Taming of the Beast (Scandalous Affairs #2) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,48
place at the empty stove.
Faye hesitated. He’d simply turn the exchange over to her? He’d allow her control of the meeting and himself step back? It was an empowerment that did wicked little things to her heart’s normal tempo. It—
“Ye expectin’ someone to pull yer chair out fer ye?” Colb snapped, effectively dousing the warm, fuzzy thoughts distracting her.
Gone was all hint of the earlier warmth the stranger had shown Tynan.
Adjusting her bag on her arm, Faye hastened over. “No. Not at all.”
And yet, as she hurried to claim one of those seats, Tynan briefly quit his place at the hearth and pulled that rickety wood chair out for her. He winked, once more in a show of encouragement, and oddly, that glide of his dark lashes, that offering of support, strengthened her.
The moment she sat, Tynan returned to the place he’d vacated, surrendering the exchange over to Faye once more.
Grabbing the other chair and seating himself upon it, Mr. Colb stuck his thumbs in the waistband of his trousers and glared her way. “Well?”
There could be no doubting the man before her would more happily send her to the devil than welcome her here in his household. And the only reason was being as magnanimous as he was, entertaining her and her questions, was because of the silent figure standing as a guard of sorts over the exchange.
Faye cleared her throat. “I am looking for information about the Lost Lords of London,” she explained as she fished out her notebook and pencil.
“Lost Lords,” Colb snorted on a laugh. “Well, ain’t that the cutest, cleverest title?” It had been the one used in all the papers and whispered about in every drawing room and ballroom. “Pretty words used by the”—he peeled his lips in a sneer—“fancy sort.” He gave her a pointed once-over in a telltale nod that he knew precisely what station Faye belonged to. “They weren’t lost. Taken, they were. Kidnapped. Stolen.”
Her fingers tightened around the pencil in her fingers, the scrap of charcoal biting into the thin fabric of her fine leather gloves. Yes, that was precisely what had become of too many children. For the world, it was far easier to think of it in terms of the boys being lost, than assigning true words about the fate they’d suffered. “Yes, you are right,” she murmured.
“’Course I am. And they weren’t all boys either. And not all lords.”
“Not all—”
“Some were from wealthy gentry. They had the look of the fancy sort enough that when they were sold to Mac Diggory, he could be convinced that they were of a grander station than the one they were actually born to.”
Mac Diggory. That was the name of the hated man from the streets who’d had an obsession with the peerage and, worse, in building an army of children, filling the ranks with boys and girls who possessed those desired roots.
“Do you know what happened to any of those children?” she asked quietly. “Are there…more? Lost children whom society does not know about?”
“I heard there were. A lot died,” he said with a blunt matter-of-factness at odds with the actual words of tragedy and travesty he spoke. “They weren’t fit for this life.” He pinned another sharp look on her face, his meaning clear.
She no more belonged here than those boys she now inquired about.
“Some found their way back to their families. A handful are eking out an existence here now. Only rumors and myths around who they actually are. Time confused it all. If the children spoke too well and carried themselves different than the people really born here, then everyone just took it for fact that those ones were Diggory’s boys… and girls,” he reminded her.
“The duchess,” she said automatically. Everyone knew the story of the Duke of Wilkinson and the illegitimate daughter who’d lived on the streets and ultimately become a bookkeeper at the notorious gaming club the Hell and Sin, before she’d gone and married the Duke of Somerset. “Yes, I…” She stopped herself from revealing too much about her familial connection to that family, from acknowledging her brother had married the sister-in-law of one of the Duke of Wilkinson’s bastard-born children. “I am aware of the duchess.”
“Yea, but there were others. Other girls, that is.”
Settling into their exchange, the stocky fellow dragged his chair over and let his elbows fall to the table.
So many stories. So much evil. And yet, all of them remained Polite Society’s great secrets.