Chapter 3

 

In Which Father and Son Renew Their Acquaintance, with Mixed Results

 

“Is that any way to greet your old man after ten long years?” chided Pickett, Sr., rising from the sofa to meet him.

Suddenly it was all too much. First Lord Melrose—his grandfather, impossible as it seemed—and now this: his father, returned from Botany Bay just in time to throw his life into chaos.

“If that isn’t just like you,” Pickett fumed. “Yes, ten long years! Ten years since you went off and left me with Moll, who chucked me out of the house before your ship had reached Gravesend! Ten years since I was put out on the streets to fend for myself. And now you come back and think to pick up right where you left off? Well, think again!”

Gentleman Jack made no reply, but then, he didn’t have to; the pointed look he cast about the room, encompassing the Axminster carpet, the Adam fireplace, and the elegant Hepplewhite furnishings, said it all.

“Yes, I know,” Pickett said with a sigh. “First of all, you have to understand that the house isn’t really mine. Oh, it is according to the law, but only because it came to me when I married. It really belongs to Julia.” Belatedly recalling that some form of introduction was in order, he added, “Julia, in case you haven’t already guessed, this is my father. Da, make your bow to my wife, Julia.”

“Aye, it’s a hard fate that shackles a man to such a woman,” Jack said sympathetically, shaking his head in mock sorrow even as he winked broadly at his daughter-in-law.

“It’s a hard fate that leaves a fourteen-year-old boy sleeping under bridges and stealing food to keep from starving to death,” retorted Pickett, unmoved. “Julia, where is Kit? Have you—? Does he—?”

“Kit is in the garden. He has taken it into his head to tame a squirrel that has taken up residence there,” she added as an aside to her father-in-law before turning back to her glowering husband. “No, I thought you would want to perform that introduction yourself.”

In fact, there were fewer things Pickett wanted less. Still, his father was Kit’s father too, and he could think of no valid reason for keeping the two apart, much as he might like to do so. “Yes, I suppose—I’ll ring for Rogers to—”

“Never mind ringing; I’ll go and fetch him myself, shall I?” She gave him a reassuring smile before quitting the room.

Left alone together for the first time in more than a decade, father and son eyed each other warily before Gentleman Jack broke the silence.

“So you stole food to survive, did you? I must have taught you well, then, for it’s clear you’ve not been going hungry. Pity you weren’t arrested, too; you could’ve joined your old man in Botany Bay.”

“I was. Arrested in Covent Garden for stealing an apple, by a Bow Street Runner who thought to teach me the error of my ways by blacking my eye and breaking my nose.”

“Oh?” Jack’s carefree air vanished. “Only point me in his direction, and he’ll rue the day he messed with any son of Gentleman Jack Pickett!”

“Stubble it, Da,” said Pickett, unimpressed. “He’s dead. Shot by the Bow Street magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun. I don’t know if you remember him, but—”

“Oh, don’t I just?” Gentleman Jack broke in bitterly. “I remember him, all right. I thought of him every day, the bastard, on that hellish trip around Cape Horn.”

“That’s enough.” Pickett never raised his voice, but if his father had harbored any doubts that the scrawny fourteen-year-old boy he’d left behind was now a man grown, they would have been instantly dispelled by tone in which this simple comment was delivered. “You’ll not say one word against Mr. Colquhoun, not in this house. I owe him too much.”

“The man who sent your da halfway ’round the world? Aye, you owe him, all right. I owe him, too.”

“He might have ordered you hanged, you know,” Pickett reminded him. “As for my own arrest, he—I guess you could say he took an interest in me, although I’ve never understood exactly why. He didn’t make me stand trial—never handed down any form of punishment at all, in fact. He took me to a pub and bought me something to eat, and then arranged for me to be apprenticed to a coal merchant. Five years later, he brought me to Bow Street.”

The elder Pickett scowled. “He did, did he? What’d he have you up for this time?”

“Nothing!” said Pickett, bristling. “I don’t mean he arrested me! He only thought I—well, he thought I had brains, and that I was capable of something more than hauling coal. He bought out the last two years of my apprenticeship from his own pocket, and gave me a place on the Foot Patrol. Five years later, I became a principal officer. That’s how I met Julia; her first husband had been stabbed to death, and—”

Gentleman Jack, listening to this speech in growing indignation, could no longer keep silent. “That bloody beak turned my son into a damned prig-napper?”

“That ‘bloody beak’ has been ten times the father to me than ever you were, even before you were transported!”

Fortunately for the harmony of the household, Julia returned to the drawing room at that moment with Kit at her heels, his cheeks flushed and his clothes rather the worse for his most recent encounter with the recalcitrant squirrel.

“John?” he said breathlessly. “Julia says you want to—” He broke off abruptly, staring wide-eyed at the visitor.

Even the eldest Pickett appeared to be somewhat taken aback, eyeing the boy in surprise before glancing uncertainly at his elder son. “Yours?”

“No,” Pickett said. “Yours. It seems you left Moll with a pudding in the oven. This is Kit—short for Christopher. Kit, this is your—our—father, back from Botany Bay.”

“H-how do you do, sir?” asked Kit, sketching a rudimentary bow.

“Well, and aren’t you the little gentleman!” exclaimed his father, chucking the boy under the chin. “How d’you do—Kit, is it?”

Apparently bereft of speech, Kit merely nodded emphatically.

“Well now, let’s see,” said Gentleman Jack, reaching a hand into the inside pocket of his coat. “A gentleman needs a good watch, doesn’t he? D’you think maybe this one’ll do?” He drew out a gold watch by its chain, and dropped it into the hands Kit held out eagerly.

“When Kit is old enough to need a watch, I’ll buy him one.” Pickett snatched the timepiece out of the boy’s hands and gave it back to his father, noting the engraved initials on its case that read H. B. “I wouldn’t want him to be taken up for thievery. One Pickett might as well have a clean record,” he added dryly.

“Hey!” cried Kit. “He gave it to me!”

“Thievery?” echoed the elder Pickett in tones of outraged dignity. “No such thing! Won it fair and square, I did, in a friendly little game of penny-up-the-wall on the voyage home.”

Julia laid a hand on her husband’s arm, forestalling, at least for the moment, what was bidding fair to becoming a quarrel of no small magnitude, all the more so for having been delayed for more than a decade. “I’ll just ring for tea, shall I?”

“Don’t bother,” Pickett said, glowering at his father. “Da isn’t staying.”

“Why not?” wailed Kit.

“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!” exclaimed Jack, adding, “But then, it’s no more than I would expect from a turncoat who’d go to work for the very man who ordered his da sent to Botany Bay…”

The rest of this speech was lost, as it was delivered in a low and no doubt profane grumble that Pickett thought a good thing neither Julia nor Kit was able to discern.

But however unintelligible the words, Julia had at least taken in enough to form a very fair assumption of their meaning, for she slipped her hand through Pickett’s arm, saying, “And I, for one, am very glad he did, for it was John who saved me from the gallows when it appeared I would hang for my first husband’s murder.”

“And then he saved me,” Kit piped up, determined not to be left out. “He broke into the Bank of England for Roger and Jud, so I wouldn’t have to do it.”

This claim had the happy effect of seizing Jack’s full attention. “The Bank of England?” he breathed reverently, all his anger evaporated. “I take it all back, every word! What did you get away with?”

“One ten-year-old boy,” Pickett said, ruffling his brother’s curls affectionately even as he recognized with an unexpected pang of jealousy that their father had replaced him as Kit’s idol.

“That’s all?” demanded his father, rendered tactless through incredulity.

“That was all I wanted,” Pickett said impatiently. “I’m respectable now, Da. I want to stay that way.”

“You call it respectable, casting off your poor old father and taking up with the man who sent him away? John, I’m ashamed of you!”

“But not so ashamed that you’ll give back all the money I’ve sent you over the last ten years, I’ll wager,” Pickett predicted with grim certainty.

“Well, and I couldn’t do that in any case, could I?” observed the “poor old father,” unabashed. “Seeing as how I’ve spent it.”

“Now, what does that not surprise me?” Pickett asked of no one in particular. “What did you spend it on? Those togs you’re wearing, I suppose. What else? I didn’t know they made Blue Ruin in the Antipodes. Or did you take up with another prime article like Moll?”

“In fact, Mister High-and-Mighty—” retorted his father, “I spent it on land. Aye, your old da’s a man of property now. What do you think of that?”

Pickett, unimpressed, chose to ignore this claim. “I suppose we’ll have to put you up for the night, but you’re not living here! It’s bad enough that Julia’s jointure has to support me, and Kit, and soon the baby. I won’t let you sponge off her, too. And if you’re thinking to move back in with Moll, I’ll tell you to your face that Kit stays with me.”

“John,” Julia began, her hand tightening on his sleeve, “may I have a word with you? Kit, why don’t you tell your father about the school you’ll be attending next year? We’ll be back directly, and then I shall ring for tea.”

Kit launched eagerly into a spate of words in which cricket, riding, and marksmanship all strove for prominence, and Julia practically dragged Pickett into the dining room.

Once she could be certain of relative privacy, she turned on him. “John, how can you speak to your father so?”

“Very easily,” he replied, then added, “And I thought you were supposed to be in bed.”

“Well, yes, but I could hardly receive your father in my bedchamber!”

“Believe me, he would prefer it that way,” Pickett said dryly.

She gave him a reproachful look, but refused to take the bait. “I know his treatment of you left a great deal to be desired, but do him the justice to own that his life over the last decade will not have been an easy one, either. You’ve changed since then; why should not he? Although,” she confessed in a lighter tone, “I hope he won’t change too much. I rather like him.”

“Everyone does,” Pickett said in a flat voice. “Everyone who doesn’t have to live with him, anyway. I had fourteen years of him, and that was more than enough. He can go back to the Antipodes, or to St. Giles, or to perdition, for all I care, but he’s not staying here.”

“In case you have forgotten”—Julia’s voice was gentle, although a hint of steel lay beneath the soft words—“you are not the only one of his sons who lives in this house.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt Kit thinks he hung the moon,” Pickett readily conceded the point, albeit it not without bitterness. “He never knew him the way I did.”

“Exactly.” She took a deep breath. “If you were the only one of Jack’s sons who lived here, I would honor your wishes, whatever my own views on the subject. But you’re not. This is Kit’s home too, and he deserves the chance to know his father.”

“Oh, of course!” exclaimed Pickett, flinging up his hands in surrender. “In fact, why don’t we invite Lord Melrose, and make it a family party?”

“Lord Melrose?” echoed Julia, utterly bewildered by the introduction into the conversation of an elderly aristocrat with whom she was barely acquainted. “What does he have to do with anything?” Receiving no response, she changed tactics. “When you left here earlier, you were going to Fortnum and Mason to buy pears. John, did something happen there to upset you? What was it?”

The pears. So much had happened since he’d left the house this morning that he’d forgot all about them. He’d gone to the market at Covent Garden instead of the more expensive Piccadilly establishment of Fortnum and Mason, and he seemed to have a vague recollection of something rolling beneath his feet as he struggled against his captors.

“I—I think I must have dropped them,” he confessed, deflated. “I’m sorry.”

She waited in silence for some explanation beyond bruised fruit, but none was forthcoming.

“I’ll—I’ll tell you all about it later,” he said evasively. “In fact, I’d hoped—but then he was here, and—but that’s neither here nor there.” Looking back, he wondered how much of his ill temper was not due to his father’s unexpected return at all—at least, not entirely—but rather to the fact that his presence in the house must of necessity postpone the tête-à-tête with Julia which he desperately needed—even if he could only call to her from the accursed camp bed in the dressing room.

“Later, then.” Steadying herself with her hands on his shoulders, she stood on tiptoe and gave him a quick kiss. “But in the meantime”—her hands slid down his chest until her right hand rested over his heart—“it seems to me that perhaps you and your father are long overdue for a conversation of your own. Now that he sees you’re no longer a boy, he may be willing to tell you things he felt he could not, when you were younger. We shall have tea, and then I shall take Kit upstairs so the two of you may speak privately.”

“Oh, Julia.” Breathing her name with a sigh, he drew her close and put his arms around her, burying his face in a nest of golden curls. “I love you. You know that, don’t you?”

“I had my suspicions.” She lingered in his embrace for a long moment before extricating herself with great tenderness and not a little reluctance. “I suppose we’d best return to your father and Kit.”

“Before Da corrupts him,” Pickett agreed, but his voice held none of the bitterness with which he’d spoken of his father before.

True to her word, Julia requested Rogers to bring tea and cakes, and once these had been consumed, she spoke to Kit.

“Why don’t we go upstairs and leave your father and John alone to talk about grown-up things? I’ll give you another drawing lesson if you like, and you can choose one of your drawings to give your father as a present.”

Whatever else might be said of him, no one had ever accused Gentleman Jack Pickett of being stupid. He was quick to take his cue, and when Kit seemed disinclined to forsake his newly-discovered parent in favor of the schoolroom, Jack expressed his approval of this project with all the enthusiasm Julia could have wished. for this project In the end, Kit followed his sister-in-law upstairs with obedience, if not eagerness.

Some twenty minutes later, as Kit applied the finishing touches to a pencil sketch of the squirrel whose taming was his particular project, he asked in an offhand manner, “D’you think John might give Da’s watch back to me if you asked him?”

However carelessly the words were spoken, Julia had the distinct impression that the answer mattered very, very much. But Kit’s confidences, much like his brother’s, could not be rushed—which made it all the more remarkable that the elder of the two Pickett sons was impatient to pour his troubles into her sympathetic ear.

But that was a conversation for later, and in the meantime, Kit awaited her answer with bated breath.

“He might,” she said, being careful to match the boy’s tone of feigned indifference.

Abandoning his attempt at apathy, Kit looked up from his drawing with flushed cheeks and shining eyes. “Would you, then? Ask him, I mean,” he added hastily, clearly wishing to avoid any possible misunderstanding on her part.

“I will,” she assured him with a smile. “But if I know anything about your brother at all, I won’t have to.”