“Humph.”
He sat and looked at her. “How is Mary Darling?”
“Fast asleep after playing and having a bath,” she said. “The nursery is lovely.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
“Rose and Annie are obviously practiced nursemaids, and what is even better, they seem to like Mary, and she them.”
He grunted. “It would take a hard heart to turn away from my Mary Darling.”
A smile curved the corners of her lips. “You didn’t seem too enamored of her when you first met.”
“She has a forceful personality, as do I. We just took a bit to get to know one another.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “I think your Irish has mysteriously disappeared from your speech, Mr. Rivers.”
No, he’d not imagined the emphasis. He shot her a warning look as Mrs. Bittner entered with a steaming dish.
The housekeeper bustled around the table serving roasted chicken, boiled vegetables, jellies, and fruit. A little maid trailed behind her, acting as acolyte to the service.
“There now,” Mrs. Bittner exclaimed when the table was laden. “Will you be wanting anything else, sir?”
“Thank you, no,” Mick murmured.
The housekeeper nodded in satisfaction and left with the maid.
“Will you have some chicken?” Mick asked as he reached for the dish.
“Yes, please,” she answered quite politely. “Are you in disguise here?”
He ought to have known she wouldn’t let it drop.
He gave her a wing and some breast meat. “Not exactly, but I find it… useful to have a place where I’m not known as the pirate Mickey O’Connor.”
She waited until he’d served himself and then tasted the chicken. “Then you’re a simple English gentleman when you’re at Windward House.”
He nodded. “More or less.”
“And do you really build ships?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“How did I come to be a shipbuilder, do you mean?” He cut into his chicken. “Several years ago I hired Pepper to manage my money. He advised me that it would be wise to invest some of it in a business that wasn’t linked to my pirating.”
“But why shipbuilding?” she asked. “You could’ve chosen anything, couldn’t you?”
“I suppose.” He ate a bite of chicken and chewed as he thought. “I’ve always admired the ships that dock in London. I used to sit and watch them for hours at a time when I was a lad. Shipbuilding seemed a natural business to invest in. Too, there was an established shipbuilder—his business has been in his family for three generations—who was in need of financial backing. That was where I came in.”
“Then the investment has worked well for you?”
He shrugged. “I make nearly as much from the shipbuilding business as I do from pirating.”
She frowned a bit, drank a little of her wine, and set the glass carefully down.
He tensed with foreboding. He expected her to bring up again the topic of him retiring from pirating, but she spoke about something entirely different instead.
“That night when the palace was attacked,” she said, “you told me that you had thrown vitriol in the Vicar of Whitechapel’s face, but you did not tell me why.” She looked up at him, her hazel eyes dark in the candlelight. “Can you tell me now?”
He froze as her question caught him off guard. He’d been expecting the question all this long week, yet she’d chosen to ask it when he’d at last come home. For that at least he supposed he should be grateful.
He took a sip of the wine because his mouth had grown dry. It was a French wine and of an excellent vintage, but it tasted like vinegar in his mouth.
“I was a boy,” he began and then stopped. How could he tell her? This was the most wretched part of his life—the most wretched part of him. How could he expose her to it?
She waited, sitting quietly, her back straight, her eyes clear and innocent, and he could only stare at her, the words clogged in his throat.
“Michael?” she whispered at last. “Michael, can you tell me?”
And her voice was like a drought of sweet water relieving his thirst, quenching his pain.
“I was a boy,” he said again, holding her gaze, for it seemed the only way he could speak this terrible evil. “And me mam and I lived with him, Charlie Grady, the Vicar of Whitechapel, though back then he was only Charlie Grady. He made gin in St. Giles and he sent me mam out to walk the streets at night.”
She didn’t say anything, but her eyes seemed filled with sorrow. Sorrow for him, that innocent boy, long dead now.
“Sometimes she’d bring her customers back with her, but mostly she sold her wares out on the streets, and she never said naught to me about those nights, but once in a while I’d hear her crying…” His voice trailed away and he watched his hand as he fingered his glass.
He hated to think about that time. Mostly he was able to push the memories to the back of his mind. Try to forget them, though he never could. Truth be told he didn’t want to think about it now. But she wanted to know, so for her he’d dredge up this foulness.
He took a drink to rinse the taste of evil from his mouth.
“She would sing to me in the evenings afore she went out, and her voice was sweet and low. She did her best to shield me from him, for he had terrible rages and then he’d beat me. He never liked me much.” He shrugged. That part of his story was common enough in St. Giles. “But when I were thirteen or thereabouts she got sick. It was winter and grain was running low. He couldn’t pay for it, the price had ridden so high, and without the grain he couldn’t make gin. And she—she was too sick to go out at night.”
He paused and the room was very quiet. From without, distantly, they could hear someone laughing in the kitchen.
He looked up at her because he wasn’t a coward and he wouldn’t have her pity him for one. “I was a fair lad, pretty as a girl, and there are those who like such things, you understand?”
Her face had gone marble white, but she held his gaze and nodded her understanding once. No coward either, was his Silence.
“He said he had a taker for me and that I was to do as the man said or he’d beat me until I couldn’t move. Well.” Mick inhaled, still holding those beautiful hazel eyes. “I was an innocent, had never touched a girl in me life, but I knew the kind of thing that would be expected of me. And I knew it wouldn’t be the once. After I’d done it, Charlie would want me to do it again and again until I was naught but a boy whore, despised by all. I wasn’t going to be that thing. We were in his distillery and he had the vitriol in a basin to use for the gin. I knew what it could do, had watched it burn through wood. I took that basin and dashed it in Charlie Grady’s face and then I turned and ran as fast as I could.”