Chapter 4

 

In Which a Truce Is Declared

 

Julia had not exaggerated when she’d said father and son were long overdue for a conversation. For Pickett, however, finding some way to put this suggestion into practice proved to be more than a little awkward. Pickett dispatched Rogers to fetch a bottle of something a bit stronger than the tea they had just finished, then sank down onto the sofa facing his father and tried to think of something reasonably amicable to say.

The butler returned a few minutes later with a particularly fine brandy, and Pickett noted that, although Da must surely have betrayed himself with every word he uttered, Rogers had made no attempt to fob him off with the cheap stuff, but supplied them with the best the cellar had to offer. Pickett knew not quite what to make of this gesture, and could only suppose it was further evidence of his father’s ability to charm his way through any situation; he would have been stunned (and very likely embarrassed) to know that it was in fact a token of the high esteem in which he himself was held below stairs, and the determination of the butler to see that the young master made a good impression on a caller who could only be his father.

It was perhaps for the best, then, that Rogers said nothing beyond “Will that be all, sir?” before decanting the brandy into two pot-bellied glasses, placing the bottle on a small table at Pickett’s elbow, and, having received an answer in the negative, retiring to his pantry.

Left alone with his wayward sire, Pickett asked, with an attempt at civility if not warmth, “So, did your ship reach London only today?”

“We docked yesterday, but it was this morning before anyone was allowed to disembark. I sailed on a merchant vessel, and apparently there’s a lot of paperwork involving the ship’s cargo.”

Pickett nodded in understanding, having learned more than he’d ever wanted to know about international commerce during his mercifully brief career as clerk to a firm of importers. “What was she hauling?” he asked, more for something to say than any real interest.

“Timber, mostly, and flax. And half a dozen passengers.”

The two men lapsed once more into uncomfortable silence, and after a long, awkward moment, Pickett refilled both glasses in spite of the fact that they were still almost full; in fact, he had ordered the drink mostly to have something to do with his hands, as neither he nor, presumably, his father could possibly be in need of further sustenance after having put away substantial quantities of tea and cakes.

Finally, he took a deep breath and grasped the bull by the horns. “Today I discovered I have a grandfather.”

“Oh?” It was a curious thing, but although his father’s voice held a trace of wariness, it contained nothing at all of surprise. “How did you find that out?”

Pickett gave a careless shrug, quite as if it didn’t matter. “He had me abducted off the street near Covent Garden and brought to his house in Park Lane.”

If Pickett had hoped to break through the awkward silence, he had all the satisfaction of knowing he’d succeeded with a vengeance.

“You don’t say!” exclaimed Gentleman Jack, with a convulsive start that sent the brandy sloshing in his glass. “The old buzzard’s still alive, then? Well, well! They say the devil looks after his own.”

Pickett leaned forward intently, all traces of indifference banished. “Then it’s true, what he was saying?” Lord Melrose really is my grandfather?”

Jack nodded. “The father of your mother, God rest her soul.”

“You married the daughter of a marquess.” It was a statement, not a question, but it was intended as one nevertheless, and Pickett Senior understood it as such.

“You married a viscountess,” Jack pointed out defensively.

“Yes, and don’t think I didn’t try to make her see reason, for I did! But you—! I can see how the wife of a marquess might have taken you as a lover, if you’d happened to cross her path”—in fact, that was precisely the arrangement Julia had proposed on that rainy day in Scotland, neither one of them dreaming they’d already contracted a legal marriage according to Scottish law, but Pickett wasn’t about to make his father a gift of this information—“but the daughter of a marquess willingly accepting you as a husband? I’m sorry, Da, but no. Even your legendary skill with women would fail at that endeavor. So, how did it happen? What hold did you have over the poor girl?”

“Son, you wound me to the quick!” In demonstration of this claim, Jack pressed a hand to his heart in a gesture that would have brought down the house at Covent Garden Theatre or the Haymarket. “I was one of her father’s servants. First footman, to be exact.”

“Oh?” Pickett’s tone was skeptical, although he recalled seeing his parents’ marriage lines, and his father’s name recorded as John Pickett, servant. “I don’t see how that exonerates you. In fact, I should have thought it would put you in a better position for gaining some hold over the daughter of the house: passing letters between her and some undesirable suitor, providing cover for clandestine meetings—”

“The only ‘clandestine meetings’ Lydia kept were with me! That was her name, you know. Lady Lydia Melrose. She was betrothed to Sir Godfrey Graham—her father’s doing, you understand, not hers.”

“Lord Melrose seems to have a predilection for arranging other people’s marriages,” Pickett observed cryptically.

“Lord Melrose has a predilection, as you call it, for running other people’s lives.” He grinned mischievously at his son with the same smile Pickett occasionally glimpsed in the mirror. The sight was more than a little unnerving. “Now that I’m back in London, maybe I ought to pay a call on my dear father-in-law.”

“Now that you’re a man of property,” Pickett put in dryly.

“Go ahead and laugh, son. Mark my words, you’ll soon be laughing out of the other side of your mouth.”

It was the second time in less than three hours that one of his progenitors had predicted that he would someday approach them with hat in hand, and Pickett liked hearing it from his father no better than he had from his grandfather.

“Never mind that,” he said impatiently. “Go on; you were a footman in Lord Melrose’s household, carrying on a clandestine liaison with his daughter.”

“It wasn’t at all like you make it sound! Lydia was being pressured to accept Sir Godfrey’s suit, and there was no one to take her part. Well, I couldn’t take her part, either—I’ll wager you’ve seen enough of his lordship to reckon how much a servant’s opinion would weigh with him—but she needed a shoulder to cry on, and I had one. Two, in fact.”

“That was convenient,” Pickett remarked.

“Make no mistake; I knew my place, and I knew it wasn’t with Lady Lydia Melrose.” The words stirred a chord of memory, and Pickett realized he had once said the very same thing about himself and his growing love for the recently widowed Julia, Lady Fieldhurst. Since he had been speaking to his magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun, at the time, however, he thought it best to keep this recollection to himself.

“And then one night,” his father continued, “there was to be a grand ball announcing her betrothal. I’d been sent on some errand—I don’t remember now what it was—but anyway, I stumbled across her in the conservatory, hiding behind a potted palm and crying as if her poor heart would break.”

“I think I see where this is going,” remarked Pickett with a little smile, leaning forward to catch every word, nevertheless.

“Aye, well you might! We ran off together that very night, me and Lydia, and wasn’t Lord Melrose beside himself when he found out! I don’t know which was worse in his eyes: the insult she’d dealt Sir Godfrey, or the fact that she’d defied his order that she marry Sir Godfrey, and had run off with me instead. No, I take that back. I do know what was worse, at least in his eyes. Lydia could’ve wed the Prince of Wales in Westminster Abbey and he wouldn’t have liked it any better, not unless he’d arranged the match himself. Anyway, that’s how it happened, and if you’ve any idea that you were born on the wrong side of the blanket, you can put that thought right out of your head. We were married as soon as the bans were posted—that’s three weeks, mind you, and me half expecting his lordship to show up in church and object to the marriage—and don’t be thinking I laid a hand on her before the knot was tied, neither!”

“I always assumed I was illegitimate,” Pickett confessed. “At least until quite recently, when I found your marriage recorded in the register of St. Giles-in-the-Fields.”

“Now that you mention it, I might just go and have another look at it myself,” his father said, with a reminiscent gleam in his eye. “They were happy times, in spite of everything. Maybe the happiest days of my life.”

“What happened to her?” Pickett asked softly, not wanting to interrupt his father’s expansive mood.

“She died when you were four years old. You got sick—typhus was going around—and she nursed you all day and night. I couldn’t be much help to her, I’m afraid. I’d managed to get a position with the Duke of Weybridge in spite of not having any references, Lydia’s da having given me the sack at the same time he cut her off. There was no love lost between the duke and Lord Melrose, and I think it amused him to have his lordship’s son-in-law at his beck and call.

“Anyway, you pulled through, but by the time you were out of danger, Lydia’d come down with it herself. There was no money for a doctor— she’d spent what little money we’d had on a doctor for you—so I swallowed my pride and went to Lord Melrose. It was the first time we’d spoken in five years. Lydia wrote to him after you were born, telling him he had a grandson, but if he read the letter, he never acknowledged it. I told him his daughter was going to die if she didn’t have a doctor.” Jack had been staring blindly down at the glass in his hands, but suddenly he looked up at his son, and his grip on the glass tightened until his knuckles turned white. “Do you know what he said, the bastard? He said she’d made her bed when she ran off with me, and if it turned out to be her death bed, it was no more than she deserved. I didn’t know what else to do. When I went to the duke’s house the next day, I pocketed one of the silver snuffboxes he kept in a marquetry cabinet, thinking to sell it. He had so many, I reckoned he’d never miss just one. I was wrong; he did.”

“What did he do?” asked Pickett, enthralled.

“He said he wouldn’t prefer charges against me, but nor would he keep me on. Me no longer having a position to go to, I nursed Lydia the best I could, but it was no use. She was gone within a se’nnight, leaving me with a boy scarcely out of leading strings. Well”—his voice became brisk—“I’d had two employers, and I’d eloped with the daughter of one and stolen from the other. I couldn’t find honest work after that, so I reckoned if I had to settle for dishonest work, I’d be the best damned thief in London. Truth to tell, nothing much mattered to me anymore, not with Lydia gone. Dead and buried in a pauper’s grave without so much as a stone to mark the place where she lay, and she not yet twenty-five years old.”

Jack shook his head at the memory, then tossed back the brandy remaining in his glass and reached for the bottle.

Pickett, resolutely swallowing the lump that had formed in his throat, took the bottle from his father’s grasp and refilled first his father’s glass and then his own. “In fact,” he said, hardening his heart, “you were so devastated that you took up with Moll before Mum was cold in her grave.”

“And what would you have had me do? I had a motherless boy to care for, and not so much as a roof to cover his head, for I’d spent the rent money on nostrums the apothecary swore would cure your mum—not that any of them were worth a farthing in the end,” he added bitterly before resuming his tale. “And then there was Moll. She was a pretty piece in those days, and she’d always fancied me, even when your mum was still alive. More to the point, she had a house—Moll’s grandmum had been a whore early last century, and her cully had bought it for her. The street was never as smart as he’d thought it would be, but by that time he’d moved on to some other doxy. Moll’s grandmum kept the house, it being her only security against old age, and hired out the rooms she wasn’t using, just like Moll and her mum did themselves, each in their turn. So I took up with Moll, and moved with you into her house, she having put out her tenants to make room for us. I was that grateful to her, but I didn’t marry her, and I made it plain from the start that I never would. I wouldn’t disrespect your mother’s memory by setting any other woman in her place.”

Pickett could all too easily imagine his father’s dilemma; he was all too keenly aware of what his own position would be if, heaven forbid, Julia should die in childbirth or afterwards of childbed fever. The jointure left to her by her first husband would cease, leaving him with an infant to care for and no money on which to support it beyond the sporadic income from his fledgling investigation service.

Still, he was not quite ready to completely absolve his father, not just yet. “Do you have any idea how Moll treated me when you weren’t around?”

“Not at first; I only found out later. I didn’t know she was so jealous of your mother, even after poor Lydia was dead. The two had never been what you’d call friends, but that was hardly surprising, seeing as how they had nothing in common.”

“Nothing but you, anyway,” Pickett observed dryly.

Jack stiffened in indignation. “No, not me, either. After Lydia died, I took up with Moll—needs must, you know—but while she was alive, I never so much as looked at another woman. Why should I? I was the luckiest man in the world!”

This sentiment was so familiar that Pickett could not quite suppress a grin. “I’m sorry to disillusion you, Da, but you were only the second-luckiest.”

Jack acknowledged this hit with a wink, but made no attempt to dispute it. “But Moll wanted more from me than I could give. Mind you, I never claimed to love her—I thought she understood what I needed from her, and what I could offer in return—but she knew things had been different between me and Lydia, and not only the fact that we’d been legally wed. Oh, I tried; I owed her a debt of gratitude, and thought maybe I could make myself love her if I put my mind to it, but it was no use.” He sighed. “That part of me was buried with Lydia, and Moll could never forget that another woman had been first in my heart. Well, and to be fair, how could she, with you there as living proof? Everyone said you looked just like me, but there was something about you—a certain expression in your eyes—still is, for that matter,” he added, studying the features in question with a keen gaze. “Every now and then I could look at you and catch a glimpse of Lydia looking back at me.”

“According to my loving grandfather, I also have her stubborn chin,” put in Pickett.

Jack’s eyes narrowed in silent appraisal. “I’m not sure but what he isn’t right, though I’ll admit I never noticed it before. Ha! Fancy me and his nibs actually agreeing on something!” His smile faded, and his voice grew serious. “If he intends to do something handsome for you, son, you let him—for your mother’s sake, if not your own. God knows she earned it.”

As this comment reminded Pickett all too clearly of the interview endured in Park Lane, he quickly turned the subject. “Never mind him; you were saying Moll saw too much of my mother in me.”

“Aye, and heard too much of her, too, what with you crying for your mum more often than not, and with the same plummy speech as hers, since it’d been her voice in your ear day and night. I had to shut you up for your own good, so I started boxing your ears every time you mentioned her. God knows it took you long enough—stubborn chin, as you say—but eventually you took the hint and stopped talking about her.”

“We could have talked about her when Moll was absent, just the two of us,” Pickett said, aggrieved on behalf of his younger self. “Instead, you let me forget all about her!”

His father gave him a knowing look. “Haven’t spent much time around the nursery set, have you? Never mind, you’ll learn soon enough. Anyway, I thought maybe that would serve the purpose, until one day I came home just in time to catch Moll in the act of selling you to a chimney sweep. Do you have any idea what a climbing-boy’s life is like?”

“I’ve seen the results often enough to make a pretty good guess.” Pickett suppressed a shudder at the thought of the thousands of little boys sold into virtual slavery to sweeps who forced them naked into the narrow chimneys of London—boys with filthy faces, bent backs, misshapen limbs, and, for those fortunate enough to survive to manhood, the cancerous “sooty warts” that would eventually kill them. Such a fate had nearly been his—and would have been, if Moll had been allowed to have her way.

“That’s why I started taking you with me, teaching you how to pick pockets, setting you to mudlarking—” He shook his head at the memory of that long-ago decision. “If you’d been caught—well, magistrates don’t like sentencing children to hang, but even if you’d ended up swinging from the end of a rope, it would have been an easier fate than what Moll had planned for you. It didn’t take long for you to lose your mum’s plummy vowels, which I hated to see for Lydia’s sake, but there’s no denying you attracted less attention that way when we were out and about, to say nothing of setting up Moll’s back when we were at home.”

“Moll’s maternal instincts haven’t improved, even where her own spawn is concerned,” Pickett said, his voice hardening. “She sold Kit to a criminal gang, and I should warn you that I meant what I said: If you intend to go back to her, you’ll go alone. I won’t let you take Kit with you.”

“And just how you’d stop me when it’s plain as a pikestaff that I’m the boy’s father, I’d like to know,” his father retorted without rancor, then added somewhat sheepishly, “although, truth to tell, I’d not thought of picking up where I left off with Moll, seeing as how it’s not likely she’d be wearing the willow for me for these ten years and more. Besides,” he added, still more sheepishly, “there’s a woman I met on the ship that I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more of.”

Pickett rolled his eyes. “Of course there is. You never change, do you?”

Jack understood the question to be purely rhetorical, for he made no attempt to answer it, only offering in his own defense, “We were on board ship for three months! Three months, mind you! A bit of flirtation to pass the time never hurt no one.”

“The woman’s husband might disagree,” was Pickett’s dry observation. “I’m assuming she’s married.”

“Of course she is! D’you think I’d seduce an innocent fresh from the schoolroom? That’s a thing I’ve never done, and if any man says otherwise, I’ll call him a liar to his face!”

“No one’s accusing you of anything,” Pickett said with perhaps less than perfect truth, reasoning that if ten years in the Antipodes had failed to change his father’s nature, a lecture from his son was even less likely to do so. “Do you have a valise? Surely you must have brought something with you!”

“I left my things at a boardinghouse in Limehouse where me and Sully hired a room.”

“Sully?”

“A friend of mine,” Jack said, then added by way of explanation, “He just finished serving out his sentence, same as me.”

And that settles it, thought Pickett, yielding to the inevitable. He supposed there must be men who were capable of enjoying luxurious living in Mayfair while their fathers lodged in cheap boardinghouses along the waterfront; unfortunately, it appeared that he was not one of them. He tossed back the last of his brandy and set the empty glass on the tray, then rose to his feet.

“Are you finished? If you’ll tell me how to get to this boardinghouse of yours, I’ll go collect your things before it gets any later. Darkness falls early in December—but you’ll remember that—and it’s not a part of Town where I’d care to linger at night. In any case, I’ll be happy”—he had expected to choke on the word, but found it came more easily than he’d anticipated—“to put you up here, at least for the nonce.”

“I’m obliged to you, son, but there’s no need for you to go,” Jack protested. “I can be there and back in a trice, since I know exactly where I’m going. Besides, you’d stand out like a mustard pot in a coal cellar. Where are you buying your clothes these days? I didn’t spend all those years working in a gentleman’s house without learning to recognize bespoke togs when I see them. Did Weston make that coat?”

“Oh, no,” Pickett hastily corrected this erroneous but undoubtedly flattering assumption. “I’m not so modish as all that. I go to Mayer in Conduit Street. He was recommended to me by—he was recommended to me,” he finished lamely, realizing too late that Gentleman Jack Pickett would not welcome the revelation that his son regularly sought advice from the very same magistrate who had ordered his own transportation.

Jack, however, did not appear to notice this slip—Pickett could only assume that his father’s thoughts were already racing ahead to the prospect of a tryst with his comely shipmate—but announced his intention of setting out on this errand immediately after dinner, adding that there was no need at all for his son to accompany him.

His determination to carry out this mission on his own certainly added weight to Pickett’s suspicions regarding his father’s plans for the evening, but he made no effort to drag the reprobate’s feet onto the straight and narrow. In fact, he wanted nothing more than a few minutes’ private conversation with Julia during which to make sense of a family tree that in only six hours had sprouted an alarming number of branches.