Chapter Seven
Oh my God, the pain, Stoker raged in his head, limping like a ninety-year-old man, using every fiber of strength to hold his considerable weight off his staggering wife.
He drew in a long, slow breath, trying to balance the gnawing pain in his side with their peg-leg wobble down the corridor.
Sabine kept on a steady stream of encouragements and scolds, and Stoker left off trying to contradict her. She was correct to scold him. His protestations were ridiculous, bordering on belligerent.
They wobbled around a particularly harrowing corner, Sabine murmuring, “Nicely done,” and, “There you are,” and Stoker heard himself actually growl in frustration. He paused, stricken by the thought that she’d felt threatened, and he blurted out, “I nearly died when I was a boy.”
“Oh,” she said, pausing to wipe her brow with the back of her sleeve.
He glanced at her, grateful she had taken this admission in stride. He continued, “It’s no excuse for my... lack of graciousness, but you might as well know.”
“Is graciousness what this situation lacks?” she teased. And then, “What was your boyhood brush with death?”
“Typhus,” he said. “I was living on the streets at the time. The winter I was eleven or twelve. A miserly woman saw me through. She was truly terrible. She actually mocked my recovery, but I was too ill to refuse her. The experience left me with a lifelong aversion to relying on other people. I... I vowed never to be helpless again. I am not trying to be difficult.”
“Rarely does anyonetryto be difficult,” she said. “God knows I do not.”
For this Stoker had no answer. He’d never thought her difficult, merely—strong willed. Her strength was thrilling to him. It meant, he hoped, she would not shatter from his coarseness.
“I’m sorry to learn you didn’t have proper care when you were so ill,” she continued. “My friend Willow nearly died from an infection when she was a girl. Of course, she had every advantage and comfort. I cannot imagine enduring a childhood illness alone, at the mercy of the world.”
Nor should you,he thought. It was one of the reasons he’d kept mostly away these four years. He drifted through life on a raft of terrible memories that tended to surface and haunt him at the worst possible times. She’d had a proper childhood with loving parents, a grand house, fine manners, safety, and security. Until her uncle’s season of abuse, she’d not known a moment’s ugliness. He would no sooner expose her to his wretched past than haul her to Covent Garden and expose her to the bawdy disarray inside a brothel.
She lived on, unsullied and undisturbed by the darkness inside him, while he surreptitiously borrowed the lightness of their rare visits to distract from the dark memories when they came. From the afternoon of their first meeting, Stoker found himself basking in his memories of her, taking comfort, distracting himself. No other woman had ever captivated him in this way. Even with a bloody lip and a swollen eye, she had been pure and perfect but also strong and defiant.
After they married he was afforded a handful of fresh memories of her, but the occasional letter, and eventually her travel guides. He pieced these together like a sort of refuge in his mind, a safe place he could go if the phantasm of the past howled too loudly. If this imaginary refuge alarmed him, if he was obsessive or strung along with schoolboy devotion, he told himself it was his own secret. A way to enjoy her in his life with no burden to her.
In person the effect would not be the same, he knew. Her memories distracted him, but her living, breathing person would drive him mad with want. Stoker already wrestled with the lifelong curse of a lustful nature, a shameful mix of what he’d seen as a child and what he desired as a man. He only needed her lush beauty and high spirit to push him over the edge into lunacy.
On the rare occasions when they met face-to-face, he allowed himself to endeavor nothing more than a glance, a stolen look. One moment to memorize her. He liked to look at her because she looked like a survivor, and Stoker prized survivors above all others. But he also liked to look at her because it was the next best thing to touching her, and he longed to touch her like a drowning man longed for one more breath. He alternated between lust, which spun her face and body into every torrid fantasy his depraved brain could concoct, and iron-willed control. The control was preferred, obviously. He placed her securely on an untouchable pedestal, a protected saint, chaste and revered.
Now they were near the end of the corridor, and his eye was on the bedroom door. Before he could reach out, Sabine’s dog, previously trailing behind or marching ahead, began to leap and bark, jumping onto their legs.
“What’s wrong with it?” Stoker groaned. Pain shot through his side with every impossibly high collision of paws on his hip.
“Bridget is a girl,” Sabine reminded him over the barking.
“She’s a petulance,” Stoker said.
“She thinks we might go out. She loves a ramble above all else.”
“Can you call her off? Her bark is deafening and if she knocks you over, we both go down.”
The barking increased, and Sabine said, “Now you’ve done it. You’ve said her favorite word.”
“Deafening?”
Sabine laughed. “No, it’sgo.”
Stoker exhaled painfully and ground out, “Make. The vermin. Stop.”
Sabine laughed again, a happy musical sound, a sound Stoker would remember and call up in his brain for years to come.
“Bridget, stop,” Sabine commanded through her laughter, and miraculously the dog dropped to her four paws and fell silent. She told Stoker, “It’s not her fault you’re out of bed. My dog is not the problem, as you well know.”
“Your dogexacerbatesthe problem.”
