Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

R ecovering debts, extorting information, repossessing property... Sebastian Rooke passed his week under review looking for a suitable topic for his regular letter to his sister. He sighed and dipped his pen in the ink pot again. It had been a particularly unpleasant week.

A rustle behind him made him turn to see two of the five kittens he had rescued three days ago playing with a piece of bark that had fallen off one of the logs in the fireplace. The hot summer weather that had plagued them for the past month and half had taken a cold turn today, necessitating the lighting of a fire.

Little paws batted at the fragment, making it dance, and two black and white balls of fluff pounced. The pair rolling over and wrestling with each other, the wood was soon forgotten. He smiled at their antics and turned back to his desk. Kittens! Now that was something he could tell Hetty about. With some judicious editing of course.

No mention of the circumstances in which he found the kittens. Under the f loorboards in a derelict house, that formerly belonged to a rival of his employer, Mr Lovell. That rival was now dead of course. Had been for some time, hence the derelict nature of the house. Mr Rooke and his crew had been occupied in looking for any caches of information or valuables that might have been left behind. They found more than they bargained for, including two rotting corpses, identity unknown and never likely to be as there wasn't enough left of them to identify anything but their gender.

There was no sign of the kitten's mother, and the little things were bleating fit to bring the roof down, which was how Seb discovered them.

Standing in the middle of the wrecked room, sweaty and disheveled, listening to the racket, he bent and ripped up the remaining floorboards with his big, strong hands, until they were revealed, nestled into a rotten blanket. Five sets of enormous eyes stared up at him and five little pink mouths opened in supplication.

His compatriots were all for leaving them or drowning them, but Seb couldn't do that.

So, he found a rat chewed creel and brought them home to his single room apartment in St Giles and fed them milk till they nearly burst. He'd found a shallow wooden box and filled it with earth from the small garden plot that ran along the back and side of his long narrow apartment and set it down near the side door for their toilet .

Twenty minutes later, the letter finished, Seb reviewed his sisters last letter to ensure he had responded to all her queries. Except one. He had no prospects of meeting a respectable woman in his current circumstances and even if he did, his line of work prohibited him taking a wife, so there was no point in responding to that question. Even if he was worthy of a woman who was fit to meet his sister and father...

Dismissing his lack of marriage prospects with a slight shake of his head and an internal wince, he folded the sheet carefully and put it in an envelope. He addressed it to Miss H Rooke care of the Rectory at Pinner in the Borough of Harrow, and put the envelope on the mantelpiece, careful not to step on the kittens whom, their fight forgotten, had fallen asleep on the hearth rug. The envelop dislodged a shiny brass button, which fell with a clunk to the floor.

Bending slowly to pick it up, Seb cradled it in his palm. At one point that brass button was all he had left of his sanity. It belonged to his soldier's uniform and holding it in his hand was the only thing that brought him back from the madness. The retreat from Salamanca to Corunna had broken the British, the conditions were horrendous and discipline sadly lacking. But it was the slaughter of the horses on top of the horrors of the battle at Corunna that brought him unstuck. Over 4000 horses slain, 900 men lost and 5000 wounded or gravely ill with fever, himself among them.

He had come home a broken man. Numb from the horrors he had witnessed, once his body had recovered, he needed work so as not to be a burden to his family. He became a cro upier for Garmon Lovell and the separation between his feelings and his actions enabled him to do things other men would balk at.

Over the years the numbness persisted, but little things got though his armor occasionally, like little balls of fluff. He smiled at the kittens sleeping by his big booted feet and put the button back on the mantlepiece.

His stomach rumbled, not an unusual occurrence, he was a big man, and it had been several hours since he last ate. He went to the pantry cupboard in the corner of the room and fetched out a generous slice of pork pie and a bottle of porter. He set his meal on the small side table, situated beside the armchair drawn up to the fireplace and lit a candle to supplement the dying summer sunlight coming through the window. Sitting down, he picked up his book.

With the pork pie in his other hand, he took a bite and settled in for a quiet read. It wasn't often he got a night off; the prospect of time alone was pleasant.

Needles in the side of his thigh, made him look down to find another kitten in the act of transferring from the chair up which she had climbed, to his leg, hoisting herself up by her paws, little claws digging in for purchase. This one was tabby with white splotches. He smiled and held out a fragment of meat to the little thing. She took it eagerly, and like magic her brothers and sisters appeared, all clamoring for their share of the treat with little bleating mews.

Breaking off some of the pie and crumbling it into fragments, he set the pla te down on the floor and the kittens gathered round it. Rising he fetched a small bowl and filled it with milk. The kittens transferred their attention to the milk, except for one of the boys who seemed more interested in the meat.

"Sensible fellow," murmured Seb approvingly, returning to his seat and his book.

It was several hours later that a loud rapping on his door jerked Seb out of the doze he had fallen into.

"Mr Rooke! Mr Rooke!" an urgent voice called through the letter slot.

It was dark and somewhat chilly, the candle having guttered out and the fire reduced to a few hot coals, the sound of pounding rain lashing the windows, told of a storm of no small proportions.

Rising and creating an avalanche of kittens that had chosen to fall asleep on him, Seb moved groggily towards the door, a hand running through his short dark hair and scratching his stubbled chin. What the hell's time was it?

"Aye what's to do?" he rumbled opening the door and finding a drenched and panting young Ben, Mr Lovell's chief mudlark and personal courier, on the doorstep.

"It's Mrs Tate's sister, Miss Whittaker! She's gone missing. We're to find her swift like, Mr Lovell's orders!"