Chapter Nine

Allguests will eat dinner together at least four times per week was the very first rule printed on the little card handed to him when he'd taken a room, so clearly the proprietresses of The Grand Palace on the Thames took this seriously.

He'd survived the gathering in the sitting room.

The gathering had also more or less survived him.

So dinner was the next hurdle.

What had Keating called it? A cheerful racket. She'd enjoyed it so thoroughly she wanted to pattern the future dinners of her life upon it, and he found himself oddly curious to discover why. His own family dinners had been fraught, resentful affairs, as there often wasn't nearly enough to eat, his parents were irritable, and his siblings liked to kick each other beneath the table.

The word he would have chosen for the dinner at The Grand Palace on the Thames was "mild uproar."

But cheerful it definitely was, and as frank and frill-free as an occasion could possibly be, if a little merrily harrowing.

Hardy sat at one end of the table, Bolt at the other, and everyone else found chairs in between.

Platters and tureens heaped with fresh sliced bread, boiled and herbed potatoes, peas, gravy, and eel pie were passed around, and then passed around again, often nearly colliding on their way to their destinations amid chuckles and cries of "look out!" and "butter on its way!"

Kirke took a bite of eel pie.

Chewed.

Closed his eyes with wonder.

Opened them again and stared at Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand.

"What manner of witchcraft is this?" he demanded.

Everyone beamed delightedly at him.

"Helga is better than a genie," Delacorte declared.

"Lord Kirke, if you would be so kind as to pass the peas, which are languishing by your elbow," Mrs. Pariseau requested.

"Miss Keating, careful with your sleeve, it's almost in the gravy," Dot urged. The gravy was en route to her via Lord Bolt's long arm.

"Oh my, thank you for the warning." Keating tucked her arm back.

"Butter, if you would, when you're finished with it, please," Captain Hardy said, and Angelique, who currently had custody of it, handed it over.

Next to him Mr. Delacorte ate with speed and efficiency and the utter trust that came from knowing he was never going to get a bad bite to eat here in this boardinghouse. He created gravy rivers among his potatoes. Across from him, his pleasant view was of Miss Keating, happily, neatly, and thoroughly demolishing her dinner.

This effect of the dining table was similar to that of the sitting room. It was subtle, but it was as if his spirit had been offered a chair after years and years of standing.

"We'll convey your compliments to Helga for you, Lord Kirke," Mrs. Hardy said.

"Thank you, please do," he said. "Will you please pass the eel pie, Miss Keating?" he asked to get into the spirit of things.

She handed it over to him, beaming.

"Gordon caught a mouse outside and brought it into the house!" He heard Dot marvel. "He ate it and only left behind one toe!"

"Maybe not at the dinner table, Dot," Delilah replied with great patience.

"Miss Keating, did you enjoy last night's ball?" Mrs. Pariseau wondered.

"Oh, it was grand. I danced with some pleasant young men. Although one of them laughed at all of his own jokes—which weren't very funny—and none of mine."

She flicked a surreptitious, mischievous glance across at Kirke.

He felt a surely outsized gratification at the acknowledgment that she'd agreed with him about her dance partner.

Mrs. Pariseau clucked in sympathy. "Oh, I know the sort! Not all men are like that, fortunately, dear."

"Why on earth wouldn't you laugh at all the jokes you possibly could, no matter who made them?" Mr. Delacorte wondered sincerely.

Kirke thought of all the children who were crammed into workhouses and orphanages. And now he understood why The Grand Palace on the Thames wanted to create a familial atmosphere. Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand clearly understood that basic human need to belong, to feel a part of something. Wanted, welcomed, even needed. And they'd gathered around them people who felt like family.

"I understand you've just returned from the shipbuilders," Kirke said to Hardy and Bolt. "Fruitful?"

"Yes, thank you. The Zephyr should be seaworthy again inside two months," Hardy told him.

"Do you think the builders could use a few very young apprentices to the trade they're willing to pay and board?"

Bolt and Hardy exchanged glances. "We will definitely ask, if you'd like. But yes, I imagine we can use our influence to find a few places for them."

With luck, a few more boys would soon have a place to belong, too.

After dinner Mrs. Pariseau paused in reading a chapter of The Arabian Nights' Entertainments to her rapt audience in the sitting room to ask, "If you rubbed a lamp and a genie emerged, what would you do?"

As this seemed an earnest question, there ensued an obediently contemplative little silence.

"I think I would urinate all over myself," Mr. Delacorte concluded somberly.

Everyone slowly turned to stare at him. Unanimously bereft of words.

"Stone terrified," he clarified frankly, as if this was the reason for the gaping silence. "Is what I'd be, if I rubbed a lamp and an enormous man popped out."

Kirke nearly levitated from suppressed hilarity.

"Mr. Delacorte..." Delilah began, gingerly.

"I used the fancy word for it!" Delacorte swiveled his head wildly to stare at the Epithet Jar. He didn't want to lose another penny this week. "Didn't I?"

"I might equivocate about ‘fancy,'" Mrs. Pariseau said tautly.

"Well, no one would believe you, either, would they, if you said, ‘there's a man in my lamp'?" Mr. Delacorte was committed to his point. "You'd be taken straight to Bedlam. Bolt killed a pirate but I wager even he would faint dead away if he innocently rubbed a lamp and a man popped out."

"Hold on now." Lord Bolt was indignant. "You think I'd faint?"

"It's all well and good when you read about it in a book. Or dream about it after taking a headache powder," Delacorte insisted. "But the real thing? Does anyone really want that? A large man springing out of a small lamp?"

"Ah, but think about it, Bolt," Kirke said mischievously. "Mr. Delacorte has a point. You know what your enemies are. Meaning, you have the advantage of knowing a pirate has roughly the same number of limbs you have, and the same kinds of reflexes, and similar skills. You know they live on ships. Not in lamps. You know what their capacities are and you know what yours are. You'll make decisions accordingly. A genie, on the other hand, is an entirely unknown quantity. You might begin your defense with what you know and fail dismally against its powers."

Delacorte nodded vigorously, thrilled to be vindicated. "I don't think there's a sane man alive who wouldn't—you're the orator, Kirke. What's the fancier word for..." He leaned forward and whispered a word in Kirke's ear.

Kirke whispered helpfully in reply.

"—defecate on the spot if a man popped out of the lamp," Mr. Delacorte maintained earnestly.

Kirke had seldom had a better time in his life.

"It's true," Kirke contributed. "People always fight against the unknown—any kind of change, for instance—because they're afraid of it. People fight what they fear. It's the biggest hurdle in my job."

"And it's about the last thing you expect, isn't it, when you rub a lamp. Imagine if you're dusting one day in the sitting room and that happens," Mr. Delacorte said. "I think Hardy might faint dead away, too. Or get his pistol out."

"If I thought Delilah or anyone for whom I was responsible was in grave danger, yes, I would probably shoot it." Captain Hardy was exasperated. "For all the good it would do me. I've never fainted in my life, Delacorte. For God's sake."

"Because you've never seen a genie," Delacorte persisted.

Kirke never dreamed he'd be so entertained by hearing Bolt and Hardy defend their masculine honor against a fictional genie.

"What about you, Kirke?" Delacorte turned to him. "Do you think you'd faint, shoot, defe—"

"Mr. Delacorte," Angelique interjected with a sigh. "Lord Kirke. Gentlemen. Jar words dressed up in more syllables are still jar words."

She glanced uneasily at Catherine, who, as the youngest, was the one with the supposedly tenderest ears.

But Catherine looked absolutely delighted with the whole conversation.

"Is the genie handsome?" Dot wanted to know.

"Some of them are. Some of them aren't," Lord Bolt explained somberly. "And whether they're nice or not depends on how well you rub the lamp."

Angelique shot a wide-eyed quelling look at her husband.

All the men in the room were suddenly close to bursting from stifled hilarity.

In a matter of seconds things had tread very close to the edge of mayhem. Such was the exhilarating risk of spirited discourse.

"But, if you had a wish," Mrs. Pariseau asked, with great, great patience, raising her voice slightly, "what would you wish for? I suppose that was my point, and I take responsibility for phrasing it poorly. Would you wish for something like... a thousand wishes? Or immortality? Something else?"

"But if people lived forever, would love exist? Would there be any need for it?" Keating asked.

Kirke's lungs seized.

Another silence fell abruptly.

All eyes were on Keating in absolute astonishment.

"Oh no. Forgive me. I didn't mean to..." Keating flushed. "Oh my goodness, please forget what I said."

"No, do not apologize. I feel you have introduced a fascinating point, dear. Care to expound?" Mrs. Pariseau said gently.

"It's just... that is... I just... change is also the thing that makes things more precious, isn't it? Knowing that anything in life can end in a heartbeat, at any time for any reason, and that things may not always be the same? And if you know that you're going to live forever, and if someone you love lived forever, would you not then take them for granted? Do we love things and people because we know they're temporary? I... I just wondered."

At once, Captain Hardy and Delilah and Angelique and Lord Bolt exchanged glances, their way of reassuring themselves of each other's existence.

Kirke stared at Keating. He was amazed and oddly—reluctantly—spellbound. For it did not seem wise or safe to feel bound by her in any way at all.

But he knew these kinds of thoughts only originated from personal suffering. For these were the questions one asked when confronted with the mercilessness and unsolvable mysteries of life. As if there was comfort to be had in reasoning through it. For a certain kind of person, he supposed there was.

Others drank, or threw lanterns.

Bloody hell, but he loved a thinker. He felt one could exhale around a thinker, as though there was more room to simply exist.

His breath had gone oddly, painfully short at the thought of her struggling to find sweetness and sense in a world that had, and would again, take things she loved.

Her eyes were worried when they met his.

It suddenly seemed urgent to offer her something of value. But the truest thing he knew was that loving could be the most dangerous thing a human could do. She was right to question every single thing about it.

But he could not allow her to endure more silence in that room after she'd opened up her heart.

"I think..." he ventured slowly, for it was nothing he'd ever considered at length, and this he found more exhilarating by the moment. "If we lived forever... I have a feeling that we humans would instinctively create reasons for change, and separation. Rituals or rites of passage or seasons, like the one you're enduring now, Miss Keating." He smiled slightly. "For I believe we humans have learned that things like anticipation and longing and pleasures that are fleeting are the things that give life its dimension. Its poignancy. Its shadow and light."

She took this in. "So it's possible love could always exist." Keating sounded relieved. "Even if we lived forever."

He didn't take this up. The surest way to discover that someone had not yet been in love was how casually they wielded the word in conversation. They would have more respect for it if they understood that it possessed mad, dangerous power, like a magic spell, or a curse.

"I like to view these sorts of questions—the kinds we can never hope to definitively answer—as a bit like... undiscovered continents," he said. "We may not find precisely what we're looking for as we seek answers, but the search may reveal to us other useful or beautiful things about ourselves and our world. In that way, ignorance is the beginning of not just knowledge, but wisdom."

When she smiled at him, the tension left his body, as if he'd just performed a delicate rescue. He felt like a bloody sage.

"If we lived forever, things would get awfully crowded," Dot reflected. "Imagine going to market if everyone lived forever. We might never get the best eels."

"Perhaps people wouldn't begin mating until they were three hundred and twelve years old, or thereabouts," Mrs. Pariseau reflected.

Delilah and Angelique stirred at this observation, preparing to head things off if "mating" took the evening in yet another anatomical direction.

"One wish?" Mr. Delacorte mused. "I can't think of anything I want that I don't have, or expect I will have. Unless it's a slice of cheese right now."

"We can make your wish come true, Mr. Delacorte," Delilah told him warmly.

"Better than genies any day," Mr. Delacorte declared, gesturing to Angelique and Delilah, as if this proved some important point, and Captain Hardy and Lord Bolt nodded in agreement.

Dear Leo,

Your mother informs me that you enjoy reading. I am sending with this letter editions of Rob Roy and Robinson Crusoe, an entire set of Mr. Miles Redmond's tomes on the South Seas, and a book called The 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 was filled with 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 of Keating 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 ferocious want pulled 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.

And with a thrill he'd felt smack in his groin, he had seen it. He had seen her pupils go the size of pennies. He had planted a seed in her imagination, and his cursed ego quietly thrilled to this. He knew how to nurture that seed. He wanted to nurture that seed.

He really ought to go to the devil for it.

He'd said it because he'd suddenly had a stabbing premonition of how she would look at him if she knew the whole truth of him. Certainly not with that starry-eyed, shy adulation, or that frank, undisguised admiration for his manly physique. And he'd said it in part because something in him wanted to demonstrate both to her and to himself what a fine line there was between innocence and... whatever he'd become. And how very, very easy it was to stumble across that line. One little word like "bed" at a time.

A hero would not have done that to ease his own discomfort. A hero wouldn't want to protect a woman as badly as he was tempted to corrupt her.

Then again, disliking himself was not a new sensation. He was indeed a bit of a bastard. After all, twice in as many days someone had hurled something at him—a lamp, a fist—and it had not escaped his ironic notice that the common denominator in both circumstances was him.

But he never lied to women. He never made promises. There was a satisfying simplicity in this, and a relief in knowing that the ending of his every liaison—and they were hardly legion, regardless of what the gossip sheets implied—was essentially foregone the moment it began.

The trouble was, the pace here at this bloody boardinghouse was gentle and rhythmic. He was held fast in one place for the first time in as long as he could remember. And this captive domesticity was blurring his sharp, hard edges. Today, during a difficult meeting with a constituent he'd caught himself calling to mind the way Keating's face lit when she saw him the way another man might reach for a shot of whiskey.

In her presence, he felt increasingly unfamiliar to himself, which made him uneasy. Her naivete and depth and her wit and her sweetness all wrapped in her unconscious natural sensuality wreaked havoc with his surefootedness. Shimmering somewhere outside of the reach of his reason were memories which seemed to hold the answers, but when his thoughts brushed too close to them, his chest tightened with an odd atavistic fear, the sort prey has for predators.

It would have shocked anyone who thought they knew him to discover he was afraid of anything.

He decided to abandon for the night his attempts to write anything better than what he'd already written. He'd send the package of books to Leo tomorrow.

He got into his nightshirt and climbed into the absurdly comfortable bed and surrendered his head to the bosomy pillow. He wasn't looking forward to a repeat of last night: he'd awakened with a start from a dream that his bed was on fire.

But he would rather let Farquar hit him again and again in front of a cheering audience than let anyone know that he sometimes still soothed himself to sleep by imagining he was a little boy in Wales again, stretched out on a cool, soft bed of clover, on a scrubby, unprepossessing hill, in the shelter of a boulder. The sun and breeze on his skin. Keating's quiet humming evolved into the hum of bees as sleep took him under.