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Chapter Four
Jasper stared at the missive in his hand in disbelief. Not only because it appeared that Cora—the indomitable, maddening and vivacious woman he had known for most of his life—was gone, but because her last request was that he honour his promise to bring up little Izzy in her absence.
They had briefly discussed this awful eventuality once.
Just once, in passing, during a morbid and philosophical late-night discussion on the transience of life after one of the doormen at The Reprobates’ Club had unexpectedly keeled over and died. He had been a well-liked and robust fellow in his prime, and the death a shock to all of them in the early days of the club’s existence when every employee had felt like family. Cora had been expecting Isabel at the time, was due any day, so perhaps had felt the fear of her own mortality more keenly than he had.
He recalled that she had been so distressed at the thought of not always being there for the child inside her that he had happily given his word to step up if the need arose. Of course he would. Because that was the honourable and decent thing to do, especially after he had let her down so grievously before.
At the time, and quite aside from the guilt he carried that she was with child in the first place, it had been an easy promise to make. He and Cora were both young, fit and filled with health and vitality, so he had no reason to think he would ever have to come good on it.
As neither had ever mentioned it again, and she and Izzy had settled comfortably in the life he’d provided for them in the country, that promise became one of those things which naturally went to the back of his mind. Something hazy and improbable, so not really worth any serious deliberation in the grand scheme of things. But there was no getting away from the fact that he had to deliberate on it seriously now, because there was a woman in the ground holding him to account and a grieving little girl finally sleeping beside him on the sofa who didn’t have another soul on the planet she could count on bar him. The rest of her family were long gone and his family...well, there wasn’t a cat’s chance in hell his father would take her in no matter how much common decency dictated that he should.
Which meant he either shipped Izzy off to paid strangers to take care of her out of sight—a cowardly but neat option that made him feel queasy for more reasons than breaking his promise—or he carried out Cora’s final wishes, exactly as she had laid out in her letter. No matter what the scandal or the consequences.
As it had at least a hundred times since he had first read it, his gaze focussed on just two sentences. The spidery, shakily written words piercing his heart and stabbing at his conscience.
You once swore on your life that you would never let me down again, Jasper, so I am begging you not to do so this time. Keep our precious cherub with you always as you promised so that I may rest in peace.
He knew already neither his conscience nor his heart could do otherwise. Aside from the fact that he had sworn on his life to never let Cora down again, he had adored little Izzy since the moment she had been born. The second he had held her as a squalling infant and her limpid big green eyes had locked with his, he had known he would do anything for her—even this.
Even this.
‘I’ve made up a pallet in the room next to yours.’ His housekeeper Mrs Mimms spoke in a whisper as she entered the drawing room so as not to wake the child, her eyes flicking to Izzy with both sympathy and undisguised interest because he had yet to explain her. ‘Of course, I’d have made up a bed if you’d bothered to get some furniture for all those spare rooms you have upstairs—as I keep saying.’
‘Well now you have an excuse to buy a bed and whatever furniture you think fit for a little girl’s bedroom.’
‘She’s staying then?’
Jasper nodded.
‘For how long?’
‘For ever.’ He swallowed at the gravitas of that answer. The implications. The huge responsibility which he was nowhere near ready for and ill equipped to deal with. The impending scandal which genuinely did not bear thinking about when he and her mother had been a huge scandal once before.
His housekeeper was silent for several moments before she inhaled, no-nonsense yet sympathetic despite her predictable disapproval. ‘Then if I might be so bold, you are going to be needing more than a bit more than furniture to raise your daughter properly.’ Because obviously she had been listening at the keyhole as the solicitor had read Cora’s will. ‘But I suppose a proper bed is a start for now.’
‘Have you ever heard of somebody called Cora Marlow?’ Hattie’s nonchalant question over the dinner table had quite a profound effect on her brother Freddie, who almost choked on a boiled potato.
He coughed into his napkin then frowned. ‘She isn’t someone you should concern yourself with.’ His eyes flicked to their father’s in one of those unspoken messages which men shared whenever they felt a topic was unsuitable for the ladies present. Then he shot a different sort of look at their mother. ‘This, Mama, is exactly why I disapprove of Hattie going to Covent Garden every day. Didn’t I warn you that she was bound to see and hear things which an innocent young lady shouldn’t?’
Hattie and Annie huffed in unison at his well-intentioned overprotectiveness—an annoying trait their big brother had always had but which had become unbearable ever since Hattie’s accident. For reasons best known to himself, Freddie blamed himself for not being there to stop it, which was ludicrous when she had been galloping across their father’s fields in Surrey alone almost since the day she had learned to ride. His neglect had never bothered him—until the day she failed to return—and no amount of rational argument now seemed to convince him that she wasn’t made of glass.
‘Oh, pish, dear,’ said her mother with a regal flick of her wrist and a supportive smile towards Hattie. At least she understood that her daughter was keen to put what had happened behind her. ‘The legendary but infamous Cora Marlow is still the subject of society gossip all these years on so Hattie could just as easily have heard it in the middle of Mayfair as she could have in Covent Garden. In fact, now that your sisters and Kitty are coming out, I suspect they’ll hear all manner of salacious gossip whispered behind fans.’ She beamed at her girls. ‘The gossip is one of the best parts of coming out. It runs rife through the debutantes like a forest fire in a hot summer. Just be sure to share it with me if it is particularly titillating. You know how much I love to be in the know.’
With Freddie’s concerns suitably defused, Hattie pushed some more, mindful that if she blurted out everything she had witnessed earlier, Freddie would likely overreact. While Jasper was his friend, he still had an atrocious reputation, and her brother was almost as obsessed with his sisters’ reputations as he was with their safety. To him, every gentleman below the age of forty was a potential despoiler and he had taken to watching them all like hawks when they were around his family as if he expected trouble.
That aside, something told her to play her cards close to her chest not just for her own sanity’s sake—but for Jasper’s. He had been nothing but kind to her earlier, treating her like a normal person rather than an object of pity, so it did not feel right to use what was undoubtedly a tragedy of some sort for him as fodder for gossip. And if it was juicy gossip, she would much rather someone else be the one to spread it as that didn’t sit right with her either. Especially as she herself was now at the sharp end of it, albeit for entirely different reasons.
‘As that door swings both ways Mama, will you kindly tell me what was so scandalous about Cora that my idiot big brother’s eyes are now bulging?’ Just because Freddie was an overprotective prude now that he was married, did not mean that Hattie would allow her question to go unanswered. She had been worried sick about Jasper all afternoon. Worried sick and beyond curious. ‘Only I overheard while doing my daily exercise in Hyde Park earlier—’ she glared pointedly at her brother as she told the lie simply to prove him wrong ‘—that she had died.’
‘No!’As Freddie’s eyes widened in shock, her mother’s filled with sympathy. ‘Dead? Really? How tragic. She was so young, too, around your brother’s age I believe. Isn’t that right, Freddie?’
‘I believe so.’ At least he conceded that titbit. Verbally at least. His expression told her more because the initial shock was replaced by concern for his friend. As if he knew Cora had meant something significant to Jasper. ‘I was in my last year at Oxford, so cannot say that I knew her as anything more than a passing acquaintance.’ He sounded cordial and accommodating but was staring intently at his plate, chasing around a pea, a sure sign that he knew much more than he was prepared to let on.
‘I never met her as we moved in very different circles.’ Her mother frowned briefly as she wafted her fork. ‘Although I did see her once. Fleetingly through the carriage window one evening as your father and I were leaving the opera. She was as beautiful as all the rumours suggested, so it is hardly a surprise she had such a profound effect on the male of the species. In fact, it was your father who pointed her out, with uncustomary awe and wonder as I recall, so I suspect she also affected him.’ She winked at him across the table and her husband chuckled.
‘You know I have only ever had eyes for you, Eleanor.’
