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“You’d better take her. She’ll be better off in East Riding than here in London. We looked after our little ones, back home. Here, it’s all I can do to keep her out of the way. And she’s getting bigger, don’t you see?”

“Yes, but—”

“You’ll have to do it,” Mrs. Fishpole said decisively. “I can’t keep her safe anymore. She sleeps there, you see—” she nodded toward a heap of rags in the corner. “But she’s getting on towards five now. I don’t know how much longer they’ll let her stay in the corner, and the older she gets, the more worry I have, to be honest.”

Tom could see the truth of that.

“I’ve done my best with her. I’ve taught her thank you, and she’s learned to say please as well. She knows the difference between right or wrong. I didn’t want her turning out like her mum. So you can tell Rumwald that I did my charitable duty with her.”

Meggin made another concerted effort to get behind Mrs. Fishpole’s skirts and hide from Tom.

“It’s not that I won’t miss you,” Mrs. Fishpole said, putting the rolling pin down on the counter and pulling Meggin around before her. “Because I will, Meggie. You know I will. You’re a willing little girl, and you’ve always been cheerful.”

Meggin was blinking very hard. “I don’t want to go nowhere.”

“You’ve never carried on and screamed the way some of them children do. But I can’t keep you here, Meggie. It’s not safe. And you know I can’t take you home.” She looked up at Tom. “Meggin used to live with me, but Mr. Fishpole died three years ago, and I went to live with my sister-in-law. Her husband doesn’t want to take in an orphan, not given the circumstances of her birth and all.”

Tom nodded and held out his hand. “Meggin, would you like to come with me to visit my brother? And then after a visit, we’ll go home to my village, and I’ll find you a family of your own to live with.” And between now and then, he swore to himself, I will not even glance at the children sweeping the streets.

“No!” Meggin wailed, big fat tears rolling down her cheeks. “I don’t go home with no men, I don’t! I belong with you, Mrs. Fishpole.” She ran at the cook, butting her head against her legs and wrapping her arms around her skirts, just as a hosteller burst into the kitchen shouting something about a sausage and fish pie.

Mrs. Fishpole ignored him, kneeling down on the none-too-clean floor. “I’ll come see my old da in East Riding, and I’ll see you as well. But I can’t let you sleep in the kitchen anymore, Meggie.”

“No one will see me,” Meggin wailed. “I’ll stay so small. And I didn’t talk to him, I didn’t! I’ll sell all my apples to ladies after this.”

“We needs more sausage pies,” the hosteller broke in. “You don’t want as Mr. Sigglet to have to come here. You know he doesn’t like the brat.”

Mrs. Fishpole picked up Meggin and held her against her chest for a moment. Her jaw was set very firmly, and Tom had the impression she would never recover from the mortification if she let a single tear fall. “If I’d had a daughter, Meggie, I’d want her to be just like you,” she said. “Now you go with the Reverend here because he’ll keep you safe. I can see it in his face. I want you to grow up to be a good girl.”

“I won’t!” Meggin cried. “I wants to stay here!”

Mrs. Fishpole handed Meggin to Tom. “You’d best go,” she said roughly. “She’s the most biddable girl usually.” For a moment her face crumpled and then she spun around and screamed at the hosteller: “Go on then! Fetch me a sausage pie from the pantry. What are you, crippled?”

Tom held the struggling little body close and walked out of the door to the accompliment of a howl of despair from Meggin, who was holding out her hands and struggling to get free.

“I don’t want to go!” she cried. “I don’t want to be a good girl. I want to be a cook, just like you, Mrs. Fishpole!”

And then, heartbreakingly, “Please?”

After listening to the pounding on the front door for a good ten minutes, Lina decided that Leke must have given the servants the evening off. Finally she traipsed downstairs dressed only in a French negligee, hoping that it would be one of Rees’s more prudish acquaintances so that she could watch him dither with embarrassment.

She carefully arranged her negligee so that the lace bits showed off all her best assets and pulled open the door with a flourish.

But it wasn’t anyone she’d seen before. A man dressed in a dusty black cloak was standing on the doorstep, clutching a sobbing child and accompanied by a sulky ostler with two boxes on his shoulder.

“Who the devil are you?” she demanded, knowing exactly who he must be. Rees only had one relative in the world, after all, and the man had Rees’s nose and mouth. But Rees never said that his oh-so-proper brother was married, nor that he was encumbered with a child. And he certainly never mentioned that the man was paying them a visit.

“Thomas Holland,” he said with a bow. “This is Meggin, and these are my boxes, as I’ve come to stay with my brother. More to the point, Madam, who are you?”

At that moment, the child, who had been eying Lina’s negligee with her swollen eyes, said in a choking wail, “I knows who she is! She’s the Whore of Babylon, she is! Mrs. Fishpole told me all about her. You’s lied to Mrs. Fishpole, and taken me to a house of sin!” She started screaming as loud as she could and kicking Rees’s brother in the leg.

Lina raised an eyebrow. This looked as if it might be a most complicated situation. She opened the door further and stepped back. “I gather the vicar is returning home,” she said sweetly. “If I’m the Whore of Babylon, wouldn’t I be dressed in scarlet and purple? Let me see…if I’m the Whore of Babylon, wouldn’t that make you John the Baptist?” She giggled and turned to go upstairs. “I suppose you can choose whatever bedchamber you wish, although I have to tell you that they are not as clean as one might wish. And I haven’t any idea about the condition of the nursery.”

She kept walking as she climbed the stairs, raising her voice above Meggin’s howls. “Rees will return sometime this evening, and until then you shall have to entertain yourself.”

“Where are the servants?” Rees’s brother asked, sounding desperate.

Lina ignored the question, pausing on her way up the stairs. “I may not be dressed for the part, but I just realized that I do know what the Whore of Babylon would sing. Popish hymns, wouldn’t it be? That’s what my father would have said. Alas, I don’t know any, so this will have to do.” And she burst into a magnificent rendition of O God Our Help in Ages Past.