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Renney to Wright. He remembered his mother holding his hand tightly as his father explained the reason for the change. For the first time, Julian learned of his parents’ elopement, and was given to understand that this act was regarded as so reprehensible by the nobility that his father could never find employment as long as he kept his own name.
    It was the truth, and yet it was a distortion of the truth, and so his parents, with the best will in the world, had deceived him. What seemed incomprehensible to him now was that he had never sensed the depths of their worries, he had never questioned the life they led nor thought of the future with anything less than supreme confidence. He was a clever boy with all the advantages of his father’s private tutoring. It was expected that he would one day find a position in some government ministry or perhaps at the university. But not under the name of Julian Renney.
    He hated to remember those few years he had spent at school in Oxford, not because they were unhappy, but because they were bought with money his parents could ill afford. It was worse than that. His father had gone intodebt to procure an education for him that befitted the son of a gentleman.
    He groaned softly, shutting his eyes as though he could avert the memories that were rushing in to claim him.
    Summoned from school, he discovered that his father had been dismissed from his position and thrown in debtors’ prison. His mother was in deep despondency. He was thirteen years old and hardly able to cope with the burdens that had fallen on his shoulders—the twins, household chores, dread for his father’s fate, and worst of all, fear for his mother’s sanity. It was very evident to him that his mother feared someone was out for their blood and that they must go into hiding.
    Bailiffs came. He remembered going for them when they put their hands on his mother to evict her from their rooms. The next thing he knew, he had taken a blow that sent him staggering to his knees. When he recovered from the blow, they were in the parish workhouse, but he had no recollection of how they had got there. Hell could not have terrified him more. Hollow-eyed children, brutal, gaunt-faced women, and few males to speak of. There were three hundred people housed in that barracks of a building, and in the space of two months, twenty-seven of them left it as corpses. Three of those corpses were his mother and his young brother and sister.
    A groan broke from him, and he twisted to his side, one arm flung over his eyes as he tried to shut out the harrowing memories. He remembered the cold, little doll-like faces of his brother and sister, and the frenzied resistance he had put up when the orderly had tried to take the twins away from him. ’they’re not dead! They’re not!” he cried out helplessly. “They are sleeping. Why won’t you believe me?” Later, he’d heard that the parish officers never intended that young children should survive the appalling conditions. It was too costly to keep them.
    He had escaped from the workhouse and had tried to find his father. Another blow awaited him. While he had been incarcerated in the workhouse, his father had died of jail-fever and had been buried in a pauper’s grave.
    God knew what would have become of him, a boy of thirteen, if he had not fallen in with a whore, a madam of a brothel. Billie McGuire was her name, and for some inexplicable reason, she had taken to the waif who lived and slept rough in the alley outside her door. By this time, fearing that the authorities might be after him, Julian had changed his name yet again. From that day to this, he had been known as Julian Raynor.
    At this point in his reflections, Julian got off the bed and went to stand by the long sash window, staring out at the scene below. Barrow boys were patrolling the streets, selling their wares, and footmen and maids from nearby houses were purchasing succulent baked pies and fresh fish and other