“You don’t have an answer, do you?” Steele asked quietly, without inflection. “Or an explanation?”
He didn’t. He never had. When the other people he’d dealt with had all been illiterate and near impossible to understand with the thickness of their speech, Malcom had always been different. So different that when he’d been younger, smaller, he’d been beaten and mocked for it: the shite who thought himself royalty. That name, “King,” once had been used to taunt him, but with the passage of time and Malcom’s growth into a formidable street opponent, it had evolved into an acknowledgment of his strength in these parts.
“How about this?” Steele murmured, withdrawing another page, this one a sketched rendering of a fancy townhouse. The artist had captured the white stucco, the gleaming windows, and the gold knockers on the front of the double doors.
Malcom opened his mouth to deny any knowledge of the residence, but froze. Then, almost reflexively, he took the sheet.
His gaze locked on the minutest detail—the door knocker that didn’t know if it wished to be man or lion, and had somehow perfectly melded the two into a bewhiskered half beast.
. . . the doors scare me, Papa . . . it looks like a man-lion . . .
The page slipped from Malcom’s fingers.
The blood rushed to his ears, and he whipped his head up, the moment shattered. “I don’t recognize that door.”
“I didn’t ask if you recognized the door, Mr. North.” Steele gave him a long, slightly sad smile. “But rather . . . the residence.”
A fancy Mayfair townhouse? He and his sort didn’t venture out to those parts of London. Not if they sought to preserve their necks as long as possible. Malcom scoffed. “And why would I know anything about a townhouse in West London?”
“I was hired to investigate the possible whereabouts of a series of children who were taken.”
“If you think I can help, you’re wasting your time,” he said tightly, clasping his hands behind his head. “I don’t deal with anyone.” As a rule, he kept people—all people—at arm’s length.
“Yes, well.” Steele cleared his throat. “The child who lived in this residence,” he went on as if Malcom’s insistence meant nothing, “fell ill alongside his parents. The parents perished. The child was turned over to a foundling hospital.”
“I haven’t been in a foundling hospital.” Not since . . . He shoved back thoughts of that night. Those memories were, at best, murky. “Why don’t you say what it is that you’ve come to say?” He had a sewer to rob.
Absolute silence filled the room, quiet so heavy that Malcom could hear only the periodic drip of water clinging to his trousers.
The detective held his gaze with an uncomfortable directness. “Because, Mr. North, I have reason to believe, and proof along with it, that you lived there . . . only”—Steele glanced around—“under different circumstances,” he murmured when he returned his focus to Malcom. “Back when you were a boy, and the son of the late Earl of Maxwell.”
Chapter 2
THE LONDONER
SCANDAL!
The Rightful Heir, the Earl of Maxwell, kidnapped as a boy by his grasping relatives and turned over to a foundling hospital. One can only wonder at the strife endured by that then young member of the peerage . . .
M. Fairpoint
Over the years much had been taken from Verity Lovelace: the comfortable cottage she’d grown up in. Her collection of ribbons. All her frocks and satin slippers.
But this loss . . . this was the keenest, unlike any Verity had suffered before. This was the first time she’d been robbed of her written words.
Motionless, unbreathing, incapable of moving, she stood in the middle of her room, the paper her sister held facing her.
How am I not shaking?
Or was she? It was all jumbled in that moment. Confused by the words hovering before her. Time stretched on. Verity tried to breathe. She tried to tell herself to get a proper breath. Inhale. Exhale. The simplest of a body’s functions. And she could not do it. The air remained lodged, painful in her chest.
“They’re not . . . all of your words,” Livvie murmured with a startling optimism that life had not yet managed to quash in the seventeen-year-old. “I’ve read it.”
Some of the words or all of them . . . it wasn’t the amount that mattered. They’d been taken from her, and along with them the coin earned from the articles she wrote. The monies Verity relied upon to feed herself, her younger sister, and Bertha, their nursemaid turned all-purpose servant. As such, Verity’s security—their collective security—was threatened.
But it was about more than money . . .
“The title is different,” Livvie murmured.
Verity briefly closed her eyes.
“Too trusting, you’ve always been.”
“Hush, Bertha,” Livvie chided, just then sounding more like a woman ten years her senior. “Ignore her,” she said softly. “You’re not. She’s not, you know.”
And yet, the former nursemaid’s opinion meant next to nothing, compared with what this moment represented.
Bertha snorted. “Don’t know any such thing,” she countered, blunt as the London day was dreary. “As fanciful and hopeful as your mother.”
Their mother had been the daughter of a Scottish tavern keeper, and because of that, she’d the misfortune of crossing paths—and falling in love—with a roguish nobleman who never did right by her.
And yet, the irony of their nursemaid’s words was that Verity had prided herself on being nothing like the woman who’d given her life. Not because she hadn’t loved her mother. She had. But neither was she desiring to repeat the same mistakes that hopeless romantic had made.
In this, however, Verity had been hopeful.
About her future.
Nay, not just about her future . . . but being in full control of it. For her and Bertha, and more importantly, for Livvie.
Her sister cleared her throat. “Would you like me to read the article to you?” she murmured.
I’ll read it. She wanted to get that assurance out. And failed. Verity yanked the pages from her sister’s fingers. She forced herself to read the whole of the words printed there, paragraphs assembled under a story that belonged to her, but with credit given to another.
THE RIGHTFUL HEIR RESTORED
At last, the world has a name. Questions have swirled, cloaking society in the same fog that rolls over the darkened streets inhabited by the man whose identity everyone longs to know.
She couldn’t make it any farther in the article. Her stomach churned, a pit forming in her belly. Livvie hadn’t been completely incorrect; they weren’t all Verity’s words inked on the pages of The Londoner. Only the important ones belonged to her. There were a handful of empty descriptions, extraneous ones that advanced nothing in the article, ones that cheapened her original draft, ones belonging to another.
Not her.
I’m going to be ill . . . “Bloody rotter.” That exclamation tore from a place deep inside, where rage dwelled. Verity tossed the pages, and they fluttered through the air, caught by her quick-handed sister.
“You gave him access?” Bertha pressed.
“I didn’t.” Her fists clenched and unclenched. “He stole it.”