Then Toby managed to find a way up on to the roofs of the decayed old mansion and Lord Carrowe had been so furious with him they’d had to leave that house as well, so here they were, back on the road again. The traffic was stubbornly blocked on the way to their next temporary lodging for the night. Most businessmen still in London now summer had finally arrived seemed to be fleeing the city for the villages around it to spend time with their family. She promised herself she would find somewhere cool and clean and suitable for a longer stay as soon as she had her breath back and got a decent night’s sleep. She could use the few days Lord Carrowe had offered them at his mother’s nearly restored house to regroup and decide what to do next.
‘I’m glad we had to leave Carrowe House, Mama. It was boring there when Lady Aline left for Worthing. It would be so much better if she stayed with us.’
‘Not for her,’ Hetta said as she wiped beads of perspiration from her forehead and wished she was enjoying a summer by the seaside as well as her new friend—at least there was one Haile she would like to meet again. ‘Lady Aline’s mama and twin sisters are in Worthing for the summer and who would not prefer to be by the sea on a day like this?’ she said with a gesture at the shouting, overheated drivers and unnerved horses outside the small windows of the ramshackle hackney.
‘Lord Carrowe is very stuffy. I don’t see how I could have harmed his roof when it was already full of holes.’
‘You could have gone through one of them or fallen off altogether, or been snatched up by one of your grandfather’s foes while you wandered around such a half-empty and insecure place heedless of any danger. I try not to be forever scolding and picking at you, but really, Toby—must you do everything you should not simply because someone forbade it?’
Toby eyed his mama and seemed to consider the question seriously. ‘Probably,’ he admitted at last. ‘How else can I find out why I’m not supposed to do it?’
‘Ask. Get a rational explanation and listen for once, because right now I have trouble believing you have any brains and never mind being clever.’
‘Lord Carrowe didn’t give me any reasons at all, let alone a rational one,’ Toby pointed out with his usual ruthless logic and carefully ignored her slight.
He was right. The gentleman had lost his impressive Haile temper and ordered them to his mother’s house in Hampstead for the night so he could wash his hands of them with a clear conscience. There was something to be said for being the daughter of Sir Hadrian Porter, the King’s discreet and coolly efficient roving agent, when even an earl didn’t dare risk his wrath and put his daughter and grandson out on the street. It was her father’s job to keep his country’s diplomats and spies safe when the usual threats and dangers they faced became too acute to ignore. Lord Carrowe didn’t know the full extent of her father’s powers, but he knew enough to be careful, Hetta recalled with a frown. She shivered as she remembered the wary and brooding feel of poor, half-ruinous old Carrowe House during the day and the creaks and moans of the crumbling old mansion during the night, not much chance of her sleeping for long amid all the Gothic brooding and unease of an old house where murder stole in and out without anybody knowing how.
‘Hmm, perhaps you’re right,’ she admitted, ‘but now I have the impossible task of finding somewhere for us to stay where you won’t cause chaos before we hardly have our feet over the threshold, my son. You are seven and three-quarters, Toby, but at this rate you won’t live to see eight and I am tired of all these accidents you keep falling into.’
‘The rat wasn’t an accident,’ Toby muttered mutinously.
‘I know,’ she said dourly.
‘And you didn’t want to stay at the Dowager Lady Porter’s London residence either, Mama,’ he pointed out slyly, imitating her grandmother’s stiff and disapproving butler’s hushed reverence for the place.
‘No, but I would rather we had somewhere to go to next before it became impossible to stay another moment, and I would prefer it if my grandmother was still speaking to me as well.’
‘Why? You didn’t like her either and we would never have met Lady Aline if we stayed at stuffy Porter House with Great-Grandmama frowning at us all the time and looking down her nose at you. I’m glad I found the poor rat in a trap and let it go in her horrid drawing room when she had her horrible friends to tea. She did nothing but blame you for everything from the moment we got inside her stuffy old house and I never want to see her again. You can’t live there when I go to school, Mama. You would hate it and so would I.’
Hetta met her son’s bright blue eyes and managed a wobbly smile to reassure him she didn’t hold that particular piece of mischief against him and a sceptical lift of her brows to let him know she could fight her own battles, thank you. Toby was offering her something nobody had since her own mother died: unconditional love and real concern for her feelings. ‘Her visitors will spread the story of your misdeeds and I don’t want the world to think you a monster, love, even if you are one.’
Toby seemed immensely cheered by the notion and Hetta didn’t have the heart to berate him for his sins again. She blinked hard at the unfamiliarity of being protected by her own son. Nobody had truly worried about how she felt about the world since her mother died. Her father made sure she was physically safe, then went on with his own life. And her late husband had been a prime example of April when he’d wooed her, December when they’d wed. She winced at the memory of Bran shouting in his cups that she’d ruined his life. At least she’d still had enough spirit left to argue he’d reneged on every promise he made to love and cherish her for life if she would elope with him. Even now she flinched at how desolate she’d felt when he staggered to his feet and glared down at her, challenging her with his superior height and strength to blame him for using his looks and charm to bend a lonely schoolroom miss to his will, even if he had done exactly that. He didn’t meet her eyes and carry on with the lie, but belched and slammed out of the house with a lewd comment about finding a woman with some go in her instead of a useless little milksop who still cried for her mother. At least she had faced him down. It hurt to know he’d wed her because he thought her father and grandmother would relent and advance his career once their marriage was a fait accompli. She was seventeen to his two and twenty when they’d wed over the anvil.
Her father had never laid a hand on her in anger, but he seemed to think she was too grown up to need him to tell her he loved her, even when he sent her back to England after his wife died. Hetta was sure he had loved her mother in a vague this woman fills the gap in my life so comfortably I must love her sort of fashion, and he probably loved his daughter as well, but he had no idea of how to comfort a grieving child when he was feeling bereft himself. He was so relieved to leave her with his mother and bury himself in work again that he’d ignored all her letters pleading to be allowed to join him on his travels and escape the constant criticism and disapproval of her grandmother and the stiff-necked governess hired especially to teach her to be the perfect English gentlewoman so she could attract a stern English gentleman one day. No wonder she had spent most of her time at Porter House fantasising about being adored by a dashing hero out of a Gothic romance. Lieutenant Champion had looked like the answer to a maiden’s prayer, but appearances were deceptive.
She had been even more lonely in the neat little cottage in Lyme Regis Brandon had bought to store his wife in. Once he realised none of his plans would bear fruit he tried to live almost as freely as if he’d never met and married her. Bran would come home, slake the lust of however many weeks he had spent at sea without a woman on her, then walk away whistling to find the knowing and flirtatious sort of women he preferred to his wife. Never again, she swore to herself as she shook off those uncomfortable memories. Never again would a man woo her, then walk away as if she was nothing. If not for his Admiralty masters’ raised eyebrows Bran would have left her in Lyme that day and never gone back and she would not have Toby. She would not undo a day of her failed romance if it