Page 145 of Immortal Rose

“Mr. Hornsby!” I called again. “A word, please.”

With obvious reluctance, he turned, taking in my disheveled state and breathlessness with disapproval. “Yes?”

I steadied my voice. “You said something earlier, about my mother. I want to understand what you meant.”

“What is there to understand?” he said. “She hurt your grandfather horribly. She was his whole world. I witnessed the devastation she left behind personally.”

Fury stormed in me, snarling. “He banished her. He held a bloody funeral, for God’s sake.”

The solicitor flinched at my harsh words. “Why would he banish his only child—his only heir? He wanted to find a husband for her so that the child—so that you—might be born into legitimacy, but your mother spurned him and all other offers for help. She wanted nothing more to do with him.”

My breathing grew ragged. “That’s not possible.”

“The funeral was in poor taste, I acknowledge that,” Hornsby said. “But what else was he meant to do? After a year he’d word that she had perished in childbirth, and it was only later he discovered she and her child had survived. He spent years searching for the both of you. Years!”

I couldn’t understand it. There wasn’t a hint of deception in his essence, only disgust coiling at the heart of it.

“You’re wrong,” I told him flatly. “He sold you a lie to console himself.”

Hornsby shook his head. “I will not allow you to slander his memory, nor my name. I have told you the truth, Lady Foxcourt. Whether you accept it is entirely up to you.”

He took his leave of me then, allowing the door to slam shut behind him.

It was a long moment before I could bring myself to move again.

Hornsby was wrong—beyond wrong. Deluded. I turned on my heel, stalking back down the echoing halls, my mind awhirl with tormenting questions I refused to acknowledge, let alone try to answer.

Mama would never have allowed us to suffer if there had been a way back. If she’d never had to leave here at all.

I was nearly to the stairs when I heard it.

“Miss?”

I turned, seeking the source of the frail whisper.

“Miss?”

It sounded like a child. Theo’s face flashed in my mind then, soot-stained and frightened.

“Hello?” I called back. “Who’s there?”

A door down the hall creaked. I eased back off the first step, heading in the direction the noise had come from until I saw the boy, no taller than the doorknob, half hidden by the doorjamb. He smelled utterly ripe, as pungent as a grown man twice his size.

“Miss,” he called again, “I’m sorry to trouble ye, but . . .”

The boy shrank back into the room as I reached the door. It seemed to be a small servants’ hall, leading out to the grove of oaks at the back of the palace. He fussed with the torn collar of his shirt as he edged toward the door there. The odor from the hall was staggering now: sweat, piss, ale, silver, and the dockyards—

“What’s the matter?” I asked him, stepping into the hall. “Are you hurt?”

The boy’s wide-eyed fear gave way to a grin.

A hand clamped over my mouth and nose, stifling my scream as someone wrenched me back against their hard, reeking body.

“No,” the man growled in my ear, “but ye’ll be, if ye don’t do exactly as I say.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I had lived too long in the Brickbats to not put up a fight.