Page 54 of Cloaked in Deception
“Why not?” Lord Hayes interjected.
Stanley’s throat worked as he swallowed nervously. “Because I had told Melanie that George’s mother died after he’d been admitted to the orphanage. She believed all this time that our son was well and truly an orphan.”
The viscount swore more oaths under his breath, and Constance shook her head, staring at her father as if she did not know him.
“I was protecting her from whatever misplaced feelings of guilt she might have felt, taking in a baby whose mother was still alive,” he said, the excuse weak and grasping.
“Protecting Aunt Melanie?” Lord Hayes barked. “Or protecting yourself? You took a child that was not your own and passed him off as if he was. If anyone finds out what you’ve done, the stain upon the Hayes name may be permanent.”
His uncle weathered the viscount’s rebuke with a stiff chin. “I don’t regret it, not for a moment. Martha did not want him. She was a vulture and would have sold him off to anyone. At least we were able to give him a stable home, a family.Love.”
He seemed to believe that what he had done hadn’t been wrong, and while Leo did not agree with his methods, perhaps it was true that he’d given Edward a better life and home than what the boy would have otherwise had. Martha might have thought so too. If so, Leo wondered why Stanley had worried she might say something to Melanie Hayes at the dinner.
He’d called Martha by her given name and accused her of being a vulture.
“Did she contact you throughout the years?” Leo asked as a suspicion grew. “Did she ask for more money?”
At his long, slow blink, she understood: Martha Seabright had been blackmailing him.
“I would hear from her every few years,” he said after several beats passed. “It would be ten pounds or so, whatever she claimed to need at the time. She made it clear that, should I refuse, she would make it known publicly that George was her son. She had letters, she said, from the orphanage, detailing the conditions of the exchange. And over the years, she demanded portraits of George to know what he looked like.”
“And you told Mrs. Hayes about these letters and photographs that night?” Leo asked.
When he nodded, she understood what his wife had been looking for inside Martha’s home.
“How did Aunt Melanie know where this woman lived?” Lord Hayes asked.
“I had gone there previously to meet and pay Martha. I must have mentioned the address during our argument. I never thought she wouldgothere.”
But Mrs. Hayes had been worried that some evidence had been left behind regarding the adoption. And with Martha Seabright’s murder, she must have also worried suspicion could fall upon her husband. Or herself. The woman had been blackmailing them, after all.
“Now you have it all, Miss Spencer,” he went on. “However, I fail to see how it is going to bloody well help me find my son!”
Leo passed Stanley Hayes in his chair and went toward the windows, needing to move, needing to think.
“Do you think it’s possible George overheard your argument?” Oliver Hayes asked his uncle after a moment. “He would have been at home.”
Stanley rubbed his forehead. “I didn’t think we were shouting that loudly, but if the servants heard, I suppose it is possible that he did as well.”
“If he found out he was adopted, he might have decided to run away,” Constance said.
“If that is the case, he could have gone somewhere he is familiar with,” Lord Hayes replied. “Perhaps he is making his way to Beechwood.”
Their discussion over where George might have gone gave Leo time to think about the letter in Martha’s handbag. It had been signed NCR. And at the benefit dinner, Martha had asked the chief coroner about Nurse Radcliff. The letter N might have stood for Nurse rather than a given name. And, as she’d alreadytheorized with a doubtful Jasper, only a nurse at the orphanage would have been able to pronounce the Seabright baby dead.
“Mr. Hayes did Nurse Radcliff facilitate the adoption of George?” she asked, cutting into something the viscount had been saying about taking the next scheduled train to Hampshire.
Stanley sat a little taller in his chair. “Yes. At the time, it was Radcliff,” he answered. “Caroline Radcliff.”
Nurse Caroline Radcliff.NCR.Her letter to Martha had been about Edward Seabright’s adoption after all. It was central to everything that had taken place since the night of Martha’s murder. But then, Leo peered at Mr. Hayes.
“What do you mean by her name being Radcliffat the time?”
Chapter Seventeen
Dew coated the grass and flower beds outside Mrs. Barnston’s inn the next morning, and a low-hanging mist curled up toward the rising sun. As Jasper set out for the orphanage, he was unexpectedly grateful for his coat. The air held a raw chill that would never be present in London in June. Back home, the close, humid air gathered under his shirt before he could arrive at Scotland Yard each morning. He now understood why the wealthy abandoned their city homes and set out for their country estates at the close of May.
Despite it being far more agreeable in the borough of Twickenham, Jasper needed to return to the city. Hell, after the telegram PC Landry had just delivered to his and Lewis’s breakfast table a few minutes ago, he began to wish he hadn’t left at all.
