An Unsuitable Heir

  An Unsuitable Heir is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A 2017 Loveswept Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2017 by K. J. Charles

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN 9780399593987

  Cover design: Carrie Divine/Seductive Designs

  Cover photographs: Ysbrand Cosijn/Shutterstock (man); Demian/Depositphotos (background)

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Dedication

  By K. J. Charles

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  This trilogy has been a long haul. I owe a huge thanks to May Peterson, Eddie Clark, and Michele Howe, there for me throughout, giving me moral support, advance reads, cogent criticism, and the occasional kick.

  Much love to all the duvet crew for endless moral support and tolerance of whining, and to my beloved KJ Charles Chat group on Facebook. You keep me going.

  Very special thanks to James “Sprite” Howe, David Hawk, E. E. Ottoman, and May, again, for lending me their expertise, and to Lady Tiferet and Kuba for help with the Polish. Any errors or infelicities are, of course, mine alone.

  Mila May has done wonderful work on the art that accompanies the series (check it out here).

  Lennan Adams did glorious designs for the promo. And I’m hugely grateful to my agent, Courtney Miller-Callihan, who always has my back.

  Chapter 1

  Saturday 29 November 1873

  Omens ought to come with fanfare. That was how it was in the theatre. Prophecies and foretellings of great events were delivered by three sinister women around a cauldron on a blasted heath, or a toga-clad messenger with winged sandals, descending from the gods with scroll in hand. Omens came with a clap of thunder that shook the walls, or a sinister cawing as a single magpie, one for sorrow, glared with jet-bead eyes.

  They weren’t meant to turn up in the newspaper while you were eating kippers.

  They were good kippers, from Brookes Market. It was a good breakfast. Pen had made the tea and cooked the kippers up in a jug over the fire while he toasted yesterday’s bread on a fork, all the trivial domestic proceedings with which he loved to start the day because they said over and over again: This is your home, this is your haven, this is your heart. He and Greta had their world in this small space for two—a shabby set of rooms in a shabby boarding house in shabby Fox Court—which Greta had made warm by blocking up the gaps in the boards with a hammer and nails, while Pen made it beautiful with bright rugs and colourful prints, frivolous and vital.

  This morning, like every morning, they ate breakfast together at the round table for two. Greta had the newspaper; Pen The Graphic weekly illustrated. Despite the temptation, he did not turn to the current serial, Phineas Redux, to which they were both addicted, with its romance, scandal in high places, politics, and murder. They would share that later. For now they sat in comfortable silence or quoted snippets of news or comic writing to amuse each other before another busy day of almost but not quite breaking their necks, and, like every morning, it was wonderful.

  Then Greta turned the page.

  Pen was examining the engraving that accompanied a piece about the imminent Ashanti expedition when he felt his twin react. He wouldn’t have been able to say what he felt, whether it was a tiny movement or a barely audible breath that caught his attention; he only knew even as he looked up sharply that something was wrong.

  Greta was staring at the newspaper, and the blood was draining from her face.

  “Gret?”

  She gave a tiny shake of the head, and pointed.

  Pen was behind her and leaning over her shoulder before the chair he’d sprung from settled back on its legs. He couldn’t tell what he was meant to look at for a moment, and then realised. An advertisement: “REWARD: A reward of £20 is offered for information that assists in the location of REPENTANCE and REGRET GODFREY, aged 23, originally of Norfolk. Offspring of Emmeline Godfrey. Contact E.P. at Box 2018.”

  “No,” Pen said. “No, no, no.”

  “E.P. It’s him. It’s the Potters. They’re coming after us. Pen—”

  Pen grabbed her shoulder. “They can’t. They can’t take us back. We’re adults. They’ve got no right.”

  “When did that ever stop them?” Greta flashed.

  “We were children,” Pen said, telling himself as much as her. “We don’t have to listen. They can’t make us go anywhere, and if they try—”

  “What if it’s Mother?”

  Pen’s stomach spasmed. “Mother?”

  Greta put her clenched fists to her lips. “It’s no good thinking Erasmus will turn up here like a pantomime villain, demanding I marry him. If he did, we’d kick him down the stairs and laugh about it, but that isn’t how it’ll be. Erasmus will oil in here and say—I don’t know—‘Your mother is very ill and she wants to see you. You’re making her ill, you’re making her suffer. If you don’t come back she’ll be sorry.’ ” Her voice caught Erasmus’s accent and tone all too well. Pen’s whole chest was hurting now, the ache of remembered, constant childhood fear. “He’ll make everything our fault and talk about Mother—”

  “We can’t go back, and we won’t. Whatever he says.”

  “No,” Greta said. “But he’ll say it and say it and say it.”

  Pen grabbed his chair, pulling it round so they sat close. “Whatever he says will be awful. So we mustn’t listen, that’s all. And, look, he hasn’t found us, and who’s to say he can? We’re not Repentance and Regret Godfrey, and we never have been, not in London.”

  Greta’s hand found his. “No repentance, no regret.”

  Pen squeezed it and echoed the motto that had sustained them since childhood. “No repentance, no regret.”

  “And no Potters,” Greta added, putting firmness in her voice. “What do they want, for heaven’s sake? Twenty pounds, just to find us?”

  “That shows anything Erasmus says will be a lie, doesn’t it? He wouldn’t pay twenty pounds as a kindly act because Mother wanted to speak to us.”

  “He’s after something.”

  “But what? What could possibly be worth twenty pounds? If it was when we ran away—”

  “—he’d have done anything to get his own back.”

  “—but now? It’s been nine years! Can he have held a grudge for nine years?”

  They both thought about Erasmus Potter.

  “Ugh,” Pen said at last. “Let’s not be seen for a while.”

  “We’re in the wrong job for that. Oh God. We’ve two shows today and look.” Greta held out her free hand. It was shaking. “Those rat bastards.”

  Pen held out his own hand, which shook too. It was larger than Greta’s, knuckles broader, nails spatulate, a few strands of hair visible on the back. A strong, powerful, masculine hand
. It was a vital tool of his trade, and it looked like an alien thing.

  He jerked it away, out of sight, rubbing it on his trousers as though that might wipe away the hair, the size. “Shit.”

  “Pen?”

  He shut his eyes, concentrating on his breathing, on making his body his own again. “Dizzy spell.”

  “We should cancel.”

  “Now? McCollum will be furious. I’ll get over it.”

  “He’d be a lot more furious if we fell, and it’s not only you who’s likely to,” Greta said. “I’m afraid. I’m sorry, but I am. I’ll be, staring down at the crowd, or in at the boxes, looking for Erasmus—”

  “Oh, as if you don’t already do that.” Pen nudged her.

  She nudged him back, harder. “Looking at the Mysterious Stranger is a hobby. Looking out for Erasmus is a problem.”

  “I know.”

  The Flying Starlings act, like any trapeze performance, demanded iron control, mental as well as physical, and absolute trust. Looking around, searching for faces, being dazzled by the glare of gaslight, listening for a Norfolk accent in the cries of the crowd—any of it could be distracting, and distraction was danger.

  Let alone if Pen had one of his “dizzy spells.” He hadn’t had one in a year or more, that awful lurching sense of wrongness, and the minute, the very minute Erasmus bloody Potter came back into his life…

  “We should cancel,” he agreed.

  “We’ll take a week. Remind McCollum and the Cirque to keep their traps shut and eyes open. We’ll stay out of sight and it will go away.”

  “Yes. We’ll be fine. He won’t find us.”

  Greta put her hand on his. “Of course he won’t. Everything will be all right.”

  Saturday 13 December

  “I don’t know what you’re looking out of the window for,” Greta remarked from her chair. “You might as well shut your eyes for all the good it’ll do.”

  “I’m sure it’s clearing.” Pen stared into the fog that called him a liar as it rolled lazily by the windowpane. “It’s definitely lighter than it was.”

  That was true, but not meaningful. The fog that had lain over London since last Sunday was the worst he’d ever known. It had shut down the theatres, since not even the front rows of the stalls could make out performers on the stage; it had mostly shut down the streets, come to that. At the worst, you hadn’t been able to see three yards ahead; it was days since Pen had witnessed any evidence that the sun was still there. It wasn’t quite so terrible now—merely an extremely bad fog rather than the end of the world—but it was still nothing you’d want to go out in.

  “It’ll have to clear sometime.” Greta held a stage costume to her nose, squinting at the ruffle she was adding. A wax candle burned at her elbow to allow her to work. It was three in the afternoon. “Or it’ll stay like this forever and we’ll all die.”

  “Enjoying your sewing?”

  “It’s my favourite thing.”

  Pen had loved sewing as a child, finding something intensely satisfying about the precision and neatness it required. He resented that his hands were so large now. Greta’s weren’t a great deal smaller, but she was far more deft with a needle than he was, and since she loathed cookery in any form, such that it put her into a bad mood to make a pot of tea, they’d partitioned the domestic duties between them. It worked well, except for days like this, when he’d already cleared up their luncheon and she still had a stack of mending piled on the chair.

  “I’m bored,” Pen said.

  “Of course you are.” Greta shifted the ruffle by a fraction of an inch and set the stitch. “Whereas I’m having a marvellous time.”

  They were both itching for activity after a pointless week huddled at home jumping at shadows for fear of Erasmus Potter, who hadn’t even shown his face. A week without pay, without movement, without the colour and glory and applause and wild exhilaration of the trapeze. They’d both been desperate to get back where they ought to be; they’d done two magnificent performances last Saturday, and then the fog had set in. London had been shrouded in night for a week, and Pen was going to run mad if he couldn’t do something.

  “For heaven’s sake, go out,” Greta said without looking up. “You’re making me twitch. Go for a walk.”

  “In this?”

  “You said it was clearing. We’re out of gin. Go to the Kitchen for a bottle and have one while you’re there. You’re driving me to distraction hanging around, and I am going to get this lot done while the fog lasts if it kills me.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have spent the last three days reading novels and you’d be finished already?”

  “Go away.”

  Pen checked his appearance in the speckled mirror. He had shaved close, as he always did. His hair was tied back at the nape of his neck and would be unobtrusive under a coat; he hadn’t felt like “making up,” as they called it in the theatre, that morning. The gold hoops he wore in both ears might attract attention, but sailors and all sorts passed through the Kitchen regularly, and anyway, it wasn’t a place people made personal remarks. You minded your own business there, because if you stuck your nose into other people’s business, it could easily end up broken.

  Not that Pen was the sort to do that, but his wide shoulders and muscled frame tended to put people off picking fights. They looked at the body and saw someone who wasn’t Pen, but if that discouraged troublemakers, he’d take it.

  He pulled on his coat and hat, bade Greta goodbye, and ran lightly down the stairs.

  Fox Court, where their lodging house stood, wasn’t a particularly salubrious location. It was a maze of dead-end alleys off Gray’s Inn Road, a little chaos of tenements and leaning houses strung together with wet washing. The streets, if they could be dignified with the name, weren’t clean or inviting or even safe, but their house was decent enough, and run with a firm hand. Admittedly, their landlady supplemented her income as a receiver of stolen goods, but that meant she understood and obliged when they asked her not to give out their names, not to let guests visit, to keep her mouth and door firmly shut.

  He called out a greeting as he passed her parlour, and headed out into the alleys. It was foul outside, but normally foul, not like Tuesday, when the whole of Fox Court had been stuffed to the point of asphyxiation with air thick enough to knit. He could actually see houses looming through the murk today, and a figure emerging from it, too.

  “Hoi, mate!” A South London voice, male. Not the Potters, but Pen made sure he had his wits about him as he paused; business would have been bad for rampsmen and pickpockets as well as everyone else.

  “Help you?”

  The man came closer, his shape firming up out of the fog till Pen could make out a pale face between hat and coat. “Are you from around here? Only, I’m lost. Got turned around, been down two dead ends, and now I could be in Timbuctoo for all I know. Don’t suppose you can point me out?”

  Pointing wouldn’t help, even in clear daylight. “It’s a maze round here, to be honest. I’m not in a hurry, I’ll walk you out,” Pen offered. “Are you heading for Holborn or up to Dorrington Street?”

  “Dorrington Street. You’re a gentleman, mate.”

  He was extremely lost, since they were in the furthest corner of Fox Court from there. “It’s no trouble.”

  “Maybe not, but you’re saving me a lot of it. Live round here, do you? I don’t suppose there’s anywhere for a man to whet his whistle without having his purse emptied?”

  “Depends what sort of place you want.” Pen couldn’t see much of his companion but the man gave an impression of sturdy build, and not rarefied tastes. “The better sort of publics are out on Gray’s Inn Road.”

  “A glass of mother’s ruin is all I’m after, keep the cold out. Been walking for an hour in this.”

  “You must be frozen stiff. Well, there’s the Gin Kitchen up here,” Pen suggested. “It’s not grand, but the drink won’t send you blind.”

  “That’ll do nicely. Te
ll you what,” the man said. “Take a drink with me as a thanks for your help, and show me out after?”

  Pen gave him a swift look-over. He was indeed dripping with fog-wet, and obviously cold. And after all, Pen had intended to drop in on the Kitchen as something to do. “All right, if you like.”

  The Kitchen was smoky and poorly lit, with oil lamps dangling from the rafters, and like everywhere the inside was fog-wreathed, but it was still better than the outside. There weren’t many people in yet. Pen took a seat at a rough table while his companion went to the bar. He returned in a few moments, carrying two tumblers of gin in one splay-fingered hand. Pen noted that as a bizarre way to carry drinks a couple of seconds before he registered the short, sewn-up left sleeve and realised the man only had one arm.

  He shifted his gaze to his companion’s face, not wanting to stare at whatever manoeuvres would be required to put the glasses down. The man was about thirty, with a strong, shrewd face, a pugnacious look. Pale blue eyes, which Pen guessed would go with fair hair when he took his hat off. Not precisely handsome—well, not handsome at all, but appealing anyway. It was the face of a tough, uncompromising, manly sort of man. Pen wondered what he was actually like.

  He shoved one glass across to Pen and took up the other. “Mark Braglewicz. Cheers.”

  “Pen Starling.” Pen sipped his gin, feeling the fiery burn. “That’s better. You’re soaked through. You must have been outside for hours.”

  “Yeah. This fog,” Mark agreed. “Think anyone’ll half-inch my coat if I hang it by the fire?”

  “Probably not.”

  Mark went to do that, hanging up his sodden hat as well. He had short blond hair, cropped close to the skull, receding a little at the temples. Polish or suchlike, perhaps, going by the -vitch sound of his name. He also had a very nice arse. Pen wasn’t sure whether he was being unlawfully solicited or just bought a drink, but decided he was open to finding out.