Secret Lessons With The Rake. Julia Justiss

him?

      Feed him, first. ‘Here, have the rest,’ he said gruffly, easing his grip on the remaining piece of pasty so the boy could pry it free. After a frozen moment, as if not sure he’d heard Christopher correctly, he tore the meat pie from Christopher’s fist and stuffed it whole into his mouth.

      ‘Thankee, sir, that be right kind,’ the child said when he’d swallowed the last morsel. ‘Guess I’m ready for you to take me in. Might be safer in Newgate, at that.’

      A long lock of hair fell from under the lad’s battered hat as he straightened. Christopher glanced over at Ellie, who was studying the child intently, her gaze examining him from hat to tattered shirt, patched jacket and shabby, too-large trousers, to the thin legs and bare feet.

      She leaned forward, grasped the child under his arms, and lifted him on to the bench beside her. ‘Heavens, you scarcely weigh anything at all! Why don’t we start with you telling us your name, Miss...?’

      Panic flitting across her face before she turned it into a look of bravado, the child wrapped her arms around her chest in a telling gesture. ‘Don’t know whatcha mean, ma’am. It’s Joe. Joe’s me name.’

      ‘Short for Josephine, perhaps?’

      ‘A girl? Are you sure?’ Christopher murmured to Ellie.

      ‘I suspected when I saw the hair. But I knew for certain when I lifted her, and felt those. Look closer.’

      Doing as instructed, Christopher discovered what Ellie had spotted—the slight swell of budding breasts beneath the shirt as it rose and fell at the child’s rapid, frightened breaths, along with hands and legs too slender and shapely to be a boy’s. ‘By Heaven, I believe you’re right!’

      ‘Are you wearing boy’s clothing for protection?’ Ellie asked her. ‘And how did you come to be in this part of the city—alone? It’s well-known the beadles at the Pantheon Bazaar don’t allow beggars to linger—and establishments like the Pulteney and the Gloucester keep a sharp watch out for pickpockets. Besides which, pickpockets generally operate in groups.’

      When the girl remained stubbornly silent, Ellie gave Christopher a rueful look. ‘It appears I may have found another candidate for my school.’

      To their surprise, at that pronouncement, the girl leapt up and would have raced off, had Christopher not collared her again. ‘Lemme go!’ she shrieked. ‘I ain’t going to no school like that. I’d die first! Was it Gentleman Bob what sent you to the Gloucester?’ she cried, looking accusingly at Christopher. ‘And I thought you was a nob!’

      ‘Hush, now,’ Ellie soothed. ‘He is a nob, and he has no connection with Gentleman Bob. Nor is the school I run anything like the Schools of Venus operated by Sister Mary or Mrs Pritchard.’

      Finding herself unable to break free, the child subsided with a whimper. ‘Please, ma’am, lemme go!’ she pleaded, looking up at Ellie. ‘Me mum’d turn over in her grave if I was to become such.’

      Seeing what must be a look of incomprehension on Christopher’s face, Ellie turned to him. ‘Gentleman Bob is the underworld boss who runs the gangs of pickpockets that infest the West End. He also sponsors some of the bawdy houses that specialise in very young girls.’ Disgust coloured her voice. ‘Establishments sometimes known as “Schools of Venus”.’

      Turning back to the girl, she said, ‘Did you belong to one of Gentleman Bob’s gangs? And struck out on your own when you got old enough that he thought you’d be more profitable to him in one of the “schools”?’

      The girl stood silently for a moment. Finally, brushing the lock of hair from her face again, she said, ‘Me and me brother Joe worked with one of his thieving gangs. Until Joe died last month, and the Gentleman started looking at me funny. Then one day, he run his hands over me chest and...and started rubbing me, there.’ She gestured towards her small breasts. ‘His eyes started glowing, like, while he done it, and he said it were time for me to go to Sister Mary’s. That night, I changed into me brother’s clothes and run off. I came here ’cause, like you say, he keeps his teams away from the fancy hotels and shops hereabouts, on account of the watchers, so I thought I’d be safer. But it’s harder to thieve, too, and the pot boys at the Gloucester kept running me off.’ She heaved a deep sigh. ‘If you ain’t from the Gentleman, fixing to snatch me back, what are you going to do with me?’

      Ellie held out her hand, and after some hesitation, the girl gave her hers. ‘My name is Ellie Parmenter,’ she said, shaking it. ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, miss...?’

      ‘Artis. Artis Gorden. After me da’ went away—he were in the army in India—me mum took in washing, mostly for the theatre folks around Covent Garden. She took my name from one of them theatre signs. Joe was seven and I was six when she died, and we joined up with the Gentleman. Been there ever since.’

      ‘Pleased to meet you, Artis. And this is Mr Lattimar, a good friend, who is also a Member of Parliament.’

      ‘Cor!’ the girl breathed. ‘And I tried to pinch your coppers! You coulda had me transported!’

      ‘As if I would do that to a starving child,’ Christopher murmured, moved with both compassion and outrage for a plight that was all too heartbreakingly common.

      Ellie smiled reassuringly at the girl. ‘I used to be in keeping to Lord Summerville—who occasionally joined friends with a taste for that sort of thing on a visit to Sister Mary’s school,’ she explained. ‘During my time with him, I met a lot of girls in the trade. I left the business after Summerville’s death last autumn and started a school for other girls like you, who didn’t want to be pulled into the life. I teach them to read and write and train them for respectable positions as shop girls, seamstresses and housemaids. Would you like to accompany me there? I can offer you a good meal, a bath, and some clean clothes. I promise, no one will harm you and you may leave again straight away if you wish. Though I do hope you will stay.’

      Artis stared at Ellie incredulously, as if she didn’t trust what she’d just heard. ‘You’d...take me in? Feed me, learn me my letters, and how to be somethin’ ’sides a pickpocket?’

      ‘If that’s what you want.’

      The girl’s eyes glowed in her thin face. ‘Mum taught me to write my name, and do some sums, but...to read? Do you have books at your school, ma’am, like the ones in the shop windows? With the pretty leather covers and lettering all in gold, looking like treasures waitin’ for someone to open?’

      ‘Yes, I have books. Primers, for teaching you to read, and leather-bound treasures, too.’

      The glow faded a bit as the girl looked down and inspected herself, then looked back up at Ellie, hope and despair warring on her face. ‘Are you sure you want me, ma’am?’

      The simple words hit Christopher like a punch to the chest, knocking free a series of devastating images. Escaping his nurse and tracking down his regal father, holding out a treasured rock to the man he’d been told collected treasures, only to have Lord Vraux brush past him without a glance, as if he didn’t exist...being accorded a slight, cold nod on the few occasions the governess was instructed to bring the children down for his inspection...receiving not a single word of farewell from Vraux when he was sent off to Eton.

      Do you want me? Could the language contain a more poignant phrase for a love-starved child?

      He looked from the girl to see on Ellie’s face the same desolation those words had caused him, and was struck again by her pain.

      He, at least, had always known a mother’s love. She had been completely abandoned by all her nearest relations. Cast into a world where ‘do you want me?’ had taken on a wholly different, degrading meaning.

      He wished he could wrap his arms around her and hold her until his warmth burned away all memory of that cold-blooded betrayal.

      ‘Yes, I’m sure I want you,’ Ellie told Artis, gently wiping a tear from the girl’s grimy cheek. ‘I