Dad Hears My Thoughts novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Woman on the Quay

The baby's mother is pulled from the river, the baby names the man with the green ring, and the matron's writ gives them until sundown.

Tristram stopped dead at the top of the quay steps.

Under his cloak, the baby had gone silent.

I pushed through the fishwives to the front.

The woman on the stones was maybe thirty. Fine hands, no rings. One shoe gone.

Her lips were blue, and her eyes were half open at the gray sky.

The watch captain from last night stood over her with his thumbs in his belt.

"Keeper of the Queen's Jewels," he told the crowd. "Ran off a month ago with the Sun Diamond. Guilt got her, and she jumped."

"Jumped," I said.

He looked at me and remembered me. "That's what I said, Hawtrey."

I crouched beside her before anyone could stop me.

Her shawl had slipped off one shoulder.

There was a bruise under her jaw. A small square bruise, very dark, with a sharp corner at each side.

I'd set a hundred square stones in my life.

That was the shape of a ring's setting, pressed hard into skin.

"Get away from her," the captain said.

A carriage pulled up on the quay road. Black lacquer, the Harcourt crest on the door.

Ralph got out.

He came down the steps with his hat in his hand and his face arranged.

The fishwives parted for him.

"Poor creature," he said. "I knew her a little, at court. She was always so nervous."

He took off his own cloak and laid it over her face.

On his left hand, the emerald ring caught the dull light.

It was square cut, set high in four gold claws.

Behind me, Tristram made a low sound.

I turned. His jaw was locked and his eyes had gone very far away.

The baby was looking out of his cloak, straight at Ralph.

"What is it?" I whispered.

Tristram spoke so quietly I had to lean in.

"She says he's cold green. All over, cold green, like the bottom of the river."

His throat moved.

"She says Mama hid from him. Mama cried when he came to the door. He has the green on his hand."

I looked at the ring. Then at the square bruise under the dead woman's chin.

Ralph straightened and saw us.

His mourning face didn't slip, but his eyes did. They went straight to the baby.

"Cousin," he said. "You brought the child to a drowning. How very fatherly."

"Come here and say that," Tristram said.

"Gladly."

Ralph came up the steps until they were nose to nose.

He was smaller than Tristram, but he smiled like he was the one who was taller.

"The matron is on her way to your little shop," he said. "I'd hurry back. It would be a shame to miss her."

Tristram's fist closed.

I caught his wrist before it moved.

Three watchmen were standing ten feet away, waiting for exactly that.

"Not here," I said. "Not in front of them."

He breathed through his nose for a long moment. Then his hand opened.

Ralph laughed softly and went back down to the body.

The captain was already writing in his book. Suicide, it would say. Thief.

We walked back up the Street of Lamps without speaking.

Halfway, Tristram stopped.

"She just asked me when Mama's coming," he said.

I didn't know what to tell him.

He shifted her higher on his shoulder and pressed his mouth to her curls.

"Soon," he lied, very low, to the top of her head.

The matron was sitting on my step when we got there.

A wide woman in black, with a ring of keys on her belt and a smell of tannery lye coming off her coat.

Two porters from the foundling house leaned on my railing behind her.

"Mistress Hawtrey," she said. "I have a writ."

"I have a door," I said. "You're blocking it."

She stood and unrolled a paper with a magistrate's seal.

"Last night you swore before the watch that this child was yours and Master Harcourt's."

"I did."

"Unwed."

"Is that a crime now?"

"No." She smiled with small brown teeth. "But it makes her his, not yours. An unwed mother has no standing against the father's house."

I hadn't known that.

I could feel Tristram realizing the same thing next to me.

"And the father," the matron went on, "was struck from his house yesterday morning before the whole court."

She let that sit.

"A man of no house can't keep a child of noble blood. By law she goes to the Crown's foundling house."

"You want her," Tristram said.

"I'm told she's healthy. Healthy girls do well with us."

The baby grabbed a fistful of his collar and buried her face in it.

He didn't need to tell me what she was thinking about the matron.

I could see it in how hard she held on.

"There's a clause," I said. "There's always a clause."

The matron's smile went thin.

She tapped the bottom of the writ with one fat finger.

"Unless the head of his house acknowledges the child as a Harcourt," she read, "by sundown this day."

She rolled the paper up and tucked it in her sleeve.

"The Duke of Harcourt disowned this man in front of the King, Mistress Hawtrey."

She nodded to the porters.

"We'll come back for her at dark."

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