Speaking of reverting to a state of stupidity, he had evidently decided to spend last night with his father, rather than returning to his small flat in Soho. Exhaustion, much like disorientation, could make fools of anyone.
“Where are you off to so suddenly?” his father whined the instant Roland passed through the breakfast room. “I thought you’d wish to spend the day together. I was going to send my suitors away.”
Roland sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose, and turned to regard his own visage, some twenty-five years older and wearing significantly more rouge, and powdered and wigged, even at this early hour and in a dressing gown. “I can’t stay,” he said. “I have business in the city.”
“You always have business,” his father sniffed, waving his spoon over the bowl of fruit compote and curds with a frown. “It’s so tiresome, Roland. When will you learn to take in leisure?”
“If I took in leisure, I couldn’t pay for yours,” he said pointedly, which made his father frown.
“Now, that is unkind,” the other man replied. “I still have generous admirers, you know. I am not an old man yet. I retained my charms, not like that mother of yours.”
“I have to go,” Roland said again. “Don’t cancel your callers.”
“Well, I shan’t!” his father called after him. “And I’d better not hear you went up to Hackney to visit your mother in her rustic sheepfold. I shall be terribly offended!”
Roland sighed as he swung the door shut behind him.
His parents did not actually dislike one another. In fact, he would call them friends, of a sort. His father just had some particular feelings about her choice to leave their mutual profession for a simple life north of the city.
Roland suspected he saw her decision as an implicit judgement on anyone who made another, and his father would never leave the life of a courtesan.
Never.
Not so long as there were clients willing to make him believe he was still desired.
At least Roland’s moderate success at building stable coffers had gotten them both out of the common bawd houses. Well, it had gotten all three of them out of the bawd houses, he supposed,even if he had never participated in his parents’ particular vocation.
He had been raised amongst it.
While his father very obviously and openly preferred the company of other men, some patrons paid well to watch staged shows of intimacy.
Roland suspected that is how he came to exist. For obvious reasons, he had never explicitly asked. The stark resemblance between himself and his sire simply clarified the matter, though paternity was always more of a matter of assumption and willingness in a brothel, anyhow.
His mother had found a husband to the north of the city after he’d bought her the little house and its sheep pen. The husband Roland liked perfectly fine, and he clearly considered himself unseemly lucky to have a wife that rich men once paid to enjoy. She did not require as much filial care as his father.
And, truth be told, Roland enjoyed being fussed over now and then, especially after a spot of bad luck or after his friends had gotten up to their mischief. So perhaps staying here last night had not been stupid so much as it had been desperate.
He hadn’t told his father about any of the chaos, but he had enjoyed a lovely filet of fish and a platter of crispy leeks instead of having to cook for himself, so that was something.
He knew he had been luckier than many of the other brothel-born children to even have a father, especially one who doted so very much. One of those fellow children, one of his many ill-gotten siblings, had been on his list of people to visit yesterday and hadn’t made the cut when the hours had started to run low.
He’d either have to write to her or find another time to visit, or she was going to be furious. Sybil was cobbling together her own living outside of her mother’s profession, too, and Roland’s absence was going to cost her some pay.
He’d have to make it up to her.
He sighed again and scratched at his forearm as he set off toward Clerkenwell.
There was a light mist in the air this morning, strangely cool against his face in the warm, hovering air of late spring. It clung to his hair in tiny, glistening beads and moistened his lips as he picked up speed, cutting through several back alleys and through market halls and service lanes he had known and been known in since he was a small lad.
He made good time.
Roland always made good time.
He hadn’t been to the clinic in some time. Not truly since it was still a construction site, back when it had been the grounds of a tenement-collapse disaster some years ago. Tod had gotten pulled into the rescue efforts through Hannah, who then suggested buying the lot and tearing down the tenement to build a more permanent place for the patients to recover.
It had been a manic, delightful time, truth be told. Everything had changed that summer and continued to change into the autumn and winter as little Hannah Lazarus wore down every defense Thaddeus Beck had built in his rough-and-tumble life.
Roland had enjoyed it immensely. Even in light of that day with the amputation.
