Page 79 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place
I gasped out loud, and then slapped a hand over my mouth, my heart beating faster.
But they must be too involved in their own conversation to have heard me, because Uncle Herbert was already speaking again. “Maisie never—” he began, voice hot, and then he choked on the rest of the sentence. There was a moment, one during which I was every bit as shocked as he was, I might add, before he spoke again. “No one ever told me!”
“Of course not,” Hughes said, her tone dripping with false kindness. “His Grace sent her away, didn’t he?”
“Did he?” Uncle Herbert sounded almost confused. “He did? My father?”
“Of course he did, my lord. You were engaged to Miss Roslyn by then, weren’t you? It wouldn’t do to have Miss Moran show up with a claim.”
“But…”
Hughes waited, but Uncle Herbert didn’t end up saying anything more. If his thoughts were anything like mine, scurrying like crabs in a bucket, I couldn’t blame him for that. Unless I had misunderstood something, he had just been told that an affair he’d had—with one of the maids? Really, Uncle Herbert?—before he married Aunt Roz, had resulted in a child he hadn’t known existed.
“Why bring this up now?” Uncle Herbert finally managed, which was a salient point, I thought. It wasn’t as if we didn’t have plenty of other things to worry about this weekend.
“If not now,” Hughes wanted to know, smoothly, “then when?”
After a second she added, “Now is when it matters, isn’t it?”
“You mean?—?”
Uncle Herbert must have thought better of what he was going to ask, because he stopped. And thought for a moment before he asked, instead, “What do you want?”
“Money,” Hughes said bluntly. When he didn’t immediately respond, she added, “You, my lord, have every incentive to help me with that. I’m sure you, like your father, wouldn’t want someone with too much knowledge hanging around your wife and children.”
There wasn’t much Uncle Herbert could say to that, of course. Nor did he try. “How much?” he asked instead, voice rough, and I was vividly reminded of Christopher, sitting on the bed in his room at Sutherland Hall after his audience with the Duke his grandfather, asking Grimsby the same question.
“Enough to go somewhere else for a fresh start,” Hughes said. “Somewhere far away from Beckwith Place and Sutherland Hall. I think perhaps it would be better not to tempt fate.”
Indeed. I focused on holding my breath and not shifting my feet as Uncle Herbert mentioned a sum. Hughes countered with one quite a bit higher, and they dickered back and forth before settling on the same amount which Grimsby had tried to extort from Christopher two and a half months ago. While Christopher and I hadn’t had it, I didn’t think coming up with a thousand pounds was going to be a problem for Uncle Herbert. He might have to do some fast talking to Aunt Roz to explain where it had gone, however. It was enough that she’d notice it missing.
Enough for Hughes to buy a small cottage somewhere out of the way, and live quietly on what was left for a good, long time.
“It’ll have to wait until after this mess is sorted,” Uncle Herbert warned, and Hughes tittered.
“Of course, Lord Herbert. We wouldn’t want to draw any extra attention to the current situation.”
I rolled my eyes even as I toed my shoes off as quietly as I could. It sounded as if they were winding up the conversation, and the last thing I wanted was to be caught outside the door with my ear to the metaphorical crack. Whatever this had been about, it had clearly been important enough to Uncle Herbert to pay a thousand pounds for Hughes’s silence, and it was probably best if he didn’t know that any of the rest of us knew about it.
So I slipped my feet out of the shoes and bent and picked them up, and then I scurried, as quietly as I could in my stockings, across the hall and through the door of the boot room. And placed my shoes on the floor there, as if I had just come in from outside. In the event anyone happened to notice me—say, if Hughes made for the side door, the quickest way out of the house—it might look as if I had just arrived from outside.
For good measure, I slipped my feet back into the brogues as my thoughts churned. Uncle Herbert had had an affair with a woman named Maisie Moran before he and Aunt Roz got engaged, and she’d had a child?
Francis was turning thirty next week, and Uncle Herbert and Aunt Roz had been married at least a year or two by the time he came along. He hadn’t been one of those ‘early’ babies, as far as I knew. Maisie Moran’s son or daughter would be thirty-two or -three by now, then.
That was if he or she existed at all, of course, and Hughes wasn’t just making the whole thing up. She hadn’t given Uncle Herbert any proof of anything she’d said. He had tacitly admitted to the affair with Miss Moran, and hadn’t claimed that a child couldn’t have come from it, so I supposed I’d have to take that part of it as fact. But just because there could have been a child, didn’t mean that there had been one.
I knew nobody whose last name was Moran. But then Maisie might not be a Moran any longer. Uncle Herbert had married. She might have married, too, and taken her husband’s name. And so might her child.
And whatever name it bore, Maisie’s child would be a decade too old to have been Abigail Dole. But Hughes had said that it happened again. And it sounded as if it had happened around the same time that Hughes had come up from Dorset in exchange for Lydia Morrison, which had been when Crispin (and Christopher, and for that matter myself) had been infants. Around the same time, I would guess, that Abigail had been one, too.
For Uncle Herbert to have had another child the same age as Christopher, he would have had to—I winced—commit adultery while Aunt Roz was expecting. I don’t know why that should make it worse, but somehow it did. I didn’t think I would ever be able to forgive my (hypothetical, future) husband if he cheated on me, but if he did so while I was carrying his unborn child, not only would I not forgive him, but I’d probably go after him with a mallet of my own.
But perhaps Christopher had come about as a result of the affair. After, not before. If Uncle Herbert and Aunt Roz were trying to repair their marriage after Uncle Herbert’s indiscretion, and they thought another child would do it, they might have had Christopher.
I made a face. The idea of my best friend being the result of an attempted reconciliation between his parents was a bit unpleasant, honestly. I wanted him to be a product of a happy mother and father deciding, after a few years, to try for another child, not a last ditch attempt to fix a failing marriage after one party cheated on the other.
Although none of this was my affair—pun totally intended. What mattered, was that it was possible that Abigail Dole was Uncle Herbert’s child by someone other than Aunt Roz. And that would explain why little Bess looked like a Sutherland. Abigail didn’t, or hadn’t, but if the genes were there, she could have given birth to a child with Sutherland hair and eyes.
