Chapter 1

 

In Which John Pickett’s Family Tree Sprouts an Unexpected Branch

 

He was being followed.

John Pickett couldn’t say at exactly what point he had noticed the two tall young men keeping pace about a hundred feet behind him, but by the time he’d turned off Southampton Street into the Strand, he had been certain. In his defense, so many people crowded the bustling market at Covent Garden that one might conduct any number of surveillance missions there without attracting the least notice—as he had cause to know, having done so more than once over the course of a five-year career with Bow Street. He might have forgiven himself for his momentary lapse, had he not been well aware that his failure to take note of his pursuers was not due to the superfluity of shoppers, but the fact that his mind had been occupied elsewhere. In Curzon Street, in fact, where just the night before, he had endured a most unsatisfactory discussion with his wife of nine months.

“We’re going to have to decide on a name sooner or later,” Julia had reminded him. “Dr. Gillray says the baby might come any day now, and the midwife concurs.”

“It might be a girl,” he’d pointed out. “We might not need a name for a boy at all.”

This much was true. Selecting a girl’s name had been easy enough; since Julia’s sister, Claudia, had named her own daughter after their mother, he and Julia had agreed that, if the coming Blessed Event should yield an infant girl, she should be called Lydia after his own mother, of whom he retained no memory. He had seen his mother’s name, however, written in her own hand in the church registry at St. Giles-in-the-Fields: Ly Lydia Melrose Pickett. He’d smiled a little at the repeat of the first two letters, presumably an unsatisfactory first attempt she’d felt compelled to abandon. This, along with the rounded schoolgirl hand, had suggested she must have been very young at the time of her marriage. Which she must have been, he supposed, to be enticed into marrying anyone of so unsteady a character as his father. Pickett could only wonder that his father had married the poor girl at all; he had certainly never legitimized his connection with Moll, a union that, some six months after his transportation to Botany Bay, had produced a second son—his own ten-year-old half-brother, Kit.

“Then again, it might be a boy, and we’ll have to call him something,” Julia had insisted, with unassailable logic. “We need not call him John, you know, even if we do choose to name him after you. We could always call him Jack,” she’d added coaxingly, laboring under the mistaken assumption that he might welcome this suggestion as a reasonable compromise.

“My father was called Jack. ‘Gentleman Jack,’ if you must know.” He gave a bitter little laugh. “Believe me, two John Picketts are more than enough. It’s hardly a name that deserves to be preserved for posterity.”

Julia had been inclined to debate the matter, but she had been considerably hindered by the fact that this unsatisfying conversation had not taken place as it should have, in the middle of a warm bed with Julia lying within the circle of his arm. Instead, they had been obliged to call to one another across the width of the bedroom.

For the fact of the matter was that after nine months of marriage, Pickett had been unequivocally expelled from his wife’s bed. Granted, this departure from the previous (and mutually satisfactory) arrangement had not been Julia’s idea, but the midwife’s, who had insisted that it would make matters simpler once the time of her confinement was at hand. The footman, Andrew, had unearthed an ancient camp bed left in the attic by some previous resident, presumably a relic of some long-ago military campaign—most likely against the Romans, if the condition of the mattress was anything to judge by. In any case, this had been set up in the dressing room, and it was here that Pickett was expected to sleep until sometime after the birth. Pickett found the implication behind this change galling in the extreme. He did not flatter himself that Julia currently had the slightest interest in the very activities that had led to her present condition, and it stung to think that he was deemed to have so little self-control that he must be bodily removed from his wife’s bed to spare her any importunities on his part.

A few days later, as if to add insult to injury, Dr. Gilroy had prescribed bed rest for Julia until after the birth, calling it a precautionary measure. Pickett had wholeheartedly approved of this, well aware that Julia’s fears for the baby’s safety were every bit as acute as his own fears for hers. Still, there was something cruelly ironic in the fact that Julia should be confined to one bed while he was banished to another.

And so the question of what to name a boy had remained unresolved the following morning. Hoping to forestall any attempt on Julia’s part to reopen a fruitless discussion, he had beaten a hasty retreat immediately after breakfast, offering as his excuse a visit to Fortnum and Mason in search of the pears which she had unaccountably begun to crave.

In fact, he’d gone to the market at Covent Garden instead, where he knew he could find them at a fraction of the price. In any case, the subject of the previous night’s debate had been left.

Except that he had not been able to leave it, at least not entirely, and so had quite failed to notice the two tall young men who appeared to be dogging his steps from a discreet distance.

But he noticed them now, so in order to test a theory, he stopped before the window of a shop in Long Acre, pressing his face to the frosted glass to inspect this sampling of the wares offered for sale within. In fact, he scarcely noticed the bottles of wine attractively displayed in the window. Instead, he watched from the corner of his eye as his unwanted escort also paused before a shopfront he had passed a short time earlier. Seeking further confirmation, he stepped away from the window and continued his progress up the street for two or three steps before pausing to remove an entirely imaginary stone supposedly lodged in the sole of his shoe. When he bent down, he could see that his pursuers had halted before the window of yet another shop.

All doubts erased, he decided evasive action was in order. A few more steps took him to the mouth of Ryders Court, a narrow pedestrian passageway that jogged sharply to the west before opening onto Cranburn Street at the northern corner of Leicester Square. Once off the main road, he plunged down the dark passage until he could be certain the shadows covered him, then watched as the two men passed the entry to the passage at a fast trot, apparently fearful of having lost their quarry. Satisfied that his maneuver had been successful, Pickett continued down the passage until it opened onto Cranburn Street, then turned left to continue his journey on a more circuitous yet roughly parallel route.

Or such had been his intention.

Instead, he reached the end of the passage only to find it blocked by two young men who stepped forward, seized him by the arms, and informed him that “You’re coming with us, sirrah.”

“I—think—not,” Pickett said breathlessly, and drove his elbow into the gut of the brute on his left.

Having grown up in the slums of nearby St. Giles, Pickett was no stranger to the necessary art of self-defense, and could give a reasonably good account of himself if ever the need arose. Alas, the fact that he was outnumbered two to one soon yielded its inevitable result. Having overwhelmed their victim, they dragged him, still struggling, toward a carriage approaching them from the eastern end of the street, a vehicle that bore on its side panel a coat of arms Pickett did not recognize. Not that he was given much leisure to study this emblem, for in spite of his attempts to wrest himself free of the viselike grips that held him fast, he was promptly bundled aboard this equipage. His captors entered the coach in his wake and closed the door, albeit not before giving the driver the order to “Go!” The horses were whipped into action, bearing Pickett away from the environs of Covent Garden toward an unknown destiny. He lunged for the door of the vehicle, only to be hauled none too gently back into his seat.

“Who are you?” he demanded with what dignity he could muster. “Where are you taking me?”

“You’ll know soon enough,” said the stouter of the two, the same fellow who had thwarted his attempt to leap from the vehicle.

“You’re not hurt, are you?” asked the second in some concern.

“I’m afraid not,” Pickett said with some asperity. “Better luck next time.”

“Oh, we wasn’t supposed to hurt you,” Pickett was assured. “His nibs was very partic’lar about that.”

“His nibs?” Pickett echoed sharply, recalling the coat of arms he’d glimpsed on the door panel. “Who?”

“Never you mind,” the larger fellow said, giving his confederate a reproachful look. “You’ll know soon enough.”

“Do you mean his lordship?” He received no answer, but persevered nonetheless. “George Bertram, Lord Fieldhurst?” Julia’s cousin by marriage was the only aristocrat he knew (not that his acquaintance amongst the aristocracy was all that extensive) who disliked him enough to arrange such a stunt, although what he might hope to gain by it, Pickett couldn’t begin to guess. Then, too, such a course of action seemed out of character for him. “I shouldn’t have thought he would have the cheek,” Pickett said, expressing this last thought aloud.

“If he opens his mouth again before we reach Park Lane,” the stouter of his captors addressed the other, “can I put my fist in it?”

“Not unless you want his lordship to be havin’ your guts for garters,” was his answer, to Pickett’s profound relief.

Still, the man’s threat had given him food for thought. Park Lane, he’d said. Not George Bertram, then, for the Fieldhurst town house was in Berkeley Square—as he had cause to know, having once paid a call on Julia there, forgetting that she would have surrendered the house and most of its furnishings to her late husband’s cousin upon his assumption of the title. He recalled that Lord Dunnington, the husband of Julia’s friend Emily, Lady Dunnington, owned a house in Park Lane, but if Lord Dunnington had required his presence, his lordship must surely know that he had only to ask and Pickett would call on him there. Pickett had always thought he and the earl got along surprisingly well, given that there was bound to be little common ground between a belted earl and a former pickpocket turned Bow Street Runner.

Who, then? And why?

Pickett watched out the window as the carriage trundled westward, his brain awhirl. The grassy expanse of Hyde Park on his left, sere and brown beneath the gray December sky, indicated that Park Lane was indeed their destination. Within the park itself, a few hardy souls rode or walked along the road that ran parallel to the street just inside the iron fencing intended to keep out the riffraff, and for a moment Pickett considered jerking the window down and shouting for help. It did not take long for him to dismiss this possibility without much regret. Aside from the fact that the more combative of his traveling companions would know exactly how to deal with such an attempt, “his nibs”’s orders notwithstanding, there was something demeaning about such a course of action. Any man worthy of the name, especially one with more than five years’ experience at Bow Street, ought to be able to extricate himself from his present predicament without shrieking for help like a hysterical housemaid.

Perhaps more to the point, however, was the fact that his curiosity was fully roused. If he were to escape now, either by his own efforts or with the assistance of others, he would never know who had ordered his capture, or for what purpose—or if he might expect this unknown to make another attempt. Not until he was actually face-to-face with “his nibs” could he discover what the man wanted, or determine what course of action to take.

Even as he arrived at this conclusion, the vehicle began to slow until it finally halted before a tall narrow house with which Pickett was utterly unfamiliar. The front door of this residence opened, and a man in scarlet and gold livery exited the building, approached the equipage, and let down the vehicle’s single step.

“I wouldn’t be entertaining any notion of running, if I were you,” the larger and more belligerent of his captors cautioned. A moment later the door was opened and the man preceded his fellows from the carriage, the better to clamp a strong hand about Pickett’s arm as he followed suit. The more cautious of the two exited last, then took Pickett’s free arm as the pair “escorted” him will he or nill he toward the door, putting him forcibly in mind of two jailers taking a prisoner to the dock.

“I’m perfectly capable of walking on my own,” he grumbled, disconcerted by the image his thoughts had conjured.

He received no answer. Instead, the two men ushered him inside—an awkward business since the door, imposing as it was with its fanlight transom and long narrow sidelights of cut glass flanking it, was nevertheless far too narrow to accommodate three men walking abreast. Without relaxing their grip on his arms, they steered him down a long corridor carpeted so thickly that Pickett fully expected to sink to his ankles with every step. At the far end of the corridor, his captors decanted him into a room at the rear of the house that he judged to be a study, given the wide desk of gleaming mahogany and the bookshelves along two of its four walls, groaning beneath the weight of dozens of large calfbound volumes his benumbed brain identified at once as ledgers; if there was one thing he had learned during his three miserable weeks of employment as a counting-house clerk, it was how to recognize a ledger when he saw it. Above the desk, an array of knives, swords, sabers, and more exotic blades—a collection that did nothing to reassure him—were mounted on the wall, the smaller weapons artistically arranged on burgundy-colored velvet behind a protective glass barrier.

More impressive than the room or its furnishings, however, was its occupant. For seated behind the desk was a large man of about seventy, his girth contained within a fashionable yet far from dandified coat of olive green superfine, one sleeve of which was bound about with a black band indicative of mourning. His thick gray hair was combed straight back from his broad forehead, and his chins (for there must surely have been more than one of them, given the man’s avoirdupois) disappeared into the stiff folds of his snowy cravat. Pickett, finding himself the object of a keen and disapproving scrutiny, had the fanciful and yet unamusing notion that he was being measured up by an aristocratic toad.

Weighed in the balance, he thought, and found wanting.

Even as his brain formed the thought, the man spoke, seemingly in confirmation.

“Well?” he demanded impatiently. “Stand up straight, boy, and let’s have a look at you.”

In retrospect, Pickett wished he’d thought to slouch, just to show this autocratic amphibian just how little he cared for the man’s approval. But he instinctively stood taller, making the most of his six feet three inches and jutting out his chin in a manner that dared his inquisitor to disparage them.

To his surprise, the man gave a grunt of reluctant—no, not approval, exactly, but acknowledgement that there was less to criticize than he might have expected. Still, Pickett couldn’t imagine why he was being subjected to such an appraisal, much less why the fellow should have any expectations regarding him at all.

He was not left wondering for long.

“I won’t lie; you’re not what I’d hoped for,” was the unflattering conclusion drawn from this examination. “Still, I suppose it could be a good deal worse, and as they say, beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Your lordship,” Pickett began impatiently, using the title by which his captors had referred to their employer. He could not bring himself to call the man “sir,” let alone “my lord”; the latter, especially, conveyed a hint of subservience which could not be further from his sentiments at the moment. “Who are you, and why have you brought me”—he glanced toward his escort, the pair of them hovering somewhat sheepishly near the door—“rather, why have you had me brought here?”

The stern gaze swiveled toward his captors. “You’ve told him nothing, then?”

“I thought you—those were your orders, my lord.” It was the more timorous of the two who spoke, albeit with obvious reluctance, while his counterpart was apparently at a loss for words in spite of his earlier braggadocio.

“Very well,” their employer conceded grudgingly, almost as if he’d hoped for some reason to deliver a scathing condemnation. Pickett could only suppose that any such criticisms would now be heaped upon his own head. “You may leave us now, both of you.”

The pair obeyed as if they could not quit the premises quickly enough, and Pickett was left alone with his host.

“ ‘Who are you?’ ” the latter echoed mockingly. “Impertinent whelp, aren’t you? I’ll have you know I’m the Marquess of Melrose!”

Clearly, he expected this pronouncement to mean something. In this, at least, the marquess was doomed to disappointment, for Pickett was at a loss; he had never heard the name before in his life. Or had he? No, Pickett thought with growing conviction, he’d never heard the name, but he had seen it once, seen it written in a church registry, the letters carefully inscribed in a rounded schoolgirl hand…

“Good God,” he breathed as realization dawned.

“ ‘Good God’?” returned his lordship with a contemptuous sneer. “Is that all you can think to say to your grandfather?”

* * *

Meanwhile, in Curzon Street, Julia sat up in bed, propped against the pillows with a book in her hands and a second pillow, the one upon which her husband had formerly rested his head, positioned beneath her swollen feet. Whatever the trials of the beautiful and virtuous Emily St. Aubert, Julia thought, turning the page with a sigh, at the moment they must surely compare favorably to those endured by a lady restricted to her bed in hourly expectation of her confinement. She had hardly begun to lose herself in Mrs. Radcliffe’s thrilling tale when Rogers peered into the room with an air of confused distraction entirely out of character for a butler who was usually equal to any situation.

“Begging your pardon, madam,” he began, “but there is a gentle—that is, there is a man below who—he came to the service entrance—he seemed to be laboring under the impression—but under the circumstances, I felt you would wish to receive him, for you will see at once—”

“Say no more!” cried Julia, casting aside Mrs. Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho. “If you say I should receive this man, I will do so, for I trust your judgment implicitly! Only give me ten minutes—no, best make that fifteen—and I shall see him in the drawing room.”

Rogers seemed inclined to linger, but as Julia had by this time rung for her maid and thrown back the counterpane, he was obliged to make his exit and convey his mistress’s message to the mysterious caller.

Fifteen minutes later, she gingerly made her way down the stairs and into the drawing room. The visitor stood with his back turned to her, seemingly making a survey of the well-proportioned room and its elegant furnishings.

“Good morning,” she said. “I’m sorry to have—”

He turned at the sound of her voice, and his appearance was enough to make her blink. He was a tall, lean man of perhaps forty-five, whose tanned skin and sun-bleached brown hair testified to a life spent largely out of doors.

Julia had never seen him before in her life, and yet his features were so familiar that she knew him at once. She crossed the room with as much grace as she could manage and approached him with a smile of recognition, her hands held out in welcome.

“ ‘Gentleman Jack’ Pickett, I presume.”