“Thank you very much for the loan of your coat,” she finally said politely. “It’s helped with the shakes.”
“You’re welcome, Miss Woodville.”
“I’m embarrassed to be such a ninny.”
“Why? If you weren’t afraid of cutthroats, I’d be even more concerned about your sanity than I already am.”
“But I want to be afraid of nothing.”
“Good luck with that,” he said dryly.
“How didyouget that way, Mr. Marchand?”
“What way?”
“Afraid of nothing. How did you manage it?” Her voice had gone small and urgent.
He knew a fresh surge of irrational fury that she’d beencompelled to withstand so much fear that she wanted to be strong enough to never again feel it. It struck him as both valiant and wrong. Ifshe, a gently raised aristocrat, felt that way, more than one man had failed to protect her. And it ought to have been easy for all those spoiled men with whom she’d been raised not to fail her. What was the point of them, otherwise? What was the point of men?
Clouds had parted over them and sunshine was slanting warmly down across his thighs. Apart from an ongoing slight ringing in his biceps from the blows he’d just struck two men, sitting on a bench with her was strangely as pleasant a moment as he’d had in a long time. Though of course these days every lovely moment brushed up against the edges of a sorrow, a regret about what might have been.
He hated to interrupt this miniature idyll with the truth.
But he did anyway.
“Have you ever eaten a rat?”
She turned her head slowly and studied him at length. “But we just had breakfast.”
He laughed.
But he could read in her expression that she inferred a very good deal from his question. Her eyes were troubled, soft, and wary.
Which meant she’d probably landed on the truth.
He didn’t think he’d ever outright told his story to anyone, not as a narrative:Once upon a time a boy was orphaned on the streets, that rot. As jaded as he was, within him lingered a superstition that if he gazed backward upon his past too long, greasy black tendrils of it would reach out to snatch him back.
“I’m not fearless, Miss Woodville. I just grew up in the St. Giles rookery. I was orphaned at the age of six. I never knew my father. And I think the shortest answer is that when fear—and it comes in a wide variety of forms, like fear of hunger, fear of death—is all you know from the beginning, you don’t call it fear, you just call it life. And you learn how to live within it the same way a fish born in the ocean learns to swim. On some days, it even feels as though you’ve mastered it. Invariably something happens to humble the devil out of you and prove you wrong. And from that you learn a new set of lessons. It’s a series of adaptations, day after day after day. That, and being willing to do almost anything to survive.”
He imagined telling her the rest. The things he’d never told anyone. He could turn it into a verbal house of cards, layering grimy detail upon brutal anecdote, watching her lovely clear eyes go more and more pained and unnerved and repulsed until he finally said the thing that permanently appalled her.
On the other hand, Miss Woodville was a chance-taker by nature. She would consider it a personal challenge to not even blink as he told her worse and worse things. But he knew she would feel it, that she would picture it, and he knew darkness left a stain if you let it settle into your imagination. He found he could not abide the thought of ever doing that to her.
“You would do anything to survive? Lie? Cheat? Steal?” She paused. “Sing?”
“Mmm... never, ever cheat. That’s a good way to get killed in the rookeries. My philosophy is to keep things as simple as possible, and lying only complicates everything. I’d lie when absolutely necessary. But never when doing business. Likewise, stealing. I mainly stole only to eat or stay clothed, not for profit. Notice, I said mainly. Probably because I was able to get odd jobs from about the time I was five years old. These days, I do none of those things. But probably only because I no longer have to.”
She seemed subdued. But she was regarding him thoughtfully, and, surprisingly, without a shred of judgment. Rather, with something like awe.
He could not deny it was pleasant to be looked at that way. Or that he felt a slight sense of relief.
As if a belt long buckled too tightly had been released a notch.
The breeze lifted one of the spirals of black hair at her temples. He felt as though he could watch that lift and flutter for a very long time and never be bored.
“That’s why you’re so elegant and clean,” she said finally, almost to herself. As if she’d been drawing a series of conclusions in her mind.
He stared at her and felt a wayward flash of anger and a peculiar little flicker of fear, as though she’d just picked his pocket. She had leaped to that correct assumption with an almost surgical precision. He was not at all accustomed to being readable.