This Duchess of Mine(100)

“If they’re still in London,” Ashmole cackled.

Villiers gave him a look.

“They’ll be here,” the butler said grudgingly. “Templeton wasn’t a man to share his profits.”

Villiers was in a carriage five minutes later. Generally, he spent at least a half-hour with his valet before leaving the house. Since he maintained the affectation of never wearing a wig, he demanded perfection in his hair, not to mention gleaming boots, a shirt the picture of snowy perfection…

Today he simply left the house.

What the hell had happened to the children?

The children, an obstinate little voice in the back of his mind reproached him, those same children whom you didn’t care a fig for a month ago.

Yes, those children. Why had Templeton run? Mrs. Jobber was kind, and had obviously provided a good home. But then his eyes narrowed. Why didn’t Mrs. Jobber have the other children? There were five more of them, after all. Why were they not placed together?

And what had happened two years ago, when Templeton had taken the oldest boy away to school? Villiers was quite certain that he’d never delivered any edicts about school. He’d avoided speaking or thinking about the children, in fact. He’d never asked Templeton for a report, the way he did on his wheat fields, or his tenants.

Guilt was such a tiresome emotion.

The village of Wapping seemed to live on the River Thames. Other places had houses and perhaps a river to the side. In Wapping, everything started at the river, and then jumbled up the bank any old how. There was a charming breeze, smelling of mud and dying fish.

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.”