A canny light entered the woman’s eye. “Childbirth.”
If he hadn’t already been seated, his knees would have buckled beneath him. His gut understood something that his mind couldn’t quite yet comprehend. “When?” he croaked.
“A few months after she arrived.”
His lungs refused to draw breath.A few months after she arrived.It could mean only one thing. “And the child?” he found himself asking. “Was it buried with her?”
A sly smile playing about her mouth, Mrs. Ditch reached for the bag of coins. He’d had enough. He slammed his hand on top of the pile as he leaned menacingly across the table. “Enough games, woman. Tell me all.Now.”
She swallowed. He’d rattled her.Good.“The child, he survived.”
If someone had taken a knife to his gut and slashed though, Jamie would have felt no differently.He…a boy…ason.
“Bring him to me.” He hardly recognized his booming voice. He never raised his voice.Never.That was the sort of thing his parents did. Never him. “Now.”
“The boy isn’t here,” Mrs. Ditch stammered. “He disappeared five, maybe six, years ago.”
“Disappeared?Children don’t just vanish into thin air.” He was being loud and unreasonable, he knew it, but he couldn’t seem to stop.
The matron gave a dry laugh. How he’d come to loathe this woman. “Now, there your thinking is all wrong-side-up, milord. That’s exactly what imps do in London. Vanish into thin air every day.” She jerked her chin toward Hortense. “Ask that one. She knows.”
Hortense’s hand wrapped around his arm. “Let us go.”
“She knows more than she’s telling,” he insisted, not budging an inch. “His name. What’s the boy’s name?”
“His mum named him James Rafferty before she passed. Everyone called him Rafe.”
James.The name struck Jamie like a blow. Mollie had given the boy his father’s name. It was the final confirmation he needed. The boy was his son.
Hortense’s fingers squeezed, nails digging through cloth to skin and muscle. “We leave.Now.”
At last, her words cut through the wool in his ears. She was correct. Nothing more was to be gained from Mrs. Ditch, whose avaricious gaze kept darting toward the bag of money beneath his palm. He unceremoniously dropped a few coins on the desk. “For your time.” He wouldn’t thank her.
But that didn’t prevent her from shooting to her feet and expressing her effusive gratitude. “Anything I can do for you in the future, milord—anything—I would be most willing to oblige.”
Jamie controlled the rise of bile in his throat and vacated the room, Hortense at his back. In a matter of minutes, they were outside, and his lungs began operating again, even if his mind was having difficulty. Through the gates they strode, the driver calling out, “Where to, my lord?”
And, like that, his mind snapped to. There was but one destination. “Take us to the Cross Bones.”
The driver frowned. “The burial yard?”
“Aye.”
Jamie found Hortense already settled inside the carriage. He took the bench opposite her and Sir Bacon, who’d already curled himself into a ball on her lap. The vehicle jerked into motion.
He stared unseeing at London squalor blurring past the window. Mollie was dead. He’d known that. But to have it confirmed was another matter. A few other questions had been answered, too—the how, why, and what—with a single word: childbirth.
Mollie had given birth to a boy. A son. Jamie’s son.James Rafferty…Rafe.Who had disappeared. A fact that struck him at hard angles.
His gaze flicked over to Hortense. She’d kept her tongue silent and her eyes upon him. She’d never seen him like this. Well, that made two of them. He’d lost control in that room, and he was having difficulty regaining it. She would wait, her eyes told him, until he was ready.
Soon, the murky length of the Thames stretched alongside them, and the carriage was stopping. To the other side lay the Cross Bones Burial Yard. In a matter of minutes, he was striding across the grounds, nary a headstone in sight, only small wooden markers strewn about, a nosegay here and there, a noisome breeze swirling off the river. Fitting that.
His fury had not faded as a feeling snuck in alongside it. A sadness that felt fathoms deep. Here, Mollie rested in an unmarked pauper’s grave. She’d deserved better.
“I need to know something,” said the woman at his side.
He sensed a question weighing heavy on her and braced himself. “Ask.”
