This Duchess of Mine

The door to the carriage opened. “Your Grace, Ashmole suggested that we go to the church. Would you like me to make inquiries?”



Villiers waved the footman on and sat back, door shut. He felt like a fool, peering out of his window, but Wapping was fascinating. It wasn’t exactly poor—it was too lively to be contained by that paltry adjective.



Just out his window was a great flight of stairs leading down to the Thames. It was thronged by a mess of boys, breeches rolled up, playing in the mud. Apparently the tide had covered the steps and then rolled back, leaving a thick coating.



Villiers watched them for a time and then leaned back against his seat. He and Elijah had once larked about in the river that used to run between their estates. He corrected himself. One ought to surmise that the river was still there and not refer to it in the past tense.



Just because he never chose to visit his estate didn’t mean that it had ceased to exist.



The footman opened the door again. “The priest is not in residence, but the sexton reports that he knows of no Grindel’s School for Boys.” He hesitated.



“Out with it,” Villiers said.



“There’s apparently a dissolute man by the name of Elias Grindel, who runs a pack of five or six mudlarks. Orphans, the sexton thinks. But he can’t be the man you’re looking for, Your Grace, because—”



“Did you get his direction?” Villiers cut him off.



“Yes, Your Grace.”



Villiers gestured for the door to be shut. He would find Templeton and have him thrown into the Clink to rot. The carriage trundled off again, stopping after a mere five minutes. He stepped out onto a street that fell away on one side, plunging down toward the river with all the abruptness of a sawed-off board. There were more steps, and more children.



Villiers felt disgust twist in his gut.



They weren’t playing in the mud. They were mudlarks. Boys who scavenged in the mud and the sewers to recover whatever they could for sale. And his son, Juby or Tobias, was likely down there as well. Some bit of his ducal bloodline was down there larking around in the muck.



Though “larking” was an altogether too pleasant word.



Grindel, once Villiers located him in a dingy house facing the river, was as belligerent a man as his name would lead one to expect. “I don’t have no boy named Tobias, nor Juny either,” he said, lower lip jutting out so he looked like an obstinate hedgehog.



“Juby,” Villiers corrected him.



Grindel just glared. “I ain’t had no dealings with a man called Templeton. I don’t run a school for boys. You have the wrong man.”



Villiers swung his sword stick casually in front of him, as if it were a cane and he were testing its weight.



“I hear there’s another Grindel, down in Bagnigge Wells. Mayhap he’s started a school for boys,” the man offered.



Villiers twirled his sword stick in his hand. The sheath gleamed with the promise that the rapier inside was designed to inflict damage. Finally, he placed the point downwards, and it sank into the rotten wood at his feet.



“Dear me,” he said gently. “And that was just the sheath.”



Grindel’s eyes narrowed.



“I want the boy named Tobias, sometimes called Juby. I want you to send someone to get him, now.”



“Or what?” Grindel asked. “You’re planning to slice my gizzard because I’m not running a school for boys? I don’t even like boys. I can’t stand having them around me.”



Villiers looked around the filthy room that Grindel had labeled his “study.” It was a study without books. In their place were warped wooden buckets, barrels, and wicker baskets. A bucket at Villiers’s feet was brimming with buttons, all shapes. He could see the open top of a basket full of coal, and a large barrel that seemed to be half full of wood chips.



“So what do you do for a living?” he asked genially.



“There’s no call for you to show interest,” Grindel said, not moving. He was short and sweaty, and wore a yellowed wig. Strands of greasy hair poking out from under the wig confirmed his remarkable indifference to cleanliness.



Villiers poked with his rapier at another basket, precariously balanced on the sideboard. It toppled, and out fell a cascade of teeth. Human teeth, Villiers thought. He took a step back as the teeth rattled to a halt around his toes.



“I collect things,” Grindel said. His face was a miracle of blandness. Villiers prided himself on maintaining an expressionless face, but he had clearly met his match. “I’d rather Your Grace didn’t overturn more of my things. A man’s home, so they say, is his castle.” His insolence was in the open now. “Even to those who consider themselves above the rest.”



“I’m proud to call myself above collecting the teeth of dead men,” Villiers said. He had poked off the top of another basket with his stick, and found it to hold a small collection of silver teaspoons. It was hard to tell through the muck, but many of them seemed to be engraved with initials or even a ducal crest. “You are planning to return these to their rightful owners, are you not?”



“What’s lost to the river is lost, and that’s the waterman’s law,” Grindel said.



The door at Villiers’s back opened and he moved to the side just in time to avoid being touched. He was already mourning the fact that he had chosen to wear the rose velvet coat again. It would be a miracle if he managed to leave Grindel’s study without touching anything.



“What the devil do you want!” Grindel roared, his eyebrows turning into a solid line across his forehead. Villiers allowed himself a small smile. It seemed that Mr. Grindel was not quite as indifferent as he appeared.



It was a small boy, quite thin. He stamped into the room without showing much fear and said, “Fillibet’s cut his foot so badly that part of it hangs right off. Not the part with the toes, the bottom part.”



“What’s that to me?” demanded Grindel. He turned to Villiers. “I’m friends with all the neighboring boys and they do come to me for advice.” Then he turned back to the boy with a ferocious grin. “There’s nothing I can do about a wound, son. You’ll have to take him to the surgeon.”



The boy looked quickly at Villiers and then back at Grindel. “You said we shouldn’t go to the surgeon anymores, but Juby says if you don’t take Fillibet, he’ll die, and the parish constable will take you up for it.”



“Take me up for it?” Grindel roared.



But the moment he heard the name Juby, Villiers had unsheathed his sword. Now the blade gleamed with a dull cruel brilliance as the tip just nudged Grindel’s grimy Adam’s apple.



“Juby says,” Villiers repeated softly. “It seems you do know of a boy named Juby.”



“Everyone knows Juby,” Grindel said. “I never says as how I didn’t know him. I said I didn’t have a school for boys, and I didn’t have no Juby living in my house.”



“We don’t live with him,” said the boy, eyeing the sword with great interest. “He says we stink. We mostly sleep down by the river or sometimes up in the churchyard. Juby likes it up there.”



Villiers put just a touch of pressure on his sword. “I will ask you one more time,” he said quietly. “Are you acquainted with Mr. Templeton?”

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