Rushed to the Altar by Jane Feather Page B

more formal education in the company of his peers.
    No one mentioned that Luke would inherit if anything happened to Francis. Somehow Clarissa hadn’t felt able to point this out to her father’s old friends. They must both have been aware of it, and it was such a gothic idea, it would make her anxiety look even less credible than it already did.
    She stood up now and with sudden energy went to open the leather chest, withdrawing the letter she had been looking at earlier. She took it back to the chair by the fire and unfolded it.
The lad’s bin took to a babby farm. ’E’ll not live long, they gets rid of ’em quick. Best find ’im quick.
    And that was all. She guessed that even such a brief message had been a supreme effort for the writer, but surely he could have included an address. But maybe he didn’t have one.
    Clarissa folded the letter carefully. It had been opened and refolded so many times it had almost come apart at the fold. She knew about baby farms; everyone did. They took in the unwanted babies, the illegitimate, the burdensome, whose existence threatened to ruin theirmothers. No one monitored the care these children received and for the most part they died sooner or later of neglect. Disease and poor, inadequate food took their toll. But Francis was strong and healthy. He was no dependent babe. It would take a long time for him to die of neglect.
    She bit her lip hard to keep the tears at bay. She had been telling herself this for over a week now, ever since she’d received the letter. She’d left for London immediately, telling only the servants that she was going to visit her uncle and see Francis. She had deliberately refrained from confiding in anyone who might question such a journey, and had taken the mail coach from the neighboring village, stepping down in the yard of the Crown and Anchor in Southwark that evening, without the faintest idea what she was going to do next.
    The first thing was to find a bed for the night before it became dark. The coaching inn seemed like the obvious choice. She had plenty of money sewn into an inside pocket of her gown, more than enough for a private bedchamber and a decent supper.
    The landlord, reassuringly, had shown no curiosity about this lone woman traveler and merely showed her to a reasonable bedchamber and offered to have supper brought up to her if she didn’t want to eat in the Ordinary downstairs with the other customers. In the morning he had directed her to the ferry stop that would take her across the river into the city.
    After a few wrong turns and a lot of directions from passersby Clarissa found her way to Ludgate Hill. Her uncle’s house was in the shadow of St. Paul’s in a narrow street running off Ludgate Hill. It was a tall, narrow building, not particularly impressive, and Clarissa wondered whether her uncle’s circumstances were even more straitened than she had sometimes suspected. He would have had some inheritance from his parents, but as the second son it would not have been substantial; the lion’s share, as always under the laws of primogeniture, went to the oldest son. She was fairly certain her father had been more than generous with his brother when asked, but now that he was no longer there, where would Luke turn if he needed an urgent injection of funds?
    Or was he counting on a permanent solution?
    She hovered in the shadows, watching the house until she became aware that she was drawing attention to herself. A couple of unsavory characters were watching her from a doorway across the street and she realized that she must present an easy target, a well-dressed young woman loitering alone in a quiet street.
    She turned and walked briskly away, not slowing or looking behind her until she reached Ludgate’s busy thoroughfare. Ignorance of the city, and a need to find somewhere not too expensive to stay where she wouldn’t draw attention to herself, had led her to Covent Garden and a brothel on King Street. And