An odd expression crossed her face, a queer blend of gratitude and disbelief. She swayed on her feet as if his offer had rocked her to the core of her being, as if it had contained all the force of a blow to the gut. There could be only a few things that had caused that frightened, desolated expression that she had worn.
“Someone is ill,” he guessed, and knew he had struck the mark when she blanched. He turned and shouted for Bradshaw, who came running promptly, appearing on the steps with a footman at his side. “Mrs. Hotchkiss will be taking my carriage instead,” he said. “It’ll be faster than finding a hack. Send the footman for a doctor, and bring him round at once.”
“No!” The sharp cry burst forth from Mrs. Hotchkiss’ lips with no small amount of desperation. “Please. I can’t wait for a doctor.”
The distress on her face had him turning to amend his instructions. “Send the footman for a doctor, and direct him to…” He turned back to Mrs. Hotchkiss. “The address?”
She stumbled over an address in Spitalfields that gave him pause. It wasn’t quite theworstof neighborhoods, but it was near enough to it to be concerning. She had a genteel accent and refined manners—certainly not a woman he would ever have suspected of a connection to one of London’s poorer neighborhoods.
When he offered his hand to her, she set her hand reluctantly in his and let him hand her into the carriage, sliding into the shadowed interior as if longing to be invisible. But her eyes flitted guiltily away from his, ashamed, perhaps, of the necessity of accepting his offer. He turned briefly to relay to the coachman the address, and then climbed into the carriage himself, and she blinked in surprise to find him seated so suddenly across from her. He rapped on the roof of the carriage, and at once it rumbled into motion.
“My lord,” she said. “You need not accompany me. It is generous enough to allow me the use of your carriage, I assure you.” Her voice quavered, and he felt somehow certain that were it not for his presence she would have dissolved once more into tears.
He didn’t have the words to explain that it had seemed wrong to leave her to face her difficulties alone. She had, after all, sat at his bedside for hours, and then patiently listened to him drone on in a drunken diatribe about his own troubles.
“I’ve nothing else to do at the moment,” he said, “and, as I assume you will have more pressing concerns to contend with, I thought I would take charge of ensuring the doctor arrives promptly.” He braced his hands on his thighs. “Mrs. Hotchkiss—Claire. Who is ill?”
She bowed her head, her lower lip quivering, and he watched her once again fight for her composure. After a long moment of tense silence, she swiped her hands over her watery eyes and said, “Matthew. My son.”
Chapter Eleven
Her son.Her son. Mrs. Hotchkiss—Claire—had ason.
Inanely, he said, “That’s where you go on Saturdays.”
She nodded, her face on the verge of crumpling once again. “He lives with my sister, Anne,” she said in a toneless voice. “She and her husband look after him for me. They’ve got two children of their own, and I support Matthew’s boarding with my wages. He’s just six.” Her head drooped again, and he heard her suck back a sob. “He’s just a baby. Just a little boy.”
“Your husband…?”
She shook her head. Just that. And he was left to wonder if the man had died, or abandoned them, or if perhaps there had never been any Mr. Hotchkiss at all. It wasn’t so uncommon a thing; women who found themselves in the family way before marriage frequently reinvented themselves as widows to escape society’s censure. And she would have been quite young when her son had been born. Just newly into her twenties, he would guess.
“I assume you received a note from your sister,” he said. “Did she say what happened? Was there some sort of accident?” Anything might be useful, anything information he could give the doctor in the service of aiding the boy.
“He had an attack,” she said on a sob. “Matthew is asthmatic. He doesn’t frequently have such attacks, but when he does they aresevere. And terrifying.” She clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle a sob. “Every time I’m afraid it’s the last time. Every time he wheezes in those dreadful little gasps I’m afraid that this will be the time they stop his breath forever.” Her eyes squeezed closed, and she rested her head against the side of the carriage, and he knew—knew—that her mind was there even now, that she was thinking it might already be too late. That in the time that had elapsed between the boy’s attack and beginning their journey to Spitalfields, her son could very well have breathed his last.
And she would not have been there. She would not have held him in her arms and comforted him. That it was possible that she would arrive to find only an empty shell where once there had been a living, breathing child, and her last memories of her son would be of holding his slowly-cooling body.
He had not been granted that much himself—but no one should have to watch their child die.
He cleared his throat in an effort to exorcise the lump that had risen there. “As a child, I was asthmatic,” he said, and heard the roughness in his voice.
“Mrs. Cartwright said as much,” Claire responded, but her voiced was strained still.
“I remember the feeling of struggling for breath,” he said. “I suffered from the affliction for perhaps ten years. But as I grew, the attacks were less frequent, less severe.”
“And…you’ve not suffered an attack since?” Her voice was nearly optimistic, as if she wished to snatch for that one bit of hope, that if she could see her child through a few more years, he might shed the burden of them altogether.
“No,” he said, feeling it would be cruel to remind her that what had held true for himself would have no bearing on her son’s situation. “Although I do seem to be more susceptible than most to fall ill.”
“But he could outgrow it,” she murmured to herself. “Hecould.”
He could, but it was not necessarily likely. Still, he understood that in this trying time, a mother would cling to any hope, no matter how faint, that the worst might somehow be avoided. In an effort to distract her, he asked, “Why did you tell no one you had a child?”
A moment passed in silence. At last she admitted, “Matthew was just two when he had his first attack. I was a governess at the time, for a family in Marylebone. My sister had sent me a note, and I asked the lady of the house—a contemptuous woman, prone to sneering down her exceptionally long nose at the staff—if I might take my half day just a bit early, because my son needed me.” She drew in a trembling breath. “She sacked me outright. She said having a child of my own meant I could not be as devoted to her own children. The audacity of a woman in service having a child was more than she was prepared to tolerate.”
Gabriel suppressed a wince at her bland tone, as distant as if she were reciting sums by rote. It was rather an unpleasant realization for him that he had never once considered whether or not his own servants might have dependants or loved ones—they existed, at least in the general opinion of people of his status—toserve, and any sort of private life they might have was inconsequential and certainly not worthy of consideration by their employers.
“You thought I would sack you?” The question emerged unsteadily, a rush of horror sweeping over him.
