Chapter Fourteen
Michael Gabriel Marchand
BELOVED
The blossoms Marchand brought with him from the park in front of the Grand Palace on the Thames fluttered in the breeze in
front of the stone.
“I didn’t want him.”
They were the first words he’d said since they’d boarded the hack at the Grand Palace on the Thames. They were barely audible,
and they punched Ginny airless.
She stared at him, stunned.
But this was Marchand, after all. So she waited.
“Whining, frightened, brainless creature. Me, that is. I was.” He flashed a ghost of his usual smile. “But the baby was helpless,
too.”
He took a long breath.
“His mother was an opera dancer. She was charming and clever and pretty. I met her at a gaming hell I worked for called the Pit. Our liaison suited and amused us for almost a year, until it didn’t, and just as things were about to end between us, she learned she was enceinte.
Neither of us wanted a child. She disappeared when he was only a few weeks old, and I haven’t seen her since. ”
The notion of a mother abandoning Marchand’s baby panicked Ginny as if it had been her own child.
She knew full well how devastated and terrified that girl must have been, especially if she hadn’t any family to support her.
Ginny thought of how it had felt to hold baby Roger and she knew she didn’t have it in her to bolt. No matter the consequences.
“So just like that, she was gone, and it was me and him alone,” Marchand continued, “and he was only a few weeks old. I held
him, the day I realized she’d gone for good. And I looked into his face . . . and I could see that he knew what he had in me. He knew I was an unprepossessing, shiftless, callow fool who thought he was so clever, so fearless, so
tough, even though I know now I was anything but, and he’d concluded his situation was not promising. I swear his expression
was . . . wry and resigned and merry. As though he was thinking, ‘Very well, if it has to be you, let’s get on with it.’ There was already an entire person in
this . . . in this wee thing.”
His voice trailed.
“I set out to prove him wrong. I was going to be worthy. I did all the things you were supposed to do. I found a wet nurse, but paying her meant I couldn’t afford rooms of our own.
I pestered every parent I knew about how to raise a boy.
I was going to win at being a father the way I eventually won at everything else.
He was mine and I was his. He was the first person who ever truly belonged to me.
He was my family, and I was never going to let him go. ”
His face was taut and pale. In the stark light of the day, he looked weary and older than his years.
A tiny part of Ginny howled in silent protest at this unbearable proof that he was only human. The selfish, frightened child
in her had come to rely on a vision of him as invincible. He was the first true source of strength she’d known in over a decade.
She understood now how he’d come by his strength and calm self-possession.
It had its origins in both the loving and the loss.
Her stomach turned in on itself. She was suddenly frantic to go back in time so she could save him and Michael from any hurt
at all. Why would fate visit so many tests upon one person?
She thrust her hand into her reticule and fished about. She came out with one of the cheroots she’d absently tucked in there
for God only knew what reason after Mrs. Haddock taught her to roll them.
She stepped forward to hand it to him.
His eyes flared in surprise, then he shot her a look of wry humor and abject gratitude and took it wordlessly.
He strode a few feet away from her to light it with the flint and steel in his pocket, and sucked it into life. He politely
aimed the smoke away from her, but the wind was anarchic and it blew it all about. Smoke wreathed him as though he’d materialized
there, fresh from the underworld. The breeze ruffled his hair and flipped the ends of his coat. A little of his tension visibly
eased.
“He was one of the smartest and funniest people I’ve ever met, Ginny.
I swear this to you. Had a way with a pun.
Liked to make up his own jokes. They always started with ‘Papa, guess what?’ I would say ‘What?’ And he’d say ‘The sky is green!’ And that was absolutely hilarious to him because I guess the notion to him of a green sky was outrageous.
” He paused to smile faintly. “He would stop to pick
a flower and carry it about in his pocket all day without crushing it, then give it to me before I put him to bed at night.
Then hurl apples for the pleasure of watching them explode.”
Her chest ached. “Little boys do like to watch things explode.”
“It’s one of the greatest pleasures in life,” he agreed somberly.
With excruciating, exquisite clarity she could picture a tiny boy with Marchand’s tumultuous hair and bright eyes and dimples.
She would never be able to meet him, to hear his laugh, and she suddenly couldn’t breathe for grief.
“I saved my money from all my shite jobs, so that one day we could get a proper room for just the two of us to live in. A
real home. We lived with a slew of others. Sometimes I took him to work with me. I eventually learned how to invest money.
I learned about maths and accounting. I talked a bloke into teaching me to read. I decided I was going to have my own gaming
establishment, and that I was going to send him to Cambridge or Oxford one day. I was on my way.”
He paused at length.
“Not quite six years,” he finally said. His voice was hoarse. “That’s all we got. A fever swept London, we both caught it.
And he—”
He stopped abruptly.
She could hear him breathing.
“I’m so, so terribly sorry.” Her voice was shredded. “I wish I could have met him.”
He looked across at her and watched her for some time. He smiled sadly, faintly, ruefully, as if he was picturing just that.
Her heart twisted.
“This might sound ridiculous, Ginny . . . but I had never felt like such a failure when I realized I couldn’t afford to have
a fancy verse carved into his headstone. Because you see, this was well before I founded Lucifer’s Fall. I’m a rich man now,
but I was too bloody poor to honor this spectacular person, because back then I was hardly better than a thug with few prospects.”
His voice frayed. “It infuriated me. It infuriated me that I didn’t even know any fancy verses because let’s just say that I wasn’t any squarer with our alleged maker or the book about him then I am
now. And so I didn’t know what his stone should say.”
Ginny understood what he meant. “On my mother’s stone it could have said, ‘Loved peaches.’ And decades from now people might
come across her stone and think, ‘Ha, isn’t that quaint’ or ‘How disrespectful! That’s all her family could think to say?’
And maybe they would laugh at it. But peaches were her favorite fruit, and ‘peach’ was my father’s nickname for her, and fanning
out from that word are a thousand memories, and when anyone says ‘peaches’ it conjures her for me as clear as day.”
He listened to this with a smile. “Michael’s could have read, ‘Laughed hysterically at every fart. God took one look at his
sleeping face and created the angels in his image.’ ”
She made a sound, almost but not quite a laugh, as her heart cracked in two.
She laughed. “I’ll probably catch a pox of some sort, and mine will read, ‘Died as she lived. Covered in spots.’ ” She absently
gestured to her freckles.
She had come to love the way he looked at her when she said things like that. With a sort of awe, mingled with a hilarity
that transcended laughter. And something more somber and intent she could not quite interpret.
Finally he gave a slow, very slight shake of his head. As if he could not quite reconcile the wonder of her.
More than anyone she’d ever known in her life, he made her feel singular. He seemed to relish aspects of her character she’d
never considered of any worth. He took her for what she was, probably because she’d revealed more of her true colors to him
than to any other human being. She’d even discovered a few new colors because of him. How odd that nothing in her life had ever felt quite so luxurious as being known.
“Anyhow, Ginny, according to the stonecutter, I could afford only a few little words or one big word. The decision tormented
me. I couldn’t sleep. I dreamed about Michael. This was the last thing I would be able to do for him and I wanted to get it
right. So ‘beloved’ is the word I chose. I thought it was a good word. Because it’s the only thing that matters about any
of us in the end, isn’t it?”
He said this quietly. Almost defiantly.
As if, for the whole of the time since Michael died, he’d been in search of absolution, some acknowledgment that he’d done
the right thing.
She was impotently furious she couldn’t go back in time so she could tell him then that the word was perfect. Devastatingly correct and to the point. Just like Marchand.
“You found the best word,” she told him with absolute conviction. “There’s no better word.”
He looked at her sharply in that way he had, as if he were sifting through her mind for lies and truths. Then gave a shallow
nod.
When he exhaled and tension in his shoulders at last eased, she felt as though she’d achieved something of worth.
He stubbed out his cheroot on his flint and steel box then tucked it inside. He strode over to stand before his son’s headstone
and matter-of-factly handed his handkerchief to her.
She hadn’t realized tears were coursing down her face.
He didn’t fuss. He didn’t say a word. They were just two people, feeling what they felt. In his presence now, sadness felt
as safe and natural as an exhale or a heartbeat.
“Do you want to be alone for a moment to have a chat with him?” she asked. “I’ll wander off.”
He shook his head. “I talk to him all the time,” he said simply.
She hesitated. “I talk to my parents, too.” Her voice was hoarse.
He just nodded, as if to say, of course.