She thrust the child at Lydia, who stiffly exchanged her notebook and pencil for it. Him.
Lydia saw little ones all the time, for children were one commodity London’s poor owned in abundance. She’d held them in her lap before, but none so young as this, none so utterly helpless.
She looked down at his narrow little face. The babe was neither pretty nor strong nor even clean, and she wanted to weep for him and the short, wretched future awaiting him, and for his mother, who was destitute and scarcely more than a child herself.
But Lydia’s eyes remained dry, and if her heart ached as well from other causes, she knew better than to give those futile yearnings any heed. She was not a fifteen-year-old girl. She was mature enough to let her head rule her actions, even if it couldn’t altogether rule her heart.
And so she only quietly rocked the infant as his mother had done, and waited while Mary slowly dragged the pencil over the paper. When, finally, the very short note Mary took such pains with was finished, Lydia returned Jemmy to his mother with only the smallest pang of regret.
Even such a small regret was inexcusable, she chided herself as she left the Bridewell’s grim confines.
Life was no romantic fable. In real life, London took the place of the palace of her youthful romantic imaginings. Its forgotten women and children were her siblings and offspring, and all the family she needed.
She could not be their Lady Bountiful and cure all that ailed them, but she could do for them what she’d been unable to do for her mother and sister. Lydia could speak for them. In the pages of the Argus, their voices were heard.
This was her vocation, she reminded herself. This was why God had made her strong and clever and fearless.
She had not been made to be any man’s plaything. And she most certainly would not risk all she’d worked for, merely because a lout of a Prince Charming had raised a flurry in her unruly heart.
Three nights after she’d nearly run down Vere and Bertie, Lady Grendel tried to break Adolphus Crenshaw’s skull in front of Crockford’s club in St. James’s Street.
Inside, Vere and Bertie joined the crowd at the window at the moment she took hold of Crenshaw’s neckcloth and shoved him back against a lamppost.
With a grim sense of déjà vu, Vere hurried out of the club, advanced upon her, and firmly grasped her waist. Startled, she let go of the cravat, and Vere lifted her up off the pavement and set her back down well out of reach of the gasping Crenshaw.
She tried the elbow-in-the-gut trick again, but Vere managed to dodge it while still keeping a firm grip on her. He wasn’t prepared for the boot heel crunching down on his instep, though he should have been, but he didn’t let go then, either, even while pain shafted up his leg.
He grabbed her flailing arms and dragged her away, out of hearing of the group of men gathering at Crockford’s entrance.
She struggled with him the whole way, and he struggled with a strong temptation to throw her into the street where an oncoming hackney could do London a favor and crush her under its wheels. Instead, Vere hailed the vehicle.
When it halted before them, he told her, “You can get in, or I can throw you in. Take your pick.”
She muttered something under her breath that sounded like the synonym for “rectum,” but when he pulled the door open, she climbed in quickly enough. Which was too bad, because he wouldn’t have minded in the least hurrying her with a slap to her rump.
“Where do you live?” he asked when she’d flung herself onto the seat.
“Bedlam, where else?”
He jumped into the hackney and gave her a hard shake. “Where do you live, curse you?”
She mentioned a few other body parts he resembled before grudgingly admitting to a lair in Frith Street, Soho.
Vere relayed the direction to the driver, then settled onto the seat with her, where he made sure to take up more than his share of room.
After they’d traveled a good while in angry silence, she let out an impatient huff. “Lud, what a fuss you make,” she said.
“A fuss?” he echoed, taken aback. “You were the one—”
“I wasn’t going to hurt Crenshaw,” she said. “I was only trying to make him listen. I had to get his full attention first.”
For a moment, Vere could only stare at her in blank disbelief.
“There was no need to make a scene—and in St. James’s, no less,” she said. “But I suppose it’s no use telling you. Everyone knows you delight in making a spectacle of yourself. You’ve been brawling from one end of England to the other for this last year at least. Sooner or later you were bound to bring your special brand of pandemonium back to London. Still, I did not think it would be this soon. It’s only three months since your infamous carriage race.”
He found his tongue. “I know what you’re trying to do—”
“You haven’t the least idea,” she said. “But you are not interested in determining the facts of a situation before interfering. You jump to your own wild conclusions and leap in. This is the second time you’ve come in my way and caused needless complications and delay.”
Vere knew what she was doing. The best defense is a good offense; this was one of his own modes of operation. He was not about to let her veer him off course.
“Let me explain something to you, Miss Gentleman Jackson Grenville,” he said. “You can’t rampage about London pummeling every fellow who crosses your path. So far you’ve been lucky, but one of these days you’re going to try it with a man who hits back—”
“Perhaps I will,” she cut in haughtily. “I don’t see what business it is of yours.”
“I make it my business,” he said through clenched jaws, “when I see a friend in need of help. Since—”
“I am not your friend and I didn’t need any help.”
“Since Crenshaw is my friend,” he went on doggedly, “and since he is too much of a gentleman to fight back—”
“But not too much of a gentleman to seduce and abandon a fifteen-year-old girl.”
That broadside took him unawares, but Vere quickly recovered. “Don’t tell me the chit you tried to start a riot about is claiming Crenshaw ruined her,” he said, “because I know for a fact she isn’t his type.”
“No, she’s much too old,” said the gorgon. “Quite ancient. All of nineteen. Whereas Crenshaw likes plump rustics of fourteen and fifteen.”
From her pocket Madam Insolence withdrew a crumpled wad of paper. She held it out to him.
Very uneasy, Vere took it, smoothed it out, and read.
In large, round schoolgirl script, the note informed Crenshaw that he had a two-month-old son who currently resided with his mother, Mary Bartles, in Bridewell.
“The girl is in the Pass-Room,” the virago said. “I saw the infant. Jemmy strongly resembles his papa.”
Vere handed back the note. “I collect you announced this to Crenshaw in front of his friends.”
“I gave him the note,” she said. “He read it, crumpled it, and threw it down. I’ve been trying for three days to run him to ground. But every time I called at his lodgings, the servant claimed Mr. Crenshaw wasn’t in. Mary will be sent back—to her parish workhouse, most likely—in a few days. If he will not help her, the child will die there, and Mary will probably die of grief.”
The dragon lady turned her glacial gaze to the window. “She told me the babe was all she had. And there his father was, going to Crockford’s, to throw his money away on cards and dice, when his son is weak and ill, with no one to care for him but a mother who’s a child herself. You have some fine friends, Ainswood.”
Though Vere considered it unsporting for a man of nearly thirty to seduce ignorant young rustics, and though he considered his crony’s reaction to the forlorn note inexcusable, he was not about to admit this to Miss Self-Appointed Guardian of Public Morals.
“Let me explain something to you,” he said. “If you want to get something out of a man, dashing out his brains against a lamppost isn’t the
way to do it.”
She turned away from the window and regarded him levelly.
And he wondered what malignant power had created this shockingly beautiful monster.
You’d think the carriage’s gloom would dull the impact of her extraordinary face. The shadows only lent intimacy, making it impossible for him to view her with detachment. He’d seen her in his dreams, but dreams were safe. This wasn’t. He had only to lift his hand to touch the silken purity of her cheek. He had only to close the smallest distance to bring his mouth to hers, plum-soft and full.