Page 31

APRIL RACED INTO HER dressing room, already tearing off her coat and her hat with its assorted pins, when she saw that the door to her bedchamber was open, and almost in the doorway stood Ruby Field, with the baby in her arms.

The child seemed contented enough, but Ruby’s eyes were wide with shock. For a moment, April was afraid she would scream and hastily pushed a finger to her own lips in a silent command.

Ruby remained mute. April closed the door in her face and tore off the clothes, shoving them to the back of her own wardrobe this time. Speedily, she washed her face and neck and hands, scrubbing them dry before she pulled a dressing gown around herself and walked into the bedchamber. She reached for her hairbrush, to brush out coal and grime and no doubt tiny slivers of glass and sawdust.

She fixed Ruby with a steady stare. “It’s a secret,” she said, “between you and me. It’s a terribly important secret, and I have to know I can trust you.”

They had no reason at all to trust each other. Ruby was new. She might or might not have divined Piers’s secret problem with faces. She may or may not have betrayed him to the man with the carriage. She might even have been the woman whose voice Piers had heard yesterday. All that would, with luck and determination, come to light later. For now, April needed her silence and if she had to, she would have no compunction about knocking her down and keeping her gagged in a trunk until Piers was safe.

But whatever April had expected of the other woman—from grave assurances to outraged denials—the reaction she got took her by complete surprise.

Ruby burst into tears.

April dropped the hairbrush and hurried over to take the baby from her. The child, immediately smelling the milk, began wriggling and rooting like a tiny piglet.

“Forgive me, my lady, please forgive me!” Ruby wailed. “I know you’ll dismiss me now, and truly I never thought I was doing no harm, but it’s never sat right with me since I done it, and I’ll never ever do it again...”

“Do what again?” April asked, using her free hand to push the girl down into the armchair. It might have felt to Ruby like comfort, but it wasn’t. It was cold rage and ruthless determination.

Ruby sobbed, wiping her streaming eyes on her sleeve. “I’m so sorry, my lady. It was when you’d just offered me the job and I was walking away past the park, my head in the clouds ’cause this is the best job I ever had, the best household I ever—”

“I understand,” April interrupted. “What did you do?”

“This gentleman falls into step beside me, congratulates me on getting the position.”

“How did he know? Did you tell him?”

Ruby looked surprised. “No. He just seemed to know. At first I thought he was another of your upper servants, but he weren’t no servant. I supposed his lordship must have told him.”

“Told a complete stranger that he had just employed a new nursemaid, and that was her just leaving the house? Do strange gentleman often stop to congratulate you on your employment prospects?”

Ruby flinched, perhaps at the ice in April’s flaying voice, perhaps at her own stupidity. “No, my lady, it never happened before. He said he was a friend of his lordship’s, that they’d been wagering together for years and he wanted to play this trick on him that he said would make his lordship laugh like anything.”

“What trick?”

Ruby blinked in confusion. “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me that. Just said that whenever I knew his lordship was going out after dark, I should go out to the end of the mews and wave my handkerchief, even if I couldn’t see anyone to wave it to.”

And from the end of the mews, anyone watching from the right position in Park Lane would have been warned he was coming well before they saw him.

“And you did that?” April said flatly. “When?”

“The night the baby started. When his lordship went for his walk.”

Frustrated in his search for sustenance, the baby opened its mouth and wailed. Ruby jumped up so that April could sit.

“Why did you do this?” April asked, opening her dressing gown and letting her son find what he sought. “Did the gentleman pay you?”

Ruby flushed even redder in shame. Fresh tears squeezed out. “I didn’t see the harm. I thought the joke, whatever it was, would take his mind off the worry about your lying in. I thought it was all a great start to my better life, what with his coin and your wages... Only his lordship never came home, and I was too afraid to tell what I’d done.”

“I’m not surprised. And I’m not sure I want anyone quite so gullible looking after my son. Because it’s either excessive gullibility or sheer disloyalty. If you are not downright complicit.”

April watched the girl’s distress with curious detachment. She seemed to have no room for sympathy for anyone except Piers. But her powers of thought and observation were most definitely working and at breakneck speed.

Ruby’s distress was genuine. She had made a stupid decision, risking the best position she had ever obtained for a moment of greed in which she must have felt both exquisitely lucky and untouchable. And April could not doubt her regret. That didn’t mean she would not dismiss Ruby. It meant she was prepared to use her.

“Ruby, when were you last in Seven Dials?”

The girl’s eyes widened. “Seven...M’lady I ain’t never been there. I’d be too frightened of such a terrible place.”