You May Kiss the Duke

by Charis Michaels

  They strode in silence for twenty yards, and then he said, “She must have known. My mother. She knew all along that he was my father, and the two of them never said a bloody word.”

  “Would it have mattered?” Sabine wondered. “Considering he . . . he never meant to claim you, and he is obviously a man of diminished character.”

  Stoker stopped suddenly and rounded on her. “I want you to know that I would never, ever have charged you with trailing around a man who was my actual illegitimate father, let alone someone who would later try to have me killed. Please believe me.”

  “I believe you,” she said, panting to catch her breath.

  “I thought the paternity claim had come from an anonymous nobleman who’d read about me in the papers and was casting around for an easy source of money. I thought it was a hoax.”

  “I believe it is something like a hoax. He is no real father to you, obviously. Was he . . . cruel to you as a boy? When you knew him?”

  Stoker thought for a moment and then turned on his heel. Sabine swore and hustled to keep up. “Stoker?” she called. “You obviously know him.”

  Stoker made a noise of disgust.

  “Will you slow down?” she demanded. “Please. I cannot keep up.”

  “His name when I knew him was Sauly New,” Stoker said, not looking at her.

  “Sauly New,” Sabine repeated. He was known in London as Saul Newington, the Duke of Wrest. “That’s original.”

  “This from Elaine Toble,” Stoker scoffed.

  “I am not a duke, impersonating . . . whomever Wrest was pretending to be,” Sabine retorted.

  She knew he’d been displeased with the role she’d affected to dupe Phineas Legg. She hated to play the flirt, but it had been the fastest and most effective way to extract the information she wanted.

  She tried again. “Who was Wrest pretending to be when he was Sauly New?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I think it matters a great deal.”

  “It should not matter to you.”

  “I alone decide what matters to me. We’ve discussed this.”

  “Sabine,” he warned.

  “Say it, Stoker,” she sighed, taking two steps to his one. “Tell me!”

  They came to another dead end, but a third corridor turned to the right, and he made the corner.

  “I don’t want to bring my terrible memories down on your head. These are things you should not have to know.” He sounded angry, desperate; he was begging her without saying the word please.

  Sabine was not too proud to beg. “Please tell me.” She stopped walking. “Please.”

  He made an agonized sound of frustration and spun back. “You ask too much.”

  “I’ve only begun to ask, Stoker,” she sighed, “and I am agonizingly persistent.”

  He swore and pivoted and walked five paces. “Fine,” he said, not looking at her. “You wish to know?”

  “I wish to know,” she said softly. The outer wall of the corridor was lined with windows that overlooked a dark garden. Cushioned benches were positioned at intervals against the glass. Sabine trudged to a bench. “Will you sit?” she asked.

  He shook his head. He began to pace back and forth, a jerky, angry march.

  “My mother’s life was not what I would call pleasant,” he began. He stared at the floor. “Neither of our lives were pleasant.” He stopped walking and looked at her. “I cannot do this.”

  “You will do this,” she said.

  He glared at her then resumed his pacing. “In our unpleasant lives,” he said, “she traded hunger and cold for her service to men. An unending line of terrible men. Sometimes there was considerable money, but in exchange, my mother suffered black eyes and broken bones. Sometimes there was money but also the constant, lurking presence of some man and his friends, lumbering through her rooms at every hour. Sometimes we had money but my mother was sick from the very nature of her work.”

  Sabine blinked slowly once, twice. Oh, my poor Stoker, she thought.

  “Always, always she was unhappy. Bitter, cynical, maudlin—a woman who knew her life had been spent in service to hateful men.”

  “But she had you,” Sabine said softly.

  He shook his head. “My presence was not a reason to live. I was a burden.”

  Sabine scoffed. “You cannot mean—”

  “Sabine,” he said sharply, stopping again. “I’ve told you that I have no wish to bring down my terrible past on another person, least of all you, and that is the honest truth. If I must say it, there is no benefit to pretending it was different. Please. I exaggerate nothing, I misrepresent nothing. I was there, and I have no confusion about what our lives were like and no reason to overblow it. It was wretched, but it was not her fault. She did the best she could.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “It is your story.” She wanted to leave the bench and hold on to him. She wanted him to drop onto the bench beside her and lay his head in her lap. She wanted—

  “But sometimes,” he went on, “maybe once or twice a year, a different sort of man would turn up.” He gestured behind him. “Sauly New was, I suppose you could say, such a man. He was not a drunk and he was not cruel. He dressed in finer clothes than ever I had seen. My mother actually appeared . . . well, lighthearted when he came around.”

  He paused and ran his fingers through his hair and squeezed his eyes shut. “Forgive me, the possibility that this man is actually my father is still taking shape in my brain. I cannot quite accept it, and yet—” He let the sentence trail off.

  “Now that I’ve seen you side by side,” Sabine ventured, “I must say that you do look rather alike. That is, he looks like you if you were aged forty years, sedentary, gluttonous, tangling with gout, and you rarely saw the sun.”

  Stoker opened his eyes. “Yes, I can see how the resemblance shines through.”

  Sabine gave a sad smile. After a moment she asked, “Did he—?”

  “He paid me very little mind,” said Stoker. “Which was my strong preference. Sometimes he gave me a peppermint. Or a toy musket. Once he brought me a pair of boots.” He stopped pacing. “I was suspicious of the gifts—uncertain of what my mother would be required to do to earn them—but I was so bloody desperate for any attention and any . . . frivolity, that I took them anyway. I liked him. He was . . . happy. He made my mother happy.”

  Now he resumed pacing. “Until he made her unhappy, which was generally in three or four weeks’ time—a month at most.”

  “He turned cruel?” Sabine guessed.

  Stoker threw up his hands. “He simply got bored, or they quarreled, or he went home to a wife or off with another whore—I was not privy to why he left. I only knew the ceaseless crying. My mother would sob for a week, and we’d have no money for food. I would suffer this strange stew of anger and guilt. I was angry at her for doing whatever she’d done to make him go and guilty for wanting to subject her to him again.”

  “Oh, Stoker. How old were you?”

  He stopped walking again. “Seven? Eight? Considerably younger than I am now, although still tortured by it, as you have the very great misfortune of witnessing.”

  “The last time you saw him was—?”

  Stoker took a deep breath. “When I was about nine years old, he turned up to announce that he was moving us out of the brothel and into a proper flat in Blackhall. It wasn’t lavish, but it was our own place, with a lock on the door and shelves for our possessions and curtains on the windows. He came and went at odd times, but he visited regularly, three or four times every week. When he was home, he ate a proper supper with us. He retired to my mother’s bedroom only after I’d gone to bed. There was plenty of money, so my mother could go to the market and bake fresh bread and buy a winter coat. She awakened in the morning instead of the middle of the afternoon. She sang idle songs while she cleaned and mended. She seemed . . . truly happy for the first I could ever remember.

  “I had always been a quiet, steal
thy, distrusting boy, always on my guard—I’d had to be. I could disappear in plain sight, meld into the shadows. I could escape any room out of a window. But after a month or two in Sauly’s flat, I had begun to relax. I spoke at mealtimes. Sauly offered to teach me to read and I accepted. He brought me books, maps, even parchment and pens.

  “After another month I began to believe my mother and Sauly had fallen in real love—whatever notion of love I had at the time. I allowed myself to hope we’d begin to live a proper life, that this flat would be a proper home. I believed my mother had finally done it. She’d escaped the constant struggle to survive and the wretchedness of her work. I lay in bed at night and hoped our lives had changed for the better.”

  “Oh God,” Sabine said softly, “I’m afraid to hear the rest.”

  “I can stop,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “I would relish permission to stop this story.”

  She shook her head. She reached out a hand to him. “Will you sit?”

  “Please don’t pity me. I could not bear it.”

  “It’s not pity, Stoker,” she said, peeling off her gloves. “My heart is breaking for you. This is a wretched story, your boyhood was truly horrible, and my heart breaks for all of it. I’m sorry if that distresses you, but pride should not apply to your horrible history, the circumstances over which you had no control. You were a victim. You are still a victim of this story, it’s plainly clear, and now I am too.”

  “Not you.” He stared at her. “You may listen, but it will have no bearing on you.”

  “If it affects the way you relate to me,” she told him, dropping her gloves on the bench, “if it has some bearing on whether we—”

  “You will not be tarnished by this story,” he vowed.

  “Fine,” she sighed. “I’m not tarnished. Finish.”

  He stared at her.

  “Please,” she said.

  Something about the pitch of her voice, or the softness of her expression, or the bloody tilt of her head must have finally been correct, because he trudged to the bench and sat heavily beside her. He took a deep breath.

  “The truth is,” he sighed, “there are worse stories with worse endings.” Now he laughed. “You would not believe the children I’ve seen and the fathers they have endured. Sauly New is inconsequential compared to some fathers.” He dropped his head in his hands and stared at the floor.

  “Yes, but we are not discussing other children at the moment. We are discussing you and your boyhood and your father.”

  Stoker said nothing. She stared at the broad expanse of his back and weighed the risk of touching him.

  Sabine waited a beat and then said, “Does it help to remember that you are no longer a child? You are a very rich man and a courageous one. This person cannot hurt you now.”

  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 remember not feeling 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 an even 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 only one thing he likes, and we both know that that kind of like never 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 “—for that 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 th
is 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 depravity for 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.

  “Oh God, it’s Legg and a paramour,” Sabine gasped, pulling Stoker behind a ceramic vase on a thick pedestal.

  “Where?”

  “Leaving the ballroom.”

  They watched in alarm as the couple danced in a fumbling sort of embrace, kissing hungrily. When they reached the curled staircase bannister, they fell against it and plunged into another kiss.

  “He seems to have made the acquaintance of another . . . friend,” Sabine said.

  “He is insatiable,” said Stoker.

  Behind them the ballroom music crescendoed to a rallying final note and then fell silent. The new quiet was followed by a spike in voices, and Mr. Legg scowled in the direction of the ballroom. The woman reared up, yanking on her bodice. They whispered for a moment and then Legg kissed her again, dragged her to him, and they embarked up the stairs at a fast clip.