Free The Opening Night Murder by Anne Rutherford Page B

moment for all of us, and I expect it was a terrible strain on your family. I’m sorry your situation didn’t turn out as you’d hoped. It appears there was disappointment for everyone in it.
    I married not long after you left your father’s house. My wife is a fine and gentle woman, pious and responsible. She is the essence of what St. Paul would call a good wife. I am most pleased with her, so my own disappointment is, in the end, not crushing. For me the situation turned out better than I could ever have hoped. I did admire your forthrightness in confessing your sin and your reluctance to foist a child on me that was not mine. I believe that sort of honesty to be rare in a woman, for even my own dear wife is prone to disingenuous behavior whenever there is difficulty. I cannot help but respect honesty in you, and as I said that night, I would have liked it in a wife. But that was not to be.
    You have asked me to take on your son as an apprentice. Though my wife, as pious as she is, would not be sanguine aboutaccepting the illegitimate son of a former fiancée, regardless of the boy’s actual parentage, I feel I can be charitable toward you and your child. So long as my wife never learns of our previous arrangement, I am open to the idea of having Piers as an apprentice in my offices for the customary seven years.
    Find enclosed a letter of credit sufficient for transportation to Newcastle and a suit of appropriate clothes, as I suspect your straitened circumstances would make obtaining them difficult. Send Piers to me at the earliest opportunity, and be assured he will learn a trade and live as safely as my own children during his tenure here.
    I wish you the best of luck in making your life in the future what you would have it be.
    Suzanne watched Daniel’s face when she spoke of his son’s childhood, but there was no flicker of guilt, or even of acknowledgment. He only looked at her as he listened, with a slight smile on his lips and a distant look in his eye. She couldn’t be entirely certain he even heard what she was saying. Her chest tightened, but she continued. “I was terribly lucky to succeed in obtaining an apprenticeship for him.”
    That finally brought a glimmer from Daniel, but of surprise. “But you obtained one. Certainly if Farthingworth hadn’t come through, you might have wheedled it out of a patron.”
    Suzanne’s eyes narrowed at the intended slight, but pretended to ignore it. “I wasn’t yet so experienced in such things, had not yet had what might be termed a ‘patron,’ and wouldn’t have known how to convince such a man to put himself out for my son by another man. At the time I believed I had no choice but to make the arrangement as if I were Piers’s father myself, and the only man I had ever known who was in aposition to give Piers what I wanted him to have was Stephen Farthingworth. He was my first and only thought.”
    Deeper surprise showed on Daniel’s face. “Rather bold of you. What made you think he would be of help?”
    “He was the only man I knew who might be charitable enough to help. When he was my suitor, he’d seemed a reasonable sort, and though I didn’t care to marry him, I nevertheless saw him as kind. Extraordinarily kind, enough to seem weak, and that was why I disliked the idea of marrying him. Besides, desperation makes one do odd, otherwise unthinkable things. I wrote to him in Newcastle and asked if he might be agreeable to taking on my intelligent, obedient, hardworking son. The worst that could happen was that he might say no, and I was used to that by then.”
    “Did you explain that said son had been raised in a whorehouse and was currently living on the street?”
    She straightened in her chair and raised her chin. “I couldn’t have him thinking Piers might have been raised to be a thief or thug. I told him we were in extreme need. I said we were temporarily reduced to taking a room at Maddie’s, which was true on the day I wrote the