She shook her head. “No, I’m not hungry.” She’d eaten as well, worried that with his nearness her stomach might have knotted until she couldn’t digest properly. What if he wasn’t impressed with Sheffield Hall?

They were leaving London proper now, the buildings becoming sparser, more distance separating them. The sun was rising ever higher. It appeared spring might be well on its way to making itself known.

“Fancy is your mother’s daughter, born to her, unlike the rest of you, who were not.” The resemblance between mother and daughter was striking.

His eyes slid away from the view to land on her with the full weight of his attention. “Yes.”

“So when you were first brought to her, she was married. You had both a father and a mother.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “No, she was already a widow. She took in bastards as a means for supporting herself. But it’s not a lucrative practice if you allow the children to live. Their upkeep is costly, much more than the few coins placed in your palm when you take them.”

The practice of farming out children born out of wedlock so the mother could remain as untainted as possible was becoming more widely known. Selena had read several articles written by Lady Lavinia exposing the horrors of what she’d discovered in her quest to rescue children from those who would do them harm. “Your mother was not married when Fancy was born?”

“Just spit it out, Selena. Fancy is a bastard, like all of us. And before you travel a path and view my mum as immoral, know that Fancy was the result of our mum doing what she had to do to ensure our survival. When she didn’t have coins for the landlord, he took payment in other ways. Fancy was an unintended consequence.” His gaze bore into her. “So I understand your desperation.”

He was liking her situation to his mother’s? They were nothing alike. But the argument fell short because they were indeed very similar: she was willingly going to take a man within her body in order to ensure the best lives possible for her siblings. His mother had been doing it for the children she’d adopted. “I was not sitting in judgment of her.”

“Weren’t you?”

She refrained from nodding, shamed by the realization that she had been. That she had judged the woman a sinner, that she herself would be as harshly judged if anyone realized what she had done. “You told me once that you were fourteen when Fancy was born. I can’t imagine things went well for the landlord once you and your brothers realized how he was exacting payment.”

His grin was wolfish, predatory, lethal. “It doesn’t go well for any man we discover has taken advantage of a woman.”