“One of your by-blows, I presume,” Ridgeway said.
Jasper stiffened. The description was insulting, both to his own honor and to that of the children. But it wasn’t inaccurate, not so far as society was concerned. They believed the worst of him.
Which was exactly how it had to be.
“It looks like it,” he replied.
Ridgeway’s expression of irritation grew more pronounced by the second. “Must we delay?”
“Not at all. I’ll read it in the carriage.”
Ridgeway nodded his approval. “Good man. Lady Clifford despises latecomers to her musical soirees. Claims it disrupts the performers.”
Jasper collected his hat and gloves before following Ridgeway out the door. The viscount’s carriage awaited them in the gaslit street—a black lacquered coach with the family coat of arms emblazoned in gold on the door. A liveried footman set down the steps.
Ridgeway climbed in without assistance.
Jasper followed, taking the seat across from his host. He settled himself in the corner beneath the light of the carriage lamp. As the horses sprang into motion, he opened the seal on Charlie’s letter and began to read.
Dear Sir,
The roof is leaking again. This time it leaked in the nursery right down on Daisy’s head. Mr. Beecham says I am not to burden you and that you have more important things on your mind than the likes of us. But even you would not wish Daisy to catch her death from neglect. Please send fifty pounds for repairs.
P.S. Alfred says to remind you that the roof in the workhouse did not leak.
Sincerely,
Charles X.
A muscle ticked in Jasper’s cheek as he refolded the letter and slipped it into the interior pocket of his evening jacket. He didn’t know which part was more offensive. Was it the implication he was neglectful? Or was it the suggestion that conditions in the workhouse had been superior to that at Goldfinch Hall?
No, he realized. It was neither.
The most offensive was Charlie’s signature. Charles X. As if he were still the same bastard-born boy Jasper had taken from the workhouse. A lice-ridden mite who hadn’t known his letters and who had barely been able to scratch out his mark, a single X taught to him by his similarly illiterate mother.
Charlie had been six at the time, and Alfred five.
Jasper had been little more than a lad himself then. Only five and twenty, with scant experience in handling domestic affairs. But he’d done his utmost in the circumstances. He’d sent the boys to school in the nearby village of Hardholme. Had made sure they learned to read and write.
It had done little to elevate him in the boys’ estimation.
Six years later, Alfred was, at best, indifferent to him. But Charlie still blamed Jasper for all the ills he, his mother, and his siblings had suffered.
No doubt Dolly had filled his young ears with all sorts of grim tales about the heartless Captain Blunt. A wicked, unfeeling monster who had left his mistress and three illegitimate children to starve and die while he went off to war.
And Dolly had died.
By the time Jasper had returned from the Crimea, the consumption had all but devoured her. She’d mustered the strength to travel to Goldfinch Hall, baby Daisy on her hip, demanding Jasper retrieve Charlie and Alfred from the workhouse before she died.
Demanding. Threatening.
Jasper had been tempted to give up the game then and there. To leave Yorkshire forever and start again somewhere new.
He hadn’t, of course.
But he wasn’t going to think of any of that now. Not on the same evening he was meant to be wooing a bride. Whether Miss Wychwood or someone else, he still didn’t know. Nothing about this bloody endeavor was turning out the way he’d planned.
“Dare I ask?” Ridgeway inquired blandly.
Jasper glanced up at him, frowning.
“Your by-blows. I can’t imagine what one of them has written to you.”
“Nothing to concern yourself with,” Jasper said. The carriage rolled through the busy street, the cab rocking as the coachman turned the horses onto Grosvenor Square. “Just a reminder of why I’m here.”
“An unpleasant reminder, by the look of it.” Ridgeway sighed. “It serves you right for sending them to school. A nightmare if you ask me, receiving disagreeable letters from one’s bastards.”
“I don’t recall asking.”
The carriage came to a halt in front of Lady Clifford’s residence. A footman opened the door of the coach for them. There was no line of carriages waiting in the street, and no crowd of guests milling about the stone steps leading up to the door. Flickering light emanated from the windows of the town house, accompanied by the soft tinkling of piano keys and the plucking of harp strings.
Ridgeway scowled. “We’re late.”
Jasper climbed out after him. A butler welcomed them at the front door and, after relieving them of their hats and coats, escorted them upstairs to the drawing room.
The connecting doors had been opened between rooms as if for a ball, making an enormous space for the more than one hundred ladies and gentlemen in attendance. Dozens of chairs and upholstered benches were arranged in long rows, set back from a dais on which two silk-clad young ladies played a sentimental duet on the piano and harp.
On catching sight of them, an attractive blond woman in the fourth row beckoned to Ridgeway with her painted fan.
“There’s Lady Eastlake,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me?”
Jasper nodded. He preferred to be on his own. And he was never more so than in a crowd. There were no ladies awaiting his company. None who knew him in London save by reputation. But his own popularity didn’t concern him. His name garnered him invitations enough for his purposes. As for the rest of it . . .
He could manage well enough for himself.
Entering the room, he kept to the back wall. Papered in pale green watered silk, it was adorned with evenly spaced gas wall sconces. Some gentlemen stood in the gaps. Some young ladies, too. Wallflowers, by the look of them. They dropped their eyes as Jasper moved past them, whispering to one another as soon as they thought him out of earshot.
“That awful scar!” one of them breathed.
“Have you ever seen anything so horrible?” her comrade breathed back in a dramatic undertone.
“And that’s not the worst of it. I heard . . .”
Jasper kept walking until the whispers faded away. He knew full well what he looked like. And he knew even better what people said about him. About how ruthless the notorious Captain Blunt had been in the Crimea.