Hope Tarr - [Men of the Roxbury House 02] Page 2

  A visitor? Prime Minister Gladstone, perhaps? Gavin’s heart lifted with joyful anticipation. He hadn’t set eyes on his benefactor since the night of his rescue a year before and had never had the opportunity to render proper thanks. The fire had made him not only an orphan but also homeless. Frozen, footsore, and fevered, he’d been wandering the East London streets for more than a month living off found coins and scavenged foodstuffs. One particular bitter night, too weary and dispirited to take a single stride more, he’d lain down upon a set of tavern steps and slipped into a fitful, dream-filled sleep.

  In his dream there was plenty of stew to go around and instead of being sent off to the baker, he’d stayed behind and become trapped inside the burning tenement building with his family. Flames hemmed them in on all sides, and the low ceiling was about to fall. Black smoke choked his lungs and the very air was too blistering to breathe. Kicking out at her crib, a red-faced Baby Amelia Grace let out a shriek that reached to the burning rafters. Gavin’s mother picked up the baby to comfort her but moments away from death, what comfort could she give? Suddenly a dark angel swooped inside the narrow room. Wrapping the four of them in his black-winged embrace, he bore them upward beyond the fire’s reach to safety or Heaven, Gavin couldn’t be sure which.

  He awoke to the scents of bay rum and leather and tobacco swirling about him like a luxuriant olfactory cloud. Strong arms lifted him from the step. He opened his eyes and looked up into the craggy countenance of the angel from his dream, only his savior was no celestial being but a flesh-and-blood man of late middle years. Passing in and out of consciousness, he had a vague recollection of being laid across a tufted leather carriage seat and borne away to a stately townhouse set on a quiet street, a lion’s head knocker decorating its black lacquer door. Later he’d learned that his benefactor was Prime Minister William Gladstone and the house to which he’d been brought Number Ten Downing Street. A fortnight later, fever-free and well-fed, he left the ministerial residence and boarded a train bound for Kent—and Roxbury House.

  Perspiration pricking his armpits, Gavin looked beyond the headmaster to the tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a top hat and caped greatcoat looking out the window to the vegetable garden. He held his arms behind his back, one gloved hand cinched about the wrist of the other. Prime Minister Gladstone, it had to be!

  Gavin held his breath as his “visitor” turned slowly toward him. Mindful to hold his shoulders straight, he looked up, expecting to meet the high forehead and deep-set eyes he remembered from the year before. The jolt of disappointment nearly knocked him to his knees. The fierce face shaded by the hat’s beaver brim belonged not to the kindly Prime Minister but to a stranger.

  The headmaster joined the visitor at the window. “Friend St. John is thy mother’s father. He has been searching for thee all this past year and has come to bear you home.”

  Panic plowed Gavin in the gut, threatening to turn his bowels to water. His mother had spoken of her father only rarely, but when she had the term “tyrant” had been applied. “But … I … don’t w-want a g-grandfather. I d-don’t want to l-leave. I have … f-friends … here.” I have Daisy.

  Gaze kind, the headmaster shook his crown of closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “The Lord has a plan for thee, Gavin, as He does for each of us. Trust it is so and open thyself to the Inner Light.”

  “Enough!” Mr. St. John crossed the room in two long strides and settled hard hands on Gavin’s shoulders, gloved fingers tightening like talons. “We may be strangers, but we share the same blood. I’m your grandfather, and I’ve had the very devil of a time finding you. Like it or not, I’m taking you back with me to London.”

  London! Gavin’s heart flipped with fear at the mere mention of the capitol city, a place he associated with foul smells and fiendish faces, with cramped corridors and crowded streets, with fire and screams and the sickening stench of charred flesh.

  “But I don’t w-want to g-go to L-London.” I don’t want to go with you.

  Shaking free of the stranger, Gavin backed up toward the door, head filling with brash plans. He’d always been fleet of foot. If called upon to do so, could he run as far as his breath and legs would carry him and then hide out in the hope his grandfather would give up and leave without him?

  Mr. St. John’s heavy brow lifted and then settled visor-like over gunmetal gray eyes. Looking up into that steely gaze, at once Gavin understood that his grandfather was not the sort of man who would give up—ever.

  He advanced on Gavin. “I see you inherited your sire’s damnable Irish temper, but you’re still a St. John by blood and if I have to beat it into you with a birch and mold you with my own two hands like a cursed lump of clay, you’ll live up to your birthright, by God.”

  The headmaster stepped between them. “Friend St. John, thy grandson has suffered much loss this past year. Can you not at least grant him leave to bid goodbye to his friends? The little girl, Daisy, is as a sister to him.”

  St. John dismissed the entreaty with a wave. “I’ll thank you to remember it’s Mr. St. John, and while I’m grateful for your keeping my grandson fed and clothed, I’ll brook no further meddling. From here on, his future is a family matter that concerns you not. See that he’s packed and ready to leave within the hour.”

  He shouldered his way past them and strode out into the hallway, his retreating footfalls ringing on the flagging.

  The headmaster turned to Gavin, his clean-shaven face registering sympathy and, Gavin thought, pity as well. “I know thy grandfather seems a hard man, Gavin, but there is that of God in him as there is within each of us. Put thy earth-bound will aside and trust all will be well.”

  Trust all will be well? Gavin felt himself torn between hysterical tears and bitter laughter. Had it been the Lord’s will for his parents and baby sister to burn up in a fire? Was it divine intervention or happenstance that he alone had been spared because there wasn’t enough stew to go around? He didn’t like to think of the Creator as a capricious puppet master, and yet if everything that came about did so by God’s guiding hand, what other conclusion might he draw?

  Gavin felt tears prick his eyes and didn’t trouble himself to blink them away. “If I must go with him back to London, then I wish I were dead and lying beside my real family in the churchyard.”

  The headmaster’s eyes widened. “Gavin!” he said, tone harsher than Gavin had ever heard him use before. “Test not the Lord with the making of such an oath.”

  His face softening, he reached out as if to lay a hand on Gavin’s arm, but Gavin was beyond comfort. He jerked away and sped out the door, one thought burning through his brain. I have to find Daisy.

  He found her in the attic sitting on the dusty floor, head resting on her tented knees. She looked up when he entered and he saw she’d been crying. Had the news traveled so quickly? “I heard you were being adopted.”

  Damn, he’d wanted to be the one to tell her. Determined not to show her his sorrow, Gavin shook his head. “Not adopted exactly. I have a family after all or at least a grandfather. He’s come to fetch me back to … L-London.” Even now that the first shock was fading, he couldn’t keep from stumbling over that one dreaded word.

  She sprang to her feet and launched herself at him. “Gav, take me with you,” she begged, wrapping her thin arms about his legs. “Please, take me. I’ll be quiet as a mouse and good as gold, I swear I will. Your horrid old grandfather won’t even know I’m there.”

  Gavin felt a warm droplet trickle down his cheek and disappear into the top of her head of corn silk hair. “You’re always good, Daisy. In fact, you’re the best little girl in the world. As soon as I’m settled, I’ll write you to let you know my direction and how I’m getting on, and you must practice your letters so you can do the same.”

  Burying her face against his torso, she shook her head. “I don’t want us to only write. I want us to be together as we are now.”

  Gently, very gently, he disengaged her clinging hands.
He reached into his pocket and drew out the wrapped handkerchief he’d meant to give her later, his share of the pilfered candy from the night before. He untied the bundle, snapped off a bite-size piece of peppermint stick, and popped it into her mouth. Gaze on hers, he set his mind to memorizing every detail of her dear little face—the wide-set green eyes that angled upward at the corners, the pert little nose that turned up ever so slightly at the tip, and the adorable “upside down” mouth with its full top lip—and felt his heart cave in on itself under the weight of so much love and loss.

  Crunching the candy, she looked up at him with big soulful eyes. “You won’t forget about me, will you, Gav?”

  He retied the hankie and pressed it into her palm. “I could never forget you, Daisy, not in a million years. And no matter how long it takes or how hard it is, someday, somehow I’ll see we’re together again.”

  Bottom lip trembling, she looked up at him, lashes spangled with tears. “You swear?”

  Gavin nodded, the lump in his throat grown so large he could scarcely speak past it. “I swear.”

  Through thick and thin,

  Forever and ever,

  Come what may,

  We’ll stay together … just like a real family.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Why, how now, monsieur! What a life is this,

  That your poor friends must woo your company?”

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Duke SENIOR,

  As You Like It

  The Palace Song & Supper Club

  Covent Garden, London

  Spring 1891

  It had been a bad day. Certainly not the very worst day of Gavin Carmichael’s twenty-nine-year life—the day of the fire occupied that honor. Neither could it match the trauma of the second worst day of his life, the day his grandfather had swooped into the headmaster’s study at Roxbury House and taken Gavin away from Daisy and everything else he held dear. If he was to be precise, and precision was among the qualities which had landed him among the ranks of London’s top notch barristers despite his young age, he would have to say it was the third worst day of his life.

  The third worst day and still it felt as though he was skirting the edges of Hell, if not the core of the inferno, than surely one of its outer rings. Ah, yes, Limbo, Dante’s First Circle, described his state perfectly. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” or so was writ on the gates. Abandoning all hope of ever finding Daisy was precisely what the detective’s report, delivered that day, called for him to do.

  Despite the prevalence of scarlet in its décor, The Palace wasn’t particularly hellish or satanic so much as it was tawdry. One of the new song and supper clubs cropping up like clover throughout the city, it was luxurious in the overblown style reminiscent of the better class of brothels, the columned entrance festooned with plaster garden statues, colored lamps, and gilded trelliswork, none of which served any apparent function beyond adding to the general decorative clutter. Filing inside with his friends Harry and Rourke after a deucedly long wait, Gavin had gathered a general impression of thick carpets, mirror-covered walls, and windows aglow with stained glass. A spiral staircase led downstairs to the auditorium. Rows of white cloth-covered tables faced the semicircular stage hung with crimson and gold curtains, and a gas-fired chandelier reputed to hold 27,000 pieces of cut crystal crowned the coffered ceiling. Yet all the contrived splendor of the place couldn’t conceal its basic coarseness anymore than evening tie and tails could transform a butcher into a baronet.

  What a snob I’ve become, Gavin thought, at once guilty and unspeakably sad because it was true and because snobbery, he strongly suspected, was more or less an irreversible state. Even in the midst of it, he couldn’t stop the flash fire images from his early childhood from cropping up—his mother’s slender, chapped hands; the meanness of the three-room flat the four of them had called home; the bone-penetrating chill that hit like a fist in the face on winter mornings when he crawled out of bed to start up the stove, fingers so cold-stiffened he could scarcely strike the match.

  It wasn’t until after the fire he’d known how brutal winter could be. Homeless as well as orphaned, he’d made a bed of park benches and the crawl space beneath front steps, cramming crumpled newspapers into his layers of clothes to stave off the wind. He’d been a hair’s breadth from freezing to death the night Gladstone discovered him and carried him indoors. With its big, homey kitchen, scrubbed corridors, and lush, green pasturelands, Roxbury House had seemed a seat of opulence and plenty. And yet were he to go back there now, he doubted even it would satisfy his highbrow standards.

  That last thought made him well and truly angry, for he hadn’t always been this way. No, this puffed up prideful person, this supercilious snob, wasn’t really him but rather what the old man, his grandfather had made of him.

  You’ve molded me like a cursed lump of clay, indeed, Grandfather, he said to himself, and then tossed back another mouthful of the dreadful, too-sweet champagne as if it might wash away fifteen years of bitter regret.

  Harry, now known as Hadrian St. Claire, leaned over the table toward him. “Gav, are you all right?” To sever ties with his unsavory past, the photographer had taken the new name when he’d set up shop in Parliament Square several years before.

  “I’m perfectly fine. Why do you ask?” Gavin replied, not because he was even remotely fine but because in his present circumstances, what else could he possibly say?

  Hadrian shrugged but held his gaze. “You looked far away just now.” Even when not peering through his camera’s eye, his friend could be too observant for comfort, Gavin’s at any rate.

  Seated to the other side of him, Rourke poured them all more wine. “Aye, the entire purpose of our coming out was for you to set aside your quest for the night at least and have some fun. It’s been fifteen years, Gav. Daisy is likely married by now with a family of her own, a real family such as she always wanted, not we ragtag orphan lot. For all we know, she might even be d—”

  A scowl from Hadrian cut off the Scot at mid-word, but Gavin knew what he’d meant to say. Dead, Daisy might be dead.

  Gavin shook his head. “I can’t give up. She’s out there somewhere, I can feel her.”

  Indeed, there’d been times over the years when he’d awakened to the sound of sobbing and known beyond all reason he wasn’t dreaming, that Daisy was somewhere out there in the great wide world in deep distress, perhaps even calling out his name. At other times, she’d suddenly appear to him in his dreams, no longer a little girl but a grown woman. A woman who looked up at him with wounded green eyes and a full, trembling mouth. You swore, Gavin. You bloody well swore.

  For the past year he’d done his level best to find her. Indeed his friends had hinted on more than one occasion that his search bordered on obsession. So be it. He couldn’t expect them to understand. Though all four members of the Roxbury House Orphans Club had been famous friends, he and Daisy had shared a special bond, a connection which transcended the physical limitations of time and space.

  The detective he’d hired was from one of the top London agencies, but he only managed to track Daisy so far as Dover in the spring of 1877. Apparently she was adopted shortly after Gavin had left Roxbury by a husband and wife acting team, Robert and Florence Lake. The Lakes had been players in a traveling regional theater company that had stopped in Dover for a fortnight’s spell. After that, the trail went cold, and the detective held out scant hope it might heat up again.

  Rourke held up the folded program hawking the evening’s performances, notably that of its top liner. “If anyone can take your mind off long-lost little girls, it’s sure to be this Delilah du Lac. Judging from the artist’s sketch, she’s a stunner.”

  Gavin gave the program a half-hearted glance. Earlier when he’d stood in queue beneath the entrance canopy, he had ample time to study the full-size poster displayed on the building’s façade. If the promoter could be believed, Mademoiselle du Lac was newly arrived from Paris and possessed an angel’s fa
ce, a nightingale’s voice, and a body befitting the Biblical temptress from whom she’d taken her thoroughly disreputable name. And yet the color drawing of a voluptuous redhead wearing too many feathers and too few clothes had failed to move him.

  Still, no one fancied a spoil sport and his two friends had weathered more than their fair share of his dark moods of late. He plucked the cloth-wrapped champagne bottle from the ice bucket and topped off their glasses, determined to be carefree and jolly and boisterous if it was the last act he accomplished on earth.

  Raising his champagne flute, he offered a toast. “To Miss Delilah du Lac, may she come onstage and seduce us all with her siren’s song.”

  They touched glasses, his friends answering with “Here, here” and “That’s the spirit, man.”

  Determined to set aside his melancholy, he spent the better part of the next two hours telling Hadrian and Rourke, their white-jacketed waiter, indeed anyone who would listen what a jolly good time he was having. He ordered pease pudding and pigs’ trotters because that’s what his friends were having, never mind the lobster patties and new potatoes would have suited him far better. After finishing off the champagne, he joined his friends in ordering mugs of bitter stout, followed by a bottle of hock.

  But all his studied jocularity was nothing more than a farce, a ruse. His stomach ached, his head ached, and as for his heart, it had never felt emptier. He hazarded a glance to Rourke and then Hadrian, blissfully emptying the dregs of what must be their third bottle of the house swill. With two penny cigars wedged into the corners of their mouths, they looked as though between them they hadn’t a care in the world. How he envied them, not Hadrian’s skill with a camera or Rourke’s knack for turning a few quid into a fortune, but their simple ability to savor the moment and be happy.

  Not so simple at all.

  No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to throw himself into the spirit of the place, into the spirit of fun, and the actuality was a great deal harder to swallow than a bad supper or bitter beer. As always, the failing, the lack, began and ended with him. Something that once had lived inside him had gone missing and, whatever that something was, he could no more find his way back to it than he could find Daisy. That he’d actually let himself be lulled into thinking he might lose himself in a smoke-filled London supper club struck him as hopelessly absurd, a cruel jest played upon him by The Powers That Be.