Discussion of his court case made no improvement in his mood. Rosenfeld agreed that Sybil’s absconding to the Continent with the duke’s steward, income, and several household items should have the effect of dismissing her case obstructing his efforts to gain guardianship. But he didn’t have to remind Mal that the Courts of Chancery moved at a pace best called glacial. Rosenfeld could enter a bill for a provisional appointment of Mal as the children’s guardian, but the Lord Chancellor was likely to impose restrictions on Mal’s access to the estate’s income and other assets, given the estate in question belonged to a duke.
“Rosenfeld,” Mal said as they strolled out of the lush, tranquil gardens, a haven of peace inside busy London, and came to the broad square before the Hall. “That’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?”
His friend’s face assumed a bland expression. “I suppose it is, in some families,” he said, his tone neutral. “But, of course, to graduate Oxford with my civil law degree, I took the Oath of Communion as a member of the Anglican Church.”
“Yes, naturally,” Mal murmured. He’d taken the same oath, though he couldn’t say he was a church member in good standing. Such a thing would require church attendance, possibly tithes, and most certainly a subscription to the doctrines and dogma of belief. Mal had his doubts.
But all students of England’s greatest colleges were required to be Church of England. No Dissenters, Protestants, Quakers, Methodists, or Jews.
“It’s recently occurred to me,” Mal remarked, “how long, and how often, Jews have had to hide their culture and their religion to survive.” He supposed many, like Amaranthe’s mother’s family, had chosen to conform as a means of survival when to cling to their faith would mean penury, exile, or death at the stake.
“Prickly history, that,” Rosenfeld said dryly, and there the matter rested.
Mal wondered about Rosenfeld’s private beliefs, but a man ought to have some things he could keep to himself. For his own part, Mal didn’t advertise that he was a bastard any more than he needed to. He liked the way he was treated when he was accepted as just another young man about town, erstwhile gentleman, aspiring barrister. He could usually tell when his parentage had reached a new acquaintance’s ears. Invitations from their mothers and requests to escort their sisters stopped, but he was invited just as often, if not more frequently, to less savory entertainments like gambling clubs, cock fights, and drunken rambles.
Mal’s mood turned decidedly glum as he fought his way down the narrow, twisting lanes of the City to the office of his solicitor and the estate’s man of business. It seemed his traditional bad luck was holding true. He wondered if Miss Illingworth were having better luck than he with her errands of the morning.
With that serene face and that clever, wry twist of her lips, she could wring anything from anyone, he had no doubt. When she drifted into the parlor in a cloud of indigo silk, he’d been struck dumb. He had expected to find his fancies of the evening before and the strange, erotic dreams that had followed him intosleep would be banished in the morning, and in the light of day he would find her again prim and plain, a steely-eyed spinster bluestocking.
Instead he found a ravishing beauty. Against a backdrop of expensive silk, the severe lines of her face looked elegant, her coloring became vivid and arresting, and that all-too-expressive mouth looked decidedly alluring. Wondering about the shape of her beneath the stylish gown fired his blood in the light of day every bit as much as it had in the candlelit shadows of his father’s study the night before.
But her transformation posed a sobering reminder that in the world of thehaut ton,it was easy to confuse worth with how much money someone possessed. The right trimmings could make any woman appealing, elegant, well-bred. He had to teach Hugh how to discern a woman’s character beneath the plumage.
Amaranthe Illingworth had character in spades. It was written in the high curve of her cheek, the way her mouth pinched when she was angry, the brows that rose up and down with curiosity, and the eyes that gleamed with intelligence. In the violet glow that stunned him when he got close enough to look.
Mal shook his head to clear it of fanciful images. Money. The subject at hand was money. Where was he to get it? He couldn’t ask Viktor for a loan. Like most of their friends, Viktor spent coin as freely as it came to him, not letting a guinea grow warm in his pocket before it was gone in the pursuit of some pleasure.
Neither could he write home and ask Aunt Beatrice for money. She and Littlejohn were getting on in life and needed every penny of their tiny, well-earned savings to serve as a pension for when they were too old to finally work. It had always been vaguely in Mal’s mind that, when he became a sergeant at law, he would be able to send money home, not ask for it.
Not for the first time, he cursed the slippery Popplewell and the bewitching, heartless Sybil who had seduced him to her evil cause. He wished he could hire men to go abroad, find them both, and haul them back to England to account for their crimes. But he didn’t have the money to hire a hack, much less offer a bounty on the duchess’s head.
“I really cannot advise returning Her Grace to England, if that is your intent,” his solicitor answered when Mal shared what was on his mind. “I feel it will support your case if she is absent and cannot account for herself. The Lord Chancellor cannot choose but to award guardianship to you.”
“True,” Mal said heavily. “If the case comes before him before they are all grown and married and out of the house, and my guardianship is rendered irrelevant.”
“Indeed, the wheels of justice can move all too slowly at times.”
Mr. Thorkelson, of Mssrs. Thorkelson and Sons, sat across from Mal in an office shadowed by a set of heavy, dark oak furniture large enough to kill a man if they happened to topple over on him. Ensconced behind a desk so massive that a fully grown person could take refuge beneath it, Thorkelson slid open a drawer and drew forth a file, two inches thick, which he placed upon his blotter.
“Now, then. Joseph Alexander Illingworth. What is it you would like to know, Mr. Grey?”
“May I?” Mal gestured toward the bulging file.
“I’m afraid not.” Thorkelson managed to sound regretful without looking it. Behind a set of thick spectacles, he had the look of a Viking warrior of old who had found a settled life agreed with him. Beneath a heavy brow his cheeks were rather doughy, and his hands were soft and full and smooth. “Some of the information is quite sensitive, you see.”
“But I am his employer.”
Thorkelson gave a discreet cough. “Or will be, as soon as we are authorized to draw up the proper papers. Naturally we remain willing to expedite your guardianship case however we may.” He smiled, or made an expression which Mal assumed was a smile. “Now, what is it you wish to know?”
“Is he a proper influence? My brothers are in his charge for much of the day.”
It was humiliating to admit that he had not made proper inquiries before, but Thorkelson had tendered Illingworth’s name as a tutor when Mal was in the middle of a heavy spate of reading for the bar while wallowing through a towering stack of decisions about the household following the duke’s death, decisions Sybil was useless at making. He’d been glad to let Thorkelson have his way in the matter of selecting a tutor.
“Is he dependable,” Mr. Thorkelson murmured. He opened the file and consulted a scrawled set of notes. “Let us see. Twenty-six years of age. Born in Cornwall, in the village of St. Cleer, only son of the vicar Jonas Illingworth and his wife, Bracha Crosby. Educated at home, sent to Oxford, where he took a second in classics and a negligible place in mathematics. Exemplary disciplinary record. Not a single infraction.”
“Not one?” Mal echoed.
Not a single riotous act, not a lark, not even a momentary rebellion? That seemed a bit spiritless. Mal had had his share of scrapes at Winchester and then Cambridge, most of them the result of being a bastard. His tutors had often made an example of him, and the boys assured of their stations made him a frequent target.
