“My lord, you must be very bored to be amusing yourself with me. I’m merely a naval officer’s daughter, and companion to two elderly ladies.”
“I can vouch for that,” Lady Calliope said, seeming amused. “Turn your agile mind to the problem of Mr. and Mrs. Dash’s misbegotten babe, Ashart. What are we to do with him, eh?”
“Put him on the parish.” He finally began to eat.
“The baby needs the wet nurse,” Genova pointed out.
“Then put both of them on the parish.”
The heartless wretch! “And what do you think would happen to them?”
He gave her a bored look that did finally remind her of that portrait. “They would be fed and housed while the errant Mrs. Dash is tracked down.”
“To the meanest degree. No parish wants the poor and desperate from elsewhere. And who will fund that search? You?”
“Why the devil should I?”
“Language, sir!”
“No one else minds.”
“And Genova, dear,” interrupted Thalia, “you said that you’d heard everything when on board ship.”
Lord Ashart gave her a look as if he’d scored a winning point. Genova seethed as she forced herself to eat the excessive amount of food she seemed to have acquired. Pistol point it would have to be.
As she ate and the others gossiped, she regretfully concluded that even gunpoint wouldn’t work. She recognized stiff-necked pride when she saw it, and she doubted the marquess would back down at death’s door. Would persuasion do any good? Surely there must be a scrap of Christian charity in him. He was kind to his great-aunts.
At a gap in the conversation, she returned to the subject. “What are we to do about the baby? To be put on the parish would likely be death for him.”
Ashart sighed. “I’ll leave funds, Miss Smith. Will that suffice?”
“And when the money runs out?”
“If this Mrs. Dash isn’t found by then, she likely never will be. I can hardly be expected to provide for the child for life.”
Why not?she silently demanded.
He met her eyes, daring her to insist.
So be it.
Genova turned to the two old ladies. “The marquess is the man who came here as ‘Mr. Dash.’ He is the baby’s father.”
Chapter Six
So the weapons are finally unsheathed, Ash thought.
“I most certainly am not.”
The brazen hussy stood her ground. “You are, at least, the man the mother came to meet. You can’t deny that, my lord.”
“No.”
“So you know who she is. You can return the baby to her.”
Now where was that supposed to lead? He raised his wineglass and took a sip, but could see no reason not to tell the truth.
“I assume that the lady you met was Molly Carew. Lady Booth Carew, widow.” He addressed his great-aunts, who would know the scandal. “I am not the father of that child.”
