Chapter Eleven

Having no idea what Lord Wharton liked to read, she grabbed a novel and a collection of poetry to take down to him. He watched her cross the room and set them on the table, but neither of them said anything.

She practically ran back up the stairs.

The dining hall upstairs was as quiet as the kitchen had been, and she paused at the edge of the room. Normally, the evening meal was a boisterous affair, filled with talking, laughing, and sharing stories from that day’s lessons.

Instead of the vibrant chatter, though, the children sat in wide-eyed silence. A few of the children hadn’t met Lord Wharton, and they had to be itching with curiosity, but they weren’t willing to be the first to ask a question. The ones who had met him were watching Jess and Daphne, and Kit now that she was in the room. They’d been raised in secret, very aware that they were hidden for protection.

A stranger made them all nervous. The fact that he was an aristocrat, a class of person they’d never been around in their life, only complicated matters.

Kit sat in front of her bowl of stew and picked up her spoon. Something had to be said, but what?

“He’s really great at climbing trees,” Henry said. “Scaled right up the oak in the clearing like he could fly.”

That sentence was all it took. Suddenly all the children were talking.

Alice chimed in. “His horse is enormous, and its backside goes up and down when it walks.” She shifted back and forth in her chair like she was back on her precarious animal perch.

“Did you see his clothes?” Sarah asked.

“I’m glad we don’t have to make all the boys that many layers,” Eugenia answered, flexing her fingers as if the very thought of sewing that much made her fingers cramp.

“Will Benedict need all those things when he starts working with Mr. Leighton?” one of the girls asked. Kit couldn’t tell which one it was because the table had erupted in a cacophony of words.

“Do you think he’d let me ride his horse before he leaves?”

“Did you see how tall his boots were?”

“I never want to wear that cloth he had crawling up his neck.”

“He knows how to dance, doesn’t he?”

Kit fought back laughter. She didn’t know which boy was horrified over a cravat, but that last question had absolutely been little Sophie. She was only four, but she was obsessed with anything romantic. There were paintings in the house of balls and couples courting—apparently the last occupant had been a bit of a romantic as well—and Sophie could spend hours in front of them, making up stories about the people in the paintings.

“Do you think I’ll grow to be that tall?”

“Is he going to court Mama Kit? He seemed to know her.”

Heat bloomed across Kit’s cheeks, and she ducked her head to hide the blush. Daphne’s chuckles rolled down from her position in the center of the table. Kit peeked up to glance at Jess sitting at the foot of the table. The blond woman wasn’t laughing, but she was wearing a smirk, clearly happy to see what Kit intended to do about the rampant curiosity in the room.

Kit hadn’t a clue.

More questions, more speculations, more observations bounced across the table until Arthur piped up with a question that brought the entire room to a freezing halt. “Father?”

All three women snapped their heads in Arthur’s direction. What to tell the children about their parents had been heavily debated when Kit and Daphne had started on this journey all those years ago. Should they know the situation? Be allowed to believe their parents were dead?

They’d gone with a simple version of the truth, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a way to convince them of the importance of being cautious. The fact was, illegitimate children met an untimely fate every day. They got unexplainably ill and died or had a strange accident. If the men paying Haven Manor to care for the children decided they wanted to be free of their obligation, it could be done easily enough.

No child deserved such a fate. They hadn’t asked to be born, hadn’t asked their parents to throw off the acceptable conventions of society, hadn’t chosen their lot in life. Kit and Daphne had decided it was their job to make up for as many of those unasked-for shortcomings as possible.

So they’d told the children a version of the truth.

Well, most of the children.

Kit’s gaze skittered over Benedict, the eldest of the children, sitting in the middle of the table.

Twelve young faces looked from Kit to Daphne and back again. While they’d all accepted Jess into the fold readily, she’d kept a certain distance and they all knew she hadn’t been there long. Kit and Daphne had been there from the beginning.

Kit cleared her throat. “No, Arthur, he is not your father.” She glanced around the table. “Nor is he anyone else’s. At least no one here or anyone we’ve ever met.”

Daphne stood and began gathering the dishes around her. “Finish your stew. I think it’s been a long day for everyone and a bit early to bed would be a good thing. Mama Jess, Mama Kit, and I will take care of the kitchen chores.”

The children shuffled around, seeing to their evening chores with quiet solemnity. As embarrassing as it had been, Kit wished they could go back to the riot of questions, the speculation about his relationship to Kit. Haven Manor was usually its own little bubble of life, but for tonight, that bubble had been popped by the reminder of harsh reality, and she wasn’t sure how to put it back together.

The brutal bite of reality wasn’t just lurking at the dining table. It was also waiting for Kit on the back porch.

Every night, once the children settled, the three women would gather outside, look down on the moon’s reflection in the lake, listen to the sounds of the forest at night, or, on nights like tonight, watch the rain fall in a curtain around them, creating their own little room away from the rest of the world.

Skipping the porch meeting wasn’t allowed unless illness was involved, so Kit dragged herself out there, braced for Jess to say she knew Kit had been hiding something about London.

“The bridge is going to be impassable.” Jess dropped one shoulder against a column and stuck her hand out into the rain. “If it rains all night, it could be days before the water goes down.”

“I’ll check the conditions tomorrow,” Kit said. It would likely only confirm what they all suspected, but it would get her away from the house for a few hours.

“He’s going to have to stay,” Daphne said quietly. “If he takes the long way back around to Marlborough, he’ll have nothing to do for days but wonder why we didn’t want him here.”

Jess sighed. “You’d want him to stay even if the sun was shining and we were in a drought. He’s not a lost puppy, Daphne.”

Color exploded across Daphne’s cheeks, and her nose lit up bright red. Kit bit her lip to keep from rushing to Daphne’s defense. Jess’s particular sense of dry, brusque humor didn’t seem to bother Daphne, even though it made her blush. In fact, over the past year, Daphne started trying to jibe back at Jess. The attempts were pitiful and more adorable than harsh, but Kit could also see the quiet confidence and strength growing in her friend with every attempt she made.

Perhaps Jess knew more about people than she let on.

“Perhaps not.” Daphne straightened her shoulders. “But he did save Henry, and from the way Alice spoke, the boy was in a dangerous situation indeed. We owe him our hospitality—what little we have of it anyway.”

Kit wanted desperately to argue. They all knew that Alice exaggerated the severity of things, tending to be one of the most serious children Kit had ever met. But the fact was, Henry had been in danger and Lord Wharton had saved him at the risk of injuring himself, and there was simply no way to repay that besides letting him stay at the manor until the road was passable.

Jess nodded. “Do we leave him in the kitchen or move him to the barn?”

“We can’t put him in the barn.” Daphne shuddered. “His horse is in there.”

“Then he’ll have company he knows,” Jess said with a shrug. “Horses are good for warmth.”

“So are fires,” Daphne muttered. “We’re not putting him outside like an animal.”

As much as Kit didn’t want to, she had to agree with Daphne on this one. One simply did not tell the heir to an earldom to bed down among the goats and chickens. “We don’t have a good reason to send him to the stable.”

Jess looked back and forth between Kit and Daphne. “Have you not considered what’s going to happen if he realizes what we’re doing? If he learns who these children are? We have to let him stay, but we have to keep him away from the children.”

Daphne paled. “How could he possibly learn who we are and who the children are? They barely even know who they are.”

“It would help matters,” Jess said as she folded her arms across her chest and sent Kit a pointed look, “if we knew a bit more about who he was.”

Kit sighed. Here it was. “I told you I had to hide from two thugs. Well, I took a shortcut through one of the houses.” She swallowed. “He was there. He helped me find a corridor to slip through.”

The sigh Daphne gave was dreamy and she looked as if she were about to melt off the porch and join the puddles on the lawn.

“What else?” Jess asked.

What else? Kit really didn’t know much about him. He was an aristocrat. She didn’t dally in that world any longer, only visited it occasionally to wreak havoc on those who needed it. Her world was the children, the manor, perhaps Nash and his wife Margaretta and a few of the men in Marlborough who came to the manor on occasion to help with repairs or other tasks the women couldn’t handle on their own.

But those men were nothing like Lord Wharton. He’d grown up with tutors, gone to school, joined gentlemen’s clubs, and rubbed shoulders with England’s most elite.

Kit gasped and her eyes flew to Jess’s. “He’s from London,” she choked out.

“Didn’t we already establish that?” Daphne asked.

They had, but Kit was only now realizing what that meant. The grim look on Jess’s face said she’d already put the pieces together.

Their visitor probably knew many of the children’s parents.

Never before had they needed to worry about that. The chances that the few country folk who met one or two of the children on their occasional ventures into town would recognize anything about the children wasn’t even enough of a risk to consider. But now . . .

Jess rubbed her hand over her mouth. “The girls are likely in no danger, but the boys—”

“He absolutely can’t meet John.” Kit’s knees were threatening to give out.

“Would one of you speak plainly?” Daphne said with a huff. “I can never follow these vague conversations.”

Kit swallowed and reached one hand out to grasp Daphne’s. “John looks exactly like his father.”

“And there’s a very good chance that Lord Wharton has at least a passing acquaintance with the man,” Jess added. “I knew who had fathered him the first time I saw him.”

Granted, Jess had trained herself to be more observant than the average person over the years, but as a maid in an aristocratic house in London, she would have had only the briefest of encounters with John’s father. Yet it had been enough.

The aristocratic world was small. How many of the children’s parents would Lord Wharton know? How much did the children look like their parents?

Jess pushed away from the column and started a slow pace around the covered area. “If it stops raining, we’ll be able to manage. We can keep the children in the garden or with the animals. Maybe give Lord Wharton access to the library during the day and let him sleep in the kitchen at night.” She gave Kit a hard look. “Are we in danger from this man?”

Kit hesitated before shaking her head. She didn’t really trust her instincts about people, finding it safer to simply live in a cocoon of suspicion, but Lord Wharton had made attempts to rescue her both socially and physically. She had a feeling the man had been about to intervene in the discussion with her father as well before she decided to leave the premises.

He’d left London in the middle of the Season to help his friend find his sister. And he hadn’t hesitated to rescue Henry from the tree. No, there was no reason to think Lord Wharton was anything other than a true gentleman, if an inconvenient one. “No. I don’t think he’d intentionally harm anyone.”

Jess nodded as if Kit’s assessment were gold. “Then all we have to do is keep him as ignorant as possible.” She blew out a long breath. “Shouldn’t be a problem at all.”

There were several moments of silence as each of them contemplated what their next few days would hold. A sudden exhaustion threatened to overwhelm Kit, and she turned toward the door, intending to go to bed.

“Not so fast,” Jess said, moving quickly to block Kit’s path. “You have some more sharing to do.”

“Start with running into a stranger’s house,” Daphne said. “And don’t leave anything out.”