He paused and ran his fingers through his hair and squeezed his eyes shut. “Forgive me, the possibility that this man is actuallymy fatheris still taking shape in my brain. I cannot quite accept it, and yet—” He let the sentence trail off.
“Now that I’ve seen you side by side,” Sabine ventured, “I must say that you do look rather alike. That is, he looks like you if you were aged forty years, sedentary, gluttonous, tangling with gout, and you rarely saw the sun.”
Stoker opened his eyes. “Yes, I can see how the resemblance shines through.”
Sabine gave a sad smile. After a moment she asked, “Did he—?”
“He paid me very little mind,” said Stoker. “Which was my strong preference. Sometimes he gave me a peppermint. Or a toy musket. Once he brought me a pair of boots.” He stopped pacing. “I was suspicious of the gifts—uncertain of what my mother would be required to do to earn them—but I was so bloody desperate for any attention and any... frivolity, that I took them anyway. I liked him. He was... happy. He made my mother happy.”
Now he resumed pacing. “Until he made her unhappy, which was generally in three or four weeks’ time—a month at most.”
“He turned cruel?” Sabine guessed.
Stoker threw up his hands. “He simply got bored, or they quarreled, or he went home to a wife or off with another whore—I was not privy to why he left. I only knew the ceaseless crying. My mother would sob for a week, and we’d have no money for food. I would suffer this strange stew of anger and guilt. I was angry at her for doing whatever she’d done to make him go and guilty for wanting to subject her to him again.”
“Oh, Stoker. How old were you?”
He stopped walking again. “Seven? Eight? Considerably younger than I am now, although still tortured by it, as you have the very great misfortune of witnessing.”
“The last time you saw him was—?”
Stoker took a deep breath. “When I was about nine years old, he turned up to announce that he was moving us out of the brothel and into a proper flat in Blackhall. It wasn’t lavish, but it was our own place, with a lock on the door and shelves for our possessions and curtains on the windows. He came and went at odd times, but he visited regularly, three or four times every week. When he was home, he ate a proper supper with us. He retired to my mother’s bedroom only after I’d gone to bed. There was plenty of money, so my mother could go to the market and bake fresh bread and buy a winter coat. She awakened in the morning instead of the middle of the afternoon. She sang idle songs while she cleaned and mended. She seemed... trulyhappyfor the first I could ever remember.
“I had always been a quiet, stealthy, distrusting boy, always on my guard—I’d had to be. I could disappear in plain sight, meld into the shadows. I could escape any room out of a window. But after a month or two in Sauly’s flat, I had begun to relax. I spoke at mealtimes. Sauly offered to teach me to read and I accepted. He brought me books, maps, even parchment and pens.
“After another month I began to believe my mother and Sauly had fallen in real love—whatever notion of love I had at the time. I allowed myself to hope we’d begin to live a proper life, that this flat would be a proper home. I believed my mother had finally done it. She’d escaped the constant struggle to survive and the wretchedness of her work. I lay in bed at night and hoped our lives had changed for the better.”
“Oh God,” Sabine said softly, “I’m afraid to hear the rest.”
“I can stop,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “I would relish permission to stop this story.”
She shook her head. She reached out a hand to him. “Will you sit?”
“Please don’t pity me. I could not bear it.”
“It’s not pity, Stoker,” she said, peeling off her gloves. “My heart is breaking for you. This is a wretched story, your boyhood was truly horrible, and my heart breaks for all of it. I’m sorry if that distresses you, but pride should not apply to your horrible history, the circumstances over which you had no control. You were a victim. You are still a victim of this story, it’s plainly clear, and now I am too.”
“Not you.” He stared at her. “You may listen, but it will have no bearing on you.”
“If it affects the way you relate to me,” she told him, dropping her gloves on the bench, “if it has some bearing on whether we—”
“You will not be tarnished by this story,” he vowed.
“Fine,” she sighed. “I’m not tarnished. Finish.”
He stared at her.
“Please,” she said.
Something about the pitch of her voice, or the softness of her expression, or the bloody tilt of her head must have finally been correct, because he trudged to the bench and sat heavily beside her. He took a deep breath.
“The truth is,” he sighed, “there are worse stories with worse endings.” Now he laughed. “You would not believe the children I’ve seen and the fathers they have endured.Sauly Newis inconsequential compared to some fathers.” He dropped his head in his hands and stared at the floor.
“Yes, but we are not discussing other children at the moment. We are discussing you and your boyhood and your father.”
Stoker said nothing. She stared at the broad expanse of his back and weighed the risk of touching him.
Sabine waited a beat and then said, “Does it help to remember that you are no longer a child? You are a very rich man and a courageous one. This person cannot hurt you now.”
