Page 51 of A Sham Engagement

Elenora nodded, busy trying to take unobtrusive but steadying breaths, her mind still a whirl.

Having added a generous serving of cream from a pretty china jug that matched the cups, Mrs. Sharpe handed a cup to Elenora, who took it with a trembling hand. The cup rattled so in the saucer Elenora had to set it down on the small table by her chair. Hopefully, her hostess hadn’t noticed.

Mrs. Sharpe, giving her guest a knowing glance, took the opportunity to stir several large spoonfuls of sugar into the teacup, unasked. “I can see you’ve had a shock, miss. This’ll put you to rights.”

Elenora managed a weak smile, shocked at how enfeebled circumstances had rendered her and chiding herself for not having more backbone. “Elenora. As we are to be thrown together tonight, I feel I should make you free of my name.” Why not? Mama would be shocked at her bestowing this liberty on someone of Mrs. Sharpe’s class, but who cared? Mama would be shocked at everything that had gone on this afternoon and evening, so why not shock her a bit more? Besides which, how would she ever find out this part of it?

Her hostess looked flattered at the suggested familiarity. “Why, thank you very much, miss, I mean Elenora. Martha’s my name and you’re very welcome to call me by it, especially with you being engaged to his lordship. I never thought I’d live to see the day. It’s a blessing you are. A blessing. He deserves to be happy and I’m sure you’ll make him so. You take a sip of your tea while it’s hot, Miss Elenora. The sugar’ll do you good.”

“Thank you, Martha.” Elenora sipped the hot sweet tea and did indeed immediately feel better. Odd how something so simple could have such an effect. But Mama always said tea was a pick-me-up in difficult times, and it seemed she was right. Elenora drained the teacup. “Might I trouble you for a second cup? I fear I’m quite thirsty after our hasty journey here through the streets.”

Martha’s kind brown eyes widened. “You come along the streets? In the dark? From his lordship’s house?”

Elenora nodded. “There was no time to call for his carriage, I suppose. We came as soon as we heard Edward had been snatched.” Fresh anxiety for the little boy coursed through her. “And I think Jack, Lord Broxbourne I mean, most likely didn’t want to turn up at your door in his carriage.” She managed to avoid the obvious for once—that his carriage would have looked out of place on this working class street. Or were they in the slums? Never having been in real slums, she had no idea. Although this street had appeared neat and tidy, which was not how she’d ever pictured slums.

Martha nodded, sagely. “His lordship thinks of everything.”

Ruth returned with a plate of large slabs of cake and one of thickly buttered bread, the few crumbs adhering around her mouth attesting to the fact she’d taken the opportunity to fortify herself in the kitchen. She bobbed a neat curtsy and made no effort to leave, but stood there, trying hard, perhaps, not to stare at Elenora.

“Sit down, Ruth,” Martha said. “And make yourself useful with that mending.”

Clearly delighted that she was to be allowed to remain, Ruth did as she was told and picked up her discarded sewing, but Elenora could recognize a girl making a pretense of work when she saw one, having done so herself so many times. What Ruth was really doing was being nosy.

“I’m that pleased to find his lordship’s found himself a lady,” Martha said, as she refilled Elenora’s cup a second time. “I’ve long said that’s what he needs. A mother for his little lad and brothers and sisters for him too, one day. ’Tisn’t right for a little lad to grow up with no other children around him.”

Elenora bit her lip, deciding to ignore this suggestion that she should provide Jack with children. The cake looked most inviting, and she was beginning to recover from the shock of being kissed. Martha, who must have been a mind reader, held out the plate. She took one of the large slabs of pound cake. Her favorite. “This is excellent cake. As you divined, I haven’t eaten since a small snack at noon. I’m feeling much better now, thank you, having drunk your excellent tea.”

Mrs. Sharpe took a piece of cake herself. Her figure betrayed the fact that she probably was fonder of eating cake than she should have been. “Now,” she said, settling back in her seat, “perhaps you might like to tell me all about yourself, Miss Elenora. I’m getting to be an old lady now, and I don’t get out of this house often, what with all the children in my charge. So I always likes to hear about other people, and now I know as you’re to marry our Lord Jack, I’d like to hear about you. If you don’t mind, that is.”

Elenora managed a smile. No, she didn’t mind at all, and perhaps talking would go some way to preventing her from worrying about Jack and Edward as she was doing right now. She set down her cup on the table, and dabbed her mouth with the corner of her napkin. Where to begin?

Ruth, whose ears must be fairly flapping, bent her head over her sewing, but Elenora caught her eyes slanting sideways. No doubt all of this would at some point be relayed to her friends here in Betterton Street.

Jack and Benjamin had left via the back door of the house, out into the little, stone-slabbed yard where the privy stood. Unlatching the gate, they let themselves into an alley, nowhere near so clean as the road itself, that ran behind this row of houses and the one backing onto it. A rat scuttled out of their way, and somewhere farther down a cat, who should have been chasing the rat, meowed plaintively. In the distance a dog barked, closely followed by a second, as if in answer.

“This way, milord,” Benjamin, who was holding a lantern, said.

Jack fell in behind the boy. “Best not call me that where we’re going. Jack will do just fine.” The boy nodded but said nothing, loping along like some long dog out after hares with Jack as the owner running him.

Betterton Street, despite its lower middle class pretensions, lay close by the rookeries of St Giles. Within minutes, they’d left behind the rows of neat brick houses and quiet streets which clerks and schoolteachers and office workers called home. St Giles, renowned as the most deprived area of London and from which Jack had rescued most of Mrs. Sharpe’s young charges, had changed little since Medieval times. As more people had flocked from the country into the city, it had only grown more congested. Whole families lived in single rooms with damp running down the walls, and whole buildings shared a single outdoor privy. Jack had been here before, of course, in the course of his activities in saving his orphans, but rarely in the dead of night and the cold of winter.

The stench, despite the cold, clogged his nostrils with an evil miasma of overflowing cesspits, piles of discarded rubbish and the general dirt of thousands of human beings crammed into a space better suited to hundreds. Rats scuttled everywhere, and worse things he couldn’t see.

Every time he came here, Jack was struck with how terrible a place it was and couldn’t wait to be out of it. If hell were to be found on Earth anywhere, it had to be here. Only now, this had to be where the men who’d taken Edward would have retreated to, secure in the knowledge that it would be nearly impossible for Jack to send Bow Street Runners after them. The Runners were brave, but not brave enough to enter the warren that was the rookeries of St Giles and the Devil’s Acre, down near Westminster Abbey. Jack would have to do that by himself. With Benjamin’s help, and hopefully with that of his father, who had his ear to everything that happened in the rookeries of London. If Reuben Sharpe didn’t kill him first.

Benjamin trod the filthy lanes as if born to them, which of course, he had been. When Jack had helped Martha Sharpe escape the clutches of her husband, eight years since, Benjamin had been a half grown boy of twelve, already entangled in his father’s web of crime, and it had been hard work to twist him free of it and into respectable employment at first at Smithfield Market, then later the docks. But he was strongly attached to his mother still, and had not, as far as Jack knew, reverted back to his old life. Although he’d kept in touch with his villainous father so that might well not be true.

Although the hour was not as yet late, the rickety wooden houses that grew like so much dirty fungus to either side of the lanes showed little light. Here and there a murky oil lamp hung to light their way along the foggy streets, and only the taverns on every corner seemed to show signs of occupation. Music and shouting tumbled out of their doors and into the streets, and sometimes drunken customers too. Down side streets dirtier and darker than the lanes lurked the destitute, the beggars, the prostitutes and thieves, all of them ready and waiting to fleece and rob any gentleman who might unwarily venture into their territory.

Jack kept a tight hold on his cane, glad of the pistols hidden in his coat, but either Benjamin’s presence kept them safe, or the people they passed were too lost in their own miseries to care.

Ahead loomed the shadowy bulk of Westminster Abbey, towering high above the mean streets that surrounded it. “We’re in the Devil’s Acre now,” Benjamin said over his shoulder, his voice a raspy whisper. “That’s where Pa’s based nowadays. Keep close, Jack.”

How could this fetid conglomeration of buildings, running with filth, exist a bare stone’s throw from something as glorious as Westminster Abbey? And Westminster Palace as well, along the banks of the Thames, had all of this lurking at its back whilst those in government, with their top hats and their carriages, went about their daily business all unknowing, or more likely ignoring, the immense suffering they’d turned their backs on. That people should have to live like this stuck in Jack’s craw as much as the stench of their homes did. Worse than the way the pigs were kept at Broxbourne Park. So much worse. No wonder they resorted to crime to feed themselves.

“Here we are, sir,” Benjamin said. “The One Tun.”

A dilapidated inn sign showing the dirty image of a barrel hung motionless above the street, where the buildings on either side leaned toward one another so much the sign almost touched the house opposite.