Page 24 of What's an Earl Gotta Do?
“I should hope not,” Anne said, setting aside her teacup. “I was wondering if you two could tell me how you came to be working for your former master sweep.”
“You mean Mr. Smithers?” Johnny asked.
“The very one.”
“Well… uh…” Johnny scratched the side of his nose. “My papa was in the army. My mum went with him. But they both died. This was…” He screwed up his face in concentration.
“Smithers took Johnny on about two months ago,” Nick offered.
“Yeah, two months, I guess. I went home on a ship. One of the officers said I’d live with a new family. A carriage came and took me to Mr. Smithers.”
“A carriage?” Anne leaned forward. “Do you mean Mr. Smithers came to collect you in a hackney carriage?”
“No, there wasn’t no one inside,” Johnny confirmed. “And it wasn’t no hackney. It was a fancy carriage. Black and shiny with a golden crest on the door.”
“I remember the crest, too,” Nick said. “That sounds just like the carriage that came for me.”
A crest would make it possible to identify the carriage. Now they were getting somewhere. “What was it on the crest?” Anne asked.
Johnny said, “It was two pigs,” in the same instant Nick said, “A pair of elephants.”
“It weren’t no elephant,” Johnny said. “Aren’t they the ones with long noses?”
“It was elephants,” Nick insisted. “They did have a long nose, and tusks.”
The two boys fell to arguing about it. Anne sighed. This was a good reminder that the memories of small children were fallible. Not that she had spent hours memorizing every crest in Debrett’s Peerage as her mother had desired, but she felt fairly certain no noble house would select a lowly pig for its emblem, and elephants seemed only a little less far-fetched.
Anne cleared her throat. “You say this same carriage came for you, too, Nick?”
“Yes, m’lady. My father was in the army, too. The 18th Royal Hussars.” Nick puffed out his chest. “My mum followed the drum, too, and my parents were both killed. There was an officer, maybe a lieutenant…” Nick bit his lip, thinking. “I don’t recall his name, but he’d lost his leg and was being sent home. He’s the one who looked after me. Said he was going to get me some kind of ship, a print ship, maybe?”
“An apprenticeship?” Anne asked.
Nick snapped his fingers. “That’s the one. The carriage came for me twice. The first time it was empty. I remember my lieutenant got really mad. Said he wasn’t just going to send Robert Palmer’s only son off to God knows where in some empty carriage. So he wrote a letter, and a few days later, the carriage came again.”
“And was Mr. Smithers in it this time?” Anne asked.
“Not Smithers,” Nick said. “A gentleman. Talked like you do. So the lieutenant shook my hand and let me get in the carriage, and then the gentleman took me to this house. I stayed there a few days before Mr. Smithers took me away.”
“Do you remember this gentleman’s name?” Anne asked.
“No, ma’am, I don’t think he said. He was a real strange cove. It was dusk when he came to collect me, and he refused to get out of the carriage. Shook the lieutenant’s hand through the window. He had this big tricorn hat pulled down over his face, and he hunched back in the corner of the carriage. But at one point the lights of another carriage came straight through the window, and I got a look at his face. He caught me staring, and he clouted me.”
“What did he look like?” Anne asked. “What color was his hair, his eyes?”
Nick screwed up his face. “I… I couldn’t say. It was dark, and he had that hat on.”
Anne tamped down the hope that had been rising in her chest. “Then you wouldn’t recognize him?”
Nick bit his lip, considering. “I think I would, m’lady. I’ve a good memory for faces, and I can still picture his. It’s hard to describe on account of his face being so plain. He didn’t have a hook nose, or a scar, or anything like that.”
“How long ago was this?” Anne asked.
“Uh… I passed four Christmases with Mr. Smithers. So sometime thereabouts.”
“You said something about a house,” Anne said. “Can you describe it?”
“It wasn’t nothing fancy. Just a room, and about eight or ten boys sleeping on the floor. The master sweeps would come and take one of us away, another boy would arrive, that sort of thing.”
