He grunted. “I likes me life well enough.”
“But might you be interested in something else if you could be trained for it?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps an indoor servant in a great house? A clerk of some sort? It would depend on your talents, your ability to learn. If you qualify, I am quite sure I can help you to such a position.”
“Qualify? What’s that mean?”
“That you meet certain conditions.”
“Such as?”
“That you are currently free of family obligations and you are willing to work hard at matters that may be totally foreign to you.”
“Got no wife or young’uns,” he said.
“Good. It is not necessary, but it would help immensely if you are literate,” she said.
“Literate?” he repeated.
“Can you read and write?” Gerald asked.
“Some.” He picked up his spoon, gripping it much as she had seen farm lads do in the country. He now had the spoon in one hand, a chunk of bread in the other, and he talked around a mouthful of food. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why you here? Suggestin’ such?”
Retta held his gaze as she spoke. “To be perfectly honest, to win a bet. But also as a sort of social experiment, if you will.”
Having finished his meal, he sat back slightly, reached for the ale with one hand and gestured with his other hand for her to continue. Suddenly, it seemed that he was in charge of this interview.
She explained the terms of the bet.
He looked at her skeptically. “Don’t know as I’d like ta be party ta this here bet. Sounds kinda silly ta me. An’ what’cha mean by ‘experiment’ anyways?”
Retta shoved her own glass aside and leaned forward to speak more persuasively. “I believe, and I should like to prove, that often it is merely education and circumstances—happenstance—that account for differences between people of one class or another.”
The man looked at Gerald. “Is she serious?”
Gerald nodded. “She is.”
“You win a bet. But what’s in it fer me?”
“You will be amply compensated for your time. And presumably you will, in five months, be qualified for something more lucrative than dock work.”
He rose. “Ye won’t mind if I think this over some? Right now, I gotta get back ta work.”
Retta took a card from her reticule and handed it to him. “I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity. Come around by midday the day after tomorrow if you are inclined to accept our offer.”
Chapter 3
For the rest of that day and into the evening, Jake thought of little else but Lady Henrietta and her strange proposal. Even as he willed himself to sleep in a shabby room he shared with two other already snoring workers, the matter continued to dominate his musings. To start with, he was intrigued by the idea of a woman’s actually negotiating the issue herself. A good-looking woman at that. Not that Jake underestimated what women were capable of doing. On the Iberian Peninsula, some of the smartest and fiercest partisan fighters he had known were women. But to find a lady of the ton presuming to present her argument so forcefully in a male environment was unique in his experience, though he did note that her brother’s accompanying her had lent a modicum of propriety.
So she wanted to train a duke’s son in the ways of society, eh? He grinned at that thought. This could prove to be very entertaining . . . He quickly sobered. The whole scheme was ridiculous.
However, the next evening when he informed his immediate superior in the Foreign Office of his meeting with the Blakemoor siblings, Colonel Lord Peter Fenton did not think it so ridiculous at all. The two met once a week at some facility—usually a pub—situated far away from both the docks and establishments likely to be patronized by members of the ton. To preserve Jake’s anonymity and blend in, both were dressed in the manner of common workers, though in considerably cleaner attire than most of that rank.
Located in “the city,” that oldest section of London, this particular pub catered to a motley clientele: day workers, some clerks or scriveners in law offices, a few dustmen, and a chimney sweep or two—as well as two prostitutes plying their trade. These last had seen Jake and his companion as likely targets, but the two men had laughed them off with a vague “Maybe later.” A group in a far corner sat around a man with a concertina loudly singing ballads—off key and off-color—the lyrics eliciting loud hoots of laughter. The sawdust on the floor emitted the faint odor of spilled ale and wine. Light from several candles failed to permeate the dark entirely. Jake and Peter Fenton sat at a small table in a dark corner in the rear; a short candle in pewter dish splashed feeble light between them.
Like Jake, Fenton was a younger son—of a marquis rather than a duke. The two men had gone to school and then university together, and they had both served first in India and then in the Peninsula, Fenton as one of Wellington’s staff officers, Jake as a “corresponding” officer gathering information among the locals or spying behind enemy lines. In any but the most formal military situations, the two conversed as the long-standing friends that they were. Fenton, as commander of the current investigation, was the only person in England who knew of Jake’s undercover work now that Wellington had returned to Paris and the secretary himself was on his way to Vienna.
Fenton laughed heartily as Jake finished his report. “She wants to make you a gentleman? You? Impossible. Your tutors could not do it. The masters at Winchester tried. So did the dons at Oxford. Even your housemates there failed, though we did our collective best.”
“Go ahead. Laugh if you will,” Jake said in mock umbrage. “As I recall, it was your idea to put that goat in the headmaster’s office.”
Fenton grinned, then his expression sobered. “I know Lady Henrietta. Danced with her at Almack’s once and at the Messington ball two weeks ago. Pretty, but a bit aloof. Inherits a bundle one day. Said to be something of a bluestocking.”
“Yet she entered into this ludicrous bet,” Jake said.
“That does not quite fit the picture, does it? But she may be offering us an opportunity we cannot pass up.”
“How?”
“If you were to be lodged in Blakemoor House, it would give us more access to persons that we find rather interesting. You know, along with Richter’s being a footman in Trentham’s London residence, which is in the same neighborhood, by the way.”
“Richter was a footman before he joined the Guards,” Jake protested. “You are suggesting I pretend to be a dockworker pretending to learn the manners and speech of a gentleman! I have already slipped a time or two on the dock, though no one noticed.”
“I have confidence in your ability to charm your way past any mistakes.”
“And if this plan fails?”
Fenton sat at an angle to the table and idly twirled his empty