Page 8 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
“Still,” Jack said. “That’s not the same thing as a gentleman’s daughter, is it?” It was a question that didn’t need answering—they both knew the gradations of gentility, just as they both knew they would perpetually be beneath even the lowest rung.
After they finished their soup, Jack rose. “I’m going to take a walk.”
“It’s late.” It wasn’t even nine o’clock, but this too was part of their evening ritual: Sarah admonished Jack for his habit of taking a walk after supper, as if the two of them hadn’t been raised on the streets of St. Giles, every night encountering dangers far worse than anything Jack could turn up in Mayfair. But Sarah was one of the few people who had ever displayed more than a passing interest in whether he lived or died, so Jack tolerated her fussing. Rampant disapproval seemed to be the only way his siblings knew how to express their affection these days.
“I’ll bring a pistol if it’ll make you rest easy, Sarah,” he offered.
“It won’t.” She stacked the dishes. “Send Betsy up if you see her, will you?”
He bent down to kiss her cheek before taking his leave.
It was dark but the streetlights were lit, and when he reached Piccadilly, it was crowded with carriages. Young ladies and lordlings headed to their evening’s entertainment, he gathered. If he got a peek into one of the carriages he could have instantly told where the occupants were headed—the theater, the opera, a ball, a dinner. Before beginning in his present line of work he had served as a valet, first for a barrister, then for a gentleman who had since gone to India, and finally for Mr. Rivington’s brother-in-law, Lord Montbray. He had spent more evenings than he wanted to remember selecting precisely the right waistcoat and ensuring that his gentleman’s cravat was exactly as it needed to be. The fact that he had also spent some of that time pocketing silverware and whatever trinkets he could fence was not something he liked to dwell on overmuch.
That was how he had first seen Rivington. Lord and Lady Montbray were spending a few weeks at the lady’s father’s estate as part of a hunting party. Rivington had been home on leave. One evening Montbray hadn’t turned up in his bedchamber after dinner, so Jack went to see whether he had fallen drunkenly into the well or whether he was imposing himself on one of the housemaids, the latter being a situation he had to actively work against in their London household. He had heard some rustling in the orangery and slipped inside, intending to defend the virtue of whichever servant his master was accosting. Instead he found Rivington getting serviced by another young gentleman. Jack had left as quietly as he came, but he hadn’t forgotten.
And who could blame him for keeping that memory locked away in a dark corner of his soul? From time to time Jack would take it out and turn it over, as one might admire a bauble. Rivington had been—oh, hell, it was mortifying to even think it, but Rivington had been beautiful. Jack still remembered the way his head had been thrown back in pleasure, the way he had twined his long fingers in his lover’s hair. He even remembered the single helpless sigh that had escaped the man’s lips.
Rivington was likely in one of these carriages tonight, heading out to dine or gamble or get up to more of the same business Jack had witnessed in the orangery all those years ago. Not that it mattered. With any luck Jack had seen the last of him.
He walked clear out of the genteel part of London, listening as the sounds of carriage wheels on well-maintained cobblestones gave way to the sounds of discord and drunkenness that permeated the rookeries to the north—the same rookeries where Jack and his siblings had been born. Bloody hell, it stank. He was sure he had never noticed the smell as a child, but now the stink of piss and sick and filth and worse assaulted him as soon as he approached.
Jack stopped at one of the neighborhood’s less squalid looking public houses. He scanned the room, looking for a familiar face and not finding any. There was no sign of Georgie.
He waved over the barmaid. “Gin, please.” There was no sense in attempting to order anything other than gin in a place like this.
“Yes, gov’nor,” she said with an awkward attempt at a curtsy.
“Has Georgie Turner been here lately?”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m Jack, Georgie’s brother.” He produced a shilling from his pocket and slid it toward the end of the table. The girl’s eyes went wide.
“Haven’t seen him in weeks,” she said, and Jack thought she was telling the truth. “They say he has fancier haunts these days.” She snatched up the coin and darted off, and it was a different girl who brought Jack his gin a few minutes later.
When he spoke with the barmaid, he had attempted to drop the bland, public-school accent he had adopted so many years ago. But no matter what he did he could hear lingering traces of Mayfair in his tone. What had once been a sham now sometimes seemed more real than these rookery voices around him.
There was a burst of laughter and he turned his head to see the barmaid engaging one of the locals in some ribald patter. He remembered that she had called him “governor.” He didn’t belong here anymore. And if he didn’t belong here, then where the hell did he belong? Certainly not the fashionable quarter where he and Sarah now lived and did business.
All at once it dawned on him that Mrs. Wraxhall was as much of an impostor as he was. Well, perhaps not quite so much—that would be no mean feat. But her accent was as fraudulent as his own. Jack knew, knew as an absolute certainty, that Mrs. Wraxhall had practiced speaking in front of the looking glass as surely as he and Sarah had done. Her words had been too exact, each vowel precisely calibrated to correctness.
He finished his gin—it was predictably terrible, but that was almost the point of gin—and glanced around the room, still not seeing anyone he knew. With a sigh, he pushed away from the table and returned to the noisy, malodorous street.
He took a circuitous route back home, not wanting to go back to his empty rooms. He kept his eyes on the pavement before him lest he catch a glimpse of any courting couples walking arm-in-arm, any happy families sitting down to dinner inside the ramshackle buildings lining the street. Ordinarily he could train his mind not to dwell on all the things he wanted but would never have, but tonight he didn’t trust himself.
CHAPTER THREE
It was too early for anyone to be about, aside from servants returning from the market and nursery maids wheeling babies through the park. An old man was letting a couple of spaniels off their leads to run, but Jack couldn’t see any other gentry.
He spotted Molly Wilkins before she saw him. Well, well. The maid had certainly come up in the world. She was wearing a sober gray day dress and a tidy-looking bonnet that only a few years ago she would have stolen as soon as look at. A pair of kid gloves covered hands that were likely still red from all the time they had spent scrubbing floors and hauling coal scuttles. She had been a scullery maid at a house Jack had worked at several years ago, and now she had achieved the pinnacle of a servant girl’s career.
“How did you sweet talk Mrs. Wraxhall into hiring you as lady’s maid?” he asked before she had turned to notice him.
She visibly started. “A fine greeting, Jack. Have you forgotten all your manners now that you’re a constable or whatever it is you are these days?”
Jack ignored this because Molly knew perfectly well he was no constable. “Did you have something on her? Or did you simply forge your references?”
