Page 96 of Rules for Ruin

Effie felt Gabriel cast her a frowning look.

At the moment, his curiosity was the least of her problems.

She leaned forward in her seat. “You mean to say she was a—”

“Oh, she were, right enough. A pretty lass. Never knew her real name. None of us respectable folk did. Wouldn’t want to know it. She were that unpleasant.”

Effie flattened her palms in her lap.

She refused to quail at discovering that Mrs. Grace—a woman who might very well be Effie’s mother—had been a prostitute. Many poor females had been similarly reduced to selling themselves. What choice had they? It was often either that or starvation and death. One couldn’t attach a moral valuation to survival. Even so…

Effie was suddenly cold. “Yes, I see.”

“That wouldn’t have been the woman,” Gabriel said.

“T’were the only woman named Grace I remember from that time,” Mrs. Young replied.

“Did you tell them, Vera?” Mrs. Sturges entered with the tea tray. “I warned that man he hadn’t got the right woman.” She set the tray down with a clatter on a low walnut table by the sofa. “Tea, Mrs. Flite? Mr. Royce?”

Effie managed a thin thank-you as Mrs. Sturges poured out her tea. She took the cup, grateful for something to warm her.

“I don’t encourage my sister to dwell on her former circumstances,” Mrs. Sturges said, serving tea to the others. “She married unwisely as a girl, and that husband of hers put her in the way of bad company.”

“God rest his soul,” Mrs. Young murmured.

“But she retained her honor and dignity, even at the worst,” Mrs. Sturges went on. “She never fell into vice like some I could mention.”

Mrs. Young nodded in eager agreement. “I did only what I must. No one could accuse me of—”

“That’s all behind you now,” Mrs. Sturges interrupted firmly. “We live a quiet life in Trowley Green, Mr. Royce. I’ve given my sister a place of respect in this village.” She sat down beside Mrs. Young. “There’s no good raking up the past and sullying her good name at this stage of her life.”

“We have no desire to rake up the past,” Gabriel said. “Only to learn what happened to Mrs. Grace.”

“Dead,” Mrs. Young said bluntly.

Effie started. “Oh.” She lowered her cup back to its saucer. She had known it was a possibility. She had prepared herself. The tersely delivered information nevertheless gave her a jolt. “When—?”

“She were always ill with summat or other. That brat of hers, too. Screaming the place down all hours of the night and day.”

Effie’s fingers tightened spasmodically on the handle of her teacup. Any doubts she had that Mrs. Grace was, indeed, her mother vanished in a puff of smoke.

“Folk knew the mite were hungry,” Mrs. Young continued unaware. “Still…it weren’t any more likable than its mother. A strange brown little thing with unnatural blue eyes. Mrs. Grace had no fondness for it.”

No fondness for her own baby?

Effie didn’t believe it. She couldn’t. The harsh fact was too far removed from the dreams she’d been constructing all her life. Dreams built upon a gossamer-thin understanding of a mother’s self-sacrificing love.

“How do you mean?” she managed to ask.

“Didn’t want it, o’course. Couldn’t hardly keep it or feed it.” Mrs. Young took a noisy gulp of her tea. “Mrs. Grace rented a bed in the attic room of an old rag-and-bone shop at the time. Used to put the child on the roof when its cries became too troublesome.”

Effie’s breath stopped in her chest. Again, she felt Gabriel’s gaze on her. This time it was no brief glance. It was a long, steady look. There was an oddly arrested expression in his pale eyes.

She scarcely noticed it.

Her attention was wholly fixed on Mrs. Young. “She…She put the child on the roof?”

“It were the only thing to stop her crying, Mrs. Grace claimed. Been doing it since the child could toddle. The mite used to get real quiet and still up there for fear of falling. Not even her hunger could inspire a peep out of her.”