It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (30 page)

I
T WAS A FAMILIAR
scene: the long table set with a snowy tablecloth, the lit candles arrayed down the center, exchanging dazzle with the chandelier overhead, maids and footman padding unobtrusively in and out, in and out, for the endless reel of the Dinner of the Enormously Wealthy.

Isaiah sat at the head, as usual, his family grouped around him.

His family grouped around him except for
Lyon,
of course.

The Earl of Ardmay at his right.

The Duke of Greyfolk sat upon his left.

Jonathan had been in Sussex for an entire fortnight, spending his days riding, visiting his family, aiming dart after dart flawlessly into the board at the Pig & Thistle at night And in a moment of weakness, visiting the very bridge Tommy had leaped from, finding his way back down to the bank, staring at the water that had nearly carried away the Duke of Greyfolk’s medal. She’d risked her life for that medal, and that man had eviscerated her with just a few words. And now Jonathan tried, but failed, not to stare at the duke. The man’s heavy handsome head turned this way and that, bestowing his attention on various diners as if it were a benediction, and in short supply.

“I understand you’ve become a partner in your own concern, Mr. Redmond.”

“Yes. Klaus Liebman & Co. You ought to see our decks of cards. They’re . . . droll.”

There was a surprised little hush at the table. The duke regarded him thoughtfully.

“Are they? I suppose it’s is a fine thing for a young man to have a hobby. I see your bruise has healed.”

“Bruises do that,” Jonathan said cheerily. “Your Grace . . . I wondered if I could ask your opinion regarding a business concern. Given your decades of superior experience.”

Greyfolk nodded, granting an audience.

“We’ve employed a young boy to do the sweeping and errand-running for us. Tell me, Your Grace . . . I understand you’re interested in the Lancaster Mill. Do you have an opinion about the uses of children for labor? From what I understand the mill’s employees are almost primarily children. Small ones.”

“Well, it’s an efficient system, clearly. Quite sensible, from my point of view.”

“Efficient, Your Grace?”

Jonathan had an inordinately tight grip on his knife.
“I was holding it too tight,”
he imagined telling Tommy.
“It slipped from my grasp and flew right into his throat. There was really nothing I could do about it.”

The duke tipped his head. “Tell me, young Mr. Redmond . . . are you aware of the inner workings of a cotton mill?”

“Just vaguely,” he lied.

“The machinery is such that only small children can help to maintain it.”

“Is that so? Oddly, I’ve heard some mills employ adults solely. Were you aware, Your Grace, that children obtained from the workhouse are lied to about the conditions to expect at the mills? At ages as young as six, they’re promised the moon, apparently, and then are made to sign a paper committing them to servitude until they’re twenty-one years of age.”

“They receive wages, Mr. Redmond.”

“Oh, well. As long as they’re paid. Although . . .” Jonathan furrowed his brow. “. . . It isn’t wage enough to buy penny sweets, from what I understand.”

“Jonathan. This is hardly lighthearted conversation, dear,” his mother reproved gently.

“Jonathan dear, do go on,” Violet encouraged. She’d been following this with increasing fascination. She sensed a windup to something.

His father was listening, too. He seemed poised and alert. But Jonathan scarcely paid him any attention. The duke was his dartboard this evening.

Jonathan’s tone was deferential. “Well, Your Grace, you have children, do you not? Now, I understand that children who work for the mill are often beaten if they so much as sit down for a moment. That they’re on their feet more than twelve hours a day. That they’re given scarcely anything to eat. That they’re caned and shackled if they’re perceived to be misbehaving. They often lose their hair in the machinery. Or their lives.

“Jonathan . . .” his mother warned again.

Violet shushed her mother with an irritated wave of her hand. She was watching Jonathan in dropped-mouth avid glee.

And Jonathan was struggling now to keep his voice even and dispassionate.

The duke’s eyelids were lowered. One of the beloved defenses of the Important, Jonathan had learned, was to effect boredom. Nothing more rapidly deflates a plebian.

“If you intend to be a businessman, you will one day come to learn the necessity for maximizing profit and minimizing expenses, Mr. Redmond. As I have. And quite simply, unwanted orphan children are an efficient source of labor. And as many of them are from a decidedly unruly underclass, it’s often necessary to beat them to instill the necessary discipline. If they were not put to some good use, they would be running amuck in the streets and will soon fill our prisons and cost us money, rather than contribute to the country’s economy. And if they should lose their lives through carelessness, well, it is a fact of life that others will take their place.”

Jonathan pretended to mull this. “You’re right, of course. And it’s not just orphans who work for the mills. I understand that occasionally the unwanted illegitimate children of wealthy influential men end up in workhouses.”

And suddenly the silence was charged with something threatening and dark. The duke had walked into a trap, and was only just realizing it.

He slowly straightened in his chair and fixed Jonathan with an inscrutable, searching stare. As if he was seeing him for the first time.

And the silence went on. No one knew what quite what to say or what precisely had happened, only that something significant had been said. He thought he saw a flare of swift savage emotion in the duke’s eyes, but that could just have been the flickering in his pupils.

Jonathan gave the duke a small tight smile. He searched the duke’s face for a twitch, a tensing of muscle.

And at last the duke simply gave him a slow unpleasant smile. The smile that said,
“No matter what you say, you can never touch me. You’ll never be a duke.”

“If this is in fact true, what a fortunate thing that the workhouses and mills exist to shelter these children. Or they might meet a more dire fate on the street or at the hands of the law.”

Jonathan stared at him. Neither blinked.

“Evil bastard,” Jonathan said thoughtfully.

A gasp went up. Every head at the stable shot up and pivoted toward Jonathan.

Then whipped toward the duke.

Violet looked more cheerful than she had in weeks. Clearly she should have been requesting a little controversy when she’d been asking for marzipan.

“. . . is what I suspect one might say to you if one
objected
to the practice of employing children in mills. Given that some minor reforms are in place, I expect some people do object. I’ve heard rumors of such a thing.”

No one was fooled.

Jonathan didn’t
want
anyone to be fooled.

“Jonathan.” His father’s voice was frigid. The voice of a man who would probably love to take a cane to his youngest son at the moment. “Child labor is a common practice.”

The duke was staring at Jonathan now. Candle flames danced in his pupils. The effect was entirely appropriate. Jonathan wished him in hell.

“Is it?” the duke asked icily. And almost indulgently.

But Jonathan knew that tactic, too, thanks to his father.

“But surely Mr. Bean will sell the mill to you,” Jonathan pacified. “Once, of course, you meet whatever his inscrutable requirements might be.”

I will defeat him, Tommy,
Jonathan swore to himself.
If it kills me.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t he?” the duke asked idly. “I can’t imagine he’s had a better offer than the one extended by the Mercury Club, especially given that my name is now attached. I expect he’s merely somewhat inefficient, and hasn’t yet considered our bid thoroughly enough to respond. Your father and I—”

“Mama?” Violet’s voice was a small strange thing. Choked and faint.

And yet somehow they all heard it, as people will hear a foreign sound, a warning sound, in the midst of a crowd.

They all turned to her.

Her face was colorless. Her eyes were wide and shocked. “Something . . . something’s amiss . . . I think we should . . .”

And then her head tipped backward, and she crumpled, sliding from her chair.

The earl lunged for her before she struck the floor. He lifted her torso, and her white throat arced back over his great forearm.

And he turned a taut face up to them. “Send for the doctor.”

T
HEY SENT FOR
the doctor.

Five hours later they sent for the vicar.

And they sent a somber and silenced Duke of Greyfolk back to London.

The Earl of Ardmay had taken up a position in the parlor, facing the wall, one hand against it, as if he could push back the encroachment of death.

Jonathan sat slumped on the settee, feet propped on a stool, staring into the space Violet had occupied just the other day, knitting something blue. He smoked.

A few hours ago he’d heard his sister scream, an unearthly, ungodly sound that made him want to drop to his knees and pray, or weep like a boy.

And then they closed the door and no one downstairs heard anything else at all.

The baby was early, and breech, they’d been told. But the women were privy to more of the truth, and the truth was clearly rather more severe.

Particularly since the towering blond vicar had been sent for, and had bolted up the stairs when he arrived.

Funny. He’d never thought of Violet as religious, despite the fact that they all attended church regularly. Would she care if the vicar held her hand while she died?

Miles sat next to Jonathan, similarly slumped. He was staring at Isaiah, who was uncharacteristically slouched in a chair across from the two of them. Jonathan longed to ask his older brother what he was thinking. Miles, who had been the one to whom the siblings all turned for strength. Miles, who had married for love, and whose wife Cynthia was Violet’s best friend, but wasn’t welcome in this house because she wasn’t everything his father had schemed for in a wife for his son.

He’d warrant Miles was thinking the same thoughts about love.

And if Violet died, would Lyon ever forgive himself for not being here?

Would
Jonathan
ever forgive him?

Isaiah’s skin had a grayish cast in the low light of the fire that no one was tending. Some life force had drained from him. This was one thing he couldn’t control: whether the earl’s heir would kill his daughter.

He loves us,
Jonathan thought. He must. Why it should feel like a revelation, he didn’t know.
Surely
his father knew about love. Had been in love once. Whether he loved their mother now was a mystery known only to his parents. Or perhaps only to Isaiah.

Would it take the death of one of his children for Isaiah to realize that love was the only important thing?

And then Jonathan remembered what that horrible Gypsy girl had said.

She will break hearts
.

And he shifted in his chair, and closed his eyes.

A slow chill filled his gut. Oh, God. How many hearts would be broken if
Violet
died?

Not Violet, Jonathan thought fiercely. Better me than Violet.
Please not Violet.

What the bloody hell use were predictions like that? He was suddenly impotently furious with that Gypsy girl. They caused nothing but havoc, her predictions. What use was it to
know?

Jonathan had already smoked himself sick, but he still lit another cheroot.

Wordlessly he handed one to Miles, who took it wordlessly. And then he extended the humidor to his father, and his father took one, too.

And in silence they smoked.

The earl still had his face to the wall. Perhaps he’s praying, Jonathan thought. Perhaps he’s savoring every memory he has of Violet, going over and over them, like rosary beads.

And in his weariness, only one word came to Jonathan, like a prayer.
Tommy,
he thought, invoking what was good and real.
Tommy
. The word for love in his world right now.
Tommy
. And he supposed the word that occurred to you in your darkest moments . . . well, that word meant love. That was how you knew. And perhaps that was the purpose of dark moments.

H
IS HEART CLOGGED
into his throat when the vicar came downstairs to them.

They shot to their feet, all of them. The earl turned around. And Jonathan would never forget the expression on his face for the rest of his days.

There was something about Adam Sylvaine. The vicar brought a peace into the room with him, and Jonathan felt the edges of his fear and anger and weariness soften, blunt, as if the very presence of the man filled in the jagged places. A product of prayer, or of being worn smooth by the cares of others?

“Mother and baby are fine,” Reverend Sylvaine said immediately. “You have a daughter, Lord Ardmay. It was hard and a near thing, and she will need to rest in bed for a while. Go and see—”

But the earl had already vanished up the stairs.

Adam Sylvaine watched him go, a slight smile on his face.

The three Redmond men exhaled. His father slumped, and dropped his head into his hands.

The vicar was weary, too, Jonathan saw. And it occurred to him then that the vicar’s work—seeing to deaths and births and weddings and secrets and cares—was the kind that Tommy would have approved of. Doing good, some small good, one parishioner at a time.

He wanted to be a man she admired. The way he admired her. He wanted her to think of him as brave. He wanted to be
better
because of her, and for her.

He
was
better because of her. She’d changed him irrevocably.

And it occurred to him that the moments in which he had felt most worthy were because of her. Of comforting a little boy. Or holding her while she wept.