meetings with the staff. Nurse Betts was on hand to answer questions. She’s a well-spoken lass, and kind. I noticed her kindness. I was struck by it.” He turned appealing eyes to us. “You must understand that in my lifetime, both before I was respectable and after I became a vicar, I have encountered the most deplorable people. Those who pretend to be kind usually are scheming to take every penny you have and possibly your life. The exception has been Nurse Betts.”
“Ah,” Lady Cynthia said. “Love ensued?”
“Not quite.” Mr. Fielding’s laugh was breathless. “I have never allowed myself to trust enough for that. But I liked her, quite a lot. I first asked her if she’d take a walk with me, and as we strolled, we talked. Talked about many things. I saw her again, and again. For about, let me see, four months, we have been ambling through London’s parks and conversing about . . . everything. I’ve never suggested more to her—what do I have to offer? The living here is not much. She makes a better wage at the Hospital, in fact, and she dotes on the lads and lasses and doesn’t wish to leave them. Besides, she is an angel, and I—” Mr. Fielding gave us a self-deprecating smile. “Well, ladies, I am not. The collar notwithstanding.” He touched it as though it pinched his throat.
Mr. Fielding might deny falling in love, but the tension in his voice, his body, spoke the lie. I could see he cared deeply for Nurse Betts, and that fact made me like him better.
“You said you feared she has gone searching for the children herself,” I said.
“Yes.” His answer was quiet. “She is that sort.”
I subsided. Lord Russell had lied about the fostering, or at least his records did. Why? I knew the perils children could face in London, which was why the Foundling Hospital, as grim as it was, existed. The children were safe within its walls. Lonely and afraid, yes, but bodily safe.
If it were no longer the haven it should be, and Nurse Betts discovered this, she might be in grave danger, indeed.
But then, so might Mr. Fielding be. He’d marched into the office of the director and demanded to be told about the missing children. One would have to be terribly unobservant not to notice the connection between Mr. Fielding and Nurse Betts. Mrs. Compton in the kitchen had known, and now feared for her.
Something was going on in the Foundling Hospital, possibly something terrible. It made me sick to think of.
Cynthia must have agreed with me, because her eyes had gone quiet. “I’d say we need to find this Nurse Betts,” she said. “The sooner the better.”
“I agree, dear lady.” Mr. Fielding turned to me, resigned but resolute. “What do you wish me to do?”
Cynthia also looked at me expectantly. It ought to be comical, a vicar and a highborn lady asking a cook to give them orders, but the situation was too dire for amusement.
“Please keep searching for her, Mr. Fielding,” I said. “Go where she would have gone, to the places she told you were special, anywhere she mentioned, even in idle conversation. Lady Cynthia and I will also look, and question. I have made a friend of one of the cooks, and I plan to try to speak to some of the maids who work in the wards. They might have seen or noticed something without knowing it.”
“Exactly,” Cynthia said. “Mrs. H. told me of the peculiar practice of people observing the kiddies at tea or dinner or some such. I’ll put on my visit-the-charities gown and go myself. Who knows? Awful people might be using the opportunity to sweep a child away.”
Mr. Fielding’s expression was far from that of a man of God. I saw rage in his eyes, raw and unyielding.
“If they have, hell will be too good a place for them. I was one of those children once, ladies, without the good fortune of being taken in by a charity. My mother left me on the street as quite a little fellow, and only by the grace of God did I survive. The man Daniel and I called ‘Father’—Mr. Carter—only let us into his house because we could work, though he turned out to be a decent enough cove, for a villain. That was short-lived. In a few years, he was dead, and we were out again, avoiding filth any way we could, until I was fortunate, several