Page 21 of To Tame the Wild Rake
The boys scurried out of the building on their own once freed, and the other pair of searchers carried the unconscious boy out on the sheltering table, his mother hovering anxiously.
“We’d better try upstairs,” Aldridge said to his helper, but the man backed away, shaking his head. “They took out the patients from the hospital, my lord,” he said. “Did that first. No point in risking the floor caving in or the roof coming down.”
Aldridge acknowledged the point, and followed the others from the building, stopping on the doorstep to examine the scene outside. Ashbury’s crews were focusing on damping down the surroundings so the fire would not spread. A fire engine had arrived and was being dragged into place by men in the distinctive livery of his insurance company.
Bentham had joined Lady Ashbury, and was currently bent over the boy that Aldridge’s men had rescued.
Aldridge could see some of Winshire’s foreign guard, too, riding the magnificent horses they had brought with them from their faraway home. They delivered a pair of waterskins apiece to a group of footmen in Winshire livery and rode back in the other direction. Lord Andrew Winderfield was in the midst of the footmen, lugging a pair of skins and directing his team to pour the water into the trough of the engine so the pumpmen could fill the cloth hose.
A shout, “Watch out!” was Aldridge’s only warning, and enough for him to shift sideways, so that the flaming mess of timber shingles and wooden beams that crashed down from the building’s pediment only struck him a glancing blow.
He clawed at whatever it was that entangled his face and head, as hands grabbed his arms and dragged him several steps. Other hands pulled at the blinding obstruction. “Hey!” he protested, as someone slapped at his head.
“Hold still, my lord. Your hair’s on fire.” The voice was familiar.
The blinding obstruction cleared, and he looked down into the anxious face of his groom, Henry. Two other men were stamping on the remnants of what must have been the cloth banner that hung over the pediment.
Ow. He could feel the burn, now. One side of his head stung with it. “My thanks, Henry,” he said. It could have been much worse.
Charlotte’s eyes widened as she entered the drawing room. Aldridge’s hair had been trimmed so close to his scalp that, fair as he was, it was near invisible.
“Lord Aldridge. I didn’t expect you after I heard of your injury. Should you not be resting?”
He smiled and bowed. Even shaved like a convict off a hulk, with one side of his scalp pink and already peeling, he was temptation personified, all elegance and charm.
The fire had not affected the low hum of his voice. “The injury is more to my self-esteem than my physical well-being, Lady Charlotte. My valet has done the best he could to remove the singed bits and even up the sides so I can appear in public, but I present an odd appearance, I know.”
“Startling, let us say,” Charlotte offered. “I suppose you are anxious to speak with Tony. I shall show you up.”
He inclined his head, and followed as she led the way to Tony’s bedchamber. “You will find him alert, and the distraction of your visit is just what he needs,” she confided. “He has refused the laudanum, but I am sure the leg and rib must be paining him.”
The boy was sitting up in bed, supported by pillows, two other pillows elevating his leg. Charlotte had organised a tray table and a variety of activities to keep him occupied. He was currently frowning at a wooden puzzle. It had come apart easily enough, and now needed to be rebuilt in precisely the right order.
He looked up and smiled as they entered. Charlotte carried out the introductions. “Meet Tony Tweedy, Aldridge. Tony, this is Lord Aldridge, the gentleman I spoke to you about.” Charlotte nodded to the footman who had been sitting with the boy. He put the book he had been reading into his pocket and slipped out of the room.
“You knocked out the guard and gave me the chance to escape,” the boy said.
“I am glad I could help.” Aldridge pulled up a second chair beside the one the footman had occupied. “My lady?”
Charlotte sat so that Aldridge could do so, and Tony shifted awkwardly to face them, wincing as he did so. He narrowed his eyes. “Her ladyship thinks you might be my father.” His tone was threaded with resentment.
Aldridge inclined his head. “I have no doubt we are related, Mr Tweedy. You look too much like the men of my family for doubt. Which means you can be assured of my help, whether we are distant cousins or the closest of kin. What did your mother tell you about your father?”
Tony rewarded Aldridge’s promise with a cynical glance but answered the question. “He were—wasa nob. A nobleman’s son, she said. Not a sailor died in the wars, like I always thought. He bought her the shop she ran till she got sick. She said I was old enough to know the truth, and sides—besides, I mean—I was going to meet him when we got to London.” His jaw tightened and his eyes glistened as he forced out the next sentence. “’Cept she died, din’t she? And I din’t know who the dandiprat was or ’ow to find ’im.”
Aldridge nodded calmly. “Then let’s talk about what you do know, and work it out.” He pursed his lips, then continued. “I have four children that I am aware of. I keep track of their well-being and I have made provision for each of them and their mothers, but I have never purchased a shop.”
Charlotte blinked and turned her face away to hide her blush. Not that Aldridge’s bland recital was particularly shocking, when she thought about it. The man had been a notorious rake while she was still in the nursery, and it would be more surprising if he had no offspring at all. And, of course, he was kind, as well as fabulously wealthy.
The only surprising thing was that she had never heard mention of any of them. He must have acted with amazing discretion. To further cover her reactions, she went to the door and ordered refreshments. Aldridge, without taking his attention off the boy, stood when she did, and sat again when she resumed her seat. He and Tony kept talking, Tony thawing slowly as he shared his story.
He had grown up in a village in Kent, where his mother ran a drapery, claiming to be the widow of a navy man. Charlotte gained the picture of a close pair— a mother who doted on her son and a boy who adored his mother. “We were not rich, my lord, but we had enough. And then Mam got sick.”
It was consumption, the village doctor said. She needed rest. Tony left school and took over the shop, but his mother continued to decline. That was when she told Tony his true history, and planned a trip to London, “as soon as I feel a little stronger.”
But the hoped-for improvement never came. “Galloping consumption,” the doctor said. And before she could do more than write a letter to the man she said was Tony’s father, the illness caught up with her.
“After the funeral, I had to sell everything to pay the doctor’s bill and the rest. Had enough for a coach fare to London, but when I got here, the man at the place Mam sent her letter whipped me away from his door. Anyways. The landlady said the whipping man had only been there six months, and she hadn’t owned the house herself ten years back, so she didn’t know who had lived in those rooms.”
