Page 54 of A Sham Engagement

Jack held his tongue. If he spoke now, he might end up leaping over the table and seizing the man about his doughy throat.

Reuben smirked. “Another has your boy, not me. Another who has a right to him in law. He come to me for help, seein’ as the last he saw of the boy’s mother was in my tavern in Limehouse. Seein’ a way to make you pay, I agreed.” He coughed again, his whole body wobbling with the effort. “And seein’ as I don’t have much longer on this Earth, I thought as it were high time I fulfilled my promise to you. And made you pay for stealin’ my wife away from me. So me and this other cove, this Warren, we’re working together on this. You’re dicked in the nob if you think I’m goin’ let you have your brat back fer nothin’.”

Jack’s fists clenched.

“You owes me bad, fer what you did eight year back. You prigged my fam’ly and deprived me of their use. A man’s wife is his property, same as his dog and his business, and you took my wife away from me. Now, with Warren’s help, I’ve done the same to you.” A self-satisfied smile crept across his sweaty face.

“What is it that you want?” the words came out through Jack’s gritted teeth.

Another smirk graced that ugly face. “What does anyone want from a wheyfaced nob like you?” He laughed. “Money. Me and Warren wants money from you, or you’ll never see your boy agin. He wants money for what you took from him, and I want money for what you took from me. Same thing.” He coughed again, bloody spittle on his lips. “Only I wants money that I can’t take with me—for my boy.” His eyes went to Benjamin where he still stood leaning against the door. “To set my boy up in honest business, and to look after my little ones that I’ve got from my second wife.”

Whoever had provided Sharpe with further children could hardly be his wife, as he’d never divorced Martha Sharpe or Jack would have heard about it. He forbore from pointing out that Benjamin already possessed an honest occupation working at the docks. “Who is this Warren, then? Tell me, and I might believe he exists and this is not all down to you.”

Reuben stuck his fingers in the pockets of his waistcoat, a difficult undertaking due to his enormous girth, and leaned back in his seat, a toad of a man whose great tongue might well come snaking out to snatch a fly from off the ceiling at any moment. Repugnant, evil. “He’s your doxie’s husband, that’s who. Back from sailin’ the ocean blue in the king’s navee. Back to find his wife gone, stole from him by a swell cove with too much blunt to know what to do with. The wife Able Seaman Warren loved, what should’ve bin waitin’ for him on his noble return. But he comes home to find her gorn from where he left her, dead, in fact, and all that’s left to him is her little lad. A lad that should by rights be his. A lad what bears his name and what you stole.”

Jack’s stomach lurched. “Her husband?” He couldn’t keep the shock out of his voice.

Reuben grinned. “Aye, that’s addled your pate for you, my fine lord, I c’n see. Din’t tell you that, did she, when she was climbin’ her way up through the theaters you’d introduced her to? Via your bed. Usin’ you as a ladder to success. Kept her man quiet, p’raps thinkin’ he’d never be comin’ home. Happens often enough with sailors—they dies for lots of reasons thousands o’ miles from home. Their wives don’t never know what happened to’em. Thought she’d get away with forgettin’ him. Well, now he’s back, and he wants a cut of what should be hers by right and therefore his. Payment for services rendered, call it.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Reuben appeared unmoved by this statement. “B’lieve what you likes. He has the boy—his boy by law as he were born while she were wed to him. He’s keepin’ him if you don’t settle wi’ him, quick like.” His face contorted into a leer. “An’ I hear he’s goin’ back to sea wi’ the boy if you don’t pay up.”

Her husband. His Mary, the woman he’d thought the love of his life had been living a lie. Causing him to live a lie. He’d spoken to her of marriage, content to go against his father’s wishes for his love of her, and she’d lied to him. She’d said she had to put him before herself, that she could never bring him down to her level and disgrace him before his family. And every bit of it had been a lie. She couldn’t have married him if she’d wanted to, and she’d let him think her reasons for refusal noble.

The pedestal he’d relegated her to after her death came crumbling down as images cascaded through his head. Her shock, when she’d found out she was pregnant, the difficulty he’d had persuading her not to resort to a back street abortionist, the badly disguised anger she’d shown when her increasing girth had halted her singing career. Of course, he’d said she should go back to it after the baby was born—his baby—but she’d never been able to do that, dying in a welter of blood on the bed in the house he’d bought her.

She’d been a liar.

But that didn’t alter his love for her child. His child. The child who, along with Martha Sharpe, had prompted his own altruistic endeavors. The child who could have grown up backstage in a theater and in tawdry rooming houses with his mother, who instead had grown up on a viscount’s country estate and in a mansion in the city. He’d think about Mary’s perfidy later. Right now he had to get their son back.

“How much does he want?”

Reuben licked his lips with relish. “You can ask him fer yerself. He’s upstairs. Been stayin’ here for a week while he took a spyglass to the lay of the land. Told him it’d be no good goin’ face to face with the likes of the gentry. Told him the only way was to come at you sideways and force your hand.” He held up his own pudgy hand as Jack half turned toward the door. “Hold yer horses. The boy ain’t with him, an’ if he don’t get back to the boy, safe an’ in one piece, you’ll not be seein’ the lad again. Mark my words. You keeps your hands off of him.”

Jack’s shoulders rose and fell as he fought to control himself. He had to stay calm. He had to, for Edward’s sake. He must mean nothing to this man who called himself Mary’s husband other than a meal ticket to untold riches. The man would not care if the boy died. He was not his true father, whatever the law said.

“Very well. Take me to him.”

Reuben nodded at Benjamin. “First room at the top o’ the stairs. You go in with him. I don’t trust him not to cause a mill. I’m trustin’ you to watch him for me, boy.”

Chapter Twenty-One

At about the same time as Jack was being led upstairs by Benjamin Sharpe to meet the husband of the woman he’d once thought the love of his life, Robert, Aunt Penelope’s footman, was returning home with sluggardly steps. He was not looking forward to having to break it to her that the tender shoot she was in charge of, her only brother’s eldest daughter, had been whirled off into what sounded like the darkest corners of the underworld by the well-known rake who was her betrothed. He, like all of Lady Dandridge’s servants, had already formed the opinion that Miss Wetherby had made a mistake by getting herself entangled with a man of such deep and disreputable infamy. And now they’d been proven right.

His only comfort was that he was returning in the company of Miss Wetherby’s maid, Agatha, who was more terrified than he was. She’d committed the unforgiveable crime of allowing her young mistress to slip between her fingers in the most uncaring way, and Robert could only see dismissal looming before her. From her slumped shoulders and trailing feet, she shared his opinion. Hopefully, once she’d been given her marching orders, Lady Dandridge would be too upset to sack him too. Which in any case would have been unfair. Although Robert was familiar with the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger,” in his experience the messenger was always a good one to blame.

They let themselves in through the mews at the back of the house into the servants’ hall, where they found an agitated Hemmings waiting for them. To Robert’s horror, the butler insisted on taking both of them upstairs immediately, without even the opportunity for a fortifying snifter, to where Lady Dandridge, attended by her own maid with plentiful smelling salts, was waiting in the drawing room.

As Agatha appeared to have been struck dumb, it fell to Robert to relay the situation. Out came the smelling salts.

“Oh, good heavens above. Where on earth has he taken her?” Lady Dandridge finally managed to gasp, her voice barely above a horrified whisper, as she waved her maid away. Discovering that her niece’s betrothed, despite her prior knowledge of his less than perfect reputation, had been nurturing an illegitimate child in his household, like a cuckoo in his nest, had proved the worst shock of all, and Hemmings was immediately asked to pour her a generous glass of brandy.

Robert could not answer this, for no one in Lord Broxbourne’s house had known where his lordship had headed off to so precipitously, in the company of Miss Wetherby. He shuffled his feet in embarrassment, praying silently for a deliverance that took its time coming.

Hemmings, once her ladyship was sipping her brandy, dismissed Robert and the trembling Agatha, still both in a state of employment, and turned his attentions to his distraught mistress. “Please don’t upset yourself, my lady.” He kept his voice level and emotionless, something he’d learned to do long ago with the volatile Lady Dandridge. “Miss Wetherby seems to me the sort of girl who can look after herself.”

Her ladyship shot him an anguished glance. “That is what I am afraid of.”