The Captain's Kidnapped Beauty. Mary Nichols
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for guests to help themselves to a plate of the plentiful food on offer. Her father had disappeared into the library with another of the trustees and had left her to fend for herself, which was typical of him. She smiled up at Alex. ‘Good evening, Captain. I had not expected to see you again so soon.’
‘Nor I you.’ He sketched her a bow. ‘Have you enjoyed the concert so far?’
‘Indeed, yes. Of course it is not the same without Mr Handel. His loss will be keenly felt by everyone, but especially the poor orphans. He was a great benefactor.’
‘So I have heard from my friend, Viscount Leinster. You are acquainted with his lordship, I believe?’ He indicated Jonathan with a movement of his hand, which made the lace fall back over the sleeve of his dark-blue evening coat. She wondered if he always wore dark blue when everyone else seemed to favour peacock colours. Viscount Leinster, for instance, was in apricot.
She bent her knee to him. ‘Yes, we have met at Long Acre. Good evening, my lord.’
Jonathan acknowledged her with an elegant leg. ‘Your servant, Miss Gilpin. I have been telling my friend the M—’ He stopped when he saw Alex shaking his head and hastily corrected himself. ‘Captain Carstairs, that Mr Handel was a great influence in making the work of the hospital known.’
‘Yes, indeed he was. Have you ever visited the hospital, Captain?’ she asked.
‘I am afraid not. It is a pleasure still to come.’
‘You will not have time before you go to Norfolk,’ she said. ‘But perhaps when you return you will find time for a visit. Mr Hogarth’s paintings are particularly fine.’ Hogarth was another well-known benefactor of the charity and many of his paintings were on display at the hospital.
‘I shall make every effort to do so.’
‘I feel so sorry for the motherless children,’ she went on. ‘They are well looked after and given some training in an occupation when they are old enough and they seem happy, but life in an orphanage must be hard.’
‘Do you visit often?’
‘When I can. It is the babies I feel most for. Poor little things, being without a mother is so sad. I like to go and help feed them and bathe them and nurse them. I lost my mother when I was a little girl and I know what it’s like, even though I have a papa who has tried to be both mother and father to me.’
‘You have a soft heart, Miss Gilpin. I am persuaded you will make a splendid mama.’ He dug his elbow into Jonathan’s ribs when that worthy seemed unable to stifle his laughter and added, as they shuffled forwards, ‘Are you here alone?’
‘No, my father is here. I believe he has gone into the library with Lord Milgrove and another of the Coram trustees and will join me directly.’
‘In the meantime you have no one to serve you. Please allow me to help you. Would you like the chicken, or would you prefer the ham? Some green salad, perhaps? And there are love-apples, too. I wonder how they acquired that name?’
She looked hard at him, wondering whether he was teasing her, but his expression was inscrutable. ‘I have no idea.’
‘I believe they are supposed to have aphrodisiacal qualities,’ Jonathan put in. ‘But I have never put them to the test.’
They were bamming her. Charlotte felt the colour rising in her cheeks. ‘I should like the ham and the green salad,’ she said. ‘And one of those little tartlets, but I think I will give the tomatoes a miss.’
Alex noted the colour rise in her cheeks and realised suddenly that she was beautiful and for a single heartbeat he was tongue-tied, but gathered himself to put some of the food on a plate for her and helped himself to another plateful, which he carried to one of the little tables arranged about the room. Jonathan, plate piled high, joined them.
While they ate they engaged in a lively conversation about the music they had been hearing, the weather, the terrible state of the roads and the dreadful crime which was becoming more and more prevalent, especially in the capital. Pickpockets abounded, some as young as five or six who had been taught to creep under the skirts of a man’s coat and cut away his purse. They were so deft and so slippery, the victim did not know he had been robbed until he went to fetch out his purse to pay for something and by then the culprit was long gone.
‘We have to find the gang leaders,’ Jonathan said. ‘You may depend upon it they are being trained by unscrupulous men. It is not the children’s fault. If they are hungry and ragged, who can blame them when someone offers them a way out of their difficulties?’
‘Oh, I agree wholeheartedly,’ she said. ‘Something ought to be done, not to put the children in prison, but to help them keep out of it. That is why the Coram Foundling Hospital is so important— besides taking in unwanted babies, they house some of these urchins, but unfortunately there are more such children than they have room for.’
‘Arresting the men who train them in their pocket picking is equally important,’ Jonathan said.
‘Lord Leinster is one of the Piccadilly Gentlemen, as am I,’ Alex told her by way of explanation.
‘I have heard of them,’ she said, looking from one to the other. ‘I believe they investigate crimes and bring the criminals to justice. I remember reading about some coiners being apprehended through the offices of the Piccadilly Gentlemen. And wasn’t there a murderous gang of smugglers rounded up by them recently?’
‘We do what we can,’ Alex said. ‘Unfortunately we are only a small force and cannot be everywhere.’
‘Do the Bow Street Runners not work to the same end?’
‘They can arrest wrongdoers when they are brought to their notice, but they do not go out investigating crime,’ he explained. ‘Besides, they do not operate outside London unless they are sent for.’
‘There should be runners in every town and on the roads,’ Jonathan put in. ‘A national force. It is hardly possible to travel abroad in one’s own coach without being held up by highwaymen.’
‘I have heard my father say it is the common practice to have two purses,’ she said. ‘One with little in it to hand over when stopped and the other containing one’s real valuables to be well hid.’
‘I have heard that, too,’ Alex said. ‘But so, I think, have the robbers and if they suspect anything has been withheld they rip everything out of the coach to find it and often manhandle the poor travellers when they try to resist. It is sometimes more expedient to hand over one’s belongings and hope the criminals will be caught with the booty still on them.’
‘Which is a rare event,’ Jonathan put in morosely. ‘And when they are apprehended and put into prison, they somehow manage to escape.’
‘You will surmise from that,’ Alex told her, smiling, ‘that my friend is even now engaged on tracking down two escaped prisoners. They held up a coach and fatally wounded the coachman who dared to try to defend his passengers.’
‘They are dangerous men, then?’
‘Very dangerous.’
‘Then I hope you will take great care on your journey into Norfolk, Captain.’
He looked hard at her, but there was no irony in her tone and nothing in her expression to suggest she was roasting him and he accepted the advice on face value. ‘I shall do that, never fear.’
‘My father has devised a secret compartment in some of his coaches,’ she said. ‘It can only be found and opened if you know the way of it.’
‘Is there such a place in the carriage I have bought?’ Alex asked.
‘Yes, did I not show it to you? How remiss of me. Remind me to do so when you come to take delivery.’
Her father arrived at this point and seated himself at the table to join in the conversation which ranged from ideas for reducing