The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles (26 page)

Marie’s fists clenched. “To labor like a nobody in some foreign land where everything’s in a turmoil—is
that
your proposal?”

In an attempt to rescue Phillipe, Sholto stepped between mother and son. “Madame, I remind you that we are in the midst of a working day. I appreciate that you and your son have matters of consequence to discuss. But pray do so later, when I’m not paying for it.”

With effort, Marie suppressed a retort. The front bell tinkled. Two bonneted ladies entered. Mrs. Emma bustled forward, saying much too loudly:

“Good day, Mrs. Chillworth! Come for the newest novels? Madame Charboneau will help you find them—”

For a moment Phillipe feared that his mother would explode with anger. But she didn’t. Seconds passed. Mr. Sholto cleared his throat.

With a final glance at Phillipe that promised an accounting later, Marie turned and stalked off to aid the new customers.

Another welcome diversion, albeit one that made Mrs. Emma exclaim aloud, was a sudden crash from the back. Hosea bellowed, “Oh, God damn and blast!”

Phillipe and Mr. Sholto dashed into the printing room. They found Hosea furiously kicking one leg of his press. The thick, all-important platen had split through the center.

At his type case, Esau was smirking. “Too much pressure on the lever, dear brother. Where was your mind? Up some doxy’s skirt?”

“We shall take all day replacing it!” Mr. Sholto fumed, purple in the cheeks.

But as Phillipe followed the owner up the steps to where Hosea was swearing and rubbing his toe, he realized that no delays of any kind could prevent an inevitable—and inevitably unpleasant—confrontation with Marie.

Mr. Sholto had to send all the way across the Thames to Southwark for a replacement platen. The part didn’t arrive until well after dark. Installation took two hours. The family’s customary eight o’clock supper was delayed. Phillipe was tired and edgy when he finally followed Sholto and his sons upstairs shortly after St. Paul’s rang ten.

Marie was waiting for him.

“We will not eat until I have spoken with you, Phillipe.”

He checked his temper with great effort. “All right. But at least we needn’t disturb the household. We’ll go for a walk.”

“Careful of the streets at this hour,” Mr. Sholto advised, moving on toward the kitchen, from which drifted aromas of steaming tea and new-baked bread. Phillipe nodded absently.

Marie fetched a shawl from her room. They walked down the outside stairs into darkness that had become thick with fog. Their feet rang hollow on the cobbles of Sweet’s Lane. Phillipe was hardly conscious of which way they were going. His mother didn’t speak. The tension mounted. Suddenly Marie slipped in the slime of the drainage channel.

He reached for her arm. She shook off his hand angrily. Then the outburst came:

“Your mind’s been affected! You’re ready for that asylum they call Bedlam! How can you even entertain the idea of traveling to another country when there’s wealth—position—power waiting for you in this one?”

He could no longer treat the subject tactfully. “Mama, that’s an illusion! Have you forgotten the trouble at Kentland? We’ve no chance of pressing the claim successfully.”

Marie seethed; he could hear it in her rapid breathing. “What has turned you into a coward, Phillipe?”

He wheeled on her. “Nothing! I’m trying to look at the future like a grown man, not a bemused child!”

“I won’t listen to—”

“You will! Do you propose that we live on charity all our lives? Clinging to the hope that some miracle will happen? The Duchess of Kentland won’t permit miracles! And what’s left for us in Auvergne?”

“Therefore—” He’d never heard such awful bitterness in her voice. “Therefore you intend to waste your life as a printer’s boy? You, who swore an oath that you wouldn’t let yourself be humbled into obscurity?”

Phillipe winced inwardly at that. Guilt lay heavy on him a moment. Marie was expert at striking at the most sensitive part of his defenses.

“I hadn’t definitely decided to propose that we sail to America,” he hedged. “It seemed worth looking into, that’s all. Printing is a worthy occupation—”

“Being a tradesman is
worthy!
Faugh!”

“Dr. Franklin did well at it. His writings made him more than welcome among the nobility—”

“Oh, yes, I remember all the talk on the river trip. A genius!” Her tone grew cutting. “Are you a genius, my son?”

“No, no, of course not, I—”

“But you
are
a nobleman,” she argued, as their clacking footfalls carried them deeper into the mist that beaded cold on his cheeks. “Even your American
genius
can’t claim that. It comes down to this, Phillipe. If you refuse to press your claim, then I’ve lived for nothing.”

Phillipe’s spine crawled. She no longer spoke with fiery conviction. She ranted, on the edge of hysteria:

“Will you do that to me, Phillipe? Will you destroy me after I’ve surrendered my whole life for you?”

“Mama, you know I’d never willingly hurt you. I love you too much. But you must be realistic—”

“Exactly.
Exactly!
Why do you think I’ve hoarded every shilling we earn helping the Sholtos? To buy passage back across the Channel?” Her harsh laugh unnerved him even more. “No. Oh, no. I’ve been making secret plans of my own, Phillipe. When we have enough money, we’ll find a lawyer here in London. One who can help us use the letter to advantage—”

Phillipe’s voice was edged with irritation: “But I still plan to accept Franklin’s invitation. Talk to him. Talking can’t hurt—”

He realized Marie hadn’t heard a word. She was caught up in her own wild monologue:

“—because I’ve no intention of sailing to a land peopled by tradesmen and farmers and those—those hideous red Indians everyone prattles about. I’ve no intention of leaving England until you have your full and rightful share of—”

“In God’s name, woman,
let it die!
”

Die die die die
rang the echo in the slowly swirling fog.

He hadn’t meant to shout. Or call her by any other name than the one he’d used since childhood.

But he had done both. In an eerie way, that told him something new about their relationship.

His shout had cowed her a little. She spoke less stridently:

“Phillipe, what’s happened to you? Don’t you still have a desire to be like your father?”

He thought briefly of Lady Jane, of Alicia and, with hatred, of Roger. “Only sometimes,” was the most honest answer he could give.

Marie Charboneau began to cry then. Short, anguished sobs that tore at Phillipe’s heart. Miserable, angry with her as well as with himself, he lifted his head suddenly.

He’d heard another sound.

It came again, in counterpoint to her sobbing.

Shuffle-shuffle-shuffle.

The sound prickled his scalp and turned his palms to ice. It came from their left, but the source was invisible in the fog.

Then a second set of footsteps blended in. This time from the right.

Phillipe realized they must have wandered near St. Paul’s Yard. There was a feeling of open space. High up, he glimpsed very faint lights in the murk. The small windows under the church dome. He groped for Marie’s arm.

“Mama, I think we’d best turn back—”

Abruptly, an unfamiliar voice barked out, “I tell ye it’s him! I knew when he yelled.”

That voice came from the left, where the shuffling grew louder. Another responded from the right:

“Then old Jemmy weren’t daft, saying ’e thought ’e’d seen ’em along Sweet’s Lane. Let’s find out fer sure—”

A lantern shutter clacked open. A sulfurous yellow flare lit the mist close by. Phillipe leaped back in alarm.

The lantern light revealed a graybeard with browned gums and one cocked eye. The apparition exclaimed, “Him, all right!”

Phillipe didn’t recognize the hideous, leering face. But he wouldn’t have known the face of any of those who had attacked him that first night on the church stairs.

Holding the lantern high, the beggar seized Phillipe’s forearm with his other grimy hand. His one good eye glared. A second rag-festooned creature appeared behind him. A woman; a crone. Her sagging dugs were partially revealed by torn places in her filthy blouse.

The crone’s mouth was just as toothless as the man’s. Her eyes shone as she extended her hand, palm upward. The fingers wiggled suggestively.

“A penny to buy a posy for the General’s grave?”

Phillipe stepped in front of the frightened Marie, tried to shake off the man’s clutch as the crone shrilled:

“Just a penny. That’s not much for a lad who works in a fine bookshop. Old Jemmy, he saw sharp. He recognized you!”

“Let go, damn you!” Phillipe pried harder at the dirty hand holding him. Suddenly the man with the crazed eye dropped his lantern, shot out both hands and closed them on Phillipe’s throat.

“Can’t buy a flower for a good man’s grave?” he screamed. “You owe him!
You killed him!”

Savagely, Phillipe drove his fist into the beggar’s belly. One punch was enough to tear the broken nails from his throat. He practically jerked Marie off her feet, dragging her away as the old man and the crone began to shrill together:

“Murderer!
Murderer!”

Their feeble shuffling followed Phillipe and Marie a short distance down Sweet’s Lane, then faded.

Out of breath, they reached the sanctuary of the rickety stairs ascending to the Sholtos’ second floor.

They clattered up. Only the closing of the door behind them stilled Phillipe’s hammering heart.

The beggars had really presented no serious physical threat. He’d been startled, that’s all. Gotten alarmed all out of proportion to the cause.

Yet he was still shivering. He thought that somewhere out in the fog, he could still hear voices crying,
“Murderer
—”

Marie went to her room without speaking.

Phillipe slept badly that night. In the morning he described the incident to Esau. The big-shouldered young man shrugged it off.

“It was only an attempt to bully you into giving them drink money. Do you really think they care when one of their own dies? The man you cut down—the General—was probably stripped and left to rot naked five minutes after Hosea and I brought you home.”

Trying to take reassurance from the words, Phillipe was still troubled. The beggars knew where he lived. What if someone else came searching for him? Inquiring of the street people about a French boy?

Of course there hadn’t been so much as a hint of any pursuit since the flight from Tonbridge. But he couldn’t shake off the new worry.

Esau grinned at him. “Look here, stop scowling! Go ink Hosea’s type or I won’t be able to pick up my flute till midnight!”

Phillipe nodded, started to work. Yet the anxiety lingered with him most of the day.

He didn’t mention his fear to Marie. In fact he avoided her. He didn’t want to reopen the discussion—the argument—about their future until he’d hit on some way to persuade her that further involvement with the Amberlys was not worth the risk and was futile to boot.

By the next day, a warm but windy harbinger of spring, he had thrown off some of his apprehension. Though the gray sky threatened storms, he made up his mind to walk to Craven Street that very evening. He hoped he’d find Franklin home.

Marie retired early. Thus he was spared the need to tell her where he was going. He told the Sholtos, however. Once more they repeated their warnings about the unsafe streets. Out of range of observation by his father, Hosea slipped Phillipe a cheap dirk to stick in his boot.

“Don’t ask me where I got the bloody thing—or how I use it. Just take it.”

Phillipe thanked him and set out.

Thunder rumbled as he proceeded down the Strand. He glanced behind frequently but saw no sign of anyone following him. He located Craven Street, which led south to the river, without incident.

Going up the steps of the house at Number 7, he dismissed his anxiety about the beggars as foolish. By the end of the week, he was to discover that was a grave mistake. But as the night sky glared white and a thunderclap pealed and fat raindrops began to spatter down, he had no inkling.

E
VEN AS PHILLIPE LET
the door knocker fall, lightning blazed again, raising white shimmers on the Thames, churning only a few steps further south of the brick residence. All at once the wind turned chill. The rain slanted harder. He huddled close to the building until someone answered.

A woman. Of middle age, but still attractive. She raised a candle in a holder as she peered at Phillipe from the gloomy foyer.

“Yes?”

“Good evening. Is this the house of Dr. Franklin?”

“No, it’s the house of Widow Stevenson. But he lets rooms from me.” The woman glanced past Phillipe to the dark doorways on the other side of the rain-swept street. Her eyes suspicious, she asked, “Are you a friend?”

“An acquaintance. Dr. Franklin gave me leave to call. My name is Phillipe Charboneau. If the doctor’s at home, I’d be obliged if you’d announce me.”

Mrs. Stevenson’s suspicion seemed to moderate. She stepped back, motioned him in. “Very well. But I’m afraid you’ll be interrupting the doctor’s air bath.”

“His what?”

Phillipe’s words were muffled by more thunder. Mrs. Stevenson didn’t hear. Turning toward an open door on one side of the foyer, she continued:

“Normally he takes his air bath first thing in the morning. Today, early appointments prevented it.” At the entrance to a well-furnished parlor bright with lamplight, the woman called, “Polly. Polly, my dear—”

In a moment, a pert, pretty girl appeared. She was about Phillipe’s own age.

“Benjamin has a caller,” said the older woman. “Mister—?”

“Charboneau.”

“My daughter will show you up.”

Phillipe thanked her, moved aside to let the girl precede him with the candle. Thunder boomed, then faded as they climbed the carpeted stairs. In the lull of silence, Phillipe heard someone singing behind a door on the second floor. He recognized the voice. Franklin’s—accompanied by music unlike any he had ever heard before. Shimmering, almost eerie notes. The melody itself was plaintive; the words equally so: