“Thank you, but no.” Be damned to them if they thought he owed them another reason. “Shall we set out to Mrs Able’s, Miss Pelman? That is, unless you would prefer to give me a note and some directions to her house.” Please give me a note and let me escape.
She led the way from the room. “Yes, yes, let us go. It is not far.”
Once out of the gate, Miss Pelman turned uphill, towards the village canter, and then almost immediately down a little narrow side street with four terraced houses on either side. They looked to be of the same vintage and type as the hovels at the bottom of the hill, but in much better condition, and lights flickered behind the downstairs window of each.
Miss Pelman stopped at the second house on the right and mounted the three steps that took the doorway higher than the muddy road. How many people lived here? The cacophony behind the door suggested at least a score: a baby crying, children shouting, and a couple of adult voices pitched to be heard above all the rest.
A knock brought an immediate response: a child’s voice retreating as it shouted, “Mam, Mam, someone’s to door.”
The door opened, just enough for a half-grown girl to insert her wiry body in the gap and examine first Miss Pelman and then Bear with eyes that were twenty years older than the rest of her.
“We’re here to see your mother,” Miss Pelman did not waste courtesy on the children of the poor. “Take us to her.”
The girl let the door swing open and led the way a few paces down the narrow, cluttered hall to a parlour door. Five children of various ages and sizes tumbled up and down the stairs leading to the upper floor, playing some complicated game that required frequent pauses for negotiation of the next move. In the parlour, more children draped themselves across the furniture, sat against the walls, or lay on their stomachs on the knotted rag rugs.
A lushly built woman, not old enough to be mother of all these children, let the suckling infant she held detach itself from her nipple, and reached for the wailing baby that one of the older girls held. Another girl scooped up the little sprite who had finished his or her meal, and skirted Bear to whisk it out of the room.
The nursing woman watched Bear with a sardonic eye, as if daring him to comment on her exposed, full breasts. He kept his face impassive as the baby in her arms bumped blindly against her bare skin. She thrust her nipple into its wailing mouth, silencing, at least, that source of noise.
“Mam Able, it’s Miss Pelman and a gentleman,” the door opener announced, and Bear turned to see who was being addressed.
Half screened by children, another woman watched them from one of the couches. She was much older. The first woman’s mother, perhaps? They shared the same eyes, though this second woman had run to fat, with several chins, a bosom like the prow of a ship and arms like young oaks. Above her broad face, hair an unlikely shade of orange stuck out in a parody of a fashionable coiffure.
“Wha’ might Miss Pelman ’n’ a gen’leman want of Mrs Able?” she asked, tipping her head to one side in question.
Miss Pelman drew herself up to announce, “Mrs Able, Mr Gavenor is a great friend of my brother’s, and he has need of your services.” She ignored the nursing mother as if she were not in the room.
Bear regretted his keen sense of smell, which detected urine-wet child, heavy sweat, and an overlay of juniper. Gin, probably.
“Lying in, laying out, wet nurse, or sick-bed nurse? Only, if you need a wet nurse, you’ll ’ave to ’ave Penny.” She gestured to the woman feeding the baby, explaining, “Me dugs ’ave dried.” Miss Pelman glanced in the direction of the gesture and as quickly looked away.
“Sick-bed nurse,” Bear told her. “Just for the night, until the daughter can make other arrangements.”
“It is Neatham,” Miss Pelman explained. “But Mr Gavenor is paying.”
Mrs Able pursed her lips. “Just tonight?”
Bear nodded.
“Two shillings by the night. Extra if he soils himself.”
Highway robbery, but undoubtedly anyone with this many mouths to feed needed the money. “Half now, half in the morning.”
“And dinner from the inn and a pint of porter.”
He would pass the inn on his way back to Rose Cottage. “I will pay to have it sent. Enough for Mr Neatham, too.”
The sick-bed nurse hoisted herself from her seat. “Penny, they’re all yours,” she announced.
Penny cast her eyes upwards, though whether in prayer or protest, Bear couldn’t say. “I’ve someone I promised to meet tomorrow, noonish,” she warned.
“I’ll be back by then, or Sal can watch them.”
Mrs Able left the room to a chorus of “Night, Mam,” and pulled on some men’s boots in the hall while the children on the stairs stopped long enough to add their good nights.
Then she covered her head and shoulders with a blanket before leading the way back across to the Pelhams’ street and to the entrance of a steep flight of steps that led down to the hollow where the Neathams’ new abode wallowed in its pond.
Miss Pelman looked uncertainly down the hill to the waiting flood. Bear seized his chance. “Thank you for your help, Miss Pelman. I’ll just stand here, shall I? Until you are safely within your doors.”
She looked at him helplessly, but the wind blew a sudden flurry of heavy drops into the face sheltered under her rain hood. “Yes, of course. Do please call again, Mr Gavenor. I will tell Pelman that he must invite you for dinner.”
She hurried off down the street, and he watched dutifully until her front door closed behind her, wondering how influential the Pelmans were in the local community. Could he avoid a closer association and still do business here?
“Are you coming, Mr Gavenor?” the sick-bed nurse called from halfway down the steps. He collected himself and followed, and soon re-entered the miserable house.
CHAPTER 5
Mr Gavenor was gone for a very long time; so long, that Rosa began to wonder if he intended to return. Rosa managed to scoot across the floor on her bottom to fetch a book to pass the time. Getting back up on the couch seemed too much trouble, so she remained on the rug, leaning against what used to be her chair.
The book was an old favourite, but it couldn’t engage her interest, which kept hopping back to the pain in her ankle and her anxiety about her father. A little about Mr Gavenor, too. She hoped he had not come to harm. Not that she wished to stay the night in his cottage, but he seemed a kind man, if a little gruff.
All right. A lot gruff. Oddly enough, that reassured her. The kind of facile charm that Pelman turned on as if with a tap hid a familiar danger, for he expected to be rewarded with liberties she had no intention of permitting. Not, at least, from Pelman, for though she was running out of other ways to protect and care for her father, he was not the only man in England. If she must sell herself to someone, it would not be to the man who had driven her to such a necessity.
Except she had not the first idea how to find another man who might want a virgin well past her youth—and one with few feminine graces.
Once again, Rosa reviewed the litany of her marketable skills.
She could teach reading and writing, but the Pelmans had convinced the locals she was not fit to associate with children.