Page 6 of Snowy and the Seven Doves
When everyone had eaten their fill, Poppy and Petunia cleared the table and set the loaded trays outside the door. Still, no one had mentioned the reason for this gathering.
“Let us move to the comfortable chairs,” Poppy suggested.
Lily, the acknowledged leader of them all, had left most of the talking to everyone else, but, as Snowy took his seat, all the others turned their gaze on her.
“Snowy,” she said. “If you are wondering whether this meeting is about you, the answer isyes. It is.” She looked around at her friends as if to garner strength—an unusual sign of vulnerability.
Snowy stayed silent. He could not think of anything he had done to offend or upset any of them. Perhaps—the sudden thought had him gazing uncertainly at each of the six women—one of them was ill? They didn’t look any different than usual. Even Jasmine, who was delicately sneezing into a small square of linen, was probably just reacting to the large bunch of flowers that Holly must’ve brought with her from the country.
Lily cleared her throat. “Seven years ago, you asked me about your parents and your family. I promised your mother that I would tell nobody about you, including you, until the man who tried to kill you was dead or imprisoned, or until you were past the impulsiveness of youth.”
Snowy could not have spoken if he tried. This was beyond anything he had expected.
“We—” she gestured to include the other ladies—“decided to wait until you were twenty-five. Next week is your twenty-fifth birthday. I believe your mother would be very proud of you. We—” again the inclusive gesture—“certainly are. You are entirely capable of taking on the villain who stole your future from you, if that is what you decide to do. The decision will be entirely up to you. Once you have all the facts, and have made your choice, we will help in any way we can.”
Jasmine smiled as she said, “We have been collecting information to help you for the past nineteen years, Moses.” That was the name they had given him, for they’d found him cast adrift from his family and surrounded by human crocodiles. Until they’d dubbed him Snowy, instead. Only Jasmine still called him Moses.
They seemed to be jumping ahead. Snowy needed to know more about what Lily had said already. “Who is my family? Is my mother still alive? Who tried to kill me?”
“Tell him the story in order, Lily,” Poppy suggested. “Start with how you found him.”
“It was February, and colder than the hearts of men,” Lily began. “I was mistress to a nobleman in those days. Had a nice little house in St John’s Wood, and no good reason to be in London town, except it was just after Petunia…” she broke off what she had been about to say. “Iris and I were going to visit the herbwoman who was looking after her.”
After Aunt Petunia had been beaten to within an inch of her life by a customer, is what Lily did not say. Snowy knew the story. The Madam at the brothel where Petunia had worked wanted to dispose of the evidence by dropping Petunia’s battered body into the Thames, even while she was still breathing.
Holly, Lotus, and Jasmine, who’d worked in the same place, stole the injured woman, and Jasmine and Lotus had taken her to a Chinese herbwoman while Holly crossed London to tell Lily and Iris, who were Petunia’s sisters.
“You were in the alley where the herbwoman lived, a terrified little boy, all bruised and bloody, naked, and near dead of the cold. I couldn’t leave you there. I took you with me to the herbwoman. After she’d patched you up, I was going to drop you off to the orphan asylum. But in the end, I took you home with me. You see, we—my friends and I—guessed whose child you must be.”
And you didn’t take me back?Snowy wondered. But no. What Lily had said about his mother meant she had tried to return him.
“You spoke like a swell,” Lily explained. “And Iris and I recognized the white streak at your temple.”
Snowy touched his left temple; the dye he’d been applying a short while before was still damp, and when he pulled his fingers away, they glistened with a thin layer of dark brown. He grimaced but he’d promised Lily he’d always hide it, and she made him repeat that promise every year around this time. The reason for it was suddenly—awfully—clear. He leaned forward.
“I looked like one of your customers?” he asked.
“Like a family from near our home,” Lily corrected. “That white streak was in the family. The viscount and his brother had it, and so did the viscount’s son. Not the brother’s son, though.”
Snowy blinked at that. “I am related to a viscount?”
“My dearest duck,” said Poppy, “youarea viscount.”
Chapter Three
Margaret was inher herb garden. She could not cultivate the full range of culinary or medicinal herbs in unprotected beds beset by the coal dust-laden atmosphere of London, but she grew the species impervious to the conditions.
Other plants, those more sensitive to their environment, she could coax along in her little greenhouse. And still others came down by cart or canal from her estate in North Leicestershire, carefully packed and protected from the sun.
This morning was a fine clear spring day, warm enough that some of the pall of smoke had lifted from the leafy streets surrounding her London home and she’d decided to spend it clipping the rosemary to shape the bushes and encourage growth. The rosemary had finished flowering and the lavender had not started, but the rich spicy scent of the leaves made her work a pleasure, and she was humming to herself when she heard a familiar female voice on the terrace outside the French doors from the drawing room.
“No need to announce me, Bowen. I can see Lady Charmain among her plants.”
Margaret straightened and hurried toward the visitor. “Arial! I did not expect you in Town for another two weeks! When did you arrive? Is everyone well? How are the babies?”
She remembered the clippers in her hand just in time to put them down before she hugged her friend in greeting. She and Arial, Countess of Stancroft, had been friends since the day Margaret’s mother took her to visit the neighboring estate.
Lady Charmain had been supplying ointment from her still room to soothe Arial’s terrible burns since the poor little girl had arrived at Greenmount, near Margaret’s home. Arial and her grieving father had escaped a terrible fire that took a large part of their family seat and half of their family, but not before she’d suffered from burns on her face and body that had caused her to hide from Society for most of her life, until she’d married and emerged from her cocoon like a rare, fabulous butterfly.
