A Lily Among Thorns(12)
He gave an unsteady, surprised laugh, trying to slow the exhilarated pounding of his heart. He felt clean, like a lanced wound. “I don’t know what came over me. That is—it’s my best impression of my father giving a sermon. That’s his accent. My brother Elijah used to fall out of his chair laughing.”
She met his gaze and shook her head regretfully. “You show such a touching faith in my character that I’m almost loath to destroy it. You called me an honest woman. I’m not. I’m one of the most notorious ex-whores in London.” Her face showed perfect unconcern, but she didn’t appear to be breathing. He couldn’t believe that that was what she was worrying about, now, after her father’s threats. Did she care that much what he thought?
He grinned at her. “I know.”
She blinked. “You know?”
“I recognized you as soon as I saw you in the dark.”
Serena couldn’t believe it. He knew, and still he’d defended her.
Once, when she was eighteen and had done something new with her protector, and not liked it, she had lain in bed after he’d gone home and shivered in the dark and thought, No honest man will ever want me now.
She didn’t, generally, let herself dwell on things like that; there was no use moping over facts, and honest men could go hang. But that night she hadn’t been able to help herself. For days afterward, despite her best efforts, she had felt cold and miserable and damaged, somehow, inside—ruined.
Solomon wasn’t looking at her as if he thought she was ruined.
He’d done the same thing six years ago; he’d come into that awful place and looked at her as if he saw her, as if he wanted to see her. And that forced her to see him, and she didn’t want to. She couldn’t afford to, not when she needed all the energy she had for herself, simply to get through each moment.
“Why did you do it?” she asked. “Why did you give me the money?” She’d wanted to know for years; she focused on that. If she let herself think of Bedlam—she couldn’t think of it. She couldn’t.
He chewed on his lip. “Because you needed it?”
“Didn’t you?”
He laughed. “Yes, I did. It was my entire allowance for the quarter. But is it not written, ‘He that loveth wine and oil shall not be rich’?”
He said it as if it could be as simple as it seemed. He was a kind young man, and he’d been drunk, and she had needed it. Try as she might, she could not twist it into selfishness or lust, into something she understood; it unsettled her. “Did you regret it?”
“Of course.” He shrugged. “But not—I regretted it, but I didn’t want to change it.” He gave her a rueful half smile. She didn’t say anything, and the smile faded; his eyes dropped and he rubbed his thumb along the edge of his table of equipment. “I do wish I’d borrowed the money to buy my brother Elijah a birthday gift.”
She shrugged. “I’ve never understood the great fuss about birthdays.”
“He only had two more of them after that,” he said, and she felt abruptly cold. “And he gave me just the thing I wanted.”
“On his own birthday—” Halfway through the sentence she understood, but it was too late.
“Sorry, I—we were born on the same day,” he explained. “We were twins.”
She stood, frozen. She should say something. She had to say something. But she couldn’t think of anything. So this was why he’d lost weight, and why his freckles stood out starkly against his pale skin, and why he had that drawn, defeated look she’d steadfastly refused to be concerned about from the moment she’d seen him again.
“And now I’ve got to go on having birthday after birthday without him.” He looked up; the sweetness of his smile was foreign and incomprehensible, but she felt a piercing kinship at the self-derision in his eyes. “I always thought—I’d know if anything happened to him. I’d feel it. But that was rot. I had no idea. I was laughing or eating and he was dead. He bled in the dirt all alone.”
Serena had no idea what to do. I’m very sorry for your loss, she thought, dredging the polite courtesy up from God knew where. But she couldn’t say it, didn’t know how to make her tongue form the words. She was more helpless before his simple, ordinary need than she would have been before any display of mastery. For long, painful moments, the only sound was the rain on the roof and the cobblestones.