Stoker shoved up. “I said I would not hear insults against my mother.”
“And why not?” spat the duke. “You’ll not stand there with a straight face and claim she was more than a common whore, would you? And you, her silent, soulful boy. I don’t care how rich you’ve become. I’ve seen the pit from whence you came. I’ve seen you fight other whores for food.
“And now, here you are,” he continued, “with your pretty wife, casting smug glances around my house as if you aresuperior? You forget yourself, Johnny.” He made a sound of disgust.
To Sabine, he said, “Did you know that when Marie first showed him to me as an infant, he was so covered in flea bites, I thought he had the pox?”
Sabine rose to stand beside Stoker. He turned to her as if in a daze. They locked eyes.Let’s go, he wanted to say.
Take my hand,he begged in his head.Take any part of me. Deliver me.
Subjecting her to this man went against every wish he’d ever held for her, but he couldn’t have come without her. But perhaps that would have been a better plan. To simply release any thought or speculation or question from this part of his life and stay the bloody hell away.
He knew now why he’d been so ambivalent about the duke’s original overtures. He hadn’t wanted to remember any detail of his mother’s myriad men, real or imagined. He’d hated those men. He hated this man.
“Your Grace,” said Sabine levelly, “I think perhaps Jon wonders what has become of you. Clearly, you are... bitter and out of funds. What has happened, in thirty years?” She looked around.
“What’s happened?” he asked. “What’s happened?Bills and debts and money lenders have happened. The property and farmland that was meant to sustain me, sent me to debtor’s prison! I was brought up to believe a great fortune awaited me, but that money goes to repairs and tenants and blights and taxes, taxes, taxes—so many bloody taxes. My father installed an idiot manager who bankrupted our seat in Devon. I hired a steward who was a liar and a thief. I had a run of bad luck at the card table. Women require money. Horses require money. The obligations of a dukedom require clothes and carriages and staff. From where is it all meant to come, I ask you?”
“I see,” surmised Sabine. “It has all been someone else’s fault.”
Stoker looked at the duke. “What of your family?”
He waved the question away. “Wife—dead. No children, thank God. When I die, the title may go to a distant cousin in America.”
“Have you asked him for a loan?”
Another dismissive wave, Stoker said, “You have.”
But now Stoker wanted to be clear. “Did you really believe thatIwould deliver you? When you were such an unreliable figure in my mother’s life? When you knew you had a son, and yet allowed us to carry on living in a brothel?”
“But this is where whores and their spawnlive,” said the duke. “In a brothel.”
Stoker lunged. The duke’s eyes bulged and he tried to slide right. Stoker grabbed him by the jacket and hauled him off the floor. Holding him eye to eye, he said, “My mother loved you. I’m glad I did not truly know you, because it would have taken no effort for me to love you, too. Whatever your financial woes, you had more than she ever did, and you gave her pennies and broke her heart. How dare you come after me for money now.”
“I will do as I please, and you’ll have no say in it,” the duke gurgled. “Put me down or I will call the authorities. You may not assault a peer of the realm. Rank still means something in this count—”
“You’ll report me?” scoffed Stoker. “You’ll report me.” He shoved him deeper into the wall. “I’ve a sworn statement,Your Grace, from a man called Roberto Giuseppina, who said you paid him £250 to stab me in the spleen and leave me for dead in Portugal.”
The duke’s cracked mouth fell open and his red face went purple. Stoker shoved once more and then released him, turning away as he slid down the wall.
“Now... now you’re making up slanderous lies!” blustered the duke.
“A sworn statement,” repeated Stoker, shouting now. “And a scar in my side and a month of doctor’s care to corroborate it. Tell me, where did you get £250? And why, when you are clearly living in penury, would you spend it on a mercenary? I had not thought ofSauly Newin thirty years, and good riddance. Did you believe I named you in my will?”
“No,” spat the duke, “you could be named in mine!”
“Ha!” scoffed Stoker. “To inherit what? This squalor?” He threw out his arms.
“The title, you ungrateful, self-important gutter rat!”
“How can a bastard inherit a title?”
“And what if I say we were married for a time?”
“My mother never married,” stated Stoker. The thought of his mother as a duchess was a cruel joke.
“Think of what an enterprising young man could do with an ancient title!” the duke boomed. “Think of your wife. She could be a duchess. Your children would inherit piles of money from you, and from me, they would inherit entrée into the highest rungs of society.”
