Kunigunde shuddered.
“I was too far away and there was no one to catch her. The sound of…” He closed his eyes tight and swallowed hard. “The show was over, of course. Mr. Schmidt had to clean up the stage for the next performance. Baron Vanderbean was in the audience. He found me and gave me a choice. The first choice I’d ever had.”
“Stay or go,” she said quietly.
Graham nodded. “The ringmaster claimed he had a contract. I had never signed one, but of course I wouldn’t have. I was underage. Who knows what he’d coerced my mother to sign?”
“He would not produce a copy?”
“He didn’t have to. Bean let the ringmaster name his own price, without any attempt to negotiate. He wanted there to be no future argument, no future claim. Bean drew up his own contract on the spot and had the ringmaster sign away any hold on me or my mother.”
Kunigunde blinked. “Your mother?”
“Bean arranged for a proper funeral. I didn’t want Mr. Schmidt there, so Bean made sure he wasn’t.”
“Baron Vanderbean sounds very considerate.”
He nodded. “Though I doubt the Schmidts would have bothered to pay their respects. They didn’t respect my mother when she was still living. Our fellow performers deserved to say goodbye, but only a few managed to sneak away. The strongman, the animal trainers…”
“Animal trainers,” she repeated. Her eyes widened. “Was…Jacob…”
“Jacob’s story is his to tell. The same goes for the rest of my siblings.” He paused. “I suspect you already know Marjorie’s?”
“A little.” Kunigunde touched Graham’s hand. “But we were talking about your mother. That is…unless you would rather not remember the details of her funeral?”
“I’d rather she’d never died at all.” The words were raw. He cleared his throat. “The service was short and sparse. Bean would have arranged for enough pomp and circumstance to rival a king, but I couldn’t bear for strangers to see my grief. After Mother was interred, we came home.” He gestured with his hands. “Here.”
He would never leave it. Not his home, not his family, not London, where he had finally become important on his own terms. Not as the star of a circus, but as the head of a family who saved people. This was where he belonged.
“It must have seemed as though you’d managed to find a palace after all.”
“It still does at times,” he admitted. “Bean said my life was my own now. I need only leave behind the bad parts. I could train every day if that was what I wanted, or never leap through the air again. It was up to me.”
“You chose to keep training.”
“Acrobatics was all I knew.” Graham started to shrug, then shook his head. He was here to show her his true self. “Acrobatics was the one thing I shared with my mother. I think you know what it is like to wish to honor a parent by following in their footsteps. By being the thing you know would make them proud.”
Her eyes went glossy. “I do.”
He knew she would. Kunigunde comprehended his need to be bigger than himself, to be the man his mother hoped he would be, to protect others, more intuitively than Graham could express with words.
“You might think Bean rescued me, but all of my siblings did, too. They gave me another reason to live. I no longer had a mother, but I had a wonderful new family.” He could not help but smile at the memory. “Sometimes, someone else saving the day is the best thing that can happen to you.”
“And now all of you spend your lives saving others.”
She did not sayLike you failed to save your mother, but he knew she understood. Everything Kunigunde did was in the name of family, from her deceased ancestors long ago to those who had not yet been born. She wanted to be a Royal Guard not just for herself, but for future generations of Balcovian girls.
Much like the reason Graham was London’s protector. He wanted to saveeveryone’smother. And father. And child. And neighbor. He didn’t want anyone to yearn for a rescue that never came. He would always be here to save as many as he could.
“My siblings and I know what it’s like on both sides of the rescue coin. But we didn’t start out being heroes. We were children. One of the first things Bean taught me was how to read.”
“The papers,” Kunigunde said quietly. “The articles you didn’t read.”
“I couldn’t have done so even if I’d wished to,” he agreed. “I still haven’t, though for years I read every word ever printed about the Splendiferous Schmidts. But I didn’t clip a single article about the circus. Mr. Schmidt has taken enough from me. He deserves no place in this house.”
“Were you hoping God would strike him out of business? Or plotting revenge of your own?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I hungered for news, despite dreading the inevitable memories. I didn’t miss the circus exactly, but it was my entire life for so long. It took a while to figure out who I was if I wasn’t onstage.”
