Michael Gabriel Marchand
1810–1815
BELOVED
The blossoms Marchand brought with him from the park in front of the Grand Palace on the Thames fluttered in the breeze in front of the stone.
“I didn’t want him.”
They were the first words he’d said since they’d boarded the hack at the Grand Palace on the Thames. They were barely audible, and they punched Ginny airless.
She stared at him, stunned.
But this was Marchand, after all. So she waited.
“Whining, frightened, brainless creature. Me, that is. I was.” He flashed a ghost of his usual smile. “But the baby was helpless, too.”
He took a long breath.
“His mother was an opera dancer. She was charming and clever and pretty. I met her at a gaming hell I worked for called the Pit. Our liaison suited and amused us for almost ayear, until it didn’t, and just as things were about to end between us, she learned she was enceinte. Neither of us wanted a child. She disappeared when he was only a few weeks old, and I haven’t seen her since.”
The notion of a mother abandoning Marchand’s baby panicked Ginny as if it had been her own child.
She knew full well how devastated and terrified that girl must have been, especially if she hadn’t any family to support her.
Ginny thought of how it had felt to hold baby Roger and she knew she didn’t have it in her to bolt. No matter the consequences.
“So just like that, she was gone, and it was me and him alone,” Marchand continued, “and he was only a few weeks old. I held him, the day I realized she’d gone for good. And I looked into his face... and I could see that heknewwhat he had in me. He knew I was an unprepossessing, shiftless, callow fool who thought he was so clever, so fearless, so tough, even though I know now I was anything but, and he’d concluded his situation was not promising. I swear his expression was... wry and resigned andmerry. As though he was thinking, ‘Very well, if it has to be you, let’s get on with it.’ There was already an entire person in this... in this wee thing.”
His voice trailed.
“I set out to prove him wrong. I was going to be worthy. I did all the things you were supposed to do. I found a wet nurse, but paying her meant I couldn’t afford rooms of our own. I pestered every parent I knew about how to raise a boy. I was going to win at being a father the way I eventually won at everything else. He was mine and I was his. He was the firstperson who ever truly belonged to me. He was my family, and I was never going to let him go.”
His face was taut and pale. In the stark light of the day, he looked weary and older than his years.
A tiny part of Ginny howled in silent protest at this unbearable proof that he was only human. The selfish, frightened child in her had come to rely on a vision of him as invincible. He was the first true source of strength she’d known in over a decade.
She understood now how he’d come by his strength and calm self-possession.
It had its origins in both the loving and the loss.
Her stomach turned in on itself. She was suddenly frantic to go back in time so she could save him and Michael from any hurt at all. Why would fate visit so many tests upon one person?
She thrust her hand into her reticule and fished about. She came out with one of the cheroots she’d absently tucked in there for God only knew what reason after Mrs. Haddock taught her to roll them.
She stepped forward to hand it to him.
His eyes flared in surprise, then he shot her a look of wry humor and abject gratitude and took it wordlessly.
He strode a few feet away from her to light it with the flint and steel in his pocket, and sucked it into life. He politely aimed the smoke away from her, but the wind was anarchic and it blew it all about. Smoke wreathed him as though he’d materialized there, fresh from the underworld. The breeze ruffled his hair and flipped the ends of his coat. A little of his tension visibly eased.
“He was one of the smartest and funniest people I’ve ever met, Ginny. I swear this to you. Had a way with a pun. Liked to make up his own jokes. They always started with ‘Papa, guess what?’ I would say ‘What?’ And he’d say ‘The sky is green!’ And that was absolutelyhilariousto him because I guess the notion to him of a green sky was outrageous.” He paused to smile faintly. “He would stop to pick a flower and carry it about in his pocket all day without crushing it, then give it to me before I put him to bed at night. Then hurl apples for the pleasure of watching them explode.”
Her chest ached. “Little boys do like to watch things explode.”
“It’s one of the greatest pleasures in life,” he agreed somberly.
With excruciating, exquisite clarity she could picture a tiny boy with Marchand’s tumultuous hair and bright eyes and dimples. She would never be able to meet him, to hear his laugh, and she suddenly couldn’t breathe for grief.