Page 30 of Lord Gabriel’s Undoing

She had to fight not to laugh, as really, the injuries she’d done him weren’t a matter for laughing. She might even have killed him had he not raised his arm to protect his head. “Of course.”

He grinned. “And you do indeed have a mighty hand with a cricket bat. If you were to demonstrate your skills, I’m sure the fusty old MCC would change the rules to allow women to play.”

She chuckled again. “I doubt that very much. But…you may tell me more about your orphanage and what you think I can do to help you with it.”

They crossed Park Lane and went into Hyde Park by the Grosvenor Gate.

Chapter Ten

The park thronged with people. Most were out in all their finery taking advantage of a rare dry day to promenade where they knew they could be seen and remarked upon. Gabriel had been there enough times as a small boy with his adoptive mother, although that had been when he’d thought her his real mother. Since then he’d been brought back by a succession of governesses. More recently, as an adult, he’d been avoiding it. Since setting up the orphanage he’d found the ostentatious splendor of the world he’d been brought up in more and more distasteful.

In the distance, gentlemen were driving their curricles to show off to one another how splendid, and expensive, their cattle and vehicles were, and to demonstrate their manly prowess to the strolling ladies, of course. His lip curled in scorn.

Phoebe giving his good arm a tug brought him back into the moment. “Well, if you wish me to help you, then I think you should tell me a lot more about yourself.”

Startled out of his reverie, his eyes widened. “There’s really very little to tell.”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t mean things like where you went to school and your favorite dessert. I don’t need to know any of that. Although, while we are on the subject, my favorite is ice cream. I haven’t had it here in London, at Aunt Fanny’s, but Papa had Cook make it all the time for me at Coakham.” Her voice fell as though she hadn’t wanted to think about Coakham and her papa.

A polite person would distract her from her memories, even if so doing meant he had to delve into his own. “What do you want to know then?”

She seemed to pull herself together. “While I’m interested in what you are doing with your orphanages, there’s one thing that interests me more. I think I’d like to know more about this Frenchwoman who gave her baby to a stranger and then was never seen again. I feel she’s quite a mystery. And I’ve always fancied myself good at solving mysteries. Although my experience so far is purely literary.”

They were walking under the lime trees now, all of them sadly bereft of leaves. He recalled being disappointed by them as a child, as he’d expected them to bear actual limes, a fruit he’d come across growing in Wentworth’s hothouses.

She squeezed his arm. “Have you not wanted to find out more about her yourself? To discover your true origins? As they seem to have been the catalyst that’s inclined you to philanthropy.”

He pursed his lips for a long moment before turning to look at her. Their pace slowed. A few couples passed them and, behind, Atkins politely slowed as well. An admirably tactful maid.

“Of course I would like to know more about her, and I’ve tried from time to time, but I’ve been unable to discover anything.” He paused. “I had hoped that if I became more au fait with the world of the rookeries it might lead me to clues about the French émigrés who settled there, but I’ve discovered nothing useful, as yet. It’s as though she never existed. Or that she just vanished back from whence she’d come and was lost forever.”

Phoebe nodded, perhaps glad to be able to pursue this topic. “I suppose we must allow for the fact that she could be dead by now. We have to remember that. But the fact that she is supposed to have been a Frenchwoman makes me think she might be easier to find than an ordinary denizen of your rookeries. Although she might not be from there at all, of course, and also if she was there back then, she might not be there now. That might be why you can’t find her. My old governess, Madame Dupont, herself fled France at the time of the Terror. She told me there are societies that reconnect French émigrés with each other even now. Have you tried one of those?”

He nodded. “I have, with no success. They tend to cater for the aristos, not the working classes.” He paused. “She might as well be dead indeed, for all the clues I’ve never found about her.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. Records of deaths within the rookeries were notoriously badly kept, as he’d found to his shock.

“Well, to begin with, how do you know she was from the rookeries?”

He frowned. “Because I was told she was, I suppose. I’m not sure how my mother knew…” For the first time he considered that what he’d been told might not have been accurate.

Phoebe’s eyes narrowed. “You said your mother thought you were a gift from God?”

He nodded.

“Has it ever occurred to you that she might not have wanted your real mother found? That it was in your adoptive mother’s interests to make sure that didn’t happen? She might have paid her off, for example, bought you, really. Or she might not have instigated a thorough search.”

It seemed Phoebe was thinking along those lines as well.

“Do you have any kind of description of her?”

He nodded. “From my father, not my mother. I was only seven when she died. And I was in shock that the woman I’d loved all my life was not only dying but also wasn’t my real mother. I didn’t even think to ask her.”

“What about your father? Did he see her?”

Gabriel shook his head. “He wasn’t with her. She’d been to her dressmaker’s in Soho Square, which is very close to Denmark Street and St Giles. It was he who set up the search for her.”

“Then he must have had a description to work with.”

“He did. I’m not such a fool that I didn’t ask him when I decided to look for her myself. He said she was short, with graying hair and a sullen expression. He told me she was ugly.”