When Tom arrived home not half an hour after the happenstance of the previous chapter, such were the effects of an evening parted from Daisy’s company that, with little resistance, he shortly resolved to break his self-imposed abstention from her bed-chamber. There was a distinctly different air to the fashionable streets at this hour.

A pair of cheerful and amorous evening revellers, noticed by Tom on his slow stroll towards Camden Place, appeared to drive all his thoughts upon the darling creature who awaited him at home. A light was glowing in her window, and though he could not see her perfect form sitting at the other side of the glass, he did not doubt for a moment that she would be waiting and watching for his arrival home.

Quite bounding through the street-door and up the stairs, our young hero clattered through the halls only to meet with the puzzling sight of his lover’s door open. ‘What ho, Daisy!’ said he, doubting not that she resided within. ‘You wouldn’t believe the score of good luck I’ve had this evening!’ But when he stepped beyond the doorway, he saw not Daisy, but Mrs Prudence, weeping and packing her lady’s clothes into a trunk.

‘Where is Daisy?’ asked he, in suddenly wild spirits.

‘To be sure,’ began the old waiting woman, breaking into a new flood of tears, ‘she is gone!’

‘The devil take me! What are you talking about, Prudence!’ exclaimed our hero, though, the second explanation offered by Prudence was perhaps less informative than her first. After several more moments of water falling from her tear-swollen eyes, and flinging her hands up to high Heaven with accompanying mutterations of prayers, Mrs Prudence reached into her pocket and passed Tom a note hastily written by Daisy.

Now that Tom had within his hands what must have been an object of the greatest curiosity and concern to him, Mrs Prudence found her words again, and took Tom’s hands within her own so that, even if he had been tempted to ignore her in favour of the epistle, he should not have been within his power to do so.

‘My master, sure he knows my lady’s condition,’ began she, squeezing with each word his hands, ‘and sure he knows it could not be his child. When first he discovered the news — and sure, it was that wicked doctor who told him, foul ungodly fellow he is ruining the lives of young women — he sent me to my room. And when he called me back again, my lady was stretched out, with her face pressed against the floor. She looked, to all appearances quite dead. I surmised she was not once your father told me that she was to be taken by cart to Bridewell prison that very evening. Sure enough, she was dragged most unhappily from the room and I watched from that very window there as your father superintended her being fixed to the awful vehicle by a rope bound to her arms.’

‘When, for God’s sake, did this happen?’ demanded he, pulling his hands free from the restraint of the weeping woman. Mrs Prudence answered to say that it had not been two minutes since the cart rolled away. ‘To be sure, had you been any faster in walking, you should have seen her out there for yourself.’ An agitation of mind immediately seized Tom in consequence of this thought, such that he was ready to fly from the house that instant in pursuit of his treasured lover.

He felt he must do something instantly. While his feet were ready to run — to follow, to find, to free the singular object of his heart — his hands had already, almost unknown to himself, begun to unfold Daisy’s note.

‘Do not follow me, Tom.’ This was the first line of her message to him. ‘I begged your father for a few moments to say my farewell to Prudence, and it is these moments I used to hastily pen this note to you. Forgive my scrawling hand but I must tell you not to follow me. In the first instance, we can neither of us know which road your father will have chosen for my journey; you cannot be sure of choosing the right one. Your father had, in our younger days, always been resolutely determined to believe that I never could be in earnest in my loving you, but if you run away in pursuit of me, he must comprehend and believe me capable of loving you very earnestly indeed and what a danger that shall be to us both. Our case will be utterly hopeless for the truth must then be out. Good Heavens! I realise I have forgotten to mention, your father knows not that you are to blame. Do you see, there is some hope of recovering our situation, so long as he knows not the truth. I shall not tell you whose name has been given in place of your own as the perpetrator of this crime because I should like you to appear convincingly outraged and surprised by it! Do as your father bids you. I must, my love, be gone. Play your part, Tom, and all may yet be well!’

What Tom’s part was, he did not exactly understand.

The was no great length of time produced for rumination upon the omitted details of this office as, within moments of Tom placing the note within his own pocket, Sir Charles entered the room. ‘Whatever has happened to Daisy?’ Tom asked affecting a tone of someone utterly ignorant of all happenings.

‘Bless me! Whatever has happened to Daisy! She is an adulterous slut, my boy. Pay it no concern. She shall be dealt with appropriately.’ What rage this inspired within Tom! Instinct would have him confess his own fault in pursuit of defending the honour of Daisy. Yet, her words span about his thoughts. If his father knew the truth, he would, perhaps immediately, attempt to enact some violent revenge upon Daisy or those people for whom she cared deeply.

Save for his father having suddenly developed theatrical talents, it was clear that Sir Charles neither blamed nor suspected his son. Even prior to Daisy naming Captain George Fielding as the illicit lover, Tom’s being responsible for the creation of this adulterous abomination did not once enter the peripherals of his father’s mind.

Long before she had married Sir Charles, Daisy had spoken adamantly and openly of her admiration and love for Tom. But Tom’s father had never been capable of seeing his son as anything greater than a disfigured idiot. Tom was, in the eyes of Sir Charles, bound always to look concomitantly hideous and ridiculous. If he could not see beyond this happenstantial mark on his son’s face, it was impossible he should believe anybody else might, especially pretty young women; and was not Daisy the prettiest of them all?

Daisy’s former confessed adoration of Tom was, in the mind of Sir Charles, by reason of her adoration for his inherited fortune. Now that Daisy was married to the father, she could have no reason to concern herself with the son. To Sir Charles, the thought never occurred, that in what he might view as an ugly mistake of nature, Daisy might see the height of all God’s creation.

In spite of all the evidence of their mutual affections, the old baronet had never once suspected his son’s treachery. Daisy smiled at Tom so perpetually because she pitied him; she spent so many hours in his singular company because she was not suffered to make or keep friends. It gratified Sir Charles to render his wife an isolated and lonely beauty — but his son, now, why should not he enjoy the company of his stepmother who might yet teach him to speak easily with womenfolk?

Daisy surely laughed in Tom’s company so often because social economy frequently produced a sharpened sense of humour in ugly men. Never had Sir Charles entertained any of the above as symptoms of love, much less of lust. That Tom had ever adored Daisy, Sir Charles did not doubt; it was, in part, the triumph of daily tormenting his son’s unrequited and hopeless admiration for this young woman that gave the old tyrant such pleasure in the possession of her.

‘I have been saying she was becoming a round thing, have not I?’ said Sir Charles, in the course of putting on his greatcoat. ‘Hang me, what a trusting fool I am become in my old age. It is George’s child — of course it is! Saucy slut would have passed it off as my own!’

‘By Gad! Hang me! George?’ exclaimed Tom, naturally exhibiting the surprise and alarm that had been Daisy’s hopeful expectation. ‘The deuce fetch me, George Fielding! Daisy has barely spoken to him in these past seven years. She is always avoiding him.’

‘Cuckolding whore!’ shouted his father, seemingly unable to keep that epitaph to himself any longer. ‘Perhaps she has barely spoken to him, but sure as a gun, she has been abed with him plenty! See what comfort he will be to her once she learns he is dead!’

‘Dead? But I was just with him, playing billiards. George isn’t dead!’

‘Not yet he isn’t. But you will, Tom, perform your duty by the stepmother you adore and kill the man who has debauched her in this foul manner.’ Sir Charles, appearing ready to quit the house at this strange and late hour, left the bedroom and began to step heavily towards the stairs.

He shouted across the hallway the remainder of his thoughts, ‘Thirsty for a fight as you always are — bless me! — I should hope you are capable of defending the honour of your family and enacting your revenge upon this whore. Has not she plagued your heart since you were a boy? You are not afraid to shoot your own cousin are you, Tom? The pretty hussy might have been duping you for twenty years but she will not get away with duping me! I ought to have had her sent to Bridewell the first time she flung herself at George!’ Though he could not see it, Tom could sense the excitement of a cruel jealousy behind his father’s eyes.

‘But what have you done to Daisy now?’ bellowed our hero, sticking his head over the threshold of the door. ‘What has happened to her? Have you sent her to Bridewell?’ The reader will remember that Tom already knew the answer to this question and will therefore congratulate the young man on his quick wit to feign absolute ignorance of the fact.

‘Don’t you worry about her, my boy,’ replied his father, pausing as he passed by the first steps on his journey downstairs. ‘She and her bastard will soon be rotting away in a gaol where they belong. Boldface slut! I have ordered her to be strung up to the back of a cart and belted with the horsewhip all the journey there. You can tell Mrs Prudence to stop her weeping.’ Mrs Prudence was now crying with an exceptionally loud vehemence. ‘It is only what she deserves. And you can tell your cousin before you kill him, that she and his bastard child were whipped dead on the road to London. That should give him something pleasant upon which to reflect!’

Hearing his father leave the house, Tom took Daisy’s note from his pocket again. ‘Do not follow me, Tom.’ This was the first line of her message to him and he read it again and again, considering if he would trust in her scheme and leave his pregnant lover at the mercy of this cart driver.

‘Do as your father bids you. I must, my love, be gone. Play your part, Tom, and all may yet be well!’ The unrequited, jilted admirer, destined to be only known as Daisy’s stepson and friend, this was his part.

Even if he could kill George — who was not innocent of many things, but was innocent of this — and convince his father to forgive and pardon Daisy, Tom felt he could not return to play that part for seven years more.

To resume this platonic performance — to witness every day this child be disguised as that of his own father. He could not tolerate the notion. Daisy and he would live together, they would own publicly their affections and he would have nobody take his place as the father of this child! Though I cannot say whether it was a very good one, Tom had, in these short moments of reflection, formed a scheme of his own.