The clerk looked suitably alarmed by thoughts of her violent father, even though he expressed disappointment. He tipped his hat, and the two of them parted.
It had been too late to rush across London that night and track down the house near Grosvenor Square—Bertie hadn’t been exaggerating about her father’s temper when he didn’t have his supper on time.
The next day, then, Bertie made her way to the heart of Mayfair, rambling along the roads that connected directly to Grosvenor Square. The square itself was bounded by four wide streets; in the center was a large stretch of green with trees, surrounded by a fence with a big gate. A nice little piece of countryside for those who lived on the square to enjoy.
Three days Bertie had come to the square and wandered the streets, looking for any sign of Mr. McBride. She was careful to pretend she was a slavey on an errand or out shopping, so no constable would arrest her as a girl on the game. She’d die of mortification if she were taken for a prostitute, and her dad would thrash her good before she had a chance to prove her innocence.
Apparently, she looked respectable enough, because the constables left her alone and no one along the busy streets complained about her. It was early on the third day of her investigation that she stood eating chestnuts and watched Mr. McBride emerge from his very tall, very elegant brick house on Upper Brook Street, which led from the west side of Grosvenor Square.
The ground floor’s large bricks were painted white, which made the black door with fanlight all that more sharp. The tall windows didn’t have arches over them, but they were regal, becoming smaller on each story as the house climbed—at least five floors that Bertie could see. Delicate wrought-iron railings ran across the windows of the first floor rooms, while the ground floor was encased in a more functional railing, with stairs that ran down to the scullery and kitchen.
While Bertie stood eyeing the house after Mr. McBride had ridden away, absently popping another chestnut into her mouth, the red-haired Scotsman, Macaulay, turned her way. His blue gaze bore into her so fiercely that Bertie almost swallowed the chestnut whole.
She quickly assumed a nonchalant look and hurried across the street and down toward Park Lane. Just a harmless young woman, she made herself convey, taking a day out to see the sights. She felt Macaulay watching her, but by the time she was brave enough to turn back, he was gone, the door of Mr. McBride’s house shut.
Bertie didn’t trust that the man wouldn’t be peering out the windows, so she turned her steps to Hyde Park, on the other side of Park Lane. A gate not far from Upper Brook Street led into the park, and Bertie kept up her rapid pace as she went through that gate, finishing off her chestnuts and crumpling the paper into her pocket.
Even in winter, Hyde Park was a vast expanse of lawn dotted with trees, a relief to eyes accustomed to jammed-together gray houses and teeming streets. Bertie liked to come up to the park when she had the time, to look at the flowers in summer, the trees turning colors in autumn, and the horses trotting along the Rotten Row any time of year. She liked Regent’s Park even better, with its avenues of flowers and sloping lawns, but she couldn’t get that far north very often. How splendid it must be to live in the big houses around here and have this park nearly outside the front door.
“Master Andrew!” A sharp voice cut through the winter air. “You come back here! At once!”
A small object burst past Bertie from behind her, a red hat flying from a little head to reveal hair the same color as Mr. McBride’s. The hat belonged to a boy in a handsome coat, knee breeches, white stockings, and sturdy boots. Bertie was nearly knocked off her feet by this missile, his small arms and legs pumping, but she sidestepped and spun in place, catching her balance and preventing a fall.
A woman in black panted after the boy. She was hampered by the heavy coat she wore, and a hat with a small veil was slipping over her ear.
“I beg your pardon, miss,” she said as she caught up to Bertie. Then the woman gave Bertie a quick once-over, taking in her well-worn clothes and straw hat, realized she wasn’t an upper-class miss, and changed her tone. “You ought to keep out of the way,” she snapped. “What are you thinking? Master Andrew!” she called again, and loped away after the boy.
A little girl walked down the path after the woman. The girl was about eleven, Bertie would judge, but she was dressed like a fashion plate. She wore a fur jacket over a dark blue dress that had a little bustle in back and a skirt with many flounces reaching just below her knees. She wore fine white stockings, a bit too thin for running around the park in this cold, Bertie would have thought. Completing the ensemble was a pair of ivory-colored button-up shoes and a fur hat that looked silky soft. From under the hat cascaded thick dark hair, wonderfully curled.
The girl walked slowly, almost primly, and she hugged a large doll with dark curls to her chest. The girl could be a porcelain doll herself with her pink cheeks, blue eyes, and elegant clothes.
The girl didn’t acknowledge Bertie at all but simply walked along after the nanny or whatever she was. The emptiness in her eyes struck Bertie—not only was the girl far too young for that kind of bleakness, but Bertie had seen the same emptiness in another pair of eyes recently—those of the handsome Mr. McBride.
She also remembered Mr. McBride reclining in her secret hideaway, his hand wonderfully warm in hers, as he spoke to her with ease. No one in the wide world had known where they were. In the passage before he’d left her, he’d told her about his children, Cat and Andrew.
“Andrew, no!”
Bertie saw why Mr. McBride had said his children were lively. Andrew ceased running in a straight line and dodged left, out through another gate and into the traffic of Park Lane.
The nanny ran after him, screeching as she wove past horses, carts, and carriages. Drivers pulled up, swearing at her. “Are you daft, woman?” “Can’t you keep your charge better than that?” “You want to get the lad killed?”
The girl, Cat, stopped at the gate, as though uncertain whether to cross the road or wait for Andrew and the nanny to return. Bertie caught up to Cat and gave her a friendly nod.
“We’d best go after them, I think,” Bertie said. “Your nanny will likely fall over dead if she has to hunt you down too.”
Cat turned a scornful look up to Bertie, worthy of the judge who’d scowled down at Mr. McBride at Ruthie’s trial. “She’s our governess. I’m too old for a nanny.” She looked Bertie up and down. “Who are you?”
“Me name’s Bertie. Traffic’s cleared a little. Come on.”
Bertie caught Cat by the hand and pulled her quickly across the street. The girl kept up, not dragging, her doll held firmly in her arm.
“Bertie’s a boy’s name,” Cat said with certainty.
“I know, but it’s what me mates call me. My real name’s Roberta. Here we are.”
Andrew had disappeared down another street. Halfway along was a house covered in scaffolding—the house was being pulled down, or put up, or painted, or some such. In any case, no one seemed to be working on it at the moment.
Andrew took the opportunity to scramble up a short ladder, grab the scaffolding, and start climbing it like a monkey. The little girl shook off Bertie, ran to the ladder, and went right up after him.
Chapter 5
“Come down!” the governess implored. “Please, come down.”
Andrew and Cat blissfully ignored her. They’d climbed nearly to the top floor, just below the last set of windows, when Andrew sat down on a board, swinging his legs in the empty air. His sister, with more dignity, sat down beside him and twined her leather-clad ankles.
The governess tried to be stern. “Master Andrew, Miss Caitriona, you climb down here this instant!”
Andrew looked over the side and stuck out his tongue. Caitriona said nothing, only stared straight ahead of her.
A crowd had gathered. “You treed them, no doubt, missus,”
a man said, and guffawed.
“Cheeky beggars,” a clerk who’d emerged from a shop said. “You need to take a strap to them.”
Another man was more kind. “Wait for the workmen to come back. They’ll shift them. No one’s in that house, or someone could go inside and get them through the window.”
“Where are the workmen?” the governess demanded. “Lazy layabouts. They’ve nipped off for tea, or something stronger, I’d wager. Haven’t they?”
“They won’t be long,” the kinder man said.
“Master Andrew, come down.” The governess was near to tears.
“Let me.” Bertie pushed past the governess, who smelled strangely of fish, and gave the ladder and scaffolding a calculating eye. “The workmen might frighten them anyway.”
The governess’s look of chill disapproval evaporated with her desperation. “If you believe you can fetch them down, young woman, you’re welcome to try.”
Bertie pulled off her gloves and tucked them into her pocket. She spit on both palms, rubbed them together, jumped, and caught a horizontal pole of the scaffolding.
She used her feet and legs to carry her onto the first board, then started climbing the bars, moving upward quickly. Such things had been easier when she’d been ten, she reflected as she pulled herself up, but she’d kept herself limber.
“You in the circus?” one of the men yelled from below.
Bertie didn’t answer. She knew she could have climbed the ladder, as the children had, but she’d decided that swinging up like an acrobat would better catch their attention.
She was right. Both Cat and Andrew were staring at her, round-eyed, by the time Bertie reached the top board and walked fearlessly down its narrow length toward them.
Bertie sat down next to Andrew with a thump, swinging her legs over the side as he did. She made a show of gazing around her. “Ooh, lovely. Quite a view from up here, innit?”
She could see down the short length of the street and then out across Hyde Park, down to the Row and the houses of Knightsbridge beyond.
“There’s the Serpentine,” Bertie pointed out. “See?”
Andrew climbed to his feet for a better view. He braced himself on an iron pole, leaning out alarmingly far. Caitriona silently seized the back of his jacket, holding him steady.
Cat had come up here to make sure Andrew didn’t fall, Bertie realized. Cat pretended to be sullen, but a truly sullen girl would have walked away or stood below, bored, until her brother was either rescued or had fallen to his death.
“Let’s go boating on the Serpentine!” Andrew shouted.
“Sounds a treat,” Bertie said. She’d never been boating on the Serpentine but she’d watched others do it while she stood by, envious.
“You’re not going boating,” the governess called up. “You’ll be going back to your studies, Master Andrew, so you can grow up to be a fine barrister, like your father.”
Mentioning studies was not the best way to entice a boy home, Bertie thought. Andrew clutched the pole.
“I’m not going to be a barrister,” he shouted down. “I’m going to be a ghillie, like Macaulay, and hunt game. Or a soldier, like Uncle Steven, and shoot enemies.” He raised an imaginary rifle and made explosive noises as he potted his target, human or animal.
“You come down here at once!” The governess had returned to commanding.
“Might be too cold for boating,” Bertie said conversationally. “But maybe not for tea. Do you have tea in the mornings? I bet you have truly wonderful teas, with cakes and buns, with lots of butter and jam.”
“No,” Cat said without inflection. “Miss Evans makes us take our tea very weak, with no milk or sugar, and only a bit of plain bread, no jam or even butter.”
“Oh.” No wonder the kids had run away from Miss Evans. She sounded a right tightfisted old biddy. “Well, I’ve got a few coins in me pocket,” Bertie said. “How about tea at a shop?”
Both children stared at her, Andrew with his arm around the pole. “We’ve never been to tea in a shop,” Andrew said. He looked wistful a moment, before his disarming grin returned. “Can it be a great, big tea?”
“As much as you want.” Bertie wasn’t sure exactly how much it cost to have tea and cakes in a shop in Mayfair, but surely she had enough left for it. She’d planned to have her tea or luncheon out today, like a fine young lady, before heading home to be plain old Bertie again.
“We’ll come then,” Andrew said, mind made up. “What’s your name?”
“It’s Bertie.”
Andrew laughed. “That’s a boy’s name.”
Caitriona answered for her. “Her name is Roberta, but her mates call her Bertie,” she said, proud of the knowledge.
“I can be your mate,” Andrew said eagerly to Bertie. “So I’ll call you Bertie too.” He stuck out a grubby hand. “I’m Andrew McBride. This is my sister, Cat.”
“Caitriona,” Cat said.
Bertie shook Andrew’s hand. “Nice to meet ya.”
“Come on,” Andrew said. “I want lots of cake.”
Bertie barely stopped him from swinging onto the scaffolding below him and climbing down the way he’d come up. There was an easier way down at the ends of the boards, where the scaffolding crisscrossed like a ladder. Bertie led the children that way and climbed down ahead of them. She halted at each level and hung on to Andrew and Cat in turn as they climbed after her, not letting them go on until they’d steadied themselves. At last they reached the lowest board, six feet above the street, with the ladder leaning against it.
Andrew and Cat climbed down the ladder, but Bertie held on to the pole she’d used to scramble up and swung out and to the ground. Her landing was a bit harder than she’d have liked, but she pasted on a smile, shook out her aching feet, and held out her hands to the children.
“We’re going to have tea and cakes,” Bertie said to Miss Evans, whose face was nearly purple, her hat still hanging over one ear. “Where’s the closest shop?”
Miss Evans’s mouth puckered up, as though she had something nasty trapped inside her. If she didn’t let it out, she might burst. “Tea and cakes?” she repeated in a frosty tone.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Bertie said. The woman ought to show some gratitude. After all, Bertie had succeeded in coaxing the two children off the scaffolding, making sure they didn’t break their necks along the way.
Miss Evans sniffed and righted her hat. “Mind you get them back before their father returns home, or he’ll summon the police. They live at 22 Upper Brook Street. Good day.”
Bertie’s eyes widened. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To my agency, to tell them to strike Mr. Sinclair McBride off their books forever. Thirty-one years I’ve been a governess, with some of the best families in England. But they are not children.” She pointed at Andrew with a long, black-gloved finger. “They’re fiends. I’ll not stay another day in that house. Mark my words, young woman, you’ll be running for your life. But take them back home first so you don’t swing for losing the children of a Queen’s Counsel.”
With that, Miss Evans turned her back and walked swiftly away. Bertie opened her mouth to call after her, then closed it again. Andrew and Cat were clinging tightly to Bertie’s hands, Andrew swaying against her grip.
“Are you our new governess then?” he asked, widening his gray eyes at her. “I like you better than Miss Evans.” He leaned into Bertie’s coat and sniffed. “You don’t smell of cod-liver oil.”
“Is that what that was?” Bertie asked, watching Miss Evans’s long coat swirl as she strode down the street, dodging past carts and carriages. She could certainly set a brisk pace. “Bit rank, wasn’t she?”
The closest tea shop was on Mount Street. The delicate interior had tables with white cloths, fine porcelain china, and heavy silver. The waiter who let them in looked
askance at Bertie, but recognized the two children who lived nearby. He put them at a table in the back and brought them teapots and cups, along with a bowl of sugar and a wide-mouthed pot of cream. Bertie asked for cakes and buns, and the man disappeared to fetch them.
Bertie knew the proper way to serve tea. One of the many women who’d come and gone in her father’s life after her mum had died had been somewhat refined. This lady—Sophie—had shown Bertie how to wear hats, walk into rooms, shake hands properly, choose her clothes, and pour tea and hand it around. A little deportment never hurt anyone, Sophie had said. Bertie had always wondered where Sophie had learned her good manners, but the woman had never spoken of her past.
Bertie had been fond of her, but inevitably, Sophie had grown tired of her father’s bullying and had gone, like all the others.
Bertie blessed Sophie now, wherever she was, because Bertie could now pour tea competently into cups, correctly take up the sugar tongs, and ask in a false posh voice whether they wanted one lump or two. Andrew laughed at her, and even Cat looked fascinated.
As they sipped the first scalding taste of creamy, sugary tea, the waiter returned with a two-tiered serving plate full of cakes, scones, and plump buns. A pot of clotted cream rested in the middle of this bounty.
Bertie stopped herself from squealing in delight, remembering to be dignified. When she had money, she usually went straight to the bakery. Hats, coats, and new boots were necessities, but a scone piled with clotted cream was a luxury. Other women could bleat about necklaces and rings, but give Bertie a fat tea cake, and she was in heaven.
She dipped her hand into her pocket and pulled out her pouch of coins. “How much?”
The waiter blinked once in surprise then gave her a cool look. “I will put it on Mr. McBride’s account,” he said stiffly and walked away.
“Well, I never,” Bertie said when he’d vanished. “I suppose I put my foot in it. An account. How lovely.”