Dear Leo,
Your mother informs me that you enjoy reading. I am sending with this letter editions ofRob RoyandRobinson Crusoe, an entire set of Mr. Miles Redmond’s tomes on the South Seas, and a book calledThe Ghost in the Attic, which I’m assured is “ever so thrilling.”
Read everything you can get your hands on.
You will find that I have included half a guinea under the seal, so that you may pay for my letters.
Kirke’s quill paused there.
Today he’d purchased the books Pangborne had mentioned, and he would send them with the letter. But he wasn’t certain he had the right to issue advice. Still, he wanted to throw himself in front of that young man and the world and its crocodiles. Failing that, books, and what they contained, could help Leo craft his own armor.
He wanted to say something more profound and true.
I am grateful to know you, and I look forward to becoming better acquainted in the years ahead.
True, yes. But that sounded like a letter to his bloody solicitor.
He could hardly burden a boy with the actual brutal truth, things he’d never possibly understand: you were created out of love and ecstasy and stupid, reckless selfishness. The aftermath of which was anguish and terror.
Oh, but there was joy, too. Fleetingly.
Dear Leo—I’ve lately realized I’ve constructed the whole of my life along the edge of the abyss into which you and your mother vanished.
He wanted Leo to know that he had always mattered to him.
But perhaps this mattered little to a boy who currently thoroughly resented him.
But he could never tell him that he had, in fact, indirectly determined the entire shape of Dominic’s destiny, even though he’d only just learned he truly existed.
Kirke himself was only coming to realize this.
He could feel the right words milling about in the murk of his mind, but they dodged away from him when he tried to grasp hold of them. As though they felt he’d long ago lost the right to use them.
The qualities that had come to define him, that had served him well—pride and arrogance and certainty, wit and stubborn ruthlessness—they suddenly felt as flimsy as so much tinsel camouflaging a hapless boy. None of those qualities were of use to him here. What was required was absolute humility.After all of these years, it darkly amused him that he’d lost the knack for it.
Dear Leo—I sometimes still jerk awake from nightmares of your grandfather’s musket pointed at my face—the first, but not the last time, someone has threatened to kill me. In case you’re wondering what that feels like: I do believe my soul left my body for an instant. I lived on. Such is the pugnacious nature of the Kirkes. Here is the thing, Leo: I deserved it.
I sometimes still wake up, sweaty, terrified, and freshly sick with grief, from a dream of wandering around and around in inky dark, fruitlessly searching for the two of you.
Those were things he had never told a soul, not in so many words, and probably never would.
But he wasn’t getting any further with a speech, either. There would be a vote soon on whether to tighten the enforcement of the already-in-place child labor laws, and decisions made about funding for apprenticeships with London guilds for children in the workhouse. He would be expected to string a series of magnificent words together before the end of the season and stand up and address the Commons and, thereby, the nation, and perhaps more importantly, he thought ruefully, the constituents who kept him employed. Usually he wasfilledwith things he wanted to say.
Who was he without words? He rubbed his forehead, as if it was a magic lamp. Perhaps words would spring forth.
He smiled slightly when he became aware ofKeating quietly humming in her room below. He closed his eyes to listen to the sounds of her feathering her nighttime nest: pushing the chair back under the desk. The slight thump as she settled into bed.
He imagined her stretched out in a white night rail that draped the lovely curves of her body. Instantly, a ferociouswantpulled his every muscle taut.
He breathed into his hands.
Then swiped them over his face and blew out a breath.
Christ.
How he wanted to be a better man. A moral man, a certain man. He knew how a better man would speak to a girl like Keating, the way he knew which fork to use at dinner.
And even though he could act the part of that well enough in the sitting room, before an audience—as he had tonight—he was also a man who had said “bed” to her last night when they were alone at the ball, because he knew how to light fires in a woman’s imagination, not to mention a woman’s loins.