Not Quite a Lady (The Dressmakers 4)

Darius stared at the paper in his hand. It was neatly ruled, the handwriting clear and square, the figures all too easy to read.

It was the list of expenses he’d told Tyler to provide.

“It would have been cheaper to send the boy to Eton,” Darius said.

Tyler twisted his cap in his hands. “The missus keeps the tally, sir,” he said. “Tells me the lad grows out of his clothes as fast as she can make them. The girls pass on their things from one to the next, so it don’t cost much more to dress six of ’em as one. But he been growing at a great rate, and he can’t wear the girls’ things now, can he? Not that he could wear any of their shoes anyway, what with his feet bigger even than my oldest gal’s. I wish you could see how he eats. Going to be a big one, my missus says.”

His missus had a good head for figures, apparently. She certainly had no trouble with large numbers.

The sum, Darius supposed, was not exorbitant. The trouble was, he didn’t know where he’d find ready money at present, as “the missus” demanded.

“What of the money Pip earns catching rats?” Darius said. “Purchase tells me the boy’s earned as much as ten pence in a day.”

“Yes, sir, but while he’s catching rats for you, I’m losing his help. Then I’ll have to train up a new boy, won’t I? And no telling how long it’ll take to find one. I been looking, but as you know, sir, the most of ’em’s worthless. Not to mention the missus must say aye or nay—on account the girls, you know. Don’t want no thieves and ruffians and such living in the house with my girls.”

Healthy and willing orphans were not thick on the ground, Darius knew. Still, he was sure the Tylers were making matters more expensive and complicated simply because they saw an opportunity to do so. Or the “missus,” did, at any rate.

“I shall speak to my man of business,” Darius said. While he was in Altrincham, he’d pay a visit to Mrs. Tyler as well.

Darius returned to Beechwood late in the day, nursing a headache. His visit had upset Mrs. Tyler, and when she was upset, her voice rose to a screech. Since he was a gentleman as well as her husband’s employer, she couldn’t shriek at him, so she shrieked at her daughters instead.

“Stop that coughing, Sally! Watch what you’re doing with them greens, Annie! Mind that pail, Joan! You’re splashing water everywhere!” And so on.

The girls shrieked back, defending themselves. She screeched at them not to talk back to their elders.

It was amazing that Tyler still had his hearing.

Screeching notwithstanding, it was not, all in all, a bad place for an orphan boy. Pip ate with the family instead of waiting for their table scraps, as was the case for many in a similar position. He slept in the kitchen, not a cupboard or a dank cellar. They did not dress him in rags. Whatever Mrs. Tyler’s faults, she took great pride in her housewifery. Everyone under her roof—including the lowly apprentice—was “fed and clothed proper and knew what soap was,” she told Darius.

Still, it represented a steep descent from Mr. Welton’s household. Life with the Tylers meant no more schooling and that, Darius had discovered during last week’s ride to Salford, distressed the boy, though he made a brave show of not minding.

I shall have to send him to school, Darius thought, as he rode home. It was that or take on Mr. Welton’s role and tutor the boy himself.

School was better. A boy ought to be with other boys. The trouble was, one must pay for it. As it was, Darius still needed to find the ready money to reimburse the Tylers for Pip’s upkeep. Mrs. Tyler might deem the boy bad luck, but she wasn’t about to let the articles of indenture be broken until she was compensated—in hard coin—for every last scrap they’d provided him and every minute they’d spent on him.

Darius was analyzing his finances for the hundredth time as he neared his stables. A series of shouts and shrieks brought him out of the mathematical reverie.

He hurried toward the noise. A short distance from the stables, he found two boys rolling in the dirt, pummeling each other.

“You queer-eyed little bastard!”

“You’ll look queer when I break your nose!”

“Your ma’s a whore!”

“Your father buggers sheep!”

“Your pa’s prick fell off from pox!”

“Your grandmother poxed the Royal Navy!”

Darius swiftly dismounted, strode to the combatants, grabbed them, and pulled them apart.

They continued to swing ineffectually at each other while breathlessly trading insults.

Darius lifted them off the ground and gave them both a shake. “Enough!” he said.

He didn’t raise his voice. He never had to raise his voice.

The boys fell silent.

He let them down but didn’t let them go.

He looked at Pip, who sported a bloody nose and would soon boast a black eye as well. “He never heard of William the Conqueror,” Pip said. “He’s an ignorant bloody buggering sod of an arsehole.”

“That’s enough,” Darius said. He looked at the other boy, whose nose was bleeding as well. “Who are you?”

“Rob Jowett. Sir.”

Rob looked to have suffered the worst of the battle. Not only was his eye promising to turn colorful, but his jaw was starting to swell. Darius released him. “Go home, Rob,” he said.

“He said the House of Lords is all bastards like him, sir,” Rob said indignantly. “That’s treason, ain’t it?”

“It isn’t, and I didn’t say all of them,” Pip said scornfully. “I said some of them were. Past tense. I suppose you can’t hear any better than you can hit.”

“That’s enough,” Darius said. “Rob, go home. Pip, I want to speak to you.”

Rob went off, making hideous faces at Pip over his shoulder until he was out of sight.

When he was out of sight, and Pip had no one to make hideous faces back at, Darius said, “What was that all about?”

“He’s as big as I am, sir,” Pip said. “It’s not wrong to hit someone as big as you are.”

“What was it about?”

“He’s so ignorant,” Pip said, looking in the direction Rob had gone. “He said Daisy was ugly.” He wiped his bloody nose on his coat sleeve.

Oh, Mrs. Tyler was going to love that.

“Where is Daisy?” Darius said.

“I brought her back. They like to have her home at Lithby Hall when Lady Lithby gets back from here, and these days the ladies go home near noon.”

“Then Rob didn’t try to hurt the dog,” Darius said. “He merely found fault with her looks. And you hit him for that?”

Pip shook his head. “Oh, no, sir. First I tried to reason with him. Firs

t I said that she’s a bulldog and that’s how they’re supposed to look. Besides, how could you say whether an animal was ugly or not, unless it was deformed? And he said I was deformed, and I said I wasn’t—like you said. I said my eyes were distinctive. And he said I gave myself airs because I was a pet with the Lithby Hall ladies, exactly like the dog. And I said the ladies were only polite to me because that’s how ladies are—polite, not that I expected him to know anything about what was polite any more than what was present and what was past tense. And he said my eyes were queer and it was because my mother was a poxy whore. And then I hit him.” He looked toward where Rob had gone and smiled an unmistakably self-satisfied smile.

That smile.

Darius knew that smile.

But no.

It vanished as the boy’s gaze came back, all earnestness now, to Darius. “I had to defend her honor, didn’t I, sir?” he said.

His mother’s honor.

The mother he’d never seen because she’d given him up when he was an infant.

A newborn infant?

Perhaps, but not the same newborn.

A coincidence, that was all.

“Sir?” said Pip. “Am I in trouble?”

“You’ll be in a great deal of trouble if you return to Mrs. Tyler looking like that,” Darius said. “You’d better put your head under the pump. And your coat sleeve as well. Where’s your cap?”

The boy looked about, found it, and snatched it up.

The cap.

Darius remembered the way Lady Charlotte had held that same cap in her hand, the dazed look on her beautiful face.

He remembered her odd behavior when she’d tripped over the bucket. He remembered Pip standing in front of her, wide-eyed…

…wearing an expression much like the one she wore.

Had she wondered what Darius wondered now?

Staring at the boy’s hair—filthy and tangled at present—Darius saw in his mind’s eye Lady Charlotte on the day they’d tussled on the gravel: the Botticelli Venus bedraggled and dirty.