Chapter Nineteen

Kirke went straight from the Shillingford ball back to the boardinghouse.

In bed before curfew with an arm draped across his eyes, he thought about the gigantic misshapen flower that bloomed once every few years.

Which made him think of his own misshapen heart, grown gnarled around the lightning-struck, hollowed-out, wounded part.

He exhaled roughly. His heart had not seemed to slow its speed since those moments in the garden.

When he dragged his hands down his face, he fancied he could still smell Catherine on his fingers. And desire lanced him so swiftly it tore the breath from him.

He growled and hurled the very fine pillow beneath his head across the room. It struck his desk chair, which wobbled.

He wished he could cut his heart out and throw it, too.

He didn't want to be in love.

He wanted to be left in peace. He'd survived love's devastation once, and he could not live through it again. He thought he'd arranged his life so that he would be safe from it.

Little by little, so gently, so subtly, so effortlessly she had peeled back layers of him until the green idiot he'd been at seventeen was exposed at the center of the man he thought he'd become.

And that boy was terrified.

It was the piss-yourself terror Delacorte described in the face of a genie.

It was the threat he'd felt shimmering on the edge of his awareness since he'd met her.

Seventeen. The age at which his heart had been destroyed.

The age at which he had forfeited his right to love and be loved ever again.

This was only just. And if he believed in anything, it was justice.

All these years since, he'd thought he had outfoxed love. Lived successfully on its outskirts. He was bemused to discover that all along he'd never had any say in it at all. The way a breeze will find a chink in armor, the way wildflowers will eventually carpet blood-soaked battlefields, it had overrun the stupid ruins of his heart anyway. He simply possessed no defenses against Catherine Keating. He'd wanted to be left alone, in peace, for the rest of his life, but love had no respect for the pain that had leveled him years ago.

For him, the notion of love was strangled by the prospect of terrible loss.

And thanks to Keating he saw other things clearly now, too. He'd called the brusqueness with which he'd ended his storied, succinct affairs over the years "honesty." This was utter shite.

He'd done it to protect himself from any whiff of pain. Because the whole of his life he'd been a walking wound. And no one ever suspected.

And Lady Pilcher had been able to hurt Keating, no doubt at least in part because he'd been short with Lady Pilcher when he'd ended things.

The shame of this realization was now caustic.

For there was no point to this love.

For how could Catherine Keating love him, knowing what she knew about him? And when she didn't fully know him at all?

What if you didn't fight everything?she'd asked him.

He'd suspected she meant the desire he'd kept leashed. He ought to have fought it tonight, but it was an unfamiliar foe, like a genie. He'd reacted instead, and he was ashamed. Oh God. But the feel of her in his arms, and in his mouth...

The thing was, he was in love with her. And loving Catherine Keating meant telling her the whole truth of him.

So she could be free of him and move on to the life she deserved.

And perhaps then he would be free of her, too.

When he sat with this notion, he knew both profound relief and a terrible dark grief. But he didn't suppose he would ever again be allowed to feel an unfettered emotion. He had felt too many things in one lifetime; there was not a single pain that didn't touch the edge of a joy, and vice versa.

And so. He needed to tell her.

His chest felt nearly caved in with this realization. But like he'd told her, people should be able to do hard things. And he could do this, too.

She'd apologized to young Lord Holroyd for missing the dance, saying she'd been indisposed, and she'd promised him a dance at the next assembly. He had countered by inviting her on a ride in his high-flyer. And truthfully, she'd always wanted to ride in a high-flyer.

He'd been so kind. You do look flushed, he'd said worriedly Almost feverish. He'd brought her a lemonade.

She thought the taste of lemonade would, for the rest of her life, remind her of the first time she held a man's rhymes-with-clock in her fist.

She couldn't believe she'd found her way back to the ballroom from Kirke's arms, let alone danced even one more dance. She was amazed that no one seemed able to tell that she'd just silently screamed her first release into Lord Kirke's coat, and that he had spilled on her fingers. That she—Catherine Keating—had made the cords of his neck go taut from enduring an almost annihilating sort of pleasure.

She had come to London for new experiences, and this was her reward. Confirmation of her sensual power. Racking, unimaginable bliss. A few uncomfortable answers.

She understood very clearly now how powerful a motivating force lust could be. And how it might have nothing at all to do with love.

She'd wondered, as she twirled and clapped in a reel, if she should think of herself as one of the initiated. If what she'd just experienced was what Lady Hackworth had meant when she'd said she'd heard Lord Kirke was "good." She would not quibble with that. How many of his former lovers roamed the ballroom? He'd said there weren't many. She had little reason to believe him, but she did.

She thought of the hidden worlds—of lovers and mistresses, of unhappy marriages and secret affairs—braided through the visible ones. Contrasted with the happy ignorance of young men and young women participating in their first season.

Still, if she'd been able to choose only one moment to live again and again for the rest of her life, she thought she might choose this one: the smell of his coat, the sound of his voice murmuring sweetheart, his lips soft on her brow, his chest swaying against hers with their settling breathing. The moonlight pouring down on their sated bodies.

She hadn't seen Lord Kirke for the rest of the evening.

But she'd heard him, later, when she was in bed.

It sounded as though he'd thrown something across his room.

It was tradition for the cream of London to stay in darkened rooms, cool cloths draped over their pounding heads, until well past noon the day after the Shillingford ball.

But Catherine awoke early and sober, after struggling to fall asleep. Her body was alive to too many realizations, both of the physical and existential sort. She drank several cups of healing coffee with sugar and devoured her morning scone.

And then she took a book—The Ghost in the Attic, because she wanted to see how it would end—out to visit the little garden in front of The Grand Palace on the Thames. She had settled onto the bench in the shelter of white blossoms when she heard the little click of the gate latch lifting.

She looked up swiftly.

It was Lord Kirke.

She stood at once. Heart in her throat. She had not expected to see him so soon, and she could feel the inevitable blush moving into her cheeks.

She examined his face.

From the looks of things, he hadn't slept particularly well, either. Those shadows were back beneath his eyes.

"Good morning," he said. "If I'm not intruding, Catherine, may I have a word?"

The way he said her name, with those lovely "r's," made the back of her neck buzz with sensual pleasure.

"Of course. Do you want to..." She gestured to the bench.

There was a bench opposite, but he sat alongside her, at as genteel of a distance as the length of the bench would allow.

"How are you this morning?" he asked after a moment.

The question didn't sound like a formality—it sounded like the sort of thing one would ask in the aftermath of a serious event, a catastrophe—so she gave it some proper thought.

"Enlightened," she decided to say. Gingerly.

This made the corners of his mouth lift, somewhat wryly. But his eyes were troubled. He seemed tremendously preoccupied.

"And you?" she inquired, carefully.

He didn't take this up. He audibly pulled in a breath, and released it.

And then another.

"I'd like to show you something." His voice was soft.

He extended his fist. She realized his fingers were closed around something in his palm.

She understood then that he was breathing to steady himself. He was nervous, she realized, astounded.

And now she was, too.

At last, he uncurled his fingers. She peered down and saw a miniature in his palm.

Her heart twinged sweetly.

It was a little painting of a boy who had lustrous dark eyes, a curly pile of black hair, and elegant bone structure.

The resemblance was unmistakable.

"Is this you when you were just a boy?"

He didn't reply.

He waited so long to speak that her heart began hammering and she knew.

She knew. She knew before he said it.

"He's my son."

The world teetered and flickered, such was her shock.

She couldn't yet look at Dominic. And she couldn't breathe. She was riveted by the sweet-faced boy looking up at her from her palm.

"But you... and you've... never been married." She managed to say it steadily.

"I've never been married," he confirmed. His voice quiet.

By-blow.The ugly word that Farquar had used. The rumor Lady Wisterberg had heard, too.

Well, then.

She breathed through this knowledge. In and out. In and out. Accommodating it. On the periphery of her awareness a fear shimmered. She knew she was about to learn something that might devastate her. And yet this was a feeling to which she knew she had no right.

Then she reminded herself forcefully: he didn't lie. He'd told her he had never been involved with more than one woman at a time. She believed him. He would not be ravishing her against ivy-covered walls at soirees if he was currently supporting another mistress.

But his voice. His posture. Whatever it was he needed to share was delicate, perhaps even volatile, to him.

Suddenly it was simple: nothing she might currently feel was as important as letting him know it was safe to tell her whatever he needed to say.

"He looks exactly like you." She looked up at him. "The poor sod," she added gently.

The corner of his mouth tipped, ruefully. Pleased with her.

"How old is he?"

"Seventeen years old." He seemed to be choosing one word at a time thoughtfully, gingerly, as though he was forging a path through unfamiliar terrain without armor, uncertain of his reception. Watching for her reaction.

He cleared his throat. "When I was seventeen, during my first year of university, I met a girl in a village in Scotland named Anna Jenkins. Brown eyes, black hair. I fell in love with her the way a boy of seventeen does. It wasn't so much falling as plummeting. Madly and recklessly and completely. And she was in love with me."

Cat held herself motionless, lest that sudden flare of spiked, acrid jealousy bump against her heart. Her breathing went shallow. Her head felt tight from imagining this controlled man a tender, ardent boy, helplessly in love.

And it was accompanied by the sore, paradoxical tenderness of picturing him as a boy, free and vulnerable, his feelings unbounded and reckless.

He swallowed. "Anna and I were... intimate. Just once. And she fell pregnant."

Catherine's breath left her in a sharp exhale.

He swallowed. "When she told me... we were both terrified. I was at university, would have ruined my life's plans, and yet... we became excited, too. It seemed a miracle. I wanted to marry her, of course."

Catherine was silent. Her breaths were shallow. Her arms were cold with nerves.

"And I suppose I ought to have taken her straight to Gretna Green, but like a fool I went the honorable route and paid a call on her father to ask for her hand. But her father had for some time been convinced I was worthless and held little hope of me becoming otherwise. To be fair, I was as unprepossessing a seventeen-year-old as ever existed. Skinny. Small. Had a temper. Full of myself. Had no notion of how I would support a wife and child at that age. But I would have found a way. No matter what it took. Believe me." He looked at her sharply.

"I believe you," Catherine said faintly.

"And right after that she disappeared. I called upon their house and her father aimed a rifle straight at my face and threatened to kill me if I ever came near him or her again. He had that musket cocked."

"Dominic..." she breathed. "Oh, Dominic."

Her heart was hammering. How ghastly, sick fear of the threat of death. His love and his child torn from him. She was nauseous from imagining the pain. Her chest felt tight.

"I tried to find her. No one who knew her would tell me a thing. I didn't know whether she was alive or dead. I didn't know if she'd survived childbirth, or if the baby did. I didn't know if I had a son or a daughter. I couldn't properly grieve and I couldn't forget. I never told another soul. And eventually I continued with school as my uncle offered, because what else could I do? I wrote letters to her that I could never send. And weeks became months became years and I suppose I got on with my life, but I never, ever forgot. It has always been a presence in my life. My life has been built around it. I simply didn't know where to look for her. Anna Jenkins. Do you know how many people in the whole of the British Isles are named Anna Jenkins?" He gave a short, dark, humorless laugh.

Catherine was motionless.

"I don't know quite how to describe the sort of... flailing, awful emptiness of someone vanishing like that. But I know you know what it's like to lose someone you love."

She took a breath, absorbing this. "I only know that for a time you absolutely lose your moorings in the world. Everything familiar is suddenly strange and almost frightening and new, and that's when you realize how much that person touched literally everything in your life."

His eyes were softer as he regarded her, kindling with warmth. He exhaled.

"That's precisely it."

"And I tortured myself imagining how alone and frightened Anna must have felt without me when she was sent away. Had she thought I'd abandoned her? I didn't know what she'd been told. It crushed me, Catherine. For that, I can never forgive her father."

She could feel it now: his suffocating desperation and grief. She could hardly breathe for imagining it.

"But you did learn what became of her?"

"I recently learned she was sent to an aunt in Yorkshire, where Leo was born." He looked at her. "Leo is my middle name." His voice was frayed.

Dominic Leo Kirke. She hoarded this information like found treasure.

"When Leo was three years old Anna married a Yorkshire farmer by the name of Atwell. He was a widower. The man who raised him has always known the truth of his parentage, but raised him as his own. She has four children now. And as it turns out... Leo is the only troublesome one." He smiled faintly. "Because—and I know this will come as a shock to you—he's annoyingly clever and headstrong and beset with all manner of gifts. Which is why..." He turned to her. "When Anna saw my name in the newspaper in recent months, she wrote to me." He paused at length. "She hadn't been sure it was the same boy she'd known. But she knew she had to try."

She went airless, imagining the cataclysm in his life encompassed by his last two sentences.

The dam between him and his past finally breaking and the memories crashing through. The grief, the joy, the terror. The swooping relief of finally knowing. The renewed sense of crushing loss.

"It must have been a shock." The words felt inadequate.

He seemed to be considering what to say. "It was. And a relief. And tremendously awkward, as you may imagine. Then again, I've never shied away from awkward." He smiled with a hint of his usual wryness. "We met again for the first time in Yorkshire. Her father..." He cleared his throat. "Her father had told her I'd run away from her."

His voice was thick.

"Oh my God," Catherine breathed.

"Ah, but I came prepared. I had the letters I'd written to her. Years' worth of them. I asked her husband permission to give them to her. And he granted it. She"—he swallowed—"wept when she read them."

Catherine's own eyes burned with tears.

"She is still a lovely person. She says she harbors no resentment of any kind toward me. Age and contentment can do that. She's happy in her life, and claims she has no regrets. But she... she remembered being... afraid." His voice was arid. "And very alone. And that was my fault. I did that to her."

He drew in a steadying breath and exhaled again.

"Now... it's clear to me that we are almost nothing alike. All that drama, all that passion... funny, like an echo of a song once heard. I think... we all become more than one person throughout our lives, if we live long enough. We change. Who would we be if we'd stayed together? I do not know. I'll never know. I'm glad she found someone to care for her, and someone to care for."

For the first time in his harrowing conversation, the tightness in Catherine's chest eased.

"I cannot say that things are entirely easy between the four of us—Anna and her husband and Leo and me—but it is civilized, and I imagine it will get easier. Her husband knows about me, and I have met him. He's a good man. We all want to do right by Leo. And so I am helping to pay for my son's education, and I was able to get him admitted to the University of Edinburgh. They didn't ask me to intervene. But I knew it was a hope, and I offered, and I'm glad and grateful to be able to do it."

And this,Catherine realized, was likely the reason Lord Kirke had allegedly backed away from enticing investment opportunities, as Lady Wisterberg had mentioned. He now had a significant financial obligation to his son.

She was stunned, imagining the courage and humility it must have taken to meet Anna's husband.

For this proud, arrogant man to look his son and Anna in the eyes, and somehow humbly attempt to reckon with his past.

She closed her eyes briefly. She wondered if he understood how brave he was.

"And you've met Leo?" she asked softly. Her own voice was thick.

He nodded. "Just once. Very briefly. He doesn't think much of me. He doesn't, in fact, like me at all." He gave a soft laugh. He sounded uncertain, a word she had never once associated with him. "Mainly because he thinks I seduced and abandoned his mother, regardless of what she tells him. He is exactly as pig-headed as I am. Filled with brilliance and outraged morality. He'll go far," he said dryly. "But I think he's a gentler boy than I ever was. The main thing is, I can make introductions for him. Pave his way. He may never like me. I can live with that. I've lived with worse. He might be my age by the time he comes to any understanding of what happened between his mother and me. I am good at waiting. I am good at playing a long game. He will come to his own understanding, however he does."

"I'm certain he's remarkable," she said gently.

He cast her a wry, grateful look.

They sat for a moment. Silent but for the breeze shaking branches near them.

"I like to think I would have been a good father, Catherine. Or a good husband. But I don't know. I wouldn't be who I am now, and so who is to say. I know I likely would never have finished my education. More likely I would have become more and more myself, who I am now, without any direction for it, and I would have been even more insufferable and I would have made Anna miserable. But I didn't get to raise my son. And I wasn't able to help her, or comfort her. And that will gut me to the end of my days."

His voice was taut. She saw the raw emotion rush his skin, and how he braced against it.

The person the world saw when they looked at Dominic—the weapon-like eloquence, the warrior spirit, the fearlessness—was a fortress built around this person, who loved fiercely, tenderly, and permanently. Who could be—had been, and still was—mortally hurt. She had seen, she had sensed this person from nearly the moment she'd met him.

Whatever else he'd done, he was a man of integrity now.

She was certain he'd never lied to her.

"I'm so sorry," she said. She only hoped her voice conveyed how she felt better than the words.

He nodded, acknowledging this.

He was quiet a moment, apart from his breathing, which was still a bit unsteady.

"But here is the thing, Catherine... I think it would have been within her father's rights to shoot me when I went to him. Because even at seventeen I knew better. I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it. So did she, in the moment—I asked her if she was certain before I"—he closed his eyes briefly, and stopped himself—"but for God's sake, that is quite beside the point. It was up to me to stop it and I did not because I wanted it. It seemed impossible to deny myself at the time. I know now that's not true. I simply cannot forgive myself for that."

And this was the crux of it. What he was trying to convey to her.

Love and the loss of it had left a great smoking crater in his life many years ago.

It seemed clear now the very notion of love was entwined with terror and guilt and self-loathing. And desire, that powerful force which she now understood as one of the languages humans are given to express love, had been the thing that nearly destroyed him.

Could, in fact, still destroy the two of them even now.

He has affairs, dear.That's what Lady Wisterberg had said. She hadn't understood until now that the word missing from that sentence was "only." He only has affairs, dear.

He allowed himself these fleeting associations. What had he said about Lady Pilcher? It wasn't right. He was seeking something, and yet denying himself that very something at the same time.

"The man I am now is nothing like the boy I was. And I will never make that kind of mistake again."

She met his eyes.

She was silent. Too many thoughts and feelings, all enormous, excruciating, and beautiful, crowded around her heart, clogged her throat. She was impotently furious at the inadequacy of words and her own experience at that moment. She felt callow and young.

She understood now that everyone—Dominic, Lady Pilcher, Lady Wisterberg, her father, everyone at The Grand Palace on the Thames, even herself—struggled to always make sense of their lives, to manage and salve the blows and disappointments the best way they knew, to seize what pleasures they could in the time they had. Wisdom was seldom innate, she understood. It was hard-won. It was acquired through a process of elimination. Of learning from mistakes. Some people only ever lashed out, and thereby stole a little relief. Like Lady Pilcher.

"After a fashion, I suppose you've been fighting for Leo your whole life," she said slowly. "And against the injustice done to you and Anna. For the vulnerable."

He turned slowly and stared at her. Utterly still.

And she could see that this had never once occurred to him. That flicker of comprehension, then abstraction, in his eyes as he took this in. Considered it. A hint of reluctance, of wry appreciation. She loved the light in his eyes when she'd impressed him.

And maybe you've been fighting for yourself, too. Because no one else ever has,she thought.

She wondered if he also understood that he'd been punishing himself for it his entire life as well.

She wasn't brave enough to say any of that out loud. It seemed very close to the bone. Likely he would deny it.

"There are very few people who know I have an... illegitimate... son, but you're the only one who knows the entirety of the story. I have a feeling my erstwhile mistress somehow got a peek at my letter from Anna, which is how Farquar came to know of it. While I'm not proud of how it came about, I'm not ashamed of him, nor am I deliberately keeping him a secret. But for his sake, I want to protect him from gossip and speculation as much as I can, for as long as I can. I should be grateful if you would not share this information with anyone else."

"Of course. I'm honored that you trust me with it. I'm glad to know of him."

They sat in silence a moment.

Finally, some instinct made her gently thread her fingers through his. It was lovely just to touch his warm, strong hand, to twine with those surprisingly elegant fingers that had known her body so intimately. Her throat was tight. He would forever be the first man to ever touch her that way. Even now, when she thought about it, her body pulsed with longing.

Then she lifted his hand and brought it to her cheek. She held it next to her skin.

She felt him tense in surprise, perhaps, but she didn't release him. Presently, as surely as if the two of them were of a piece, she could feel the tension in him melt away. He took a long breath. Exhaled at length.

And she supposed this was why she'd instinctively done it. Somehow she'd hoped to transfer peace to him through her skin. Balm ancient aches. She hadn't anything else available to her to communicate how she felt.

But she also just wanted to feel him against her: The thrum of his ferocity and passion. His strength, his precious, irreplaceably unique, maddening spirit. He scared her so.

"I like you," she said quietly.

He smiled faintly. "There's no accounting for taste."

Tumbling about with all the other things she felt—aching pity and ferocious admiration and jealousy, the restless, consuming desire that stirred every time he was near—was guilt. Guilt about the relief she felt that her life was a relatively clean slate, empty as a blue summer sky. She could marry a nice young man who had plenty of money and no regrets or demons or guilt. Who wasn't a crusader or controversial. Who hadn't maddening complexities. Who hadn't yet been shot through like a battle flag by grief or terror or love or any other emotions to which all humans are subject, and from which they may never recover. She could grow up together with this nice young man, build a family, have a peaceful, cheerful life. This possibility remained to her and she turned toward it like it was an open window she could climb back into after taking a few steps out onto a tightrope.

This was why Dominic had told her about his son. So she would finally understand the depths of his struggle when she was near. The extent of their danger. And perhaps, too, the limitations of what he was able or willing to offer her.

He'd given her a taste of her own power and introduced her to the pleasures that could be had from her own body.

But he wanted to protect her the way he'd been unable to protect Anna.

And she wanted to protect him, too.

Which meant leaving him be. Walking away forever.

Have mercy, he'd begged. She could do that for him.

"Thank you for telling me," she said.

He nodded.

She gently released his hand.

He slid his fingers from hers in a slow caress. He looked at her a moment, and then with a nod, he stood. He left her to hail a hack, striding off, she supposed, to find his next battle.

She watched him go, hating it still, because some part of her was taken away with him. The part of her he had forever changed. She stood, blinking and disoriented, as though she'd moved from the dark into the light or from the light into the dark. She didn't know which. Not yet. She only knew that somehow she would need to relearn how to be in the world. Almost as though she'd once again lost someone she loved.