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.”
Silence gave a kind of shuddering gasp and spoke. “You had no choice. What he wanted you to do was abominable.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. But me mam never forgave me for it. She spoke but once to me after that.”
“Why?” she cried, the outrage in her voice a balm to his soul. “Why would she take his side against yours?”
“Because,” he said low, “Charlie Grady is me father.”
Chapter Fourteen
Now Clever John’s kingdom was safe from attack. With an invincible army the people grew used to peace and prosperity. And if Clever John found his days a little dull, he amused himself by climbing to the top of his mountain and surveying all he owned and controlled. But an army has many mouths to feed, and one day Clever John found his kingdom’s coffers bare.
It was with a light step that he went to his garden and called, “Tamara!”…
Michael’s greatest enemy was his father.
Silence lay in bed late that night, sleepless and thinking of the things that Michael had told her over dinner. At the time, when he’d revealed what his father had done to him—had done to the mother Michael so obviously loved—she’d been too stunned, too sickened to ask anything more. They’d finished the dinner in near quiet. Now, as she lay staring sightlessly up at the dark canopy of her bed, questions and thoughts teemed in her mind. How could a mother let anyone, even a child’s father, do such horrible things to a boy? And once the child had defended himself, how could she take the part of the adult who cared so little for his soul?
She shivered in the dark. So much about Michael was explained by his terrible history. She’d wondered how a man could become so cynical, so devoid of common pity, and now she had her answer. Pity had been seared out of him by his monster of a father. Charlie Grady might bear scars on the outside of his body, but they were nothing to the scars that lay within Michael’s soul.
Yet now she realized there were questions she should’ve asked of him—what had he done all alone at the age of thirteen? What had become of his mother?
Well, she wouldn’t get any sleep tonight wondering and thinking. Silence turned her head and looked at the door that connected her room to Michael’s. A faint light shone under it.
Impulsively, she got up and tiptoed to the door. She pushed it open as quietly as possible. If he were already asleep…
Michael was sitting bare-chested in a huge honey-colored wood bed. He had some papers scattered about the coverlet and a candelabra on the table next to the bed to give him light.