All in all, her night had been a success.
Barnaby stood in the street, in the wreathing fog, and watched the carriage roll away. Once the rattle of its wheels had faded, he grinned and turned back to his door.
Climbing his front steps, he realized his mood had lifted. His earlier despondency had vanished, replaced with a keen anticipation for what the morrow would bring.
And for that he had Penelope Ashford to thank.
Not only had she brought him a case, one outside his normal arena and therefore likely to challenge him and expand his knowledge, but even more importantly that case was one not even his mother would disapprove of his pursuing.
Mentally composing the letter he would pen to his parent first thing the next morning, he entered his house whistling beneath his breath and let Mostyn bolt the door behind him.
2
Good morning, Mr. Adair. Miss Ashford told us to expect you. She’s in the office. If you’ll come this way?”
Barnaby stepped over the threshold of the Foundling House and waited while the neatly dressed middle-aged woman who’d opened the heavy front door in response to his knock closed it and secured a high latch.
Turning away, she beckoned; he followed in her wake as she led him across a wide foyer and down a long corridor with rooms opening to left and right. Their footsteps on the black-and-white tiles echoed faintly; the unadorned walls were a pale creamy yellow. Structurally the house seemed in excellent order, but there was no hint of even modest ornamentation—no paintings on the walls or rugs upon the tiles.
Nothing to soften or disguise the reality that this was an institution.
A brief survey of the building from across the street had revealed a large, older-style mansion, painted white, three stories with attics above, a central block flanked by two wings, with large graveled yards in front of each wing separated from the pavement by a wrought-iron fence. A straight, narrow path led from the heavy front gate to the front porch.
Everything Barnaby had seen of the structure screamed solid practicality.
He refocused on the woman ahead of him. Although she wasn’t wearing a uniform, she reminded him of the matron at Eton with her quick, purposeful stride, and the way her head turned to scan each room as they passed, checking those inside.
He looked into the rooms, too, and saw groups of children of various ages either seated at desks or in groups on the floor, listening with rapt attention to women, and in one case a man, reading or teaching.
Long before the woman he was following slowed, then halted before a doorway, he’d started making additions to his mental notes on Penelope Ashford. It was the sight of the children—their faces ruddy and round, features undistinguished, their hair neat but unstyled, their clothes decent but of the lowest station—all so very different from the children he or she would normally have any dealings with that opened his eyes.
In championing such powerless, vulnerable innocents from a social stratum so very far removed from her own, Penelope wasn’t indulging in some simple, altruistic gesture; in stepping so far beyond the bounds of what society deemed appropriate in charitable works for ladies of her rank, she was—he felt certain knowingly—risking society’s disapprobation.
Sarah’s orphanage and her association with it wasn’t the same as what Penelope was doing here. Sarah’s children were country-bred, children of farmworkers and local families who lived, worked, or interacted with the gentry’s estates; in caring for them, an element of noblesse oblige was involved. But the children here were from the slums and teeming tenements of London; in no way connected with the aristocracy, their families eked out a living however they could, in whatever way they could.
And some of those ways wouldn’t bear polite scrutiny.
The woman he’d followed gestured through the doorway. “Miss Ashford is in the inner office, sir. If you’ll go through?”
Barnaby paused on the threshold of the anteroom. Inside, a prim young woman was sitting, head down, at a small desk in front of a phalanx of closed cabinets, busily sorting through a stack of papers. Smiling slightly, Barnaby thanked his escort, then walked across the room to the inner sanctum.
Its door, too, stood open.
On silent feet, he approached and paused, looking in. Penelope’s office—the brass plaque on the door readHOUSE ADMINISTRATOR—was a severe, undecorated, white-walled square. It contained two tall cabinets against one wall, and a large desk set before a window with two straight-backed chairs facing it.
Penelope sat in the chair behind the desk, her concentration fixed on a sheaf of papers. A slight frown had drawn her dark brows into an almost horizontal line above the bridge of her straight little nose.
Her lips, he noted, were compressed into a firm, rather forbidding line.
She was wearing a dark blue walking dress; the deep hue emphasized her porcelain complexion and the lustrous bounty of her richly brown hair. He took due note of the glints of red in the heavy mass.
Raising a hand, he rapped one knuckle on the door. “Miss Ashford?”
She looked up. For one instant, both her gaze and expression remained blank, then she blinked, refocused, and waved him in. “Mr. Adair. Welcome to the Foundling House.”
No smile, Barnaby noted; she was all business. He told himself that was refreshing.
His own expression easy, he walked forward to stand beside one chair. “Perhaps you could show me around the place, and you could answer my questions as we walk.”
