Page 2 of Debtor’s Daughter

“Half of that lot could kill him,” Barnes said in alarm, looking at the mess of vials of coloured powders and glass jars and bottles of turpentine and linseed oil.

“I wasn’t about to get him oil paints. Just a little set of watercolours,” Larkin said impatiently. “What do you think?”

“I think the lad gets enough quiet playtime with the ladies. What he needs is to let off steam. A bit of rough and tumble.”

Larkin gave his valet a stony look. “I’m not becoming the child’s nanny, Barnes, so don’t even suggest it.”

Barnes shrugged. “You want peace and quiet?”

“How about a ball?” Larkin suggested. “That’s got to be quieter than crashing saucepan lids.”

“Reckon so,” Barnes agreed.

Larkin let out a sigh of relief. “Barnes, take what funds you deem necessary to buy such an article and have yourself a pint on the way back for your trouble.”

Barnes brightened at the offer. “That’s very good of you, sir. I shall, thank you.”

Larkin waved this away. In his darkest moments over the past months, he had relied far too much on Barnes, who had gone above and beyond. He owed the fellow, and did not wish to risk losing him to someone else.

Watching Barnes take himself from the room, Larkin poured himself a cup of coffee and took another biscuit, regarding his painting with a critical eye. It had taken him a long time to give his work the credit it deserved. Not having spent years studying like many artists, he had worried that people only commissioned him because he was gentry, and not because he was the best there was. Yet he had worked long and hard, and he was not blind to the progress he had made. Having undertaken a personal study of the master’s he admired, he now believed he was close to being worthy of placing his work beside theirs. Yes. Not bad, he thought with a surge of satisfaction. Not bad at all, though perhaps it needed a little—

Crash! Bang, bang, bang! Crash!

Larkin sighed.

17th September 1850, Berwick Street, Soho, London.

Maggie winced as she ran up to her front door, the crashing of saucepan lids quite audible from the front step. Exchanging a look of exasperation with Sally, her maid, Maggie let herself in, ran through the house, and hurried out into the back garden.

“Giddy!” she called to her son, dismayed to discover him marching about the overgrown jungle that was their garden, crashing two lids together like cymbals.

Giddy paused, the saucepan lids suspended momentarily, before giving her a dazzling smile and smashing them together once more. “How you do, Mama?” he asked cheerily.

“Giddy, what did I tell you about making such a racket in the garden? Mr Weston is an artist, and he cannot work when you make such a terrible noise.”

“Not noise,” Giddy objected. “Music.”

“Well, we’ll have to agree to differ on that score,” Maggie said, hastening out, prising free one of the lids and taking the boy’s hand. “Come inside. I expect Cook has a biscuit for you, not that you deserve one. You know very well I told you not to take the saucepans outside. That was a naughty thing to do.”

She had also instructed Caro and Aunt Connie, and the cook, not to let Giddy make such uproar, but she was hardly surprised. Caro lived in a daydream, Connie in another world entirely, and Giddy could wrap Cook around his little finger.

“Mrs Moody,” Maggie said, herding her son into the kitchen, where the heavenly scent of fresh baked bread and the sweet vanilla of sugar biscuits lingered in the air. “He’s taken the saucepans again!”

“Ah, well, only the little one and a couple of lids,” the cook—who was as far from suiting her name as night was from day—replied with an indulgent smile. “Boys will be boys.”

“Yes, but this boy is driving our poor neighbour distracted,” Maggie said, tugging at the black ribbons of her bonnet with one hand as she helped Giddy into a seat at the table with the other. “And I don’t wish to aggravate the poor man.”

Having found out a little about the man in question, the absolute last thing she wanted was to antagonise him. They had come to town intending to find Caro a husband, and it turned out Mr Larkin Weston was a most eligible parti. The son of a wealthy baron, his father a war hero no less, he was rumoured to be plump in the pocket and a rising star in the art world. He was also devastatingly handsome. It had all Maggie had been able to do not to gape at him upon their first meeting. After all, she had heard of him via the scandal sheets and read many stories about the wicked club he ran with his disreputable friends. She had assumed he would be old before his time and showing signs of dissipation. No, indeed. He had been tall and athletic, with an unruly shock of chestnut hair that glinted gold in the sunlight, and warm brown eyes. Not at all what she had expected, had she expected to meet him at all. It was a stroke of good fortune, though, and having had little in the way of luck since her husband was killed, Maggie was not about to let it, or him, slip through her fingers.

Admittedly, Mr Weston’s reputation was concerning, but since moving in Maggie had seen no wild parties or ladies of ill repute coming and going, nor any recent mention of him in the scandal sheets, so perhaps the stories were exaggerated, or perhaps he had put such wild goings on behind him. As Mrs Moody said, boys would be boys.

“There you go, Master Gideon,” Mrs Moody said, ruffling Gideon’s angelic golden curls fondly as she placed a plate of biscuits and a cup of milk before him. “You tuck into those and drink your milk.”

“Fanks, Moody,” Giddy said, with a grin calculated to melt the hardest of hearts.

Mrs Moody, already smitten, just bent and pressed a noisy kiss to his cheek. “Oh, I could eat you up,” she said with a sigh, before shaking her head and returning to her work.

“Be good,” Maggie told her son, wagging a finger at him. “No saucepans, no lids. No crashing.”