It had done little to elevate him in the boys’ estimation.

Six years later, Alfred was, at best, indifferent to him. But Charlie still blamed Jasper for all the ills he, his mother, and his siblings had suffered.

No doubt Dolly had filled his young ears with all sorts of grim tales about the heartless Captain Blunt. A wicked, unfeeling monster who had left his mistress and three illegitimate children to starve and die while he went off to war.

And Dolly had died.

By the time Jasper had returned from the Crimea, the consumption had all but devoured her. She’d mustered the strength to travel to Goldfinch Hall, baby Daisy on her hip, demanding Jasper retrieve Charlie and Alfred from the workhouse before she died.

Demanding. Threatening.

Jasper had been tempted to give up the game then and there. To leave Yorkshire forever and start again somewhere new.

He hadn’t, of course.

But he wasn’t going to think of any of that now. Not on the same evening he was meant to be wooing a bride. Whether Miss Wychwood or someone else, he still didn’t know. Nothing about this bloody endeavor was turning out the way he’d planned.

“Dare I ask?” Ridgeway inquired blandly.

Jasper glanced up at him, frowning.

“Your by-blows. I can’t imagine what one of them has written to you.”

“Nothing to concern yourself with,” Jasper said. The carriage rolled through the busy street, the cab rocking as the coachman turned the horses onto Grosvenor Square. “Just a reminder of why I’m here.”

“An unpleasant reminder, by the look of it.” Ridgeway sighed. “It serves you right for sending them to school. A nightmare if you ask me, receiving disagreeable letters from one’s bastards.”

“I don’t recall asking.”

The carriage came to a halt in front of Lady Clifford’s residence. A footman opened the door of the coach for them. There was no line of carriages waiting in the street, and no crowd of guests milling about the stone steps leading up to the door. Flickering light emanated from the windows of the town house, accompanied by the soft tinkling of piano keys and the plucking of harp strings.

Ridgeway scowled. “We’re late.”

Jasper climbed out after him. A butler welcomed them at the front door and, after relieving them of their hats and coats, escorted them upstairs to the drawing room.

The connecting doors had been opened between rooms as if for a ball, making an enormous space for the more than one hundred ladies and gentlemen in attendance. Dozens of chairs and upholstered benches were arranged in long rows, set back from a dais on which two silk-clad young ladies played a sentimental duet on the piano and harp.

On catching sight of them, an attractive blond woman in the fourth row beckoned to Ridgeway with her painted fan.

“There’s Lady Eastlake,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me?”

Jasper nodded. He preferred to be on his own. And he was never more so than in a crowd. There were no ladies awaiting his company. None who knew him in London save by reputation. But his own popularity didn’t concern him. His name garnered him invitations enough for his purposes. As for the rest of it . . .