Anxious to make amends for her earlier shrewishness, Chloe offered no resistance to Hugo's selected replacements. She did cast one longing look at the striped evening gown, but when the modiste produced a cherry-red taffeta over a half slip of rose pink embroidered with seed pearls, she was constrained to admit that it did look satisfactorily dashing.
They left Three Kings Yard very much in charity with each other and turned onto Brook Street.
"What's going on?" Chloe leaned forward as Hugo uttered one of his short naval words and checked his horses.
A small mob was coming down the street toward them, waving staves and shouting. They stopped in front of one of the tall, double-fronted houses and a stone flew through the air and crashed against the front
door. The mob surged up the steps, and their shouts grew louder. Another stone flew and a first floor window shattered. A stave hammered against the front door.
"They're attacking Lord Douglas's house," Hugo said. "It's been happening all over the city." "Lord Douglas?"
"Cabinet minister," he told her abstractedly as he tried to decide whether he would do better to turn his horses or drive straight past the crowd.
They were angry but not wild, he judged. But how would they react to two members of the hated aristocracy driving straight past them? These small mob attacks on the houses of government ministers had become frequent in the past months. The massacre at St. Peter's Field, now universally christened Peterloo in ironic comparison with Wellington's great victory, had fanned the disaffection, as well it might. There were many members of the government as horrified by that panicked savagery as were its victims and the members of the reform movement. But the hungry workingclass victims of repressive labor laws and harsh employers drew no distinction between their government sympathizers and those who would grind them even deeper into the dirt of powerless poverty.
"Go on," Chloe insisted. "They won't hurt us, and I want to hear what they're shouting." "I've no intention of exposing you-" "I was at Peterloo," she interrupted. "I'm on their side."
While he still hesitated, she suddenly sprang down and ran up the street toward the crowd.
"Chloe!" He thrust the reins into the hands of his tiger and leapt to the street, chasing after her. She had dived into the middle of the mob by the time he reached its outskirts.
"Eh, what's wi' you, guv?" a burly man demanded. "Slummin', are ye?" He waved his stave, and his beery breath wreathed around Hugo.
"No more than you are," Hugo said shortly. The milling throng seemed to have little direction. A few more stones were thrown, a few more jeers hurled, and then the mob eddied and broke.
Chloe was sitting on the steps of the minister's house as the crowd fell back. She had her arm around a shivering girl.
"The next time you shoot off on frolics of your own, Chloe, you are going to taste the full measure of my displeasure," Hugo declared furiously. "I am sick to death of these darting forays into the middle of some disturbance."
"She was knocked over," Chloe said as if none of this speech had penetrated. "And she's having a baby, but she's only a child herself. Look how thin she is, and she's so cold." She rubbed the skinny shoulders vigorously.
Hugo recognized defeat. He had early in his experience of warfare learned when the odds were insuperable. The child Chloe held was perhaps thirteen, although she looked little more than ten. Her swollen belly pushed against the threadbare material of her striped petticoat, her only protection against the sharp autumnal wind. Her lips were blue in a painfully thin, ashen face, and her feet were as bare as they'd been at her birth.
How Chloe had found this piece of society's flotsam, he didn't bother to question. They seemed attracted to her like iron filings to a magnet… or was it the other way around? Either way, he knew they would be housing the girl and saw no point in bootless discussion.
"Come along." He strode back to the curricle that his tiger had brought level with the house.
Chloe helped the girl to her feet, murmuring softly to her as she encouraged her to the curricle.
With a sudden exclamation of terror the child pulled back as Hugo moved to help her up. "I ain't goin' in there. Where you takin' me? I ain't done nuthin' wrong… I ain't goin' to no Bridewell." Her eyes wide with fear in her thin dirty face, she struggled, kicking out as Hugo tried to hold her.
"Hush," Chloe said, taking her hand. "No one's going to hurt you. No one's going to take you to Bridewell. I want you to come to my home, where you'll be warm and can have something to eat. When did you last eat?"
The girl's struggles ceased and her eyes darted between them, suddenly sharp and focused. "Dunno."
"I promise we won't hurt you," Chloe repeated. "When you've had something to eat and I've found you some warm clothes, then you can go anywhere you wish. I promise."
"You one a them do-gooders?" the girl demanded. "I bin wi' the likes a them. All preachin' and nuthin' to eat but a bite a bread and a bit a gruel… an' you don't get that 'n you don't say as 'ow yer a fallen' woman an' sorry fer it."
"Oh, I'm a fallen woman too," Chloe said cheerfully, oblivious of Hugo's sharp intake of breath. "So you'll be quite safe from any preaching. And I detest gruel, so we don't have any of that in the house."
Hugo closed his eyes in despair. "Not another word!" he snapped, conscious of the tiger's big ears. "You have not a grain of discretion. Get up!" Releasing his hold on Chloe's new prize, he caught his ward around the waist and swung her into the curricle. "Are you coming?" He turned back to the pregnant girl, who hadn't taken advantage of her freedom to run.
" 'Spose so," she said. "But we're not goin' to no Bridewell?"
"No!" Hugo said impatiently. "We are not."
The girl scrambled into the somewhat overcrowded curricle with Hugo's helping hand.
"Let go their heads," he said curtly to the fascinated tiger as he took up the reins.
"Right you are, guv." With a cheery grin the lad released the team and dashed for his perch at the rear of the curricle as it took off down Brook Street.
Chloe scrunched up on the seat to make room for the girl beside her. It put her in very close contact with Hugo, who glanced down at her with a look that guaranteed retribution. She offered a tentative smile and squiggled closer so that her thigh was pressed hard against his. Hugo's expression didn't soften.
Chloe turned her attention to the girl. "What's your name?"
"Peg."
"How old are you, Peg?"
"Dunno."
"Where do you live?"
"Nowhere in partic'ler." She shrugged her scrawny shoulders and hunched over her belly, folding her bare arms against the chill wind.
"You don't have a home?"
Peg shrugged again. "Sometimes I sleep at me nan's. She's cook in a big 'ouse, and sometimes they lets me sleep in the wash'ouse. But the 'ousekeeper's a right tartar an' if she found me, she'd 'ave me nan turned off wi' no character."
"What about the baby's father?"
"What about 'im?"
"Well… well, where is he?"
"Dunno. Dunno who 'e is."
"Oh." Chloe was silenced at the ramifications of this statement.
Hugo drew rein outside his house and jumped down.
He helped his passengers to alight and then followed them into the house.
"What the 'ell…?" Samuel stared at the new arrival, who was transfixed with terror as Dante put his huge paws on Chloe's shoulder, licking her face in exuberant, ecstatic welcome.
"Oh, you didn't think we were going to stop at bear cubs, did you?" Hugo said sardonically. "I don't think Miss Gresham will be satisfied until she's turned my house into a lying-in ward and an orphanage in addition to an animal rescue center."