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‘To my shame, I was relieved. Not hearing of their difficulties made it easier to put their precarious situation out of my mind, and because I have always had such a fractious relationship with my father, I avoided going home.’
He settled back into the chair, his expression enough to tell her being so open about his past did not come easy, so Hattie avoided asking any of the questions which popped into her head in case they caused him to clam up.
‘By then, I was also coming to realise that the Battlesbridge finances were not as healthy as my father wanted the world to believe. I had creditors knocking at my door asking why they hadn’t been paid for the books or the lodgings that I needed to study. When my reminders to my father were ignored, I started to find creative ways to pay them myself. That summer after months of uncharacteristic silence on her part and thoughtless abandonment on mine, when I finally returned home, I discovered Mr Marlow’s secret had found its way to my father’s ears and he had been dismissed and the pair of them evicted.’
Hattie could see his deep guilt at that atrocity but bit her tongue to tell Jasper it hadn’t been his fault because she could sense there was more stored up inside that he needed to share. A boil needed to be lanced fully to heal. ‘Then what happened?’
‘I fell out further with my father, tried to find them—searched all summer long—but they had disappeared without a trace. By autumn, I had to give up because around the same time my maternal grandfather passed away. He left me some money, and because I had also used the summer to uncover the full extent of the dire Battlesbridge finances, I decided to help. As we seemed to need money fast, the quickest route to getting it appeared to be via reckless games of chance.’
‘You gambled it?’
He scoffed at that, baffled that she would even think it. ‘I am not daft, Hattie. Even at nineteen I knew that the only real winners in such uncertain pursuits were the house, so I quit Oxford as my second year was due to start and I spent my entire inheritance on purchasing the building on King Street and then robbed Peter to pay Paul to turn it into The Reprobates’.’
‘And lived a high old time while you were doing it.’ Hattie remembered those years well as Jasper had been a regular fixture at their house in Mayfair whenever Freddie and George Claremont were home, where she blushed and stuttered around him awkwardly. ‘As I recall, you were always in gossip columns with your hedonistic carousing in some of the most dubious places in the city, and apparently broke hearts here, there and everywhere.’
He didn’t deny it but had the good grace to appear chagrined. ‘It was good for business, for who would visit a club designed for sinners if it was run by a saint? I was still learning the ropes, so I made a point of visiting every hell from Teddington to Tilbury to discover what worked and what didn’t.’
‘Oh, it was all research, was it?’
‘Not all.’ He offered her a sheepish shrug. ‘I never claimed I was a saint, Hattie. But with hindsight I can see that all that carousing was also a small and pathetic rebellion against my awful father, which seemed irrationally fitting at the time. He had always disapproved of me so much without me trying, in my immature head I decided I would dedicate myself to truly earning his censure seeing as he had reacted to my forays into business by publicly cutting me off. Not that he had the funds to support me by then, but appearances are everything and I was a disgrace.’
He huffed, clearly irritated by the difficult relationship he had with the man. ‘It is not a period I am particularly proud of, but in a strange sort of way I never would have found Cora again without it, so I cannot regret it.’ He opened his mouth as if he was about to continue and then thought better of it. After a pregnant pause he shrugged. ‘But thankfully I found her and you know the rest.’
Hattie folded her arms and glared. ‘I assume from that patronising comment, you consider the rest of that story too shocking for my tender ears?’
‘It is not a pleasant tale.’
‘But it is significant, Jasper. Significant enough that you have given Izzy your name and are prepared to cause a huge scandal and take the secret of her paternity to the grave.’
He glanced away to stare out of the window and she groaned. ‘If you think a woman like me, one who has been to hell and back, and who now spends her days trying to help children who have suffered at the hands of the very dregs of society will shatter like glass at an unpleasant tale, then you are no better than Freddie and do not know me at all.’ When he still refused to look her way, she kicked him lightly under the table. ‘Oh, for pity’s sake just spit it out, Jasper; I know you want to. I shan’t stop nagging or leave until you do.’
His eyes turned to hers slowly, thoroughly, a begrudging half-smile on his face. ‘One night I went to a notorious gaming hell...’ She rewarded him with the ghost of a smile of triumph in return, as if she never doubted he would see sense and come around to her way of thinking, and he rolled his eyes.
‘It was in the thick of the docks, well away from the glare of the authorities. As low a place as you could possibly imagine. The definition of a den of iniquity. I had never ventured somewhere quite so base before and cannot deny some of the wretchedness and depravity on display shocked me despite already being three sheets to the wind. I went to the bar to find the fourth sheet and one of the, for want of a better word, ladies of the house sidled up behind to whisper in my ear and offer herself as a distraction for the night. As I am sure you have already guessed, that lady was Cora.’
‘Oh, Jasper.’ She reached for his hand again and squeezed. ‘You must have felt awful.’
He winced at the memory. ‘To be honest, I cannot decide which of us was more horrified. She tried to run away while I hit the roof, and because she feared her employer, she eventually grabbed me and dragged me to a filthy back room as if I were a client, where we sat for hours and I learned every bit of the awful truth of our years of separation. From the hand-to-mouth subsistence life she and her father endured immediately after their eviction, to the rapid decline in his health where she first had to sell herself to pay for his medicine, to his death, to how she had ended up as little better than an indentured whore in that hell.’
‘You rescued her.’
He nodded. ‘I had to. I owed her. I had let her down grievously. If I hadn’t abandoned her to go to Oxford or had answered her letters, none of what happened to her might have happened. She became the hostess of my club and lived with me in the cramped little apartment above it—quite platonically.’ Hattie had no idea quite why he felt compelled to clarify that but was oddly relieved that he had.
‘Soon after, she realised she was with child. Before you ask, she had no clue who Izzy’s father was and wasn’t inclined to ponder it as it had happened at that dreadful hell in the docks. Because all the gossip about the pair of us did wonders for the business and because my patrons adored her, we concealed Izzy’s existence for her first few months and carried on as if we were a couple.
‘But as Izzy grew, as children are so prone to—’ he smiled at that ‘—and she started crawling, that arrangement became impractical. It wasn’t fair to keep her hidden indoors and neither of us wanted her to grow up tainted by our scandal, which I know is ironic given where we currently find ourselves. As soon as I had profit enough to be able to afford a cottage somewhere where nobody knew about her past, I bought one. Cora was happy, my business was booming and Isabel blossomed.’
His eyes locked with hers, myriad complex emotions swirling in the emerald irises. ‘Life was good. Or at least for a while it was. Until now.’ His gaze dipped, lost in sorrow again for a moment. ‘But I made a solemn promise to Cora just after Izzy was born that I would raise her if anything happened, and there is no better way of honouring that promise after the way I had let her down than claiming her daughter as mine.’
His eyes lifted to hers once more, cautious, as if she would judge him unfavourably for sacrificing himself for an old friend and her daughter. ‘And now you genuinely do know the rest. That is why I want to do right by Izzy despite being totally clueless and ill equipped as to how to do it.’
He fell silent as Mrs Mimms came in with the tea, snatching his hand away too late for her not to raise an intrigued eyebrow, and then sat awkwardly after she left as he awaited Hattie’s verdict. Yet even with that extended pause it took Hattie an age to formulate all her racing thoughts into words. She wanted to tell him that she was proud of him and that he might well have a few notches on his bedpost, but he had gone up several more in her estimation.
Instead, she reached for his hand again, smiling as she embraced the warm feelings this complicated, sensitive, likeable man gave her. ‘Nobody is perfect, Jasper. All we can ever do is our best and sometimes even that falls woefully short. Yesterday, I am ashamed to admit that because I allowed him to get to me, I lost my temper with a confused and abandoned ten-year-old boy who called me an ugly, lame, old hag before pushing me over.’
‘Jim?’
She nodded.
