Page 78 of You May Kiss the Duke
Stoker looked up. “Can he not?” he whispered.
She could not promise this; the man had already sent an assassin to kill him. Stoker was incredibly hard to kill, which had been an oversight on the part of the Duke of Wrest. But the harm he could do him was emotional, and it could be very great, indeed. Sabine vowed in that moment to do everything in her power to shield him. She wanted Stoker to know wholeness and hope and happiness more than she wanted anything else she could think of. More than her uncle’s arrest, more even than Stoker’s love, and that was something she wanted very badly indeed.
“Tell me the rest,” she said.
Stoker stared across the corridor at the portrait of someone’s fat ancestor. “I have to tell of our life further back,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Before we moved into the flat, we lived inside a brothel, one of several. In this... establishment, it was not uncommon for me to be awakened from a dead sleep to fight grown men out of my bedroll. I fought men for the stash of money I kept beneath the floorboard. I fought men for my mother’s safety. Once I used a brick to break off a door handle to reach her, because I heard cries of distress from her room. When I finally pried the door open, the man in her bed backhanded me, and she ordered me to get out and close the door.”
Sabine made a miserable sound of sympathy, and Stoker closed his eyes. “If something happened to Sauly’s sponsorship, it would be this to which we returned. My fear of this was constant.” He glanced at her. “Perhaps you can guess the rest.
“One day,” he went on, “I returned to the flat to discover that my mother had packed up our meager belongings, and she announced that we were moving home.
“I said, ‘Home? Which home? We live here.’ She shook her head and named the last brothel.
“I shouted the word ‘No!’ so loudly, the walls shook. I trembled with anger and fear and the sense of unfairness that only a child can feel. I’d had one taste of comfort and I was outraged at the suggestion that someone might yank it away.
“I assumed immediately that Sauly had turned my mother out. I demanded to know what he’d done. When she said nothing, nothing at all, I confronted her with a ferocity born of sheer desperation.
“I said, ‘Does he hit you, does he steal from you, is he depraved in a way that you think I can’t understand? What is it? Has he betrayed you?’ And she said he’d done none of those things. She said that it was simply time to move on.
“And I’ll never forget, I fought her, actually tussled with her over the bags. I was shouting, ‘But why? Why must we go? If he is not a cruel man and you are happy?’
“And she said to me, ‘Happy? You think I am happy?’”
Stoker shoved off the bench and turned his back to her.
“I’ll never forget the piercing bitterness of her words. I dropped the bags and stumbled back. I shouted at her, ‘But we are warm and dry here in this place! We have proper meals! He is not mean or jealous or demanding. He’s taught me to read! He’s... he’s not bad.’”
Stoker turned around. “And she got the saddest look on her face, and she said tiredly, ‘Well, you don’t have to sleep with him, do you?’
“I was old enough to comprehend her meaning. The burden of her ‘work’ was a constant refrain, and I can never remembernotfeeling guilty for the manner in which she provided for us. It’s why I left for the streets at the earliest possible age. Just after this, in fact.”
He shook his head. “But I fought her on this. Just once. I didn’t care. The security had been too glorious. I shouted at her, ‘But you like him, I can tell you like him. He is good to you. What we have here is a good thing.’
“And I’ll never forget what she said. ‘What we have here is aneven trade. I give him my attention, and we get this flat and all the comforts you love so much.Yes, I like him, and I like this flat, and I like all the rest of it. There is a lot here for us to grow accustomed to, isn’t there? Meanwhile, there is onlyone thinghe likes, and we both know thatthat kind of likenever lasts forever, does it?’
“I... I didn’t understand,” Stoker said. “I screamed at her that I didn’t understand, and she said, ‘He’s bored, Johnny. He’s bored, and he’ll move on to the next girl. No one knows the signs better than me. And we’ll do better to leave now, before he boots us out. It hurts less,’ she said, ‘if we leave now.’
“And then she was crying too. I didn’t understand at the time, but later, as I watched her grow old and sick, pining for this man—” Stoker pointed behind him “—forthat man, I realized that she wasn’t leaving him because she did not fancy him. She left because she fancied him too much. When her work became her own passion, she thought that she had nothing to contribute. She loved him, but she could not afford to love anyone. Not and survive.”
“But had he really evicted the two of you?” Sabine asked, rising up. “Had he truly grown bored?”
Stoker waved the question away. “I’ve no idea. She dragged me away and I never saw him again until tonight.” He raised his hands, running them through his hair, and then strode off down the hall.
Sabine swore and pushed off the bench, hurrying to catch up. “You said he was in and out of your life—but was this always? Did your mother seem to know him from before your... life?”
“Yes,” he said. “She always knew him. Why didn’t I see the signs that he might be my father?”
“Well, if they never told you...”
“How could any man see his son and the mother of his child exist in such squalor and depravityfor years?If he could not keep my mother as his lover, why not install us in a bloody cottage in the countryside and provide for us? Any meager offering would have been better than what we endured. Why neglect us for years? How could he put her through the emotional strain of repeated, unrequited affairs? How?”
“He is not a decent man, Stoker,” Sabine said.
“I nearly died of typhus the next year, after he’d gone. I slept in a shed to keep out of the snow because the madam in my mother’s brothel did not want the disease spread to her girls.”
The corridor ended at a vestibule that connected back to the great hall. Around the corner the ball rollicked and spun. Stoker paused, staring in the direction of the sound, and Sabine had the panicked thought that he would return to call out the old duke.
She was just about to pull him back in the direction that they had come, when a woman’s laughter pealed from the ballroom doors. Sabine looked up and saw Phineas Legg staggering out, arm in arm with a laughing woman in a daringly cut purple gown.
