Mr. Bliven? Then, when we return, you can obtain the money from your bankers, just in case.”
“We need more people looking,” her father said. “Clearly these Gipsies are elusive, if Greggory cannot find the tavern.”
“What about Lady Elizabeth’s husband, the one who is the private inquiry agent?” her mother asked. “He might be able to help.”
Lady Elizabeth was Lord Judah’s sister. But she and her husband lived in Edinburgh. He wouldn’t have any local contacts, though he did have strong opinions about kidnappers. “He might help,” Matilda conceded.
“I’ll contact him,” Gawain said.
“I want to search the park,” Matilda said. “Has anyone done that since Sir Barks was found?”
“You haven’t the strength,” Gawain said. “I’ll do it.”
“I’ll pack a few things and check the railway timetable,” Matilda said. Resolutely, she drank down her tea, every sugary drop, then popped a biscuit into her mouth. “There, I’m restored.”