— In which we shall begin to recall the circumstances that would secure Daisy’s fate as Sir Charles’ unhappy wife.

In that inland county of a most irregular figure, known to most as Oxfordshire, took place the very first dealings of the Finsbury family with the Lyons. Sir Charles was in possession of a pretty estate not unworthy of a baronet and justice; it was here he lived with Tom and it is here, eighteen years before the start of our tale, we shall redirect our attentions for a short while.

Sir Charles had not seen fit to marry till later in life; he took up the nuptial yoke at the age of two-and-forty to a beautiful young creature who, in the years before her death, bore him five sons, four who died in infancy and none for whom he felt any partiality or fondness, the very least of all being Tom who was his eldest and only surviving child.

At the time we shall look in upon the Finsburies in their state of quiet retirement in the country, Tom was then twelve years of age. You may find, quite unlike the grown gentleman with whom we have been lately acquainted, young Tom was remarkably silent and shall not, for this portion of our tale, say anything very much at all.

At thereabouts the age of seven, he had been sent away to school. Before this ill-fated transportation to an ancient establishment of education near Windsor, Tom had not been much concerned with the permanent red hue that fell upon a large proportion of one side of his face. It had often been noticed and many eyes had avoided it; many mouths had spoken of it. But only his father had been pleased to mock the boy for it, that was, till Tom left for school.

As it has often been elegantly observed and described by other esteemed writers, I need only say that such places as these public schools naturally housed that next generation of our social superiors who made torturing and tormenting younger children one of their favourite sports. Tom, with his distinguishing feature, young, and a little inclined towards weeping owing to the recent death of his Mamma, was a prime target for the tyrants of the school who found great amusement in harassing, humiliating, and abusing the child in as many ways as their expansive imaginations could conjure; I would not, for Tom’s sake, name half the things he suffered at their hands.

If this daily circumstance was not enough to cause the boy heartbreak and misery, the effects of it found Tom, whenever he attempted to speak, in awkward contortions of countenance and unable to utter any single word continuously; every word was habitually interrupted by stuttering repetitions and very often he was without the means of surpassing one syllable of what he had hoped to say.

This was a great source of entertainment to his classmates, who were very fond of laughing and elicited only fury and impatience from his schoolmaster who whipped the boy with more vengeance than any of Tom’s schoolfellows, and, eventually, after he had been found attempting to drown himself in a pond for which he was far too tall to find any great success, Tom was, at the age of eight, returned home in disgrace to his father who left the useless boy to the management of whichever servant might take pity upon him. This, of course, was Mrs Prudence.

Need I inform the reader that Sir Charles was a vulgar man with a wicked and vindictive heart? There was not a mean-hearted fellow in his acquaintance who did not think him a great wit nor a female servant in his house who did not hear his name without being put upon her utmost feelings of disgust or terror.

At this juncture of our tale, a circumstance of some particular business had called Sir Charles away from his Oxfordshire home for several days. What this business was, I do not know; we shall, therefore, presume it does not belong to the important facts of the story. His chaise arrived home late that evening, when all in the world was quite still and dark. When the gentleman prepared himself to enter his home, he saw, in the corner of the vestibule, a sleeping infant wrapped in a bundle of dirty linen.

With the astonished footman, he gazed at the tiny child for several moments before his rage began to rise within him. Every female servant was dragged from her bed. The neighbouring surgeon was woken from his own slumber to inspect each woman and girl for symptoms of a recent maternal delivery. Mrs Prudence, who was, owing to her age and appearance, above the master’s suspicion, took the child in the meantime, conveying it to the kitchen for a meal of milky pap whilst Sir Charles began to anticipate, with a hateful glee, the scene of his throwing the whore and her bastard into the embrace of the cold winter night.

‘You poor wretch!’ said Mrs Prudence to the baby as she later placed him atop her bed. ‘What is to be done with you, young sir? My master shall not allow me to keep you, you can be sure of that.’

Indeed, when it had been made clear by the surgeon that the mother of this child inhabited not Sir Charles’ home, Sir Charles had been quite ready to order the infant to be carried into the far-off woodland from which he would not hear its petulant crying.

Nature, he said, might there take its course. At this, Mrs Prudence fell upon such great weeping and theological admonishments that the tyrant decided his peace would be greater to leave the child within the care of this hysterical old wench till the mother could be found out. The night shortly passed, Sir Charles clinging to vicious excitement, thinking what he might do to this whore mother, and Mrs Prudence clinging to the precious infant whose sweet, sleeping face was so at odds with the precarious nature of his immediate future.

The next morning, a consultation was held with the squires and men of esteem and consequence in the neighbourhood. Having satisfied himself and his friends with great humour that, ‘Not one of the ugly scarecrows in his service had managed to trick a stupid fellow into investing his interest in her bedclothes.’ Sir Charles ordered an inquiry into every eligible creature in the vicinage. A list of suspected hussies was to be drawn up and the potential criminals were to be examined by the surgeon who rested presently in his bed, making amends for the slumber of which he had been bereft the night prior.

The search was over before it had hardly begun. Mr Squealer, the lord and master of the inn some half a mile from Sir Charles’ home, had, by happenstance, found his ear pressed to the door of a lady traveller and her daughters. With his person contorted in this fashion against the wood, he had overheard the muffled sounds of a young woman’s cries followed shortly thereafter by the cries of what sounded very much like the wails of a new baby. The offer of a small pecuniary reward caused this all to weigh very heavily upon the poor man’s conscience, and so, Miss Lyons and her daughters, each in a state of sleepy undress, were marched down the road to the home of the justice who would find out the whore among them and determine her awful fate.

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