Page 27

“I understand.”

That didn’t mean that she agreed.

“I have a terrible headache, so I shall retire to my room,” her mother declared. “Tangle will take the child, and I trust you will not make a fuss about it.”

Daisy drew in a shuddering breath.

“She cannot be seen by anyone, from a groom to a maid,” Lady Wharton continued, heading toward the door. “I shall tell him to retrieve her immediately.” The door closed behind her.

Grow up?

As Daisy understood it, maturity involved making ethical decisions rather than allowing others to dictate one’s choices. She may have spent her life irritating her mother, but she rarely directly contradicted her.

Now? That mutinous inheritance from her father was in full swing.

Sending a relative to an orphanage due to shame or rage—both emotions she completely understood and sympathized with—was not right.

Belle wasn’t her mother’s blood relation, though.

She was Daisy’s.

In all senses of the word but one, this child was Daisy’s.

EPISODE ONE HUNDRED

OF LECHERS AND BASTARDS

Belle made an anxious sound and pulled at Daisy’s hair again. “Moo?”

Daisy pulled out a handkerchief and dried her eyes. “Moo,” she agreed, her voice cracking. Then she placed the baby back into the basket, tucking the blanket around her. Belle immediately began sucking her thumb.

“We can’t stay here,” she said aloud, her mind scrambling as she tried to think of solutions. If she had garnered one thing from the painful conversation with her mother, it was that Lady Wharton was desperate to keep her place in society. If Daisy raised Belle, her mother would be summarily abandoned by her friends.

So Belle had to be raised elsewhere. Her father didn’t care about his illegitimate offspring, so trying to find him would do no good.

Two people came to mind: Frederick and Miles.

She was enormously fond of Frederick, but he wasn’t a hedonist, the way Miles was. Daisy doubted very much that Frederick had ever been in a house of ill-repute—if only because he was infamous for bedding married women. She had a shrewd feeling that he had no lover at the moment. He was technically courting her, after all, albeit in an inebriated and lackadaisical fashion.

Thus Frederick likely hadn’t fathered a bastard child.

But Miles? She could readily imagine him strolling through a brothel on the arm of an elegant Frenchwoman. The memory of him smiling down at her at the Rothingale masquerade when he believed she was a courtesan gave her a burning sensation in the back of her throat.

She didn’t want that in a husband. She didn’t want him.

She owed her mother an apology. Lady Wharton was right. Better to marry a greenhorn, one of the young boys who clustered about her at dances, than a man whose taste for depravity was bred in the bone.

In fact, she’d prefer to marry Frederick—better a drunk rather than a lecher. A grim choice, but salutary. “Growing up” involved hard choices.

Yet if Miles and her father were both lechers, they were cut from different cloth. She refused to believe that Miles would dispatch his illegitimate offspring to an orphanage, even the best such establishment in London.

Rakehell he may be, but he was a decent man. His by-blows were surely housed somewhere in the country where they were loved and cared for, perhaps on his own estate. She straightened, thinking hard. If Belle joined Miles’s offspring, no one would ever make a connection between Daisy and the child.

Miles was kind. He was a problem-solver. He would understand that Belle had to be kept safe from society’s reproach. What’s more, if Miles took her in, Daisy could see occasionally see her sister. Somehow.

Tangle would appear at any moment, a thought that propelled Daisy to her feet. She pulled her fichu from the neckline of her gown and draped it over Belle’s basket, arranging it so lace hung over the sides as if she were carrying a gift of fruit from the country. Then she walked straight out the door.

At the end of the block, she peeked under the fichu and discovered Belle was still sucking her thumb, albeit with her eyes closed. The baby would probably need to be fed fairly soon; Daisy had the vague understanding that babies had to be fed numerous times a day.