“How kind of you to volunteer to show me the home,” Lady Beckinhall said. “I vow the prospect of inspecting children’s beds fills me with wonder.”
“Does it indeed, ma’am?” Winter replied woodenly. He turned on his heel and strode to the stairs, starting up them. His worry for Silence—both her person and the harm she might do the home—was ever constant and now he must pander to this woman.
There was a pattering and a breathless voice behind him. “My! Will this be the five-minute tour?”
Winter stopped and turned.
Lady Beckinhall stood, panting a bit, three stairs below him. From his higher vantage point he had an intimate view down her bodice. Her plump breasts were mounded softly, the cleft between them shadowy, mysterious, and far too alluring.
He looked away. “Pardon, my lady. I did not mean to make you run after me.”
“No, of course you didn’t,” she replied.
He glanced at her swiftly. The lady’s blue eyes were watching him mockingly.
Winter sighed silently and mounted the stairs at a slower pace. The next floor held a short, cramped hall with three doors. He opened the first and stood back to let Lady Beckinhall enter.
She swept in and glanced around. “What is this?”
“The children’s beds you were so eager to inspect,” he said without inflection. “This is the boys’ dormitory. As you can see it is in need of repairs.”
She glanced at him over her shoulder and then around the room. The ceiling was low, stains from previous leaks in the roof prominent. Two rows of narrow cots lined each wall. “But you’ll soon be moving into a new home, won’t you?”
He nodded. “That is our hope. I believe, however, that there is still a need for funds to pay for furnishings for the new building.”
“Hmm.” Her murmur was noncommittal.
They needed her money. Winter inhaled. “Would you like to see the girls’ room?”
Lady Beckinhall raised elegant eyebrows mockingly. “Would I?”
Tamping down an urge to reply bluntly, he led her out of the room and into the next, which was nearly identical.
She paced to the far end of the room, peering at one of the cots lining the wall. “It’s very Spartan.”
“Yes.”
Lady Beckinhall delicately touched the threadbare blanket on one of the beds with her fingertips. “Well, the coverlets leave much to be desired, but at least the beds are roomy enough for the children here.”
Winter cleared his throat. “This dormitory houses some seventeen children. The children sleep two or three to a bed.”
She swiveled in an abrupt movement, her rich burgundy skirts sweeping the bare boards of the floor. “Why?”
He looked her in the eye, this aristocrat who’d never known want, and said gently, “Because it’s warmer at night.”
He could see the logical question form in her mind and then her swift glance at the tiny fireplace. The coal scuttle was nearly empty beside it.
She looked back at him, and to her credit, she didn’t try flippancy. “I see.”
“Do you, my lady?” Perhaps it was his impatience coming to a head. Perhaps it was his very real worry for Silence, but suddenly he was tired of sophisticated sparring. Of wasting his meager time on beautiful, frivolous women.
When he spoke again his voice was hard. “They crowd into the beds at night and huddle close, but the hearths aren’t big enough to keep the entire room warm, not with the thin walls. One of the maids must rouse herself in the middle of the night to stoke the fire again. The children who have been living with us awhile are well fed. They are fine, even if the night is cold.”
“And the others?” she whispered.
“If they have come new, often—usually, in fact—they’re thin and weak from starvation,” Winter said. “They haven’t the plumpness of a healthy child. The plumpness that keeps a child warm at night. Most do well after several months of being fed good, wholesome food. But for some it is too late. Those do not wake in the morning.”
She stared at him, her face pale. “I thought you were supposed to tell me how sweet the children are. To woo my money with gentle words and flattery.”
He shrugged. “You seem like a woman who has had more than enough flattery in her life.”
She nodded once and swept past him.
He stared after her, startled. “Where are you going?”
“I think I’ve seen all that I need to, Mr. Makepeace,” she said. “Good day.”
Winter shook his head, disgusted with himself. Every day Silence lived at that pirate’s home, the orphanage was in imminent peril of losing what funding it got from these aristocrats. All the more need, then, to placate women like Lady Beckinhall. The home needed money and if the only way to get it was by toadying up to wealthy widows, well then, he ought to toady and be happy.
Instead, he’d just driven away a potential patroness.
Fool.
LATER THAT NIGHT Silence nervously touched the ruching that decorated the neckline of her new dress. It really was lovely—the loveliest dress she’d ever worn. Before William’s death she had worn colors, but she had usually dressed in brown or gray. Sedate colors, practical colors for a woman who, when she needed to go somewhere, did so by her own feet. London was a grimy city.
Certainly she’d never worn bright indigo blue. She turned a bit before the full-length mirror that had been brought into her rooms. The silk seemed to shimmer and change, sometimes more purple, sometimes more blue.
“It’s simply grand, ma’am,” Fionnula sighed from where she sat on a footstool near the mirror.
The maid had helped her to dress and had pulled back her hair into a knot with a few locks carefully curled at her temples and nape.