The Last Hellion (2 page)
—that's what scares him. Everything's dark and grown-ups are crying. He wants to be with me because I'm big and noisy. Because I can scare away the monsters.
Don't you see?"
Whether she saw or not, she gave in, and when she did, the others followed suit.
It was only for a few weeks, after all. Even Vere Mallory couldn't corrupt a child's morals irrevocably in a matter of weeks.
He had no wish to corrupt the boy's morals, and he set out fully meaning to return Robin in a fortnight.
Vere could not be a father to him or any child, he was well aware. He was not a suitable role model. He hadn't a wife—and had no intention of getting one—to do the things females did, the soft things, to balance his rough, uncivilized ways.
His household comprised one servant, his valet Jaynes, who possessed all the soft, maternal qualities of a dyspeptic porcupine. This "household," furthermore, had not occupied a fixed abode since Vere had left Oxford.
It was no way to rear a child, in short, especially one destined to assume the burdens of a great dukedom.
Nonetheless, the few weeks somehow stretched into a month, then another. From Brighton they traveled up into Berkshire, to the Vale of the White Horse, to view the ancient etching in a chalk hillside, thence to Stonehenge, and on to the West Country, following the coast and exploring smugglers' coves all the way to Land's End.
Autumn chilled into winter, which in turn warmed into spring. Then the letters Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
came, from Dorothea and the others, with their gentle but not overly subtle reminders: Robin's education could not be ignored indefinitely, his sisters missed him, and the longer the boy wandered, the harder it would be for him to settle down.
It was all true, Vere's own conscience told him. Robin needed a real family, stability, a home.
Still he found it hard, returning Robin to Longlands, hard to part from him, though it was obviously the right thing to do. The household was not so dismal as before.
Dorothea and her husband were settled there now, with Robin's sisters as well as their own brood. The halls rang again with the children's songs and laughter, and in a defiance of convention Vere had to approve, the crepe and jet borders and black bombazine had already given way to the less lugubrious tones of half mourning.
It was also clear that Vere had done his job. He'd scared away the monsters, beyond question, for within hours, Robin was bosom bows with his boy cousins, Dorothea's sons, and joining them in tormenting the girls. And when it came time to say good-bye, Robin showed no signs of panic. He didn't take a temper fit or hit Vere, but promised to write faithfully, extracted his guardian's promise to come back in late August for his tenth birthday, then ran off to help his cousins reenact the Battle of Agincourt.
But Vere returned long before the birthday. Not three weeks after leaving Longlands, he was racing back.
The sixth Duke of Ainswood had contracted diphtheria.
The disease was not well understood. The first accurate account of the infection Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
had been published in France only five years earlier. What was understood and not debated was that diphtheria was highly contagious.
Charlie's sisters pleaded with Vere. Their husbands tried to stop him, but he was bigger than any of them, and in a fury, as he was now, a regiment of soldiers couldn't have held him back.
He stormed up the great staircase and marched down the hall to the sickroom. He chased away the nurse and locked the door. Then he sat beside the bed and grasped his ward's weak little hand.
"It's all right, Robin," he said. "I'm here. I'll fight it for you. Let go of it and give it to me, do you hear me, lad? Throw off this curst ailment and let me tangle with it. I can do it, my boy, you know I can."
The cold little hand lay unmoving in his big, warm one.
"Give it up, please," Vere urged, choking back tears, stifling the useless grief.
"It's too soon for you, Robin, you know it is. You've scarcely begun to live. You don't know a fraction of it—what there is to see, to do."
The young duke's eyelids fluttered and opened. Something like recognition seemed to flicker there. For an instant, his mouth shaped a ghost of a smile. Then the boy's eyes closed.
That was all. Though Vere went on talking, coaxing, pleading, though he clung to the little hand, he could not draw the disease away and into himself. He could do nothing but wait and watch, as he'd done so many times before. It was a short watch, this time, the shortest, hardest of all.
In less than an hour, as twilight slipped into night, the boy's life slipped away and fled… like a shadow.
Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
London
Wednesday, 27 August
"I'll sue 'em!" Angus Macgowan raged.
"There're libel laws in this kingdom, and if that isn't libel, I'm a bull's blooming bollocks!"
The enormous black mastiff who'd been drowsing before the editor's office door lifted her head and gazed with mild curiosity from Macgowan to her mistress.
Upon ascertaining that the latter was in no imminent danger, the dog laid her head down upon her forepaws again and closed her eyes.
Her mistress, twenty-eight-year-old Lydia Grenville, regarded Macgowan with similar dispassion. But then, oversetting Lydia wasn't easy. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, a few inches under six feet tall, she was about as delicate as the average Valkyrie or Amazon, and her body, like those of the mythical warriors, was as strong and agile as her mind.
When he slammed the object of his indignation down upon the desk, she calmly took it up. It was the latest edition of
Bellweather's Review
. Like the previous issue, it had devoted several columns of the first page to attacking Lydia's latest journalistic endeavor:
Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
Like her namesake, the
Argus'
s "Lady Grendel" has once again launched a
noxious assault upon an unsuspecting public, spewing her poisonous fumes into
an atmosphere already thick with her pollutions. Her victims, still reeling from
previous assaults upon their sensibilities, are hurled once more into the very
abyss of degradation whence uprises the reek of foul and tainted creatures
—
for
one can scarcely title as human the vermin she's made her subject
—
whose
cacophony of self-pitying howls
—
for we cannot call these excretions language
—
the petticoated monster of the Argus...
Here, Lydia stopped reading. "He has lost all control of the sentence," she told Angus. "But one cannot sue for bad writing. Or for lack of originality. As I recall, the
Edinburgh Review
was the first to title me after the monster in
Beowulf
. At any rate, I do not believe anyone owns a patent on the name 'Lady Grendel.' "
"It's a scurrilous attack!" he cried. "He all but calls you a bastard in the next to last paragraph, and insinuates that an investigation into your past would—would
—"
" 'Would doubtless explain the virago of the
Argus's
otherwise unaccountable sympathy with an ancient profession whose bywords are disease and corruption,'
" Lydia read aloud.
"Libel!" Angus shouted, pounding his fist on the desk. The mastiff looked up again, uttered a deep canine sigh, then once more composed herself to sleep.
"He merely implies that I have been a prostitute," Lydia said. "Harriet Wilson was a harlot, yet her book sold very well. If she'd had Mr. Bellweather abusing her in print, I daresay she might have made a fortune. He and his fellows have Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
certainly assisted ours. The previous issue of the
Argus
sold out within forty-eight hours. Today's will be gone before tea time. Since the literary periodicals began attacking me, our circulation has tripled. Rather than sue Mr. Bellweather, you should write him a note of thanks, and encourage him to keep up the good work."
Angus flung himself into the chair behind his desk. "Bellweather has friends at Whitehall," he grumbled. "And there're some in the Home Office who aren't exactly friendly to you."
Lydia was well aware that she had ruffled feathers in the Home Secretary's circle. In the first of her two-part series on the plight of London's younger prostitutes, she had hinted at the legalization of prostitution, which would enable the Crown to license and regulate the trade, as in Paris, for instance. Regulation, she had suggested, might at least help reduce the worst abuses.
"Peel ought to thank me," she said. "My suggestion stirred so much outrage that his proposal for a Metropolitan Police Force seems quite mild and sensible to the very same people who had been howling that it was a conspiracy to grind John Bull under tyranny's heel." She shrugged. "Tyranny, indeed. If we had a proper police force, that fiend might have been caught by now."
The fiend in question was Coralie Brees. In the six months since her arrival from the Continent, she had become notorious as the worst of London's procuresses.
In order to get her employees' stories, Lydia had promised not to reveal the woman's name—not that revealing the bawd's identity would have aided the cause of justice. Eluding the authorities was a game with the whoremongers, and one at which they were highly skilled. They changed their names as often and as easily as Lydia's father had done, to elude his creditors, and scurried like rats from one lair to the next. Small wonder Bow Street couldn't keep track—and didn't feel compelled to do so. According to some estimates, London had more Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
than fifty thousand prostitutes, all too many under sixteen years old. Insofar as Lydia had been able to determine, none of Coralie's girls was older than nineteen.
"You've seen her, though," Angus said, breaking into Lydia's grim reflections.
"Why didn't you sic that black monster of yours on her?" He nodded toward the mastiff.
"It's no good taking the woman into custody when there's no one brave enough to testify against her," Lydia answered impatiently. "Unless the authorities catch her in the act—and she takes care they don't—we've nothing to charge her with.
No proof. No witnesses. There's little Susan could do for us except maim or kill her."
Susan cocked one eye open at the mention of her name.
"Since the dog would do so only at my command, I should be prosecuted for assault—or hanged for murder," Lydia continued. "I had rather not be hanged on account of a filthy, sadistic bawd."
She returned
Bellweather's Review
to her employer's desk, then took out her pocket watch. It had belonged to her great uncle Stephen Grenville. He and his wife, Euphemia, had taken Lydia in when she was thirteen. They had died last autumn within hours of each other.
Though Lydia had been fond of them, she could not miss the life she'd led with the feckless pair. While not morally corrupt—as her father had been—they had been shallow, unintelligent, disorganized, and afflicted with a virulent case of wanderlust. They were forever wanting to shake the dust of someplace from their feet long before dust could possibly have time to settle. The ground Lydia had covered with them reached from Lisbon in the West to Damascus in the East, and included the countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean.
Still, she told herself, she would not have an editor to fume at present, or jealous Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
publishing rivals to make him fume, if not for that life.
Something very near a smile curved her mouth as she recollected the journal she'd begun—in imitation of her late and dearly loved mama—on the day her father abandoned her to Ste and Effie's incompetent care.
At thirteen, Lydia had been nearly illiterate, and her diary rife with spelling atrocities and horrific crimes against grammar. But Quith, the Grenvilles'
manservant, had tutored her in history, geography, mathematics, and most important, literature. Quith was the one who'd encouraged her writing, and she'd repaid him as best she could.
The money Ste had left her as a marriage portion, she'd converted into a pension for her mentor. It was no great sacrifice. A writing career, not marriage, was what she wanted. And so, free of all obligations for the first time in her life, Lydia had set out for London. She'd taken with her copies of the travel pieces she'd previously had published in a few English and Continental periodicals, and what remained of Ste and Effie's "estate": an assortment of bric-a-brac and trinkets and precious little coin.
The pocket watch was all that remained of their belongings. Even after Angus had hired her, Lydia had not troubled to redeem the other items she'd pawned during those first bleak months in London. She preferred to spend her earnings on necessities. The latest such purchase was a cabriolet and a horse to pull it.
She could afford the horse and carriage because she was earning more than satisfactory wages, far better than one might have reasonably expected. Certainly she'd expected to drudge for at least a year, writing for the newspapers, at a penny a line, accounts of fires, explosions, murders, and other accidents and disasters.
Fate, though, had sent a piece of luck her way in early spring. Lydia had first Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
entered the
Argus's
offices when the magazine was on the brink of failure, and its editor, Macgowan, desperate enough to do anything—even hire a female—
that offered a chance of survival.
"Nearly half past two," Lydia said, returning the watch to her skirt pocket and her mind to the present. "I had better go. I'm to meet Joe Purvis at Pearkes's oyster house at three to look over the illustrations for the next chapter of the dratted story."
She moved away from the desk and started for the door.
"It isn't the blasted literary critics, but your 'dratted story' that's made our fortune," Angus said.
The story in question was
The Rose of Thebes
, whose heroine's adventures had been recounted in two-chapter installments in the biweekly
Argus
since May.