"I expect you know of them charities, though, don't you?" she demanded.

"Something of them," Tom admitted, thinking that most of what he knew about London charities wasn't very cheerful.

"You take her!" Mrs. Fishpole said, giving Meggin a little push. The girl gasped and tried to dart behind her skirts again.

"What?"

"You'd better take her. She'll be better off in East Riding than here in London. We looked after our little ones, back home. Here, it's all I can do to keep her out of the way. And she's getting bigger, don't you see?"

"Yes, but-"

"You'll have to do it," Mrs. Fishpole said decisively. "I can't keep her safe anymore. She sleeps there, you see-" she nodded toward a heap of rags in the corner. "But she's getting on towards five now. I don't know how much longer they'll let her stay in the corner, and the older she gets, the more worry I have, to be honest."

Tom could see the truth of that.

"I've done my best with her. I've taught her thank you, and she's learned to say please as well. She knows the difference between right or wrong. I didn't want her turning out like her mum. So you can tell Rumwald that I did my charitable duty with her."

Meggin made another concerted effort to get behind Mrs. Fishpole's skirts and hide from Tom.

"It's not that I won't miss you," Mrs. Fishpole said, putting the rolling pin down on the counter and pulling Meggin around before her. "Because I will, Meggie. You know I will. You're a willing little girl, and you've always been cheerful."

Meggin was blinking very hard. "I don't want to go nowhere."

"You've never carried on and screamed the way some of them children do. But I can't keep you here, Meggie. It's not safe. And you know I can't take you home." She looked up at Tom. "Meggin used to live with me, but Mr. Fishpole died three years ago, and I went to live with my sister-in-law. Her husband doesn't want to take in an orphan, not given the circumstances of her birth and all."

Tom nodded and held out his hand. "Meggin, would you like to come with me to visit my brother? And then after a visit, we'll go home to my village, and I'll find you a family of your own to live with." And between now and then, he swore to himself, I will not even glance at the children sweeping the streets.

"No!" Meggin wailed, big fat tears rolling down her cheeks. "I don't go home with no men, I don't! I belong with you, Mrs. Fishpole." She ran at the cook, butting her head against her legs and wrapping her arms around her skirts, just as a hosteller burst into the kitchen shouting something about a sausage and fish pie.

Mrs. Fishpole ignored him, kneeling down on the none-too-clean floor. "I'll come see my old da in East Riding, and I'll see you as well. But I can't let you sleep in the kitchen anymore, Meggie."

"No one will see me," Meggin wailed. "I'll stay so small. And I didn't talk to him, I didn't! I'll sell all my apples to ladies after this."

"We needs more sausage pies," the hosteller broke in. "You don't want as Mr. Sigglet to have to come here. You know he doesn't like the brat."

Mrs. Fishpole picked up Meggin and held her against her chest for a moment. Her jaw was set very firmly, and Tom had the impression she would never recover from the mortification if she let a single tear fall. "If I'd had a daughter, Meggie, I'd want her to be just like you," she said. "Now you go with the Reverend here because he'll keep you safe. I can see it in his face. I want you to grow up to be a good girl."

"I won't!" Meggin cried. "I wants to stay here!"

Mrs. Fishpole handed Meggin to Tom. "You'd best go," she said roughly. "She's the most biddable girl usually." For a moment her face crumpled and then she spun around and screamed at the hosteller: "Go on then! Fetch me a sausage pie from the pantry. What are you, crippled?"

Tom held the struggling little body close and walked out of the door to the accompliment of a howl of despair from Meggin, who was holding out her hands and struggling to get free.

"I don't want to go!" she cried. "I don't want to be a good girl. I want to be a cook, just like you, Mrs. Fishpole!"

And then, heartbreakingly, "Please?"

After listening to the pounding on the front door for a good ten minutes, Lina decided that Leke must have given the servants the evening off. Finally she traipsed downstairs dressed only in a French negligee, hoping that it would be one of Rees's more prudish acquaintances so that she could watch him dither with embarrassment.

She carefully arranged her negligee so that the lace bits showed off all her best assets and pulled open the door with a flourish.

But it wasn't anyone she'd seen before. A man dressed in a dusty black cloak was standing on the doorstep, clutching a sobbing child and accompanied by a sulky ostler with two boxes on his shoulder.

"Who the devil are you?" she demanded, knowing exactly who he must be. Rees only had one relative in the world, after all, and the man had Rees's nose and mouth. But Rees never said that his oh-so-proper brother was married, nor that he was encumbered with a child. And he certainly never mentioned that the man was paying them a visit.

"Thomas Holland," he said with a bow. "This is Meggin, and these are my boxes, as I've come to stay with my brother. More to the point, Madam, who are you?"

At that moment, the child, who had been eying Lina's negligee with her swollen eyes, said in a choking wail, "I knows who she is! She's the Whore of Babylon, she is! Mrs. Fishpole told me all about her. You's lied to Mrs. Fishpole, and taken me to a house of sin!" She started screaming as loud as she could and kicking Rees's brother in the leg.

Lina raised an eyebrow. This looked as if it might be a most complicated situation. She opened the door further and stepped back. "I gather the vicar is returning home," she said sweetly. "If I'm the Whore of Babylon, wouldn't I be dressed in scarlet and purple? Let me see... if I'm the Whore of Babylon, wouldn't that make you John the Baptist?" She giggled and turned to go upstairs. "I suppose you can choose whatever bedchamber you wish, although I have to tell you that they are not as clean as one might wish. And I haven't any idea about the condition of the nursery."

She kept walking as she climbed the stairs, raising her voice above Meggin's howls. "Rees will return sometime this evening, and until then you shall have to entertain yourself."

"Where are the servants?" Rees's brother asked, sounding desperate.

Lina ignored the question, pausing on her way up the stairs. "I may not be dressed for the part, but I just realized that I do know what the Whore of Babylon would sing. Popish hymns, wouldn't it be? That's what my father would have said. Alas, I don't know any, so this will have to do." And she burst into a magnificent rendition of O God Our Help in Ages Past.

Tom stared up at her, stupefied. Even Meggin stopped crying. The music rolled off the walls. She had the largest voice that Tom had ever heard, a gloriously rich, velvety, dangerous voice. At the very top of the stairs she paused and grinned down at him, looking the picture of a godless wench, her body softly gleaming through peach-colored silk, hair rippling past her shoulders, ruby lips laughing. "This is my favorite verse," she announced. "Do pay attention. A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone. Short as the watch that ends the night, before the rising sun." She turned and kept singing, the words falling to them like silken rain as she walked away down a corridor.

"Blimey!" the ostler muttered. "There's a cracked-brained one, for you. Bedlam, this is."

Tom stood absolutely still, staring up the stairs. He felt as if he'd been poleaxed. He could feel Meggin pulling at his hand, and he was aware that the ostler wanted to be paid for tossing his boxes to the ground. But the only thing he could think of was that girl's rosy mouth, and the way she laughed, and the way her voice flew all the way to the rafters of the dusty antechamber, and (God forgive him) the way her hips swayed in that peach-colored negligee.

Chapter Eleven.

Marital Consummation.

Well, for God's sake, Helene, it's not as if you'd be doing it for pleasure. At least I won't give you a disease which, let me point out, is entirely possible if you dally with a Frenchman. Everyone knows that Frenchmen have the pox.'

"Not Mayne," Helene said weakly. But in truth, she wasn't entirely sure what the pox was. It didn't sound pleasant.

Rees was down to his smalls now. "You get the pox from sleeping with the wrong sort of women," he said, quite as if he weren't unbuttoning his most intimate undergarments in Lady Hamilton's music room.

"I will not do this with you!" Helene hissed.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't wish to!"

"You can't tell me that you were looking forward to doing the deed with Garret Langham," Rees said reasonably. "He may be a very pretty man, but you and I both know that your body isn't really suited to this sort of thing, is it?"

To her utter fury, there was no way to interpret his look but as honest sympathy.

"I'm sorry that Fairfax-Lacy went off and married Beatrix Lennox," he continued. "But can you honestly tell me that you two were happy in bed?"

Helene swallowed. There was something even worse about being comforted by one's husband than there had been in failing as a lover to Mr.

Fairfax-Lacy.

"It's the devil and truly unfair," he was saying. "But don't you see, Helene? If you're that eager for a child, we might as well do the deed now and get it over with. At least it will be my child that inherits my estate. I couldn't make Mayne's child into an earl ahead of Tom's son."

Helene saw what he meant. She hadn't even remembered the existence of Rees's brother Tom. It wasn't fair to him.

"I'm not a very good earl," Rees said, "but damn it, I suppose you and I could make a child without too much trouble, and at least I would have done my duty."

Helene bit her lip. "Esme says it only takes one time," she heard herself say.

Rees put his hands on her shoulders. "Right. So would you mind giving up Mayne and allowing me to father the child instead?"

"All right," she said, swallowing. It was rather disappointing, but she knew perfectly well that once Mayne had reached a certain point, she wouldn't have liked it any more than she did with Rees, years ago. So what was the difference, really?

Then she realized that Rees was staring at her. "Your hair's gone," he said.

Helene tossed her head, and felt the pure glory of weightlessness again.

"I cut it all off."

"And where did you get that gown? No wonder I found Mayne in here with you. That gown is a siren call to rakehells."

Helene resisted the impulse to cover her breasts with her hands. Mayne had said they were beautiful. "If you're going to laugh at my chest, why don't you get it out of the way immediately," she said coolly.

"I'm not," he said, his voice rather strangled with surprise.

Helene looked down at her gown. It was already crumpled by the exertions of the evening, so she needn't worry about taking it off and further

exposing her inadequacies. "I suppose we might as well simply get it over with," she said, turning and walking back to the couch. "Are you going to remove your shirt?"

He followed her and stood looking at her as she lay down. "Are you certain that you wish to do this, Helene?"

She actually smiled. "Yes. I think you're right. It's such a relief not to have to pretend with you. I'm not going to enjoy this much, but I would be very, very grateful if we could make a child."

"I wish that wasn't the case for you," Rees said.

But Helene's eye had been caught by something else. "I'd forgotten that it was quite so large," she said faintly.

He blinked and looked down.

"Could we get this over as quickly as possible?" she said, feeling rather dizzy. She never liked pain.

Rees carefully lowered himself onto the couch. He didn't wear any kind of scent, unlike Mayne, who smelled faintly of some male fragrance. Rees was horribly careless about his style of dress, but he did bathe every day, and so there was always a combination of soap and, well, Rees.

He was just as heavy as she remembered. She wriggled a little in protest, and then gasped when she felt his hand between her legs. "What are you doing?"

"I just have to make sure-" his voice sounded very husky now. And his fingers-Helene gasped again. Little lightning strokes went down her legs. But then his fingers were gone and then he presented himself in their place.

He was braced on his hands, looking down at her. A lock of hair had fallen over his forehead. "I'll make this as fast as I possibly can, Helene. I'm sorry for the pain of it. I always was, you know."

"I know that," she whispered, tucking the hair back behind his ear. Rees wasn't all bad.

He started to push inside and Helene almost stopped him. But she bit her lip instead. Really, the fear was worse than the pain.

In fact...

In fact, the pain didn't really seem to be there. There was a feeling of stretching that wasn't entirely pleasant. But it wasn't really unpleasant either. He managed to push his way right to the back of her, and Helene couldn't help it; she wriggled again.

There was a scrabbling noise at the door and the door handle turned. Helene went rigid. She could hear a female voice raised in fury. "I'm certain that I left my reticule next to the harpsichord."

"I'm sorry, Madam,"-that was surely the voice of Lady Hamilton's butler-"if you will just come this way for a moment, I will look for the spare key."

"Hurry up," she hissed at Rees.

"Does it hurt very much?" he asked, not moving.