The Firstborn

Chapter Five

The next morning arrived on the wings of a cold wind that carried a mass of heavy, grey clouds along in its wake. There was no rain, however, and so Sophia wrapped a shawl tight around her shoulders, tucked George's sparse hair beneath a wool cap and set out towards Stantreath.

The town itself was situated roughly two miles from the front door of the cottage, the majority of the buildings fanning out from the walls of Stantreath castle, a decaying fort that had spent the last two centuries of its existence bending to the will of the wind and the waves that beat against it.

The castle loomed larger with every step along the rutted and potholed road, its crumbling walls standing stark against the grey, shifting sky. Sophia put one hand to her bonnet as she looked up at it, her sharp eyes seeking out various shapes and shadows in the ruins, all of them transforming into characters in the story that she told to George as he bounced cheerfully on her hip.

She had decided on the morning walk for no other reason than to expend some measure of the energy that had built up within her since her encounter with Lord Haughton the previous day. She had slept fitfully during the night, her pillow receiving countless thumps and poundings from her fists, as if the lumpiness of the filling was the sole cause of her insomnia.

Everything about Lord Haughton's visit had filled her with ire. His unexpected arrival on her doorstep, his knowledge and supposition of too much of her family's situation, his poorly veiled insults against George's illegitimacy, and then the self-aggrandizing posture he'd assumed when making his offer to her, as if she should have been thanking him on bended knee for his charity.

And where was his miscreant of a brother throughout all of this? The man was George's father, and she or Lucy had yet to hear a word from him, as if he was incapable of carrying on normal human interactions. But then, perhaps he wasn't. If he was the sort to tumble about with young women of Lucy's class without any offer of protection or marriage, it followed that he most likely wouldn't be the sort to check in with his conquests after they'd adjusted their skirts and returned to their previous life.

And so along came his brother, ready to clean up the mess made by his younger sibling. Sophia's thoughts suddenly came to a halt. How many times had Lord Haughton had to do this? How many other women had been seduced and then abandoned? For all she knew, little George could have a passel of half-siblings scattered across the country, possibly over parts of the continent, as well. She had no idea how... prolific this David was, and the more she considered it, the more she realized she did not wish to know.

A slight turn in the road brought her into the main part of Stantreath, its neat rows of low houses seeming to hunker down even closer to the ground this morning, as if threatened by the heaviness of the clouds that shifted above them. Tucking George against her shoulder as a strong blast of wind pushed out from between two stone houses, Sophia slipped into Kirkland's Tea Shoppe for a brief respite from the chill.

The Tea Shoppe sold more than simply tea, its dark shelves filled with coffee, spices, laces and ribbons, bolts of fabric, patterns, books (no novels, as Mrs. Kirkland frowned upon such nonsense), and various other knick-knacks that could easily distract a person from their original purpose in entering the establishment.

A bell jingled on the door, alerting the shop's proprietors to Sophia's entrance. Mrs. Kirkland was the first to appear, that woman gliding out from the back room in a fuss of starched lace and frills, her cap so heavy with ribbons that the woman's neck seemed ready to crumble beneath the weight of it.

There was a smile on Mrs. Kirkland's face as she entered the front room, but as soon as her eyes alighted on Sophia, her grin faded and her already thin lips became nearly nonexistent. "Can I help you?"