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“Rose!” Mrs. Pershing said, as sharply as Sister Mary Stephen. “Ladies do not say ‘shite.’”
“You just did,” Rose pointed out.
“As a matter of instruction. We say ‘horse manure,’ if we must mention it at all.”
“Can I say ‘horse shite’?” George asked, turning his head to look at Mr. Pershing.
“Yes, but not in female company,” he returned promptly, his expression much less ruffled.
“Oh, is that it?” Rose yelled, leaning far enough out the window that the missus grabbed on to the hem of her pink-and-yellow-striped dress. “It’s sterling! Georgie! Look at all the windows!”
George leaned out the opposite window again, letting the breeze blow away the rest of his nightmare—afternoonmare—and tangle into his hair. “The whole orphanage could fit in there. Even Fatty Crunkle!”
“Who, pray tell, is Fatty Crunkle?” Mr. Pershing asked.
“He’s one of the long-haul boys,” George said, counting windows at the front of the giant house. They had to pay taxes on every one of those windows. The Pershings must be rich as Croesus. “And he’s enormously fat.”
“What’s a long-haul boy?” the missus queried.
“One that’s never going to be adopted. He’s already twelve. Fat as he is, nobody wants him even to clean shi—manure—out of their stables. He eats more than he’s worth, I reckon. He’ll go to the workhouse next year.” He didn’t like thinking about long-haul boys, so he reached out with one hand to point. “Look, Rosie! A pond! Are there fish?”
“There are,” Mr. Pershing answered. “Do you like to fish?”
Oh, he would probably be a magnificent fisherman. “I think so.”
Rose ducked her head back into the coach for a moment. “We never been fishing,” she explained, and returned to her view.
Mr. Pershing cleared his throat. “Well. We shall have to remedy that at the earliest opportunity.”
Fish. Fishing. No London stink, no snoring Fatty Crunkle and the other badgering long-haul boys, no being scratched at by the big people who thought he and his sister could help them nick a quid or two, and no damned nuns trying to get Rosie adopted while he got left behind. George whooped into the wind. “No more London!”
“No more London!” Rose echoed, hopping up and down.
He waited for one of the grown-ups to remind them that they would be back in London in eight weeks when they were finished playing mama and papa, but neither of them said anything. It didn’t matter to him, anyway, because he’d already decided they weren’t going back. No, they were making other plans, he and Rosie were.
The coach rolled up to the front of the house. Even before it could stop, a tall, stout cove in green and black livery emerged from the house, two more fart-catchers at his back. “Welcome home, Mr. and Mrs. Pershing,” the fancy one said, pulling open the coach door.
“You don’t have much hair,” Rose observed. “Are you the butler?”
The big man stared right back at Rosie.
“Powell,” Mrs. Pershing said in a too-loud voice, “these are our children, George and Rose. Children, this is Powell. Yes, he is Winnover Hall’s butler, and a very fine one at that.”
“Your… children, ma’am?” the butler said faintly.
“Yes, our children. Please have Edward show them to the gold and green rooms.”
“They adjoin, like you said?” George jumped down to the crushed-oyster-shell drive.
“They do.”
“And our trunks?”
“They will go up with you. No one will open them.”
The second coach turned onto the drive, its roof stacked high with blanket boxes and clothes and other things from London. The maid and the valet, Hannah and Davis, emerged, and all the other servants mobbed them. George wished them luck figuring out what was going on, because he didn’t have a clue.
He kept an eye on his trunk all the way inside the house, up the wide staircase, and down two lamplit hallways to a gold-colored room where maids were already lighting more lamps, even with the edge of the sun still above the horizon. It was bigger than the shack all the Fletchers had shared when he’d been little. It was bigger than the dormitory room where he and fifteen other boys slept and kept all of their earthly belongings—at least the ones the nuns didn’t take—in a wooden box beneath each bed. The windows weren’t so high up the wall that you couldn’t see—or get out of them—without turning a bed on its head and climbing it like a ladder.