And her heart fluttered and fell like a bird shot from the sky.
He didn’t remember her from last night at all.
Not at all.
That was good.
That was good, and she needn’t feel disappointment.
She took a deep breath, puffed out her chest, and stuck her fist on her hip, making damned sure her lips didn’t tremble when she answered him. “And what’ll you be paying me, guv, for I don’t work for nothing, more’s the pity.”
She heard a gasp from Bell. The boy had come to stand a little behind her.
Kyle didn’t smile or frown or wince or react at all to her lip, and for a moment she thought she might’ve gone too far.
Then he said, still calm, still blank-faced, “I already paid you in a dinner, if you’ll remember.”
She shrugged. “Didn’t finish it, did I?”
He mimicked her shrug. “Not my fault.”
She smirked at that, feeling lighter. She liked a quick wit, she did. “S’pose most did end in your lap, if I recollect aright.”
“Yes, it did,” he said, dry as week-old bread. “I wasn’t quite sure why you reacted so violently to my offer of money.”
“As it ’appens, I don’t inform, guv,” she said gently. “I were already in the Duke of Montgomery’s employment and you wanted me to spy on ’im. I don’t accept a cove’s coin and then turn around and sell ’im out.”
Kyle eyed her with interest. “You’re loyal.”
“As long as you treat me fair and as long as you pay me, I’m your man, guv, ’eart and soul and all my loyalty.” She grinned at him. “That good enough for you?”
He lifted a black eyebrow in what looked like amusement. “Very well, imp.”
He took a small purse from his pocket and tossed it to her.
She caught it and opened it. The coins inside were silver. She looked up again and raised her eyebrows.
He met her gaze. “The same again when you bring me back information.”
“Right.” She stuck the purse inside her waistcoat. “Tell me about these ruffians.”
“They attacked me near Covent Garden and chased me into St Giles.” He turned to stare into the fire, that beautiful wide mouth twisting down again. She’d pressed her lips to those lips last night. Tasted his breath and felt the thud of his heart. “There were at least a dozen. Maybe more. Their leader had a long knife—as big as my forearm—and wore a red neckcloth.”
He didn’t mention the Ghost. Did he think her unimportant? Or was there another reason for keeping her secret?
She whistled. “’Oo’s your enemy, guv? That’s a lot o’ coves to send after one man.”
“I don’t know.” He glanced at her. “That’s what I’ve hired you to find out.”
“Fair enough.” She eyed him. “Anything else you can give me to ’elp my search?”
He looked at her expressionlessly. “Such as?”
She shrugged carelessly, holding his black gaze. “A description of the men. Anyone ’oo might’ve been about?”
“I didn’t see the men that well. I was with a linkboy, though, when I was first attacked. I’d hired him near Covent Garden. Blond. Fourteen or so. Perhaps five and a half feet. He had on a green coat.”
“Ta, that’ll ’elp. If that’s all—” Alf began, but the door to the library opened behind her before she could finish.
“Lady Jordan to see you, Your Grace,” the big-nosed butler intoned.
The lady who walked in was about Alf’s own size, but that was where any similarity ended. The woman was older than she, nearer Kyle’s own age, with hair the color of the gold on his walls. Pure and bright and pinned into a pretty knot at the back of her head.
You never saw hair that color in St Giles.
The lady wore a white silk gown printed in tiny blue and yellow posies. The overskirt had two halves, ruffled and embroidered all along the edges. It parted down the front and was held together over the stomacher by a row of three blue bows.
It was a pretty gown. A pretty gown for a pretty, feminine woman.
Alf set her jaw. Ned had once told her that envy could eat your insides clean away like a rat trapped in a box. Until now she’d never known exactly what he’d meant.
The lady glanced at Alf, her blue-gray eyes widening in puzzlement. “Hugh, who is this?”
Alf looked between her and Kyle and thought, Of course she knows his true name.
They belonged together.
Both aristocrats. Both pretty and clean and living in the kind of house that was papered in gold and able to wear white, white silk.
Alf held her head high, because that was what Ned had taught her all those years ago. Never let them see you cry, he’d said. Never show them your weakness.
So she grinned at Kyle and at the lady in her pretty white dress and strutted out his door.
To do the job she’d been hired for in filthy, rotten St Giles.
Chapter Three
The White Kingdom was ruled by a powerful sorceress, descended from kings and warriors. She had taken as her consort her best general and from him had five children, all golden eyed and golden haired. The Black Kingdom was ruled by a ruthless warlock. He had but one child, a son as black in hair and eyes as his name.…
—From The Black Prince and the Golden Falcon
The urchin gave Iris Daniels, Lady Jordan an impudent wink as he strutted from the room. She stared after him, her brow knitted. Something about the way the boy walked was… odd. She shook her head and looked at Hugh.
He had his hands outstretched to her, his diplomat’s smile firmly on his lips, as he said, “Good morning, my lady.”
She took his hands, cocking an eyebrow at his formality. “Good morning, darling Hugh.”
He bent over her knuckles in greeting and rose again, which was when she noticed the ugly wound above his left eye.
Her own eyes widened in concern. “Your head—what happened?”
His mouth tightened in what looked like irritation, and she felt a familiar twinge of hurt. Was it so horrible to want to know what things affected a friend?
“It’s nothing, I assure you,” he said to her as if she were a girl of six and not a woman of seven and twenty. “Come. I know you wish to visit with the boys. Shall we go up and see if they’ve breakfasted yet?”
She pressed her lips together and nodded, remembering to smile brightly at the last, for they were friends—or at least she thought they were. The trouble was that it so hard to tell sometimes. Hugh Fitzroy was such a secretive man in many ways. He kept his thoughts and his emotions very close to the vest, and though they had something of an understanding that would lead one day in the vague future to marriage, it was at times like these that she wondered if she was perhaps making a mistake.
James, her late husband, had also kept his emotions and thoughts under tight control and entirely apart from her, his wife.
Theirs had not been a happy marriage.
But James and Hugh were not the same man, and it was not fair to either to compare them, Iris reminded herself as Hugh led her up the grand staircase to the upper floors of Kyle House. Though both men had been army officers, James had been more than twenty years her senior, and she his third wife. James had been a brooding, quiet man, more comfortable, she’d always suspected, in the company of other gentlemen than that of the fairer sex.
Hugh seemed to enjoy the society of both sexes. She’d seen him smile and tell amusing stories and, of course, when he’d courted Katherine he’d been dashing and intent on her. Despite that, though, he’d always seemed to keep some piece of himself aloof. As if he’d watched and studied and took note of those around him even when he’d been in the midst of passionately pursuing Katherine.
Perhaps that was because of his parentage. For he wasn’t truly like any of them, was he?
“Blast,” Hugh said, drawing Iris out of her musings as they made the third floor.
She glanced at him and saw his heavy brows were d
rawn together just as a crash and a scream sounded from the nursery farther down the hallway.
Iris picked up her skirts at the same time that Hugh dropped her arm and strode down the hall to the nursery room door.
She hurried after, catching up as he opened the door and snapped, “Peter.”
Inside the nursery the little boy was lying on the floor, red-faced, his fists clenched, his heels beating the wooden boards, as he screamed at the top of his lungs. One of the nursemaids stood over him slapping him repeatedly on any limb she could reach.
Iris gasped. “Stop that at once!” She couldn’t hear her own voice above the commotion in the room.
Christopher sat against the wall, his hands clapped over his ears, his face scrunched up, yelling over and over, “Shut! Up! Shut! Up!”
The younger nursemaid quailed at the far corner of the room, her hair half-down about her face.
Hugh grasped the older nursemaid by the arm and thrust her into the corridor. “You. You are dismissed.”
He closed the door on the woman’s protesting face.
He crossed to Christopher and picked him up, ignoring the boy’s struggles, and took him into the adjoining bedroom, passing Iris on the way. “Come.”
“But Peter—”
“I will take care of him. Once he starts screaming like this he continues for quite some time. I need you to see to Kit.”
She trotted after him, as obediently as a terrier called to heel. One part of her brain thought that this must be the voice he used with his men, his voice of command, for it certainly was most effective.
He set poor Christopher on one of the boys’ beds, gave Iris a single intent look, and turned back to the nursery, shutting the door between the rooms.
Iris sat on the bed beside the boy and took a deep breath. She was trembling. She’d known that Peter had thrown terrible tantrums since Katherine’s death, but to actually witness one… Hearing such sounds from a beloved child was very distressing.
She looked at Christopher.
He’d stopped yelling, but he was sitting on the bed, his arms wrapped around his knees, silently weeping.
She drew his slim form into her arms.
He held himself stiff for a moment and then all at once he came undone, his limbs relaxing and falling apart as he tumbled into her lap.
She laid her cheek against his dark curls and simply held him, eyes closed. She didn’t know what to do. No one, it seemed, knew what to do.
None of them had been prepared for Katherine’s death.
Katherine had been her greatest friend ever since they’d been girls of ten. They’d lived near each other as children, and though Katherine had been vivacious and always surrounded by beaux while Iris was quiet, much preferring a book to a party, they’d stayed friends as they’d grown up and married.
And found their respective marriages not entirely happy.
She’d loved Katherine. Loved her quick, sometimes cutting wit. Loved the way she’d thrown her head back in private and laughed, full throated and overly exuberant. Loved that she knew Iris’s sad weakness for soft licorice sweets—knew and pandered to her weakness by supplying said soft licorice sweets.
Iris swallowed against the choking thickness in her throat.
No one knew or cared that she liked soft licorice sweets now.
Katherine had had faults. She knew that. How could such a star shine so brightly and not have faults? It simply wasn’t possible. But Katherine had adored her sons.
That had never, ever been in doubt.
And because of her love, and because Iris had loved Katherine, she would care for Christopher and Peter to the best of her ability for as long as they needed her.
The screaming from the nursery suddenly stopped, the cessation of sound leaving an odd, almost ringing sensation in her ears.
Iris breathed a sigh of relief.
Christopher stirred. “I hate him.”
Her heart constricted. “Don’t say that. I don’t think he can help it, dear. He misses her so. I know you do, too.”
“No.” He yawned, pulling away from her, and lay down on his bed, his eyes closing sleepily. “Not Peter. Him.”
And his cherry-red lips puffed out on the next breath as he fell asleep just like that.
She stared at the boy. Stunned. Horrified, if truth be told. How could he hate his father? Hugh had never done anything to earn such rejection, surely?
Except he’d not been there for most of the boys’ lives. He’d been away on the Continent and in the army for three years.
And they couldn’t comprehend why.
She raised her hand, wanting to comfort, but fearful of waking the child. Uncertain.
Not for the first time she felt her acute inferiority: she was a poor, dull substitute for the radiant mother they’d lost.
In the end she let her hand drop to the side of the bed, and as she did so, she felt an odd hardness under the coverlet.
She pulled the edge of the coverlet back, careful not to disturb Christopher, and looked. Under the boy’s mattress, stuck between it and the bed frame, was the corner of a book, bound in red leather. She drew it out. The book was thin, hardly bigger than her hand. She turned it over, but found no mark.
But when she opened it, she saw familiar handwriting:
Katherine, Duchess of Kyle
Her Diary
May 1741
HUGH TOOK PETER into his arms, grasping at a kicking leg, winced as a flailing hand caught his still-tender ribs, and ignored the blow to his cheek. He picked up his son bodily and turned and sat on a chair in the corner as the child continued to scream, loud and awful. He paid no heed to the sound and kept himself contained, showing neither the frustration nor the anger he felt. He was the adult, Peter the child.
He could outlast the boy.
The little boy’s wails were growing quieter.
Hugh tucked Peter’s sweaty head under his chin and held the boy. He could almost admire his son’s determination to make his rage known to all.
Peter gasped, choking wetly, and the screaming stopped simply because he couldn’t draw breath.
Hugh took a handkerchief out of his pocket and gently wiped Peter’s face.
“No!” The child started struggling again, although weakly, as he’d worn himself out. “No! Go away.”
“No. I won’t,” Hugh said, calm. He held the handkerchief to Peter’s nose. “Can you blow?”
His son responded noisily.
Hugh finished wiping the boy’s face and wadded the handkerchief, then placed it in his pocket.
Peter had gone limp, sagging in exhaustion against him.
Hugh wrapped one arm across the boy’s belly and stroked his hand over Peter’s forehead, brushing back his sweaty hair, and felt the first sharp stab of a headache beginning behind his right eye.
He closed his eyes and wondered if his sons would ever recover from their mother’s death.
From his own absence in their life.
He’d met Katherine eight years ago when he’d been four and twenty and she a dashing, beautiful nineteen. She’d been the daughter of the Earl of Barlowe, the acknowledged swan of the season, and the first sight of her had lit a madness inside him. It was as if he were drunk on her, on her wit, her spark, the way she teased and made him hard. And she, she was equally intoxicated with him, his title, and his uniform. They’d been a terrible brew, the two of them, though at the time he’d not known it.
All he’d been aware of was the most intense joy and excitement he’d ever experienced in his life. A feeling of freedom and hope that would have made him immediately suspicious had he been thinking with his brain instead of his heart and his cock.
After all, he knew well enough that love didn’t lead to happiness.
But he’d disregarded his own past and the counsel of what few close friends he had and had married Katherine within months. That first year they’d fought and loved, and it was as if they lived locked inside an iron prison, thei
r passion heating the walls to burning, neither of them able to get out, each unable to let the other go.
She’d become pregnant with Kit almost right away.
His birth, delighting them both, had cooled their fiery arguments slightly, but only for a little time. When Peter was born, his sweet, golden son, Hugh suspected that Katherine had been taking lovers for over a year.
By the time Peter was two she was no longer bothering to hide her liaisons from him and Hugh no longer bothered to rage.
He could’ve beaten her. Could’ve taken to drink or shot himself. Could’ve banished her to the country to rot in obscurity. Could’ve called out her lovers one after another and killed them in illegal duels until he was killed himself. He could’ve tried to ignore her and taken a mistress. Pretended he didn’t hear the barely hidden laughter from other men who knew him for a cuckold.
He could have gone insane.
He did none of those things. Instead he left. He’d already been discreetly working for His Majesty—doing the sort of undertakings that couldn’t be done through official channels—and his type of work would be quite useful on the Continent. So he’d gone abroad, traveling as an officer assigned to various army regiments, but engaged in much more sensitive matters. Once on the Continent, he contacted his men of business and through them informed Katherine of his terms: He would, of course, continue to support her and his sons. He asked only that she attempt to be discreet and, more importantly, not have any children while he was out of the country. He requested that she keep him apprised of their son’s lives with regular letters, and in turn read his missives to them.
As it turned out, she was a much better mother than wife, or possibly they simply got on more civilly with his solicitors as intermediaries. Katherine had faithfully sent him long letters about Kit and Peter, and Hugh had spent three years tramping all over the Continent, both in the battlefield and in ballrooms.
The only thing he’d had to give up for such peace was his sons.
His. Sons.
He tightened his arm around Peter and bent to kiss the boy’s forehead. Hugh had walked back into Kyle House after those three years a stranger to his sons. Peter hadn’t recognized him. Kit had known him only from a miniature Katherine kept. The younger boy had been confused and fearful, the older had stared at him with frank hatred.