Page 30 of Too Scot to Handle
Lord Colin peered down a whacking great nose at Joe. “I admire a man who can keep his peace. You’ll be in charge for the morning, Joseph.”
Joe stood taller, though how he would be in charge when he couldn’t give orders was a mystery.
“In charge of what, sir?” Tom asked.
“In charge of what recruits do best, which is shovel shite, of course. I’m ashamed to stable my horse in yonder mews, lads, and a gentleman always takes good care of his cattle. Do you agree?”
Many a gentleman couldn’t afford a donkey, much less a horse, but that didn’t seem to matter at the moment.
“Yes, sir,” Tom said, as Dickie and Johnnie muttered their assents.
“Then you will all do your bit as gentlemen of the House of Urchins, and take up pitchforks and shovels until that stable is the cleanest in the neighborhood.”
Tom knew nothing about tidying up a stable, but he knew he’d rather muck out stalls, get dirty, and take orders from Joe than spend another minute in the detention room. Trying to keep peace, preventing John from going to jail, and dealing with his own temptations was doomed to failure when the drainpipe sang its siren song.
Because John had a point. Winter was behind them, the streets were full of culls, and Latin conjugations had never kept a boy fed, clothed, or safe.
* * *
The British army worked surprisingly well, given that its officers were mostly drawn from the ranks of those with means. Means, however, generally resulted in an education that included some military history, and in social rank sufficient that ordering subordinates about was a part of everyday life. Means also—Colin accorded this quality the greatest weight—should have resulted in a sense of responsibility, such as an officer bore toward his men, his superiors, and the noncombatants affected by the hostilities.
Somebody had to take Anwen’s boys in hand or the orphanage was sure to fail. The wealthy would open their purses to support a worthy charity, but a charity that produced no results, or worse, became tainted with scandal, would collapse overnight.
A boy transported for theft was scandal enough to bring the whole institution down. More to the point, Anwen would never recover from the child’s disgrace and would hold herself accountable.
“You take the muck wagon,” Colin said, gesturing to the mute boy, because he was the largest. “You two take up the pitchforks,” he said to the next largest two. “And you,” he said to the smallest. “Your first job is to dump, scrub, and refill all the water buckets, then pitch each horse another two forkfuls of hay, and the pony one forkful. When that’s done, you join the mucking out. Questions?”
Mucking a stall efficiently was an art—start in the back corners, never dig too deeply into the straw on any one pass—but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. The point was to exhaust the boys, give them a chance to work together, and get them outside doing something useful.
“Will we get lunch?” John asked. He was the clever one of the bunch—if the initiative to snatch a man’s purse was clever—but also impetuous, would be Colin’s guess.
“We didn’t get breakfast,” Tom added. “Hitchings sent us to detention instead.” Wee Tom was nimble as a goat, and Colin pegged him for the regimental aide-de-camp, the fellow who was always thinking things through, anticipating problems, and weighing options. He’d be brave, but he’d tend to worry.
“You will have lunch,” Colin told the boys, “but you’ll have to eat it in the garden. Cleaning a stable is miserably dirty work, and Cook would have an apoplexy if you tramped through her kitchen in all your dirt.”
Then too, Hitchings might spot the boys and devise some way to ruin their day out of doors. The dark-haired lad, Dickie, would be outraged at an order countermanded before a task was complete. Colin had shared the same affliction for his first two years in the army.
Mention of eating in the garden had Tom studying his boots, though the boy was grinning.
“Sandwiches and ale will have to do,” Colin said, improvising. “No hot soup for you today. Can’t be helped. I’ll be back this afternoon, and this stable had better be spotless.”
Colin stifled the urge to salute the lads lined up with their pitchforks. By sundown, they’d have blisters on their blisters. Their backs would ache as if burned, and one or two might have a smashed toe, courtesy of the orphanage’s aging team and cantankerous pony.
But they’d sleep soundly tonight, and they’d sleep in their own damned beds until the sun came up.
More to the point, Anwen would sleep well too.
Colin left orders in the kitchen that the boys were to be fed, and fed well, in the garden at midday. The next stop was Winthrop Montague’s bedroom, where Win was lounging about in slippers and a blue silk robe.
“Shall we start the day with coffee?” Win asked, tugging a bell pull. “My evening ran rather late.”
Not at the musicale, it hadn’t. “You were enjoying the company at Mrs. Bellingham’s?”
Win yawned and scratched his pale chest. “One takes consolation where one can find it.”
Or afford it? The room was handsomely appointed, with blue velvet hangings swathing an enormous white bed, and gold-flocked wallpaper highlighting blue and cream appointments. The windows, mirrors, lamps, and candlesticks gleamed, the carpet was more blue and cream softness beneath Colin’s boots. Win’s robe became the moving center of the decorative scheme.
The whole impression—wealth, grace, and elegance without limit—made Colin want to climb out a window. He propped himself against a bedpost rather than sit and risk getting a stray horse hair on the upholstery.
