She asked that rather quickly. Eager for a subject change, if Lorcan had to guess.
“Oh, I sprang fully formed into the world, like Athena from Zeus’s head.”
She eyed him warily, as if he’d just torn away a mask.
“You shouldseeyour expression,” he said softly. “The things I know, Daphne. I traveled with a Greek on a ship who told stories of gods and goddesses at night by the stars and taught me all about the dangers of the pox. All the knowledge a man ever needs.”
She fixed him with two seconds’ worth of a small, patient smile. “Thanks to Charles andMontague, I know how amusing little boys find it to attempt to be shocking.”
He liked this, too, but he was a bit disappointed he couldn’t shock her. “Very well. My father was a right bastard. I suppose you don’t need to know that, but do feel free to say so if the subject arises in company. My mother died when I was young. I suspect all of my finer qualities I got from her. His name was George and he was some mix of French and God knows what else, and my mother was Irish and her name was Siobhan. I’m named for her father. I get my sweet nature from her and I got my brutish looks from him. I am not quite certain how old I am, although I like to tell people I’m thirty-five, give or take a year.”
She’d gone visibly tense from the word “bastard” on. And then her face went fully troubled.
And this made him set his teeth. He could sound downright posh, if he put his back into it. He’d sneaked into the King’s Theater when he was a boy to cadge scraps of food from the vendors, and absorbed the lofty language of the actors prowling the stage. Later, he’d further refined his speaking through exposure to secret business dealings with earls and their ilk.
But out that word “bastard” had come, because it was the way he normally spoke and the only way he ever thought about his father, and he was unaccustomed to censoring himself. Sharing a suite with her was going to work nerves he hadn’t suspected he possessed.
“What do you remember about your mother?”
He had never been asked this. He was disconcerted, a feeling that rarely visited him as an adult.
“She had a pretty voice,” he said shortly. He hesitated for a time. Gruffly he said, “I remember she called meathaisce. It means ‘my treasure’ in Gaelic.”
He found that he’d gone quite still. As if to hold himself apart from any feelings he might have about those words.
“How lovely,” she said gently. “My mother called me Daphne.”
He grinned at that.
“I lived with my father until he died when I was about ten and then I fended for meself,” he said.
“In St. Giles.”
“Aye.”
“When you were ten? But... how... how did you...”
“Oh, any way I could, luv,” he said simply. “The details will only appall you.”
He could tell she didnottake to being called “luv,” which only made him want to do it again.
There ensued a long silence, during which he could almost hear the questions milling about in her head, and during which he wore an expression designed to discourage them.
“When do you celebrate your birthday?” was what she chose to ask finally.
“I do not celebrate my birthday. Haven’t a clue when it is. When do you celebrate yours?”
She paused. “I’ll be thirty years old in two days. Feel free to gasp.”
He probably ought to say something like, “and you don’t look a day over twenty,” or “I never would have guessed,” but it wasn’t true. It wasn’t so much about how shelookedas how she carried herself. By the age of thirty, more people had drawn a few conclusions about life and had acquired a sort of certainty, perhaps a bit of piquant cynicism, that no twenty-year-old possessed.
So he said the unoriginal thing. “I suppose getting older is better than the alternative,” he said.
Even he knew that thirty years old was considered well on the shelf for a woman. He wondered what it was about her that kept her at home with her father and brothers.
He found himself relieved she had a marriage proposal. Women like her ought to be safely sorted into the categories to which they belonged. He’d witnessed the suffering of too many desperate tag ends of society.
“What is your favorite thing to eat?” she asked.
