What Remains of Heaven

Chapter 6

Charles, Lord Jarvis, was in the library of his house on Berkeley Square, perusing the latest report from one of his French agents, when his daughter, Hero, came to stand in the doorway and said without preamble, “Did you kill the Bishop of London?”

He looked up at her. Since the death of his son, David, at sea several years before, she was his only surviving child. In some ways she was a handsome woman, with a Junoesque build and strong features. But she looked too much like Jarvis himself—and had far too forceful a personality—to ever be considered pretty. He said, “I won’t deny I’m glad Prescott’s dead. But it’s not my work.”

She met his gaze and held it. “Would you lie to me?”

“I might. But not in this instance.”

At that, she gave a soft laugh. “I must say, I am glad to hear it.”

Jarvis settled back in his chair. “The Bishop was something of a favorite of yours, was he not?”

“We were friends, yes. We worked on several projects together.”

Jarvis made a face. “Projects. You’re five-and-twenty, Hero. Isn’t it time you gave up this unnatural penchant for good works and found yourself a husband?”

“I might.” She came to lean over the back of his chair. “If English law didn’t grant a man the powers of a despot over his wife.”

“A despot, Hero?”

“A despot.” She placed an affectionate hand on his shoulder. “But as for good works, you must be thinking of Mama. She’s always been far better at that sort of thing than I.”

At the mention of his wife, Jarvis turned down the ends of his mouth in a grimace. He had no patience for Annabelle, a silly, half-mad imbecile who belonged in Bedlam. He grunted. “Women like Annabelle dispense soup to the poor and shed tears over the plight of orphans in the streets because it’s an easy sop to their consciences. Nauseating, perhaps, yet ultimately harmless. But you—you spend your days with your nose stuck in books, researching theories and advocating schemes that could almost be described as radical.”

Hero’s fine gray eyes narrowed with a hint of a smile. “Oh, believe me, some of my schemes are most definitely radical.”

Jarvis pushed to his feet and turned to face her. “The most powerful men in London quake in terror at the thought of annoying me. Yet my own daughter openly behaves in ways she knows full well displease me. Why is that?”

“Because I’m too much like you.”

He grunted. If she were a son, he would be proud of her intellect and her force of character—if not her political notions. But she was not a son; she was a woman, and lately she’d been looking strained. He studied her pale, unusually thin face. “You’ve not been looking your best these past few weeks, Hero.”

“Dear Papa.” She leaned forward to kiss his cheek. She was tall enough to do it without standing on tiptoe. “Surely you know better than to tell a woman she’s off her looks?”

He allowed himself to be coaxed into a smile, and pressed her shoulder in a rare gesture of affection. But all he said was, “I didn’t kill your meddlesome bishop.”

“Then who did?”

“That, I don’t know. And neither, to be frank, do I care.”

Leaving her father in the library, Hero hurried up the stairs to her bedroom, yanked her chamber pot from its cupboard, and was wretchedly sick.

She’d learned the sickness normally came upon her first thing in the morning, although it could strike unexpectedly at any time. She was not a woman accustomed to feeling either fear or vulnerability. But as she settled on the floor, her eyes squeezed shut, her damp forehead pressed against the cupboard door, Hero found herself perilously close to succumbing to both.

For a young Englishwoman of her station to bear a child out of wedlock was the ultimate, unforgivable disgrace. It mattered not how powerful or wealthy her family, or how bizarre the circumstances that had led her to such a fate; the result could only be social ostracism, complete and everlasting. Hero had always considered herself an independent-minded woman. But even she could not contemplate such a fate with equanimity.

Her options were depressing, and limited. She could contract a quick, convenient marriage; she could give birth in secret and give the child away; or she could eliminate herself in a decorous act of self-destruction. Since Hero had no patience with suicides and refused under any circumstances to submit herself to the power of a husband, she was left with only one real option: a secret birth.

The results of such births were typically dumped, anonymously, on the parish or some desperate peasant family, either of which could generally be relied upon to kill the unwanted infant within a year. But Hero had no intention of abandoning the child growing within her to such a short, brutal life. And so she had approached her friend Bishop Prescott for his assistance in locating a good, loving family. Such arrangements were dangerous, since they could be difficult to keep hidden. But she had found Prescott both supportive and blessedly nonjudgmental.

Now Prescott was dead, and all her plans were in disarray.

At the thought, she felt a new surge of nausea, but suppressed it resolutely. Pushing to her feet, she smoothed her gown, washed her face, and walked down the hall to her mother’s chambers.

She found Lady Jarvis stretched out upon the daybed in her dressing room with the drapes closed. She still wore her wrapper, and the left side of her face drooped in that way it had when she was tired.

“Didn’t you sleep well, Mama?” asked Hero, bending to kiss her mother’s cheek. Her hand dropped to Lady Jarvis’s shoulder, and she felt so thin and frail that Hero experienced a new leap of fear.

Never well, Lady Jarvis had been especially listless lately. She was nearing fifty, a fading shadow of the beautiful, vivacious woman she had once been. Worn-out by an endless series of miscarriages and stillbirths, she had succeeded in presenting her lord with only one sickly son and a hale daughter before suffering a seizure that put an end to her childbearing days and left her weak of mind and body.

Now, she gripped her daughter’s hand and said, “Troublesome dreams. Always troublesome dreams.” Her soft blue eyes came into focus on Hero’s face. “You’ve been looking tired yourself, Hero; is something wrong? Are you ill?”

Hero felt an unexpected lump in her throat. She had no doubt of her mother’s love and devotion. But Lady Jarvis lacked the mental or emotional strength to deal with her own problems, let alone her daughter’s. Hero forced a smile. “You know I’m never ill. It’s such a lovely day; shall we go for a walk around the square?”

“I don’t know if I can, dear.”

“Of course you can. Let me ring for your woman to help you dress.” Disengaging her hand from her mother’s grasp, Hero went to open the curtains and give the bell a sharp tug. “It will do you good. I’ve a quick errand to run, but I should be back by the time you’re ready.”

Lady Jarvis frowned and struggled to sit up. “An errand? What type of errand?”

“Oh, nothing of importance,” said Hero, who was in fact bound on a very important errand, to the official chambers of the late Bishop Francis Prescott, in St. James’s Square.