“Not a worry, miss.” With the competence of a well-trained clerk, he tapped the mess of papers against the table, bringingthem into a neat stack. Suddenly his face changed, his eyes popping and lips pursing.
Rose followed his gaze.
Lying in the middle of the table, pinned flat by her tin of pencils on one corner, was the cheque. Forty pounds. The Earl of Ipsley.
Her heart kicked into a panic, and she snatched up the hateful slip, jamming it back into her bag without a word. Warily she looked up at Jones, humiliation hot on the back of her neck.
The wide-eyed surprise was gone as quickly as it had come; he stared at her with a blank expression. Expertly waiting.
Rose cleared her throat. She felt as though she were on stage, playacting, as she lifted the small canvas from the table.
The clerk took it without comment, but he held it out at arm’s length, studying it. Too rattled to speak, Rose made quick work of tidying up her last few items before latching her bag shut as tight as possible.
Finally Jones spoke. “Well, we’ll see what the owners say.”
She nodded. Thankfully, that seemed to be it, with no questions pertaining to how or why an earl’s personal cheque had ended up in her possession. After barely croaking out a few more words, she escaped back to the street, the bustle and racket of Haymarket dousing her embarrassment as handily as dunking one’s head in a tub of cold water. Once more she was simply a tall, red-headed lady in wrinkled garments making her way about the city like any other denizen, her struggles typical of those belonging to all the others she shared the street with. Once more she was anonymous.
Not the bastard daughter of an earl.
Hopefully Jones would not draw that conclusion. For Rose meant to succeed on the merit of her brush, not the Driffield bloodline she didn’t consider to be her family. As she started forLambeth and the tired sanctuary of her shared rooms, she vowed to rip the cheque to shreds.
One could not eat pride, but she’d rather starve than give it up.
Chapter Eight
Icknield Court, Worcestershire, 1861
Michaelmas term had endedonly a few weeks ago, and already Joseph had found himself dragged to the West Midlands.
Not that Joseph minded; it was far preferable to remaining at university all alone or, God forbid, being back at Eton, supping on cold mutton in the lower chamber late into the night, catching sight of the rats scurrying about from the corner of his eye. However, Icknield Court was nowhere near as grand as his father’s seat in Cheshire, which meant his room was across the hall from those of Florence and Margaret, rather than in another wing altogether. He hated it.
Or, more appropriately, he hated Florence’s endless needling. Sometimes he wished his father would take some harridan as a second wife, if only to have someone to finally bring his half-sister into line. Doubtless, though, a woman willing to become the Duke of Marbury’s second duchess would also be intolerant of her husband’s bastard. And although he was now nineteen and fancied himself a grown man, Joseph needn’t another pompous aristocrat with thin lips and a weak chin deriding him.
He escaped to ride whenever he could. Like today. The sky was dreary, as per usual for this time of year, but it was holding steady as a gloomy haze, rather than a dark, roiling tumult that was more likely to open up. He rode for an hour, wondering what his sisters were about; probably playing cards and complaining about whatever perceived insult Florence had suffered as of late. His father and the Earl of Ipsley were likely holed up in the library, discussing some recently acquired and horribly dry tome, or perhaps a journal article. The other guests of the house party had departed days ago, mercifully leaving Joseph to his own devices. Finally.
Joseph slowed his horse—a dappled gelding the duke had presented to him upon his finishing Eton last spring—to a walk, then reached up to run a gloved hand over his tidy mustache. He’d grown it almost immediately upon his arrival at university, the pride he felt in his ability to do so outsized in relation to its import. A collection of buildings, just small dots at first, came into view on the horizon.
Curiosity uncurled in his chest. He’d been back to Worcestershire several times since that afternoon three years ago, but he hadn’t run into her again.
Apparently her father doesn’t keep his by-blows as close as mine does, Joseph thought with a sneer.
He kept his eyes trained on the buildings as they gradually grew in size and detail, his horse’s gait still a slow and steady walk. Somewhere within that coaching inn and its outbuildings was Rose Verdier.
Of course, neither the earl nor Joseph’s father had explained the circumstances of the awkward girl’s birth back then, nor had they since. But he knew, in the same manner that he knew the circumstances of his own birth despite neither of his parents having ever explicitly outlined just how Joseph had come intobeing, as a child born on the other side of the sheets, not wholly of his mother’s country and certainly not of his father’s.
He’d always known. It was innate, the same way a sand martin knew to return to its location of origin every March to burrow into the sandy cliffs. When he was younger he’d sometimes wondered at it, blinking back tears in his bed at school, praying that none of the other boys would notice in the dark. He’d tried to puzzle it out: how his kind, beautiful mother had allowed herself such a shameful indiscretion with such an aloof and ineffectual Englishman, and why she’d later accede to that same man’s wishes and send her only child far away, to be tortured and miserable in the rat-infested hovel his father’s people vaunted as one of the only acceptable schools for boys of a certain social standing.
He longed to be something else, like a bird. One of those sand martins who knew to leave Britain every October, back to the warmer climes found in Africa.
But he’d never returned. Not even when his father, the duke, had suggested it mildly one morning at breakfast last summer. Florence had dropped a knife to her plate with a clatter, her sharp eyes darting back and forth between him and their father.
Joseph had scoffed at the idea.
Why? He could not say, but a fear gripped him. Shame at his failings, worry over how he’d changed. How he’d grown into something he couldn’t quite picture belonging in Egypt, even though he could still hardly imagine himself ever belonging in England. And yet in England he remained, playing the aristocrat, reading political economy at Oxford. With a full, dark, neatly groomed mustache when his peers could barely muster the same volume of whiskers between the lot of them.
But this girl, this Rose Verdier, she’d been the only person he’d met like him.
A bastard.
