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“Mrs. Pershing and I are pleased to be able to support our less fortunate fellows,” her husband said smoothly.
Finally, the nun turned the sheets to face him. “If you’ll sign here, then, Mr. Pershing, the children will become your responsibility.”
“For the next eight weeks,” Mr. Pershing corrected, not moving. “And we would like to meet them before we accept responsibility.”
“Ah. Yes. My mistake.” The nun turned the paper back and crossed out a line, replacing it with another. “For the next eight weeks.” The door to her left opened. “Here are the little darlings now. George, Rose, say hello to Mr. and Mrs. Pershing. You’re to live with them for the next few weeks.”
The smaller mop of brown hair pulled her simple gray skirts out to either side of her knees and gave a clumsy, two-footed curtsy. The taller one, his hedgehog hair a lighter brown and sticking up crazily from his head except where it looked like someone had wetted the mess and attempted to pat it down, just looked at them. The novice sister flicked him in the ear. “Good afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Pershing,” he said, taking a half step sideways.
Good heavens, they were small. Things too tiny and delicate to be left alone in the world, certainly. The girl’s face was more oval than her brother’s, her dark eyes enormous as they peered from between strands of her unkempt hair. Little Rose barely would come to Emmeline’s waist, and Emmie was petite herself.
George looked a bit… sturdier than his sister, though also too thin. He was a head taller than Rose, and his eyes were lighter—a green very close to Mr. Pershing’s. As they continued to stare between her and her husband, they narrowed. Assessing? Frightened? Angry? It could have been any one, or even all three.
“Hello,” she said, staying seated so she wouldn’t tower over them. “As Sister Mary Stephen said, we would like to bring you home with us for a time. I’m sure we’ll all be fast friends, and we’ll have a grand time together. Would you like that?”
Both sent glances at the imposing-looking sister. “Yes, ma’am,” they recited.
Poor, frightened babies. These children weren’t simply props for the play she’d written about the nonexistent Pershing family. They were actual… children. Youngsters without parents, who’d clearly been browbeaten enough that they were afraid to set a foot wrong.
“Mr. Pershing, I am satisfied,” she said, keeping her hands clenched in her lap against the temptation to flick both nuns on their ears.
“As am I,” he said crisply, an undercurrent of something hard in his voice that made her give him a look. Had he seen the same thing she had? Had he come to the same conclusion? Had he abruptly become as determined as she was to give these young ones eight weeks’ worth of hot meals and soft beds and a splendid holiday in the Lake District before they returned to London?
Sister Mary Stephen slid the amended sheet of paper back around and handed Mr. Pershing the pen. “Sign here to indicate that you are taking responsibility for the children, and we’ll call this finished.”
He signed, and at the nun’s nod the novice set a small sack down beside each child—presumably their belongings—before she stepped back. “We’ll see you in eight weeks, dears,” the nun stated, that stretched smile of hers reappearing. “Learn all you can, and mind your manners. When you return, we’ll see about getting you put somewhere permanently.”
For some reason that sounded ominous, but the entire orphanage unsettled Emmie. Before she knew it, she and Mr. Pershing, along with young George and Rose Fletcher, had been ushered down the hallway, down the stairs, and out the front door. It shut behind them with a heavy, reverberating thud. Back in the depths of the orphanage, she swore that for just a moment she could hear the sound of female laughter.
“Are you going to sell us to gypsies?” the little girl, Rose, asked from her seat in the coach.
“Rosie, shut it,” George cut in. He held his sack of belongings on his lap, his body perched forward as if he meant to leap out of the coach the moment the vehicle stopped.
“No, we’re not selling you to gypsies,” Emmeline answered with a smile. “Or to anyone else.”
“Deirdre said her cousin got sold to gypsies,” Rose went on, craning her neck to look out the nearest window.
“You got to stop believing everything people tell you,” her brother stated, offering Mr. Pershing beside him a sideways glance.
“Deirdre knows things.”
Emmie cleared her throat at that pronouncement. With the frightening Sister Mary Stephen well behind them, the children had visibly relaxed, thank goodness. “Would you like to kneel on the seat so you can see outside?”
“Sister Mary Francis says sitting is for arses, and praying is for knees.”
“Well, this is a new adventure, so we can make an exception,” Emmie replied.
Without waiting to be asked a second time, Rose bounced up onto her knees to rest her forehead against the window glass. “I was just a baby the last time we was this far away from the stone jug.”
“I’m sorry, the what?”
“St. Stephen’s,” George clarified.
Across from Emmie, Mr. Pershing shifted. “I believe ‘stone jug’ is a colloquialism for Newgate Prison,” he supplied.
“That’s horrible. Did you hate it at St. Stephen’s?”
“Mrs. Pershing,” her husband said, before either child could answer, “I believe we should be discussing new clothes and shaved ices.”