Page 28 of Too Scot to Handle
Anwen had been raised with four male cousins in addition to Rosecroft, and grasped that some sort of masculine communication was in progress, though a commotion closer to Park Lane caught her eye.
“Somebody’s in trouble,” Rosecroft said as a boy shot across the green at a dead run.
“Somebody’s mighty fleet of foot,” Lord Colin observed as a corpulent man pursued the boy, shouting words snatched away on the morning breeze.
“Somebody’s chasing my Johnnie,” Anwen retorted, driving her heel into her mare’s side and taking off at a gallop.
Chapter Six
“But why, John?” Tom asked, for the third time.
They were all back in the detention room, because Dickie had failed to appear for breakfast before grace had begun. Dickie said in front of all the little ones that he’d been in the jakes, waiting for Nature to pay a call.
Hitchings had delivered him a proper smack for that, though Dickie had spoken the God’s honest truth. Even the bowels seized when a boy sat for too long, day after day.
John had barely made the breakfast bell. His knees had been grass stained and his palms smeared with dirt, but Hitchings had been too busy ringing a peal over Dickie’s head to notice that John had been taking the air again.
“Why, if you have to roam, did you nick some half-drunk nob’s purse?” Tom pressed.
“Nick ’em when they can barely stand,” Dickie said. “Didn’t our da teach you anything? When the nobs are wandering home at dawn, after they’ve been at the cards, the drink, and the whores all night. Never an easier time to lift a purse than at daybreak, unless you choose the wrong cull.”
John sat, back braced against the wall beneath the window. Joe, who’d said nothing thus far, had his nose in a French dictionary somebody had forgotten from a previous incarceration.
Or maybe Joe had left it here on purpose, because he was that canny.
“I go crazy here,” John said. “It’s spring. Winter’s over, the air is clear for a change, and outside, I can breathe.”
Tom knew all too well what he meant. Being cooped up like laying hens all night was bad enough, but then the sun came up, the birds sang, and a boy felt the urge to move, to ramble, to see what was afoot at the docks, maybe set a snare for an unsuspecting rabbit in the park…
Life was meant to be more than grammar, sermons, and birchings.
Tom leapt up to catch the top edge of the enormous empty wardrobe in the corner of the room and swung himself atop it. The high vantage points helped with the restlessness, though nothing made it go away entirely.
“Orangutan,” Joe said, without looking up from his dictionary.
He got a laugh for that observation.
“Tom likes to climb things,” Dickie said. “John likes to steal the occasional purse from them as can afford it.”
“Robin Hood’s going to end up in Newgate.” Tom rolled to his back and studied the stain spreading from a corner of the ceiling. The mark was old, suggesting somebody had long ago patched the leak causing it. The shape put him in mind of Hitchings’s fat arse.
“I ditched the purse,” John said. “I won’t be taken up, because Miss Anwen was ready to tear a strip off the cull for calling me a guttersnipe.”
“Ooooh, a guttersnipe!” Dickie smacked his forehead and pretended to stagger against the table. “Our darlin’ young Johnnie, a guttersnipe!”
John ignored his brother’s humor. “If you’d seen Miss Anwen with that sidesaddle whip, you’d not be making sport of her. Cull shut his gob and started bowing on the spot. Miss Anwen’s flash gent were with her, and some other cove who looked like the god with the hammer.”
“Thor,” Joe said, turning a page.
“Not him, the blacksmith one,” John went on. “Miss Anwen came galloping across the grass, dirt clods flying out behind her horse, the two gents bringing up the rear. She put her mare between me and the cull, and I have never been so glad to see that woman in all my life.”
They were all, always glad to see Miss Anwen.
“Then what?” Dickie asked.
“Then her flash gent flipped the cull a sovereign. The cull winked at me, bowed to the lady, and charged off as if he’d landed a whole pot o’ gold.”
“He nearly did.” Most of Tom’s acquaintances would go their whole lives without holding one of the recently minted sovereigns.
