Ever His Bride (29 page)

Unsettled but undaunted, she made her way
into the kitchen.

“Ah, Mrs. Claybourne. You look lovely this
morning. I suppose you’ll be wanting an extra rasher of bacon?” The
Brightwater cook was an artist compared to Mrs. Sweeney, and
Felicity had lavished the woman with praise.

“No, thank you,” she said. “But if you could
point me toward the Blenwick School—”

“Auch!” The cook’s face screwed into a
grimace. “What would you be doing at that horrible place?”

Apprehension wriggled its evil against
Felicity’s heart. “Horrible? But it’s an apprentice school, isn’t
it?”

The woman’s mouth soured. “Call it what you
like, but it’s a workhouse—for children.”

Felicity blood went cold, her heart froze.
No, she couldn’t have heard right.

“It’s a foul place, Mrs. Claybourne—governed
by a man named Rundull.”

Giles in a workhouse? And here she’d been
lounging about like a sightseer, sampling the wine and cheese and
her husband’s delicious kisses!

She cursed herself for being a naive fool.
She should have known the police wouldn’t give a boy like Giles the
chance to make an honest life for himself.

“What’s the matter, dear?” the cook asked,
coming around the table to place her age-softened hand on
Felicity’s forehead. “You’ve gone quite pale. Would you like to sit
down?”

Felicity shook her head and backed away. “No,
no, I’m fine. Where is the school? Is it nearby?”

“South of town, across the Wear. But you
don’t want to go there, Mrs. Claybourne. There isn’t anything you
can do about—”

Felicity didn’t stay to listen, left the
kitchen in a fury, packed her portmanteau, and left the Brightwater
Arms.

She didn’t have a plan, but she would rescue
Giles— even if she had to level the place to the ground.

Fifteen minutes later, Felicity stood outside
the Blenwick School for Apprentices, clutching the cold iron bars
of the towering gates, wondering if Giles had been as frightened as
she was of the forbidding redbrick walls and the pinprick windows
that reflected darkly, even in the midst of the morning.

The grounds were pinched and enclosed by an
impregnable stone and iron fence, soiled in coal smut and mud. The
Queen’s Bench Prison and Newgate all rolled into one dismal
complex, and guarded by a man who appeared to be asleep against the
guardhouse wall, but whose eye had opened a slit as her footfalls
in the cinder road announced her.

She had exactly six pounds in her purse,
should have taken Claybourne’s money off the table. How the devil
was she going to get Giles out of there?

“Yer here fer the job?” The man’s voice
blared like a steam horn warning ships off the rocks. His foul
breath could have melted the iron bars as it clouded past them and
broke against her face.

She stepped backward, well out of his reach,
but blessing him for one thing: the seed of her plan.

“The job, yes. Could you tell me about it,
please.”

He scowled with only one of his eyes. “Tell
you ‘bout a cook’s job? Hell, you’ll be cookin’.”

“Yes, of course, it seems a basic sort of
position; but I was wondering about . . . the facilities, the
number of meals per day, the menu. . .

She stopped because he was laughing—a rather
good-natured kind of laugh, one more suited for a public house than
this juvenile prison that reeked of vinegar, and rotting leather,
and other smells she couldn’t identify.

“Menu? Lady, this here’s a school for
‘prentices, not Windsor Castle.”

“And where do I apply for this job?”

He shut off his laughter like a spigot and
peered at her though the bars. “Suit yerself, lady. Come on with
me.”

Metal scraped against stone as the gate
parted just far enough to allow her inside. The guard passed behind
her, then bolted the gate again. Now she was a prisoner in
truth.

She followed a pace behind him toward a
low-slung building, an annex to the larger, darker one. The yard
was pitted with puddles and littered with unsalvageable trash. A
school yard should be grassy and clean. There should be courts for
playing ball and jumping rope—that’s how she’d imagined Giles at
his school. The Blenwick School for Apprentices was an outrage.

“Who am I to see, sir?” She forced the
civility back into her voice. This man seemed to harbor a modicum
of caring beneath his frightening exterior.

“Mr. Rundull.”

“Is he a fair employer? A trustworthy man? I
mean . . . if I’m to work for him . . .”

The guard stopped to look at her quite
earnestly. “Let me just say that you seem a nice sort of girl, so
I’ll be prayin’, miss, that you
don’t
get the job.”

“Have you worked for Mr. Rundull for very
long, Mister . . . ?”

“Everyone calls me Arthur. Was eight when I
come here. Twenty years, it’s been.”

He was only twenty-eight? The man’s eyes were
as old as Mr. Biddle’s.

“My back don’t work so good now; Rundull said
that I owed him.”

“Owed him?”

“For feeding me all those years. Says I have
to work for him for the rest of my life.”

“He can’t do that, Arthur. Britain has laws
against slavery.”

“Don’t know about any laws, miss—I just know
Rundull’s strap.”

“Then you just take me to Mr. Rundull. He’s
the one needs strapping.”

Arthur’s eyes got very large, and she could
finally see that they were the color of sooted brick. “If you go in
talkin’ like that, miss, you’ll never get the job.”

“I’ll take my chances, Arthur.”

He muttered something and started off again.
Felicity swallowed hard before she followed him, sobered by the
fact that she was, in truth, destitute enough to be forced into
such a position. Mr. Claybourne’s support was temporary.

She slipped her wedding band off her finger
and slid it into the pocket of her brown traveling skirt. It would
only be in the way at the Blenwick School for Apprentices.

F
elicity studied
every door and lock as she followed Arthur through a series of
twisting passages, routes of escape, once she found Giles. She
lingered at the grimy row of windows that looked from the
connecting corridor into a huge workroom.

“Don’t be standing around here,” Arthur
whispered, tugging at her arm. “Rundull don’t like the
staring.”

She shook him off and searched for Giles
among the rows of children who hunkered on the floor on either side
of a long center aisle. Watery light fell from the upper-story
windows across a sea of small, hunched shoulders and bowed heads.
Gray on gray, ashen profiles, slate-colored uniforms. She couldn’t
tell one child from another.

Some worked with hammers against small
anvil-like things, and others seemed to be sewing or picking.

“What are they doing?” she whispered,
consumed with the horror.

“Makin’ shoe tops.”

“Shoe tops?”

“You know. For ladies shoes. Like those ones
you got on.”

She looked down at her pristine, fashionable
traveling shoe–and blushed in shame. These were a second pair she
always carried in her portmanteau, had tossed away the other pair
that had been nearly destroyed in the chaos of the train disaster.
Had her own shoes come from a place like this? She forced herself
to lift her eyes to the workshop, but couldn’t see past the grimy
glass for the pool of tears.

“How can they sit like that all day?” Her
voice shook as intensely as her hands did.

“They do it, lady, or that fellow with the
birch rod gives ’em a bleedin’ good rap.”

She wiped a stream of hot tears from her
cheeks. The man with the birch was on the move toward two little
girls who seemed to be sharing a brief giggle, some childhood
silliness. But they were too absorbed to see the man raising the
rod high above his head.

Felicity was about to strike her fist against
the window to stop him when a shout from the end of the corridor
startled her into inaction. She saw the first blow land on the
little girl’s back and turned away like a coward.

A man was stalking toward her in long,
furious strides.

“What the hell are you doing in here, Arthur?
You should be . . .” Then the face twitched into a patently false,
practiced smile, his eyes raking her from bonnet-less head to her
shameful shoes. “Ah, we have a visitor, I see.”

“The lady’s come for the job.”

“Really? The cook’s job?” Rundull seemed
roundly confused for a moment, then shook himself from some
unreadable notion and cast Arthur a seething frown as he motioned
for him to leave.

Arthur’s departure left Felicity feeling
exposed to a choking kind of evil.

The man’s sparse mustache clung like a
smudged washtub ring to the ridge of his lip, and dropped in
sinister wings to his jaw line. If he were an actor in a melodrama,
he couldn’t have made up his face with any better design for
terror. His gaze stung Felicity, would surely paralyze a child.

He set his teeth. “Come this way, Miss . .
.”

“Mayfield. Felicity Mayfield.”

“Delighted,” he said, leading her along the
corridor in a cloud of camphor, into an office nearly as well
appointed as Claybourne’s.

“Please, please, do sit down, Miss Mayfield.”
The voice that had barked at Arthur now took on the consistency of
molasses, darkly smooth and annoyingly sticky.

“I’ll stand, thank you.”

“As you wish,” he said, motioning to the tray
on his desk, and the steaming pot. “Tea?”

“Not for me, sir.”

He declined the same for himself and half sat
against the desktop, one ankle crossing the other. A man in his
mid-fifties, well fed, and not easily sated. He nodded slightly,
crossed his arms, as he scrutinized her again, from her shoes to
the very top of her head, lingering overlong at her chest.

“Now, tell me, Miss Mayfield, where have you
cooked before?”

Felicity was so used to spinning stories of
late, this one came easily. “Most recently, sir, for Claybourne
Manor, in Hampstead.”

He lifted his chin and looked at her over the
ridge of his nose. “How long were you in service there?”

What was another lie? After all—she was about
to kidnap a child. “Two years, Mr. Rundull, as an undercook.”

“And why did you leave?”

She shook her head in pity. “The master’s
finances dwindled, sir.” She could imagine Claybourne’s look of
shock and disgust if he ever heard her speak of his finances as
dwindling. “Invested in an unlimited venture—railroading, it was,
in California and, so it was whispered below stairs, he lost
everything.”

“How inopportune.” Rundull fluttered his
stout fingertips on his arm he studied her. “You seem to know a
great deal about the master’s business. Were you his . . .
confidant
?”

She blushed at the implication, at the
palpable approval in Rundull’s voice, and his too obvious
anticipation of such favors, should he deign to hire her on as
cook. She widened her stance by a half-step.

“Honest gossip among the staff, sir. Our
livelihoods were at stake in the matter.” She swallowed past a
desert-dry throat.

“Yes, certainly. Well,” Rundull said, with a
knowing smile and indicating the door with his outstretched hand,
“come this way, Miss Mayfield, and I will show you the
kitchen.”

It wasn’t a kitchen; it was a filthy,
blackened cave, leaned up against the back of the hallway. Traffic
channels had been worn into the earthen floor. Rotting refuse of
every kind filled the corners. She nearly gagged.

“How many . . . students do you have, Mr.
Rundull?”

“Seventy-three, as of yesterday’s count.
Twenty-eight girls, forty-five boys. And seven. . . teachers. So
you see, you wouldn’t be cooking for many.”

The kitchen wasn’t large enough to supply a
single family, let alone a school full of children. The oven
couldn’t manage more than a half-dozen loaves a day. The stove bore
the remains of some grainy gruel drying against the sides of a
dented cauldron. It couldn’t have been left from lunch; there
hadn’t been a live fire in the hearth for at least a day.

“What happened to the last cook?”

“Well, I think that’s my business, isn’t it?”
Rundull opened a small closet at the rear of the room. “Here is the
larder. Well stocked, as you see.”

She peered inside. Well stocked with two
sacks of flour, one each of oats and indian meal, and a barrel of
some sort.

“Have the children eaten since breakfast?”
Felicity asked.

Rundull touched his lips with his knuckle and
lightly cleared his throat. “As you can see, we were entirely
without a cook.”

“All day?” Felicity couldn’t mask the outrage
in her voice. “Do you mean the children haven’t been fed since
yesterday?”

Little spots of color blotched Rundull’s face
as quickly as if she’d hit him with a tomato.