Linda Needham (11 page)

T
ry as she might, Hollie had no luck retrieving Sidmouth’s letter from Everingham’s pocket. He wore his coat all afternoon as he stormed his way through the remains of her shop, wore it all through their nearly silent supper with Chip, and then he disappeared into his office with Bavidge afterward while she bundled his son off to bed.

With the library locked down tightly and her Stanhope not yet delivered, Hollie was left with absolutely nothing to spy upon or do but to wonder again where her very incriminating Spindleshanks costume had gotten off to—because it hadn’t been in the library, thank God.

She hurried off to the gatehouse and breathed easier when she found the costume stuffed
among the clothes that Summerwell had delivered in an ungainly heap on the sofa, still the lumpy bundle she’d made of it after escaping Rennick’s mill.

She spent a few hours unpacking, grateful that Everingham’s invisible crew had supplied her new home with fresh bedding and linens, candles, and a few supplies for the kitchen.

She raised a toasty fire in the hearth and a pot of tea, and had just settled in to catch up on her reading when she heard a tiny knock at the door.

No doubt it was Everingham come to check on her, to see if she was entertaining her husband.

But the face that peered at her from her doorstep was small and sweet and too near the ground. “Chip! What are you doing here?”

He was nearly blue with the cold, his little limbs quaking. “I-yai-yai c-couldn’t sleep.”

“And so you came all the way here in the dark?” She rescued him with a blanket, bundled him in it before he could take another step. “Across the cold, wet grass.”

“I-yai wanted t-to hear a s-s-story.” His shivers came in great, teeth-rattling waves.

“Ah, and you thought you’d find one here?” Hollie took him to the fireplace and rubbed his back, covered his head with a towel, and held him close.

“Oh, y-yes, Hollie. I think you have l-lots of stories. With all your p-p-papers and things.”

He couldn’t keep doing this, sneaking off to
see her. He and his father needed to find some measure of compromise together, else the boy might wander off entirely one day.

She caught his chin and his droopy, tearstained gaze. “Chip, my good man, did you ask Mumberton if you could come to see me?”

The boy sniffled and shook his head, dropped his cheek onto her shoulder, and whispered against her collar, “I couldn’t find him anywhere.”

The poor man had probably crawled into a nook somewhere for a good forty hours of sleep. “What about his lordship? Your father. Did you ask him?”

“I forgot.”

Hmm. “But he was there?”

More nodding against her shoulder. “In his library. I sneaked past the door.”

“Oh, Chip, why?”

The boy snuggled against her and then stilled. “He doesn’t like me.”

“He does.” He
must
. Hollie kissed his cool forehead and held him tighter. “He’s just not used to having you around yet.”

“I’m not used to him, either, Hollie, but I like him.”

I nearly do too
. Though it seemed a dangerous thing to do, when she meant to be spying on him and stealing from him and running as fast and as far as she could. “You just keep on liking him, sweet, and he’ll soon come around to your side.
In fact, I know the perfect story about this sort of thing.”

He sighed, settled deeper into the blanket. “I told you so.”

“It’s about a very sad king, who had a monstrous spell cast upon him by a council of evil chancellors.”

“Uh, oh.” His little forehead puckered, etched with lines that fretted and swooped exactly like his father’s. “What happens to him?”

“That’s the happy part. A little prince comes along and sets the king free.” Hollie scooted her chair close to the fire and pulled him deeply into her lap, then wove a story for the boy while she warmed him for the long, icy trek back to the Hall.

“Have you had any schooling, Chip?”

He turned in her lap. “Mrs. Lassiter taught me to spell my name. Watch me: C-haitch-ipp!”

“That’s very good, Chip.” At least something of his learning had stuck with him. “Who’s Mrs. Lassiter?”

“The cook at Bagthorpe Manor.”

“Is that where you lived with your mama until you came here?”

“My mama died before I could remember her. I lived next to the kitchen till the Bagthorpes had to give their house away and I came here.”

Dear God, what a lonesome little heart. “Did Mrs. Lassiter teach you how to spell anything else?”

“She mostly chased me out of the kitchen. Is that how you spell my name too, Hollie? Like Mrs. Lassiter did?”

“I think I’d be more likely to spell your name, C-H-I-P.”

He screwed up his face. “I should spell it that way too.”

“It certainly will help if you want to get your point across.”

“Is that how he spells it?”

He. Charles Stirling the elder, the supposedly wiser. “That’s exactly how he would spell your name, Chip.” If he would only take the time.

“Then tell me how it goes again, Hollie. I forget.”

She spelled Chip’s name slowly, and he repeated it again and again until it became a rhyme and a song and then another story. Until he was as warm as toast and mumbling, sinking down her lap into a gentle snooze.

“It’s time to take you back to your bed, sweet, before Mumberton misses you.”

“He won’t.” He snuggled his arms around her neck.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. You’re a very missable fellow.”

And that made him smile.

“Dammit, Mumberton, what do you mean the boy’s gone? Just…go find him.” Charles had sent Bavidge away from the office for the night
and didn’t like the alarm that had suddenly shaded Mumberton’s eyes. Didn’t like it at all.

Mumberton blinked. “But I’ve already looked everywhere, sir—the pantry and the east tower lookout and the chapel. That’s what I mean: he’s gone.”

“Blast it all, Mumberton, you’ve lost him again.” Charles stood and stuffed his arms into his coat, certain that he knew exactly where the boy had gone. And who he’d gone to see. At least, he hoped so. “Never mind, Mumberton. I’ll take care of it myself.”

“You, my lord?” Mumberton’s expression of worry became a grimace of utter horror, as though he believed Charles would dunk the boy into a cauldron and bring it to a rolling boil when he found him.

“Me, Mumberton.” Charles left his office with his butler trailing after him.

“Yes, my lord. But he’s just a lad, remember. And a bit unstrung from his recent upheaval. It’s to be expected, sir, all this wandering about. Please, sir. You wouldn’t use a strap on him….”

Charles halted in midstride, and Mumberton had the good sense to stop blathering.

“Bloody hell! As though I would ever strike a child.” He had enough scars himself to last a lifetime, straps and buckles and the heart-bruising sting of the back of his father’s hand. He snagged his cloak from the hook at the side
entrance and slung it over his shoulders. “Go to bed, Mumberton.”

“But—”

“Whatever you think of me, Mumberton, I’m not a monster.” He lit a lantern from the flame of the sconce and watched it flare, his hands shaking more than he’d expected.

“Of course not, sir.”

“And by the way, Mumberton, you’re right that you’re no kind of nanny. You keep losing him. I’m quite certain that I can do better.” Keeping track of a small boy couldn’t possibly be that difficult. Yet the night was dark and steeped in foggy shadows. And the boy could be anywhere, could have lost his way.

He started off toward the gatehouse, Miss Finch’s Refuge for Seditious Radicals and Runaway Boys. He prayed the boy hadn’t gone wandering out in the fields and valleys.

Good God, there were mole traps out there and poachers and chalk pits and quarries and that old copper mine.

He was nearly running down the drive when he heard the crunch of gravel in the lane ahead of him and stopped sharply to hold his lantern to his shoulder.

She came into the pale wash of light like an angel, her long cloak flowing around her ankles and plain boots, her hair loose and streaming against the dampness, and her arms ripe and full of boy, leaving Charles spent with relief and con
fusion and a lingering fear that the boy would never really be completely safe, anywhere. No matter the loving embrace that held him.

“Look what I found, my lord.” The boy was a dangling of thin arms and lean-muscled legs sticking out from her encircling cloak, a mass of dark curls nuzzled against her neck.

“Mumberton lost him again.” It was a cowardly dodge when he knew where the responsibility lay, when that fear of an unnameable loss still prickled his scalp.

She snorted softly and whispered, “I think all of us are a bit lost these days, my lord.”

She hitched the boy higher on her hip and started past him toward the house, her burden far too great for her to carry.

“Stop. Please.” Weighted with so many doubts, his heart thunked as she stopped and turned and waited until he managed through an oddly constricted throat, “I’ll take him.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, testing him, interviewing him for the position of father. “He’s asleep, my lord, and I promised him I’d tuck him into his bed.”

“You’ll never make it up the stairs, Miss Finch.”

She sighed heavily and nodded her reluctance, no doubt expecting better from him—or worse, since he just didn’t know how to be a father.

He set the lantern on the ground and collected the boy onto his shoulder, much like wrestling a
day-old lamb into a bushel bag, with a lot of soft murmuring against his ear and wriggling and rearranging, knobby knees poking into his ribs. The boy finally settled against his chest, lighter than he’d imagined and warm, yet as heavy as a sack of golden wheat.

He couldn’t think of a thing to say as he started off toward the house, following the woman and the lantern. A powerful urge to protect the boy surged inside him like a winter tide along with the need to keep him warm and molded against his chest. More difficult to credit was a deep and unsubtle melancholy that the boy’s legs were long and his feet were hitting him in the knees, a sorrowful measure of irretrievable days that made his throat close over and his eyes burn.

“I don’t mean to be an attraction for him, my lord.”

But that was her greatest transgression—for both father and son. He was being suddenly rushed toward a blind cliff. “He has to learn his place.”

“Have you told him where his place is, my lord? Because if he doesn’t know, then he can’t very well be expected to stay put, and he’s liable to go on looking elsewhere until he finds some place that suits his little heart.”

She had the right of it. Running elsewhere, anywhere, always looking for that soft place to fall.

She stomped ahead of him, leaving her trail of crunching gravel and bobbing light, then hurried up the steps to the side entry, where Mumberton was peering with his long face through the window beside the door.

She held a muttering exchange with his butler, patted his hand, and sent him on his way down the dark corridor.

“Mumberton was worried,” she said, as though he himself hadn’t been.

“Don’t put yourself into the middle of this matter. You don’t belong.” He was doing the best he could, was trying.

“I’m already there, my lord.” She shuttered the lantern and left it on the side table, then turned her glare on him as she hung her cloak on a hook. “So are you. As in the middle of it as you can possibly be. He’s your son.”

“Why, because Bagthorpe’s attorney says so?”

“Because he looks exactly like you. You’ve noticed, else you’d have sent him packing the moment he crossed your threshold, attorney and all.”

“I haven’t time to be a father.”

“You should have thought of that before.” She hurried up the back stairs, hitching her hem to her ankles.

“Before what, madam? Before Draskel left the boy on my doorstep?”

“No, my lord.” She stopped on the second
stair above him, her stormy green eyes level with his. “Before you lifted his mother’s skirts and took your pleasure with her.”

Stunned by her bluntness, staggered at the bent of this conversation, he shifted the limp weight of the boy to his other shoulder. “What did you say?”

She raised her brows at him, put one hand on her shapely hip. “That’s how children are conceived, my lord. Or did no one ever take the time to tell you?”

“I know very well how children are conceived,” he whispered, trying not to waken the boy.

“Then you know where he came from.” She ran her fingers through Chip’s hair, sifting the soft curls past Charles’s cheek. “And you also know what you need to do about him.”

She flounced up the stairs and away from her astoundingly out-of-place lecture and hurried directly into the boy’s chamber. She was straightening the mussed covers and the pillows when he arrived.

“I’ll take him now.” She reached into Charles’s cloak and lifted the boy away from him as easily as if she’d done this every day of his short life.

“Time to sleep, Chip. You’re safe. I’m here.” Then she hummed a little melody and the boy was fast asleep, buried to his cheeks in the blankets, looking so very, very small. Easily breakable.

And smiling from the gentle kiss she placed against his forehead. “Good night, sweet.”

He couldn’t imagine the bliss of it, couldn’t recall his own mother ever entering his room to say good night, let alone to tuck him under the covers and sing a bedtime song.

“He likes you,” she whispered, when she stood and caught him staring.

“Who does? The boy?” Nonsense. He’d given the boy no reason to.

“Chip is his name. You could at least try to call him by something besides ‘boy.’”

“I’ll call him what suits me.” But he had blustered too much, and she shushed him, hooked her hand around his elbow and drew him out of the room. She closed the door quietly, taking one last, longing look, one that he’d have given the world to have awakened to each morning.

“No wonder he’s terrified of you, my lord.”

“Terrified? You just said he liked me.” And that had felt very good—good enough to ache a bit when she stole the pleasure back from him.