Storming the Castle

Page 2

Still, it was that possible baby who posed the greatest dilemma. She wasn’t sentimental about the life of servants. She couldn’t condemn Rodney’s child to a life of servitude, which is what her life was bound to be if she was with child but nevertheless fled her intended marriage.
Her mind was spinning like a whirligig in the wind. Finally, she made a decision: She would leave it up to fate. If there was a baby, she would resign herself. Walk down that aisle, smile, become Lady Durfey. She shuddered at the thought.
But if not . . . she’d steal freedom.
That very night, she discovered that Rodney had failed to “plant” anything, to use his repulsive terminology.
Philippa was still thinking about what it meant, and what she would do next, when she realized that Betty, the upstairs maid, was chattering on and on about a castle. Elsewhere in England, people undoubtedly talked of the great castles of Windsor and Edinburgh, but around Little Ha’penny, there was only one castle worth discussing: Pomeroy. It stood on the other side of the great forest, its turrets just tall enough to be visible on a clear day. For years, Philippa had stared out her window and dreamed of a knight in shining armor who would ride through town and fall in love with her, sweeping her onto the back of his steed and taking her away.
Away from Rodney, she now realized.
No knight in shining armor ever came; in fact, the castle had been unoccupied and neglected for years until a real prince moved there a couple of years ago. He was a foreigner, from some place in Europe.
As in a real fairy tale, the prince hadn’t lived in Pomeroy Castle long before he fell in love and married a princess. Or an heiress, at the least. No one really knew for sure because Little Ha’penny was far away from the polite world. Although Rodney puffed out his chest and boasted about his father’s connections, the fact was that Sir George Durfey was the sort of man who stayed very close to home. He’d even kept his son home with a tutor rather than send him off to Eton.
“It’s not good for the lad to be so provincial,” her father had remarked, years ago. Phineas Damson, Esq., was the only other gentleman in the area, though, and if the truth be told, he wasn’t all that interested in Sir George, nor in his future son-in-law. What Papa liked was to investigate battles. He spent the better part of his days in his study, surrounded by maps of places like Spain and Egypt, painstakingly translating accounts of Greek battles.
In short, no one knew anything about the castle and its royal occupants, and in keeping with their provincial outlook, most of the goodly inhabitants of Little Ha’penny had lost interest once the Prussian prince moved in.
“I’m sorry, Betty,” Philippa said, “could you tell me that again? About the princess, I mean?”
“Well,” Betty said importantly, “I was just saying what I heard from Mrs. Pickle, who heard it from the coachman of the morning mail.”
“And?”
“She had a baby. The princess that is, not Mrs. Pickle.”
“Oh,” Philippa said. “Very nice.”
“You’ll be having one soon enough,” Betty said comfortably. “One only has to take a look at the young master’s good, strong thighs to know that he’s all man, if you know what I mean. At any rate, this baby up at the castle cries all the time. Has the collywobbles, like my cousin’s second. I shouldn’t wonder if it will die. Some of them can’t take milk, and they just fade away.”
Philippa’s lips tightened. “Only if people insist on giving them cow’s milk as a substitute.”
“Well, my point is that the child isn’t doing so well,” Betty said. “The coachman said that he’d dropped off a footman in Manchester who is supposed to round up nursemaids and doctors, as many as he can find.”
“They must be desperate,” Philippa said.
“The baby’s a prince. ’Course they’re desperate. He’ll inherit the castle someday, though not if he’s dead.”
It was that easy. Philippa packed a small bag with her plainest clothes, and wrote a note to her papa. Then she made her way to what passed for a high street in the village and paid the old drunk, Fettle, who lay around in back of the Biscuit and Plow, to drive her to Bigger Ha’penny.
There she covered up her hair, which was distinctively silver-colored and therefore annoyingly recognizable, and bought a coach ticket to London. She hopped off in a bustling inn-yard in Lower Pomeroy, reasonably certain that with all the milling passengers, no one would notice that she didn’t get back on the coach.
An hour or so later, she was standing at the foot of Pomeroy Castle.
Chapter Two
Pomeroy Castle
Lancashire
Mr. Jonas Berwick, known to his half brother Gabriel as Wick, and to the castle at large as Mr. Berwick, the majordomo to Prince Gabriel Albrecht-Frederick William von Aschenberg of Warl-Marburg-Baalsfeld, was never at a loss for an answer. Well, rarely.
“What am I going to do?” Gabriel demanded again. His hair was standing on end, and under his eyes were dark circles that looked like bruises. “The baby cries, and then she cries, and—” He turned away abruptly, but not before Wick saw the gleam of something that looked like tears.
“Aw, hell, Gabe,” he said, reaching out and pulling his brother into his arms. “Your son is going to make it. You named him after me, and that alone will give him the balls to push on through.”
“He’s suffering,” Gabriel said flatly. “He pulls up his legs and he cries so desperately that it would make you ill to hear it.”
Wick knew. He kept breaking off his duties to dash up the stairs, to walk past the nursery, silently begging, praying that he wouldn’t hear his namesake crying in that desperate, pain-filled wail. “How is Kate?”
“Kate is Kate,” Gabriel said wearily. “She holds him, and she walks, then she cries, but she keeps walking. I can’t get her to sleep properly, and I’m sure it’s affecting her milk. And yet she will not allow him to be nursed by anyone else, not after the time when he cried all day after we tried a wet nurse. She’s convinced that because the poor woman reeked of garlic, her milk didn’t agree with the baby.”
“What does the new nursemaid say about it?”
“I just sent her away,” Gabriel said.
Wick made a mental note. He’d have to find the woman and pay her a week’s wages.
“I was decent about it,” Gabriel said, wearily running a hand through his hair. “I know it’s not her fault. But she kept shaking her head, and she had such a sad look about her . . . I couldn’t stand it. Besides, Kate won’t put Jonas down anyway, not unless she gives him to me. I should go back up there.” Instead, he slumped into a chair.
“I’ll go,” Wick said. “I’m the boy’s uncle. You’ll have to force Kate to give him up. I’ll walk him while the two of you nap for a couple of hours. Tell her that. I will walk up and down in the portrait gallery.”
Gabriel looked up, his eyes heavy. “She’ll never accept it.”
Wick pulled him to his feet. “Assert yourself, Gabe. Remember, you’re the master of the house, the paterfamilias, king of the castle, and all the rest of that rubbish. Grab your son, hand him to me, and take your poor wife off to get some proper sleep. You’d better go to your old chambers up in the tower because she won’t be able to hear Jonas cry from there.”