If He's Tempted (Wherlocke #5)

His mother was selling people again. For all Brant knew, she had never stopped doing so. Fresh young men and women, girls and boys, from the country would bring a nice price in the flesh markets of the city. She had been using his estates to pick and choose her victims. While he had been so obsessed with drowning his anger and guilt in drink and women, he had not noticed how his own people were suffering. The guilt that assailed him over that nearly brought him to his knees.

“Are ye feeling ill, m’lord?” asked Thomas. “We can go to see the lads in the stables later if ye like. May be that her ladyship has a cure you can take for what ails you.”

“No. We shall go and meet the lads now.”

“If ye be sure . . .”

“I am very sure. It is something I should have done a long time ago.”

Within moments after entering the stables, Brant decided he may have overestimated his strength. There were four young men in the stables who claimed Mallam blood ranging from a year older than Thomas’s eight years to six and twenty. It was not hard to see once they let him know that his father had also been their sire. Eyes or hair, the shape of the nose, even height and build were all clues to their parentage that he should have noticed time and time again as he came and went from the stables. Knowing there were two more out there only added to his shock.

Brant was not sure how he got back to the drawing room, but he roused from his distress and self-castigation when a worried Thomas pushed him into a chair and asked if he wanted something to drink. He did but he knew it would be the first step on a road to complete obliteration if he had a drink now. The urge to drink away all knowledge of the secrets that had been kept from him for so long, of how he had failed to know his own half brothers worked for him, served him, was too strong.

He briefly wished his father was still alive so that he could beat the man for his callous treatment of his own blood. There had been no mention of the men and boys in his father’s will and Brant had no idea how to settle them all as he should have done years ago. He wondered if that was what had made his mother what she was, and immediately doubted it. It may have helped, may have stirred to life something inside of her, but Letitia Mallam had a deep streak of cruelty and a large dose of pure, hard selfishness that could not have come to life within her without the seeds having been already there. His father’s faithlessness and roguish life had simply watered those seeds until they grew into full life.

“That was the dinner bell, m’lord,” said Thomas.

“Then we had best go and eat after all the trouble Lady Wherlocke has taken to feed us properly.”

“Mayhap I should just go and eat with the others,” Thomas said even as he followed Brant toward the dining room.

“Is that what you wish? To continue as a servant?”

“No, m’lord, but it is a better life than many another bastard gets. I at least have food and a roof o’er my head. Most of the time. Lady Mallam fair hates us, and that is one thing I do not blame her for, but at least we eat and have shelter. Get enough coin that we can e’en put a little aside.”

“And that is all you want? All the others want?”

“Aye, more or less. Merry got the vicar to give us all lessons so we can all read and write, even cipher some.” He grinned. “Merry is young and little but she has a lot of spine, she does.”

“It sounds so.” Brant paused outside the doors to the dining room. “But you should all have more. You are the sons of an earl. All of you should be more than servants. You can never be heirs to anything but you could be most anything else you wanted to be. There is no need for any of you to spend your lives mucking out the stables.”

“Not certain there is much else for us to do.”

“There is a lot. You could become teachers, tutors, secretaries or men of business, solicitors . . .”

“A solicitor? I saw one of them once. Might be a good thing to be.”

“Well, we can discuss it whenever you wish. Now,” he opened the door to the dining room, “we go and eat. It would be very ungentlemanly of us to leave a woman to eat alone, especially one who has helped in the fixing of our meal.”

Olympia silently waved Enid and Merry away when Brant and Thomas walked in. She waited until the pair reached the table before taking her seat. Brant looked less shocked than he had, as if he was beginning to accept the harsh truths he had had to face in such a short time. The fact that he was treating young Thomas as the brother he was made her believe he could accept the ones his parents had so obviously tried to forget and wanted to deny.

“We shall have to leave for London soon if we are to make it before dark,” she said after several moments of silent eating had passed.

Brant sighed. “I know. I just am not sure where I shall stay while I am in the city. All my friends are away at the moment or I would impose myself upon them.”

“You have no house in the city?”

“I do but Mother holds it. It was in Father’s will that she would be able to use it as her own until she died. I cannot stay with her even though it might be best to do so, for Agatha’s sake if naught else.”