It was absolutely silent. It was a silence created by motionlessness. Not a paper rustled. Not a bum shifted in a seat. Not a head turned away from him. He could not yet ascertain whether the quality of silence was uniformly rapt, or uneasy, or confused, or appalled by the spectacle of Lord Kirke ripping away the veil, so to speak, over the contents of his heart. They had never before heard him wax sentimental. But they were all enthralled because they wanted to see where this story was going. He suddenly felt like Scheherazade, waiting for her verdict.
He let the silence stretch a bit.
“And it’s the English way, isn’t it?” he said almost offhandedly. “When most of you were still small boys, I warrant, you were taken away from your homes and families and sent off to school. It will make amanof you, you were told. And you believed it because children believe what the adults we love and trust tell us. That is the nature of a child. What choice do we have?” He paused again, and his next words were almost intimate, a gentle question, as if they were all sitting across from each other at White’s. “Do you remember that day? Think about it now. Did you wonder why your parents could so easily do without you? Did you long for home? Youwere only children. Small, innocent boys.” He allowed this to settle in. “Did you feel... abandoned?”
And he could feel the emotional tenor of the place shift.
“How did you comfort yourself on those first long nights away from home? What did you think about? When did you begin to feel safe again? Some of us, in some fashion—well, I warrant, we never really felt safe again, knowing that life could take us from the things and people we love.”
Finally a sound, the best sound of all under the circumstances: a stifled sob.
Oh yes. He would ever so softly break them, he thought, with a warm surge of triumph.
He saw a man passing a handkerchief to Farquar.
“So where did you go in your heart to feel safe when you were a child? What, to you, is your clover-covered hillside? Who were you, gentlemen, when you felt your best, your safest, your truest self, at peace with the world? How often do you feel that way now? Because I will tell you: the only way any living thing can bloom is if it’s given the slightest chance to grow where the elements can’t destroy it. Some measure, some shelter, some small moment of safety and peace. I would not be standing before you now if I had not found my own. Think of me what you will, but all of us, together, shape history.”
And because his senses were so heightened, he saw it: tears shining in the eyes of the most cynical bloody men. He was speaking to some painful part of them that they had never dared visit or mention. That had been forgotten, abandoned, or buried. Laying himself bare and laid them bare, too, and they were all taken off guard.
“In the workhouse of Bethnal Green. In a dormitory attached to a textile mill. In orphanages. There are children who didn’t ask to be born. Children who are as innocent as you or I were. Who began life as hopeful, and as trusting.”
His voice rose and rose, subtly, gradually, until it was soaring. “Can you—CAN you—imagine the loneliness? The fear? The heartbreak? When a mill owner tricks them into signing a paper that says he essentially owns them for decades? The hope they felt, the joy, at finally belonging somewhere? A place of safety and refuge? And then to have that trust betrayed so brutally when the hours are inhumane, the food is inadequate, the conditions so often abusive.
“I think you can.” He said it softly. Tenderly. Regretfully.
Ever so slightly accusingly.
He paused to allow this to settle in.
“We can be their refuge. And no—we might not be able to give all of them a clover-covered hill. But we can make them that much safer. We can create in their lives a space for peace and comfort and safety, so they can bloom. So one of them one day might stand before you and give a speech like this one. We owe it to them, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to England, we owe it to the future of this great country. Together we can give that to them, gentlemen.”
He went on to tell them how.
Through changes in laws. Through better enforcement of current laws. Through apprenticeship programs. And more. They listened to every single word because they were absolute captives now; they wereinhabitantsof the world of his speech.
He had often questioned why he’d been fortunate enough to be born with this gift, but today he felthe finally knew the answer: so that a doctor in Northumberland could read it aloud to his daughter at the breakfast table, and she would know that a man from Wales had given her his heart.
The following day, Dot, Angelique, Delilah, and Mrs. Pariseau gathered in the kitchen around the newspaper and breathlessly listened while Angelique read the speech aloud.
They all sighed and murmured.
“My goodness. One of his finest,” Mrs. Pariseau declared, brushing a tear from her eye.
The Timeshad, in fact, called it “ruthlessly sentimental, incisive, informative, personal, and moving—a tour de force.”
“And to think he made Mr. Delacorte say ‘defecate’ out loud in our sitting room only recently,” Delilah mused.
“Mr. Delacorte brings out the best in all of us,” Angelique replied.
(Personally, they secretly thought this was true.)
Mr. Delacorte greatly missed Lord Kirke. “He’s eloquentanda bit of a rude bastard,” he’d mused admiringly, in the smoking room. “You wouldn’t think those two things would go well together, but they do.” He’d pressed Lord Bolt, who was a member of White’s, to inquire about Kirke’s man of affairs, and he’d tracked him down via a message.“You can run but you can’t hide, Kirke. I can still beat you in chess.”
“He called her Clover,” Mrs. Pariseau said quietly. “In the sitting room.”
They all exchanged glances.
Angelique extended her arm for them all to see. “Goose bumps.”