Claiming the Ashbrooke Heir. Mary Nichols

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СКАЧАТЬ left the busy streets behind and turned down an alley close to the river. Here the houses were huddled drunkenly together, and the air was filled with the stench of the river and the brewery close by. Ragged children played in the gutter and a couple of stray dogs fought over something loathsome. Annette hurried past them, in at one of the doors, and up the uncarpeted stairs to a room at the top of the house. She could hear Timmy crying.

      ‘Mama’s back,’ she said, dropping her parcel on the table and crossing the room to pick him up. He was soaked. ‘Oh, you poor thing. We shall soon have you dry and smelling sweet again.’

      She sat on her bed to change him, annoyed with Mrs Grosse for not seeing to him when she was being paid to do so. When he was once more clean and dry, she fed him and sat cuddling him, staring at the filthy walls of her room and musing on how she had come to such a pass. This was the second home she had had since leaving Riseborough Hall, if you could call this hovel a home, but while she had her son she would do anything, put up with anything. He was the be all and end all of her existence.

      If only Mama were still alive! But if she had been Annette would not have been working at Riseborough Hall, and she certainly would not be where she was now. They would still be in their cosy little home in Islington, running a school for young ladies, readying them for Society. There had been one or two younger children too, and it had been Annette’s task to teach them the rudiments of reading and writing and how to enjoy themselves in play.

      It was that ability to relate to young children that had led Lady Somers, the mother of one of the pupils, to recommend her to Lady Ashbrooke, who had been looking for a nursery maid for her two young children. It had been the week after Mama’s funeral, and Annette had been sitting in the parlour after they had all gone, knowing that without an income she could not hope to stay in the house. Her plight had been brought home to her very forcefully when the landlord had given her notice to quit. A young girl of fifteen could not possibly live alone, he had told her, and if she had no one to take her in then she had best make her way to the workhouse. Lady Somers’ intervention had been a godsend.

      At Riseborough Hall she had been given two grey cotton dresses and several white aprons and a cap which constituted her uniform. Nearly four years she had been there, helping Miss Burnley, the children’s governess, to look after Isabelle, who had been four years old when she first arrived and Harriet who was two. She had grown to love them, fitting into the regime of the house-hold, glad to have a roof over her head and a small wage, and to learn a little of the ways of the aristocracy, for whom money meant very little and family reputation everything. She had sullied that, so her ladyship had said. No, she had not, she told herself. It had been Jeremy who had done that, but she was the one being punished.

      She went to the table and opened the parcel she had brought in with her. If it had not been for the gentleman rescuing it, it would have been trampled in the dirt and then she would have been in trouble. It contained two sheets, petticoats, stockings, underclothes—all of which needed mending. The work had to be done and returned the next day, when she would be paid two shillings and sixpence.

      ‘Do a good job and we might find more for you to do,’ the housekeeper at one of the grand houses on St Stephen’s Street had told her.

      Thankful to find something after knocking on doors for the best part of the morning, she had been almost triumphant as she’d carried the parcel away and hurried home to Timmy. She had work of a sort and they would not starve. Not today at any rate. She took the first sheet and her workbox to the window, where the light was better, and set to work. Her fingers were busy, but it left her brain with nothing to do but reflect on the past.

      Had Jeremy really condoned what had happened to her at the hands of his autocratic mother? ‘You may have that,’ she had said, pushing five gold coins along the table towards her, as if she could not bear to put them directly into her hand. ‘That does not mean I believe your story, not for a minute. I do not. You are nothing but a harlot and not fit to have contact with my innocent children.’ Annette had known it was no good expecting Jeremy to back her story because, according to Miss Burnley, he had been packed off to join his elder brother who was in Spain, fighting the war against Napoleon Bonaparte. To keep him out of her clutches, she supposed.

      Oh, how she had longed to fling the coins back at the woman. But fortunately her good sense had come to her aid and she had pocketed it, telling herself it would be repaid in full one day. One day she would make Lady Ashbrooke eat her words.

      Her ladyship had known perfectly well that she had no family, that there was not a soul in the world to whom she could turn, and yet she had given her only half an hour to pack and leave—and that in the middle of one of the harshest winters anyone could remember. Now, in the stifling heat of a July afternoon, with her child sleeping the sleep of the innocent and her hands busy with her needle, she could almost feel the cold.

      She had left the house on foot, carrying her portmanteau which, except for a few books which had been too heavy to carry, contained the sum of her possessions—including the four gowns she had taken to Riseborough with her and not been allowed to wear. ‘Too grand for a nursery maid,’ Miss Burnley had said. What had lain before her was unknown and terrifying, and she had hardly noticed the snow seeping into her shoes, or that her toes and fingers were numb.

      She had been passing Becky Musgrove’s cottage on the edge of the village when the woman herself had opened her door and called out to her. ‘Annie! Annie Ryston, where are you off to in this weather?’

      Becky was elderly and tiny, with a mop of almost white hair, cornflower-blue eyes and a rosy complexion. She had once been nurse to Charles and Jeremy, the two older Ashbrooke boys by his lordship’s first wife, and now lived a simple but comfortable life in the cottage, on a pension provided by Lord Ashbrooke.

      ‘I am going to catch the carrier’s wagon.’

      ‘You’ll not do that today, m’dear, the roads are impassable. Didn’t you know that?’

      ‘Oh, no. Now what am I to do?’

      ‘Best come in and sit by the fire; you look frozen.’

      She turned and followed the old lady into the cottage. It was a very tiny dwelling, but sparkling clean, and a good fire burned in the grate of the living room. The table had been laid for one and a delicious smell was coming from a pot suspended over the flames. She moved towards the warmth and held out her frozen hands.

      ‘Sit down, child,’ Becky invited. ‘And take off those shoes and stockings or you will catch your death of cold.’ Taking Annette’s cloak, she hung it over the back of a chair close to the fire. ‘Whatever possessed you to come out on a day like this? I cannot imagine what her ladyship was thinking of to allow it.’

      ‘It was her ladyship sent me out,’ she said, divesting herself of her wet footwear.

      Becky looked towards the portmanteau, which had been dropped by the door. ‘You’ve never been turned off?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Goodness me, whatever have you done to deserve that?’

      She looked up at the sympathetic woman and blinked back tears. ‘Been a gullible fool.’

      ‘Oh.’ The old lady digested this with apparent understanding, then she said, ‘It was Jeremy, I suppose?’

      ‘I’m not saying.’

      ‘You do not have to. I have seen him about the estate with you and the children and I can guess. Of the two boys in my care, he was by СКАЧАТЬ