Chapter Thirty
Five adults and one child kept silent until Lady Rainsford rushed through the front door past Fleming, who had ensured that no other servants had witnessed the scene.
Rose spoke before anyone else. “I am not your child!” she cried, looking up at India. “I don’t like that woman.” Her little face crumpled, but she managed to halt the tears. “I don’t like the way people keep speaking as if my father didn’t exist. My father was Will Summers, and just because he is dead doesn’t mean that he didn’t exist!”
Then she twisted out of India’s hold, taking a step toward Thorn. “You shouldn’t give me away like that,” she cried, her voice rising. “I don’t want to be their daughter. I don’t even know them!”
For his part Thorn was in the grip of a rage that was only barely in check. What was India doing, declaring that Rose was her daughter? And Vander? Why in the hell had Vander made the claim that he was married to India?
India was his. Not Vander’s.
She would never be Vander’s.
But he looked down at Rose and realized all that would have to wait, because Rose was his as well. She was the bravest little girl he’d ever known, but her lips were quivering and her eyes were terrified. Almost certainly Lady Rainsford had called her names before he arrived, ones that she didn’t understand. She had been surrounded by shouting adults—and she thought her guardian had given her away.
He scooped her up into his arms and turned away from the adults silently watching them. “I did not give you away, Rose, and I never will. It was all a misunderstanding.” He began walking toward the dower house. “Let’s go home and we’ll ask Clara for some hot cocoa. Where is Clara, by the way?”
“That lady came and told Clara to stay,” Rose said, a sob breaking from her chest. “She brought me back to the house. But Lady Xenobia came outside just as she arrived, and they had an argument.”
“Did my parents and Vander come at the same time as Lady Xenobia?”
“No, they came just before you. Lady Rainsford is most unpleasant.” Her legs clung to his side, but her rigid backbone told its own story.
“She is not a likable woman,” Thorn observed, in one of the world’s great understatements. He pushed open the door of the dower house. “What you need to know, poppet, is that you are and always will be your papa’s daughter. Did you know that I saved Will’s life once?”
She stirred in his arms, but he didn’t release her. He just strode over to the sofa and sat down, keeping her on his lap. “We were around eight years old. It was winter, and there were ice floes in the Thames.”
“Did you have to go into the icy water?” She sounded slightly less distressed. “Papa told me that he used to fish spoons out of the river.”
He nodded, tightening his arms around her. “If we didn’t jump in ourselves, our master would throw us off the dock.”
“That is a despicable thing to do,” Rose said. Her hand curled around his forearm.
“He was the same sort of person as Lady Rainsford,” Thorn said. “Not someone you would wish to know. The amount of food Grindel gave us depended on what we brought him. Some of the boys were too small and too frail to go into the water when it was icy, so the big boys had to earn food for all of us.”
“Eight years old is not very big,” Rose observed.
“Your papa was the type of boy who never gave up. He dove and dove that afternoon,” he told her. “He was certain that he had felt something at the bottom of the Thames, something big down in the muck. Something that might make Grindel happy enough that he would let us sleep indoors.”
There were no words adequate to describe Grindel. Not for the first time, Thorn wished the man were still alive so he could kill him in memory of the boys who hadn’t survived.
“I wish Papa hadn’t been stubborn,” Rose said. “Did he find that big thing?”